Browsing by Subject "Citizenship"
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Item African diaspora in reverse : the Tabom people in Ghana, 1820s-2009(2010-05) Essien, Kwame; Falola, ToyinThe early 1800s witnessed the exodus of former slaves from Brazil to Africa. A number of slaves migrated after gaining manumission. Others were deported after they were accused of committing various “crimes” and after slave rebellions. These returnees established various communities and identities along the coastline of West Africa, but Historians often limit the scope to communities that developed in Benin, Togo and Nigeria. My dissertation fills in this gap by highlighting the obscured history of the Tabom people—the descendants of Afro-Brazilian returnees in Ghana. The study examines the history of the Tabom people to show the various ways they are constructing their identities and how their leaders are forging ties with the Brazilian government, the Ghanaian government, and institutions such as UNESCO. The main goal of the Tabom people is to preserve their history, to underscore the significance of sites of memories, and to restore various historical monuments within their communities for tourism. The economic consciousness contributed to the restoration of the “Brazil House” in Accra which was opened for tourism on November 15, 2007, after a year of repairs through the support of the Brazilian Embassy and various institutions in Ghana. This watershed moment not only marked an important historical event and the birth of tourism within the Tabom community, but epitomized decades of attempts to showcase the history of the Afro-Brazilian community which has been obscured in Ghanaian school curriculum and African diaspora history. My central thesis is that the initiatives by the Tabom people are not only influenced by economic interests, but also by the need to express the “dual” identities that underlie what it means to the “Ghanaian-Brazilian.” The efforts by the Tabom leaders to project their dual heritage, led to the visit by Brazilian President Luiz Inácios Lula da Silva “Lula” in April 2005, who also graciously supported the restoration of the “Brazil House.” Through these interactions Lula extended an invitation to the Tabom chief and members of the community to visit Brazil for the first time. This dissertation posits that Lula’s invitation highlight notions that the African Diaspora is an unending journey.Item An Archive of Shame: Gender, Embodiment, and Citizenship in Contemporary American Culture(2012-07-16) Harris, RebeccaIn this dissertation, "An Archive of Shame: Gender, Embodiment, and Citizenship in Contemporary American Culture," I use the affect of shame in its multiple forms and manifestations as a category of analysis in order to examine complex relationships between gender, sexuality, the body, and citizenship. Through chapters on incest, gender normalization, and disease, I build an "archive" of the feeling of shame that consists of literary texts such as Sapphire's Push: A Novel, Jeffrey Eugenides?s Middlesex, Tony Kushner's Angels in America, and Katherine Dunn?s Geek Love, as well as materials from popular culture, films such as Philadelphia, court cases, and other ephemera such as pamphlets and news coverage. In order to construct this archive, I bring together seemingly disparate materials and create readings of American culture that illustrate how the category of citizen is produced by the shaming of women, the gender non-conforming, and the diseased. Using feminist theoretical models, I critique previous discussions of citizenship, the state, and the body in queer theory, which have reified the privilege of whiteness and maleness by evacuating the bodies of women, the gender non-conforming, and the diseased of their radical potential to undermine oppressive state institutions. The texts I analyze in this project interrogate normalized processes of documentation and archiving, and through their subject matter as well as their form, these texts participate in the archival process?theorizing and exploring alternative methods of documentation, collecting, and historicizing and so illustrate how the discourses produced by mainstream history are built upon the maintenance of social hierarchies. By bringing these texts together, I am developing a theory of the archive and its processes, its bodies, and its feelings. Archiving as a practice collects and documents, and in that collection, develops a coherent narrative about a particular event or history. Critical theory is also a process of making meaning through the collection of events, documents, and texts into a cohesive set of terms in order to make particular abstract claims. This process is often obscured both in archiving and in theorizing by naturalizing the selection of the materials that matter. The alternative archives in this dissertation make that process explicit in order to foreground its erasures and elisions; they register material difference and the ways in which the archive is reproductive of social relations. The transient and unstable nature of the archives produced within the texts of this project makes them