Browsing by Subject "Cultural studies"
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Item A qualitative study of typology in buffy the vampire slayer fanfiction(2007-08) Oviedo, Marilda J.; Gallagher, Amanda H.; Wilkinson, Kent; Reeves, JimmieThis study looks at a sample of fanfiction written by fans of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There has yet to be a more updated look at the types of fanfiction being written by more current fanfiction writers. In addition, most research on fanfiction focuses on how writers of fanfiction use their writing to accommodate a male lead and a non-existent female lead. There has not been an examination on the types of fanfiction written for a show with a prominent female character. This thesis examines the types of fanfiction written about the show. It also looks at fanfiction in relation to cultural studies, in particular, reception studies.Item After Umm Kulthūm : pop music, postcolonial modernity, and gendered national subjectivity in Cairo(2010-05) Gilman, Daniel Jason; Keeler, Ward; Ali, Kamran A.; Strong, Pauline T.; Walters, Keith; Shemer, YaronI argue that the ways in which members of the youth generation in Cairo, Egypt consume Arabic-language popular music, and the aesthetic criteria by which they evaluate the worth of various songs and singers, constitute a key component, along with corresponding criteria of political, racial, gendered, and cultural authenticity of Egyptian subjectivity, of a new form of Egyptian gendered national subjectivity in postcolonial modernity. These aesthetic and authenticating criteria are fundamentally interrelated, as one’s consumer preferences within genres of Egyptian popular music are often taken as indicative of the nature of one’s Egyptian subjectivity. For previous generations in postcolonial Egypt, discriminating taste for high modernist aesthetics in popular music, especially the singer Umm Kulthūm, comprised an aspect of desirable cultural modernity and authenticity. This aesthetic has been superseded among contemporary youth by an emphasis on direct emotional evocation as an index of authenticity. Correspondingly, youth in Cairo have come to judge the authenticity of their Egyptian subjectivity against the political subjectivity of their elders’ generations, and the authenticity of their gendered, racial, and cultural subjectivities against those of the West and those of other Arab countries, most particularly Lebanon.Item Andy Warhol's cinema beyond the lens(2013-05) Weathers, Chelsea Lea; Reynolds, Ann MorrisThis dissertation examines a small selection of the hundreds of films made by Andy Warhol and his collaborators between 1963 and 1968. Each chapter contextualizes a particular aspect of Warhol's filmmaking in terms of the artistic and cultural circumstances that informed it. Through an analysis of the content of specific films, rather than just their formal or stylistic tendencies, I discuss how the filmmaking process might have functioned for those involved in the films' production, as well as how those films might have functioned for specific spectators. The first chapter is a speculation on how Warhol might have understood filmmaking as a method for creating concrete connections between feelings and things -- for collecting imagery with his camera in order to create a historical catalog of people and their emotions. This first chapter also considers how some art critics in the 1960s used Warhol's early silent films as exemplars for their own anti-formalist art-historical and critical discourses. The second chapter examines the relationship between Warhol's films and the proliferation of amphetamine use amongst his collaborators. Amphetamines functioned to perpetuate for its users a way of life based on an alternative conception of time, and often involved a continued engagement with bad feelings, which fueled much of the creativity of the artistic community whose locus was Warhol's Factory in the mid-1960s. As such, many of Warhol's films from this period exhibit what I term an "amphetamine aesthetic" -- visual clues that suggest the effects of long-term amphetamine use by its participants. The third chapter is an analysis of a single film, Lonesome Cowboys. Participants in the film's production used the conventions of the Hollywood Western film genre to create a circumscribed space for transforming their everyday lives and their relationship to contemporary politics in the late 1960s. All of these chapters explore the effects of Warhol's particular approach to filmmaking, which involved Warhol's own detached style of directing, as well as his cultivation of an ultrapermissive environment in which his collaborators -- actors, directors, writers, and technicians -- felt free to experiment. This environment was predicated on the idea that the boundary between the space in front of the camera and the world beyond it was simultaneously arbitrary and deeply imbricated. Such a fluid boundary between the world inside and outside the scope of Warhol's camera is in part why some spectators, watching his films a half-century after they were made, might still find new meanings for the present in the films themselves.Item Competing cultural strategies: The evolution of religion(2012-05) Ralph, David; Rice, Sean H.; Strauss, Richard E.; Durband, Arthur C.Understanding the impact of culture systems and cultural evolution is integral to understanding human evolution. Cultural systems have the property of both horizontal and vertical transmission of non-genetic highly heritable cultural phenotypes. This is particularly important when group identity is related to a specific cultural phenotype, as in religious systems. This study examines the effects of the process of conversion, in which an individual’s phenotype is changed within its generational timeframe. A game-theory approach using behavioral strategies was used to model the cultural group interactions. A stochastic simulation and a deterministic analytical framework were used to model this system. Groups that used a conversion strategy outcompeted groups that used a kill strategy unless heavily constrained. The results suggest that the ability to convert may have played a substantial role in the evolution of cultural systems such as religion and government, as well as directly impacted the direction of human evolution.Item Create to live : perceptions of contemporary art in reality TV(2016-05) Macknight, Lauren; Bolin, Paul Erik, 1954-; Bain, ChristinaWithin the field of art education, there has