difficult to pin down and make coherent, but that is what makes them powerful and transformative. I read these materials as sites where questions about the official histories of the nation, which are constructed through race, gender, and sex, might be played out. The archive of shame I compile in this project, therefore, can be read as a collection of partial sites of struggle against oppressive power relationships.Item The biopolitics of belonging : Europe in post-Cold War Arabic literature of migration(2013-08) Sellman, Johanna Barbro; El-Ariss, TarekSince the 1990s, a corpus of Arabic literary narratives has appeared that stage Europe from the perspective of forced migrants. This literature on refugees, asylum seekers, and clandestine migrants articulates central problems of migration to Europe in a period of migration policy reform in response to globalization. In this dissertation, I analyze a selection of Arabic and francophone North African literary narratives, including Mahmoud al-Bayaty's 2006 "Dancing on Water", Iqbal Qazwini's 2006 "Zubaida’s Window", Farouq Yousef's 2007 "Nothing and Nobody", Hamid Skif's 2006 "The Geography of Danger", Youssef Fadel's 2000 "Hashish", and Mahi Binebine's 1999 "Welcome to Paradise". This study is situated at the intersection of forced migration studies and Arabic literary studies. As the effort to standardize European migration policy and manage migration has increased states' power to filter and exclude, the human rights framework of migration policy has weakened (Fekete 2009; Menz 2008). Such shifts represent an intensification of what Michel Foucault calls "biopolitics," modern states' propensity to manage populations by producing belonging and exclusion (Foucault 2003). Literature of migration has become an important vehicle for reflecting on the ways that migration policies produce belonging and exclusion in contemporary Europe. Literature of forced migration requires modes of analysis that differ from the more modernist notions of exile that have dominated literary studies (Malkki 1995; McLeod 2000; Parvati 2010). In this study, I draw attention to the ways that literary narratives of migration re-figure Europe as a wilderness. The works that I analyze explore precarious migrant subjectivities through forests, urban jungles, and cannibalism, spaces onto which fantasies (and often nightmares) of the outside of political community can be projected Furthermore, I argue that wilderness provides sites of negotiation between the biopolitical and ideals of rights-based citizenship. While the biopolitical does not serve as a foundation of belonging in these narratives as suggested by some theorists (Agamben 2008), the literature posits new modes of belonging through the very exclusions produced by forced migration.Item Citizenship and global mobility : the international value of national identity(2013-12) Rennick, Elisabeth Neal; Givens, Terri E., 1964-In the past twenty years, a great deal of literature has been produced as to the value of citizenship in the global era. Some scholars insist that globalization has decreased the value of citizenship with the growth of human rights. Others believe that such claims are premature. Though these authors bring up important points as to the degree civil, political, and social rights have been granted to non-citizens around the world, they all fail to adequately address mobility rights. Primarily granted to citizens, mobility rights are going to become increasingly important with higher rates of international mobility, work, and residence. As such, these rights, the extent of which is defined by one's national citizenship, will play a significant role in determining autonomy and the capacity of an individual to determine one's own destiny. In this paper, I will explore inter-national and intra-national citizenship and immigration policies with the hopes of demonstrating the continued importance of citizenship in an increasingly globalized world. After laying out my theory, I will measure the value of U.S. citizenship inter-nationally and intra-nationally with regards to mobility rights.Item Citizenship constructions : rhetoric, immigration, and Arizona's SB 1070(2013-05) Ruiz De Castilla, Clariza; Brummett, Barry, 1951-On April 23, 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070 ("Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act") into law. This legislative effort raised questions about how political and legal thought are immersed in talk of citizenship in our present time. While the Supreme Court rejected the majority of this law two years after it was signed, concerns over issues of legality, law enforcement, and citizenship still remain. The main questions posed in this dissertation are the following: How are Latinos portrayed as citizens by media? What types and tones of citizenship are advanced in SB 1070 news coverage? To learn more about citizenship constructions, I analyzed newspaper coverage of SB 1070 by using a critical approach that combines quantitative and rhetorical analyses. I examined the following six newspapers were examined: Los Angeles Times and La Opinión (Los Angeles); Miami Herald and Diario Las Américas (Miami); Arizona Republic and Prensa Hispana (Phoenix). They were reviewed over a six month period, specifically from December 1, 2009, to May 31, 2010. I searched each edition by using physical copies, microfilm, and internet databases, for stories on immigration, Latinos, and citizenship as it related to SB 1070. After these newspapers were collected, a content analysis was conducted followed by a close textual analysis. The data reveals three major findings. The first finding is that both English and Spanish newspapers tend to frame citizenship as legal status. The second finding is that Spanish newspapers require their news consumers to translate between languages (specifically English and Spanish), as well as consider different cultures (American and Latino customs) and diverse politicians (international political figures). The third finding is that Spanish newspapers provide many more photos, especially of protests against this legislative effort. The two main conclusions of this dissertation are (1) that Spanish newspapers require their readers to have a double-consciousness, and (2) that there is value in using more than one kind of methodology.Item Civic life in flux : citizenship, technology and Generation X(2003) Sanford, Stefanie; Hart, Roderick P.This project challenges the national civic consensus that American citizenship is in decline. I hypothesize that instead, it is in flux – and that indicators used to document this “decline” represent the social capital measures of a time and generation that are fundamentally different from today. Most social capital measures are drawn from mid-20th century social practices, where Americans joined the institutions conceived and created at the turn of the last century – animated by the social ennui created in the wake of industrialization. Therefore, rather than looking at the institutions that Generation X is not joining, I look to the ways, like their Progressive Era forbears, those most engaged in economic and technological change are challenging traditional notions of social capital and citizenship and building their own institutions and means of associations and community vitality, based on their unique experiences and values. This study focuses on the young and the new and how notions of citizenship are affected by emerging forms of interactive technologies. Specifically, I explore what distinctive civic attitudes are fostered in cyber democracy and what those attitudes might mean for the future of the nation. Chapters 1-3 explore the disciplines implicitly touched by this inquiry: political communication (social capital, citizenship, civic participation); political science (generational effects, voter turnout, democratic theory); information systems (Internet growth, deployment, access, adoption rates); and mass communication (new media). Chapters 4-7 discuss findings about each of the generational sample groups (Cyber-democrats, Wireheads, Tech Elites and Trailing Xers). Finally, Chapter 8 synthesizes those findings into a critique of current methods of measuring civic health, illuminates the inherent generational and economic biases of existing definitions and measures of social capital, describes the unique civic conceptions reflected by the respondents, and then makes a series of recommendations for individual action, policy change and future research to better understand and reflect the changing norms of civic involvement and conceptions of citizenship among younger generations.Item Costly citizenship : the supply and demand of political membership in Europe, 1970-2014(2016-08) Graeber, John David; Moser, Robert G., 1966-; Givens, Terri E., 1964-; Freeman, Gary P; Chapman, Terrence; Maxwell, Rahsaan DAs Europe has struggled to adapt to the modern reality of mass migration in recent decades, the question of citizenship has emerged as an increasingly salient political topic across the continent. Numerous scholars have begun to analyze the evolution of citizenship regimes in Europe, the politics of citizenship policymaking, and the consequences of such policies for citizenship acquisition and immigrant integration. This dissertation advances a new theoretical understanding of citizenship policymaking and citizenship acquisition together within a framework of supply and demand. According to the theory, naturalization rates, and the corresponding level of integration required to naturalize, are the equilibrium result of the interaction between the political forces supplying citizenship and the varying determinants of immigrant demand for citizenship. This dissertation examines both in turn. On the supply side, I first argue that citizenship policy in Europe results not simply from the influence of radical right parties, but from broader modes of party competition that provide electoral incentives to either liberalize or restrict access to citizenship. Using a new quantitative measurement of citizenship policies across sixteen European countries from 1970 to 2014, I reveal how left party competition is associated with more liberal citizenship policy change, while right party competition and radical right electoral threats engender more restrictive policies. I then utilize my citizenship policy index alongside other political, economic, and social variables on the demand side to examine the aggregate level structure under which citizenship acquisition occurs across European countries and across time. Finally, through a combination of quantitative and qualitative evidence gathered on two federal countries in Europe, Germany and Austria, I show that these same aggregate level variables operating at the national level may also operate within them.Item Entre pueblo mágico y ciudad multicultural : ciudadanías diversas en la Periferia Urbana de San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas = Between enchanted town and multicultural city : citizenship formations among the Mayas in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico(2014-05) Canas Cuevas, Sandra; Speed, Shannon, 1964-This dissertation is an ethnographic analysis of state led multiculturalism and its impacts on indigenous people in the former colonial city of San Cristobal de Las Casas in Southern Mexico. Based on an eighteen-month period of fieldwork, it examines how the colonial order is being redeployed in the urban space through multicultural programs that seek to govern indigenous people. In particular, it discusses how indigenous people are transformed into multicultural citizens and their lands into natural reserves. In showing how indigenous people are being produced as citizens and governed through particular citizenship regimes, it also emphasizes on how they produce themselves as political subjects. Drawing upon indigenous people experiences at the urban periphery, this dissertation discusses the complexities and contradictions they face in the process of building a community of their own. It investigates how multiple citizenships, religious and gender regimes coexist in the urban periphery, and how indigenous people navigate them in the process of building new forms of belonging. This dissertation complicates the civil society vs. State opposition by focusing on how citizenship among indigenous people is built on a daily basis through contradictory and problematic articulations. Through their articulations with peasant organizations, the State, political parties, NGOs and religious discourses, indigenous people become agents of their own government. They do so by directing each other actions and decisions, shaping their leaders practices and holding them accountable, and monitoring gender relations and religious practice to secure women’s participation in both politics and religion. Finally, this dissertation argues that indigenous people in the urban periphery of San Cristóbal de Las Casas refuse to become multicultural citizens. Instead they struggle to build horizontal and inclusive communities through land occupation and conversion to Islam, and in the process they are calling into question the limits and contradictions of state led multiculturalism, and expanding liberal notions of citizenship.Item "For what noble cause?" : a media analysis of gender and citizenship within United States nationalist and anti-war rhetoric(2007-05) Green, Stephanie Volkoff, 1979-; Cloud, Dana L.Public understanding of United States citizenship is tied to the rights put forth in the First Amendment, which ostensibly protects the ability to contradict government leaders. However, the Bill of Rights is only one part of a larger symbolic and rhetorical framework of citizenship. It is this larger framework that this project seeks to interrogate. This thesis explores how dissenting voices within the United States, attached to gendered bodies, are silenced by the limited roles available to citizens during a time of heightened nationalism. More specifically, it identifies how normative roles based on gender and citizenship within nationalist rhetoric attempt to limit contemporary anti-war protest, for those citizens who have fulfilled the prescribed roles of mothers and soldiers within the nationalist framework, namely Cindy Sheehan, Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against War. The study examines the framing of this dissenting speech within the mainstream press and presidential rhetoric for the year following Cindy Sheehan's encampment in Crawford, Texas in August of 2005.Item International defendants in federal criminal court : an examination of racial, ethnic, and citizenship status disparity in sentencing outcomes(2009-05) Clark, James Dryden; Warr, Mark, 1952-The use of extra-legal factors in determining criminal sentences has long been a topic of interest to criminologists. Research on sentencing guidelines has consistently found unwarranted disparities related to defendants' ethnoracial identity, but there is limited research on the effects of defendants' citizenship status. Roughly 40 percent of defendants convicted in federal courts are non-U.S. citizens, thus by shear size, citizenship status has become a major issue within federal courts. Using U.S. Sentencing Commission data between Fiscal Years 2000 to 2003, this dissertation examines the impact of defendants’ ethnoracial identity and citizenship status on sentencing outcomes in federal criminal court. Building on intersectional theory, particular attention is given to the interaction between defendants’ ethnoracial identity and citizenship status. Decomposition of hetroskedastic tobit regressions are used to model unwarranted disparities for both the probability and length of incarceration. Results indicate that relative to White U.S. citizens, Asian and Pacific Islander U.S. citizens have lower probability of incarceration and shorter sentences. Black and Hispanic defendants, both U.S. and non-U.S. citizens tend to have harsher sentences relative to their White counterparts. Overall, non-U.S. citizens whom are Black and Hispanic experience a multiplicative disadvantage in sentencing outcomes relative to Whites and Asian or Pacific Islanders. Additionally, results from this study indicate that defendants whom are not U.S. citizens and from Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islanders, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Mexico, and the Middle-East all serve harsher sentences relative to White U.S. citizens.Item Las complejidades del retorno : a Xicana perspective on the social impacts of U.S. deportations in Mexico(2012-08) Rojas, Roxana Jaquelyn; Rodríguez, Néstor; Roberts, Bryan R.The United States Department of Homeland Security reported 354, 982 deportation events in 2010. This number has fallen short, though not by much, of the 400,000 deportations per year “goal” cited by DHS. Though many have begun research on the subsequent repercussions of this well oiled deportation regime, not many have asked questions about the effects south of the border. Those questions are the subject of the pilot research study on which this thesis is based. This document is the narration of the findings and occurrences while conducting fieldwork in Jalisco, Mexico, the goal of which, was to inform on the social impacts of deportations from the U.S. to Mexico on three levels, the individual, the familial and the institutional. The particularities of this thesis stem from the perspective taken by the author. Finding the author’s very own return to Mexico as an educated Xicana, an important part of the story she would set out to find about deportees , their families, and the reality they face upon experiencing a deportation event, this thesis is heavily concentrated on the experiences of the author and the narrations of the interviewees. Discovering her own epistemological and methodological postures on social science research while in the field, the author discusses the importance of these shifts to the future of her work and that of social science research. Taking on the pivotal questions on the effects of a social phenomenon , namely deportation, from a sociological perspective was the intention of the author, yet it was those questions and the process of attempting to gain insight on those inquiries that incited questions about the forms of knowledge production, the results and usefulness of social science research as tools for activism and social change and legitimacy of the subaltern voice within the academe. While the author does draw on her own experiences and that of interviewees to discuss the situation lived in Mexico by deportees, the base of much of the analysis also lies in data-driven questions and conclusions.Item Making the modern migrant : work, community, and struggle in the federal Migratory Labor Camp Program, 1935-1947(2009-12) Martínez-Matsuda, Verónica; Zamora, Emilio; Green, Laurie B.; Falola, Toyin O.; Gutiérrez, David G.; McKiernan-González, JohnDuring the New Deal, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) developed what is arguably one of the most provocative and far-reaching programs for farm workers undertaken by the U.S. federal government to date. Through the Migratory Labor Camp Program the FSA promised to efficiently funnel workers to fulfill the agricultural industry’s labor demands while providing migrants modern, up-to-date housing and services to alleviate the well-documented substandard conditions many faced. Most scholars have analyzed the camps primarily as sites of labor, capital, and state regulation. Rather than view the camp program as simply a government effort to more efficiently coordinate the nation’s farm labor market, this study argues that the services, programs, and activities FSA officials administered in the camps sought to regulate and transform significant and often intimate social and cultural aspects of migrants’ daily lives. By examining the role of the camps’ architecture, medical clinics, nurseries and elementary schools, as well as the “self-governing” camp committees and councils, this dissertation engages in a gendered analysis of labor to reveal how the federal camps were unique dual-purpose domestic and labor spaces. Analyzing the camps as simultaneous productive and reproductive sites allows us to see them as part of a contested terrain in which complex issues of identity, community, citizenship, and labor were negotiated on a daily basis, affecting U.S. farm labor and race relations well beyond the perimeters of the federal camps.Item Migration, ethnic economy and precarious citizenship among urban indigenous people(2014-08) Bariola, Nino; Rodríguez, NéstorThis thesis contributes to our understanding of the impacts of political, social and economic dynamics of contemporary “free-market cities” on indigenous people that leave their traditional territories to settle on Latin American metropolises. The thesis examines the case of indigenous Shipibo migrants from the Amazon that have occupied in Lima, Peru a landfill site owned by the municipal government, and developed there a shantytown. The analyzes of the case sheds light on the innovative strategies that the Shipibo resort to in order to survive in the absence of formal jobs and social programs, and even despite recurrent threats to their social and cultural rights. Through the production of traditional handicraft, they collectively become ethnic entrepreneurs and enter the vast urban informal economy. Beside its interesting consequences for local politics and gender relations, this ethnic economic practice also becomes a way of group making and community building. After prolonged waits –during which the state appeared intermittently and with ambiguous messages–, the Shipibo finally face they most dreaded fear: eviction. Upon confronting this situation, and lacking the clientelistic networks in which Andean migrant peasants could count on in past decades, the Shipibo utilize a innovative repertoire of contained contention to appeal to the leftist municipal authority and thus articulate functional alliances with the goal of gaining land tenure.Item "Our Women": Construction of Hindu and Muslim Women's Identities by the Religious Nationalist Discourses in India(2011-02-22) Imam, ZebaSecular nationalism, India?s official ideology and the basis for its secular Constitution, is being challenged by the rising religious nationalist discourses. This has resulted in an ongoing struggle between the secular and religious nationalist discourses. Since women are regarded as symbols of religious tradition and purity, the religious nationalist discourses subject them to increasing rules and regulations aimed at controlling their behavior to conform to the ideal of religious purity. In this study I examine the subject positions that the Hindu and Muslim nationalist discourses in India are constructing for "their women" and its implication for women's citizenship rights. I focus my research on two topics, where religious nationalist discourses intersect with the women's question in obvious ways. These are "the Muslim personal law" and "marriages between Hindu women and Muslim men". The Muslim personal law has emerged as the most important symbol of Muslim identity over the years, and holds an important position within the Hindu and the Muslim nationalist discourses as well as the secular discourse. The debates around the Muslim personal law are centered on questions of religious freedom and equal citizenship rights for Muslim women. The issue of marriages between Hindu women and Muslim men is located in the Hindu nationalist discourse?s larger theme pertaining to the threat that the Muslim "other" poses to the Hindu community/nation. I juxtapose the religious nationalist discourses with the secular nationalist discourse to understand how the latter is contesting and negotiating with the former two to counter the restrictive subject positions that the religious nationalist discourses are constructing for Hindu and Muslim women. The study is based on the content of debates taken from three mainstream English newspapers in India. Further, interviews with people associated with projects related to women rights and/or countering religious nationalism are used to supplement the analysis. The analysis is carried out using concepts from Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory. The analysis suggests that the subject positions being constructed by the religious nationalist discourses for Hindu and Muslim women, although different from each other, freeze them as subjects of religious communities, marginalizing or rejecting their identities as subjects of State with equal citizenship rights. The women rights and secular discourse counters this by offering a subject position with more agency and rights compared to the former two. However, it is increasingly getting trapped within the boundaries being set by the religious nationalist discourses. I argue that there is a need for women rights and secular discourse to break the boundaries being set by the religious nationalist discourses. In order to prevent the sedimentation of the meaning "women as subjects of community", the secular discourse needs to employ the vocabulary of liberal citizenship as rearticulated in feminist, pluralist terms.Item Pathways to citizenship : the political incorporation of Latino immigrants(2015-05) Corral, Álvaro José; Leal, David L.; Rivera, MichaelThis study explores the determinants of political incorporation of Latino immigrants in the U.S. from multiple perspectives. The objective is to identify the factors that promote political incorporation along a pathway to citizenship--specifically, those that promote naturalization; lead to a speedier citizenship acquisition process; and are associated with greater political participation. Findings show that the effect of transnational political activity on political incorporation varies according to the stage of immigrant integration. In particular, such behaviors have greater effects at the stage of citizenship acquisition. During the citizenship acquisition phase, associational ties to social institutions play an outsized role such that immigrants with these ties are more likely to seek out citizenship. Other findings show that once naturalized, Latino immigrant political participation is affected by acculturation processes and differences in ethnic origin. Findings also reinforce the continuing importance of ethnic origin as, Mexican immigrant political incorporation is distinct from other national origin groups.Item Performing liminal citizenship(2009-05) Skeiker, Fadi; Jones, Omi Osun Joni L., 1955-This study examines traditional and alternative citizenship models such as legal, flexible, global and cultural citizenship. These types of citizenship lay the foundation for the understanding of 'liminal citizenship.' This study identifies international students as liminal citizens and gauges the role of theatre in encouraging them to be civically engaged by creating a model for using applied theatre to 1) make international students aware of the possibilities of inclusion within their host community; and 2) empower them to become active members in it.Item Rhetoric and public action in poetry after 1960(2011-05) Smith, Dale Martin; Walker, Jeffrey, 1949-; Longaker, Mark; Baker, Samuel; Bremen, Brian; Gunn, Joshua; Perloff, MarjorieThis dissertation considers the relation between literary documents and public identities, and how U. S. culture is reflected and transfigured by poetry in the United States after 1960. Concerned with epideictic communication in public contexts, this study looks at how private interventions in public spaces can shape attitudes toward cultural phenomena. A secondary concern elucidates the ways literary texts are valued in English departments, bearing critical reflection on rhetorical, literary, and creative pedagogy. Insofar as the epideictic mode prepares individuals for a decision-making process in current democratic situations, this dissertation considers recent examples of strategic public engagements, and provides rhetorical readings of key situations in American social and cultural life since 1960 to illustrate how such methods can bring rhetoric and literature together in contemporary public contexts. The first of these studies inspects the correspondence and poetry of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov during the Vietnam War over the uses of poetry as a public document. Public identity and U. S. social practices are explored in the following chapter with the 1970s and ’80s poetry of Lorenzo Thomas and Edward Dorn, whose poems participate in the articulation of tensions between private and public life. Chapter 4 argues that Charles Olson’s poems and letters appearing in the editorial pages of The Gloucester-Daily Times in the 1960s effectively helped bring civic attention to the transformation of public space in Gloucester, Mass. While he interpreted the changes he perceived in Gloucester through literary and historical theories, he framed them within rhetorically motivated communication strategies to deliver new perceptions of what constituted civic value. Chapter 5 concludes by examining more recent attempts by poets to influence public reflection on crucial events that led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through digital media, public performance, and civic encounters mediated by fugitive texts. The opening and final chapters introduce my methodology and present the problem of poetry in public contexts, and advocates for reflection within English departments on the rhetorical value of literary texts.Item The rhetoric of common enemies in the racial prerequisites to naturalized citizenship before 1952(2013-05) Coulson, Douglas Marshall; Roberts-Miller, Patricia, 1959-; Heinzelman, Susan SageThis dissertation examines the rhetorical strategy by which groups unite against common enemies as it appears in a series of judicial cases between 1878 and 1952 deciding whether petitioners for naturalization in the United States were "free white persons" as required by the United States naturalization act at the time. Beginning in 1870, the naturalization act limited racial eligibility for naturalization to "free white persons" and "aliens of African nativity and persons of African descent." Based on the conclusion that Asians were neither "white" nor African, many courts interpreted these provisions to reflect a policy of Asian exclusion. As the distinction between "white" and Asian became increasingly disputed, however, the racial eligibility requirements of the act raised difficult questions about the boundaries of whiteness. I examine the rhetorical strategies adopted in a series of these cases between World War I and the early cold war involving Asian Indian, Armenian, Kalmyk, and Tatar petitioners who were represented as political or religious refugees at risk of becoming stateless if they were denied racial eligibility for naturalization in the United States. I argue that by representing the petitioners in the cases as victims of persecution by the nation's adversaries, the cases reflect a rhetorical strategy of uniting against common enemies which is also prevalent in the legislative, executive, and judicial discourse surrounding the act. I argue that the prevalence of this rhetorical strategy in racial prerequisite discourse suggests that a martial ideal of citizenship often influenced racial classifications under the act and that by recognizing the ways in which this discourse adapted to the rapidly changing enmities of the early twentieth century, a rhetorical interpretation of the cases offers advantages over other interpretive approaches and highlights the value of a rhetoric of law.Item Sound-politics in São Paulo, Brazil(2013-12) Cardoso, Leonardo de; Erlmann, VeitThe way a city sounds has something to do with how its residents move around and interact. It also has to do with the decisions made by the local government, as it tries to eliminate “harmful” and “unnecessary” sounds. This dissertation discusses how residents of São Paulo deal with noise conflicts and the sound-politics these mediations entail. The concept of sound-politics, which I develop throughout the dissertation, intersects with other concepts such as body politics and space politics and as such it denotes controversial sounds as instantiations of individual or collective differences. Here I focus on how state agents mediate controversial sounds. The narrative draws heavily on actor-network theory, which investigates social interaction as an open-ended and localized network made of humans and non-humans. The first part of the narrative discusses São Paulo’s spatial organization, noise legislation, and the enforcement of this legislation. Drawing from ethnography at meetings designed to review noise measurement standards, and at São Paulo’s anti-noise agency, I show the series of negotiations that accompany the identification and prosecution of noisemakers in the city. The second part of the dissertation looks closely at street parties that take place in the suburbs of São Paulo. Known as pancadões (“big thumps,” in reference to the loudness), these parties feature funk carioca and funk ostentação, two styles of popular music, among lower class teenagers in São Paulo’s suburbs. Based on fieldwork among youth, community meetings, and on interviews with police officers, I show how these parties have gone through noisification processes since they first emerged around 2008.Item Taking the lid off the Black Rio movement and música soul : the shifting terms of race and citizenship in Rio de Janeiro(2014-12) Olsen, Sandra Lea; Moore, Robin D., 1964-In this project, I situate the Black Rio movement and Brazilian música soul within a history of representations of black Brazilian masculinities in music. I do so in order to trace changing conceptualizations of race and citizenship in 1970s Rio de Janeiro. I seek to move beyond the existing literature which judges the Black Rio movement on its political expediency while ignoring its historico-cultural context. That is, prior works tend to pit black soul musicians and dancers against the mostly-white, middle-class intellectuals who have historically made determinations about black Brazilians, and in doing so these works have judged the Black Rio movement a political failure. Instead, I focus on the agency asserted by black Brazilian musicians and dancers in representing themselves and in creating alternative places for the enactment of their identities in opposition to the normative expectations of Blackness and standards of masculinity. Beginning in the 1920s and the 1930s, expectations for black masculine behavior were tied to restrictive, demeaning representations of the malandro in samba music and of afrobrasilidade in Carnaval celebrations. These representations were influenced by changing attitudes towards race in the context of national consolidation and the propagation of the myth of racial democracy, which recognized racial difference while not recognizing extant racial inequality. Entrenched modes of thinking and normative modes of being were adamantly challenged by soul musicians and dancers in the 1970s. Through the adoption of U.S. funk and soul music and strong masculine imagery associated with the Black Power movement, black Brazilians appropriated and resignified international symbols in order to forge a new black identity. In doing so, soul musicians and dancers carved alternative spaces for themselves, and renegotiated the terms of their inclusion in the Brazilian nation. This paper considers the shifting place of Blackness in Brazil through an analysis of visual, aural and lyrical representations of Blackness in music and in the critical reception of that music. I argue that funk and soul music played a key role in destabilizing the restrictive notion of afrobrasilidade held by mainstream Brazilian society, enabling new ways of being both black and Brazilian.