been little to no research into the knowledge afforded by discourses around popular culture, especially those specific to reality television, into how the public conceptualizes contemporary art and artists. This kind of foundational knowledge is critical to our own development and evolution as a field as we learn how to most effectively reach our students and advocate best for the value of arts in education. Through an investigation of the television program Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, I asked: is the perception of contemporary art and practice altered by the lens of popular culture and, specifically, the reality television format? Is this an entryway to a broader dialogue about art’s value in the 21st century and to young individuals’ lives and careers? Results from this study were threefold. First, results pointed to a pattern of progressively nuanced insight and descriptive talk, indicated alternative access to art’s interpretability through the lens of popular culture. Talk in the focus groups functioned as a way for participants to perform access to interpretive authority over subjects of contemporary art to varying degrees of success, whether that meant adopting art terminology or modeling the language of judges and artist-contestants. Secondly, analysis displayed the discursive work involved in the meaning-making around understanding the artist as a figure, as a myth, and as a profession. Participants’ interactional speech performed a balancing act between critically examining the competing discourses of the artist—as contestant and creative laborer—and an understanding of who they are and their own identity in relation to the character of the artist. Lastly, analysis uncovered situated meaning of art and its value, where participants conducted a critical negotiation of what is and what was not art unfettered by lack of art historical knowledge of access to art’s interpretability.Item Creating art, creating selves : negotiating professional and social identities in preservice teacher education(2012-08) Kraehe, Amelia McCauley, 1977-; Brown, Keffrelyn D.; Urrieta, Jr., Luis; Valenzuela, Angela; Bolin, Paul E.; Carpenter, B. StephenThis critical ethnographic collective case study examined the process of becoming a teacher in the context of visual art education. This longitudinal study was grounded in larger educational concerns regarding the preparation of teachers for socially and culturally diverse U.S. public schools. This framing of teacher learning went beyond traditional dichotomies in educational research that maintain an artificial boundary between learning to teach content and learning to teach all students effectively and equitably. In order to re-integrate the study of teacher learning, this research foregrounds the transactional relationship between a preservice art teacher’s social locations (e.g., race, class, sex-gender, language) and how s/he makes sense of what it means to be an “art teacher.” Specifically, the study asked (a) how preservice art teachers negotiated their emerging art teacher identities in a university-based teacher education program, (b) how their social positions were implicated in that process, and (c) how their teacher identities were meditated by cultural narratives, artifacts, and practices. This approach eschewed simplistic and reductive analyses of teacher identities in order to attain a nuanced understanding of the multiple, sometimes contradictory social processes involved in becoming a teacher. This collective case study centered six preservice art teachers with varied racial, class, gender, and sexual identities, all of whom attended the same undergraduate teacher education program in the southwestern U.S. Social practice theory of identity, and critical curriculum and cultural theory were employed in constructing a multi-leveled relational analysis of the commonalities and divergences in participants’ self-understandings over time. Findings showed historical patterns of institutionalized racism, as well as complex class and sex-gendered meanings of art. These inequitable norms were reproduced in ways distinctive to the asocial and apolitical “common sense” knowledge that was mobilized within the world of art teacher education. Some participants experienced alienation and marginalization based on their social positioning in relation to the world of art education. The findings also illuminated the polyvalent nature of identity through the coexistence of hegemonic identities as well as counter-hegemonic agency. Implications and possibilities for generating more critical, equity-oriented teacher education and art education research, practice, and policy are considered.Item Crime and narrative : violence as a master narrative in contemporary crime novels(2012-08) Sessolo, Simone; Arens, Katherine, 1953-; Hoad, Neville; Johnson, Michael; Nehring, Neil; Raffa, Guy; Hardt, MichaelThis study analyzes crime novels written around the turn of the twenty-first century that blur the boundaries between “serious” fiction and genre fiction. I argue that these novels represent violence, not as an isolated event or action, but as a pervasive cultural logic. In other words, they frame violence as a cultural and institutional problem, instead of as a disruptive social anomaly, and they thereby expose violence as a constitutive force in a world and era in which social relations are always already mediated by the disciplinary apparatus of institutions. Novels like Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Nuruddin Farah’s Secrets, and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, draw attention to the cultural logic of violence by reproducing conventions associated with more traditional crime fiction—a crime to be solved, a “detective” figure, and the gradual revelation of clues—but these novels break with traditional crime fiction in one important way: they do not follow a trajectory of crime and punishment. Such a trajectory necessarily limits our understanding of violence to isolated actions that can be punished and to individuals who can be reformed. By breaking with the logic of crime and punishment, these novels position violence as a master narrative or as an interpretive lens that invites readers to engage in a critique of institutionalized and systemic violence. This investigation traces how this new practice of crime narrative seeks to exile readers from horizons of expectations that would ordinarily be associated with crime fiction. These contemporary novels constitute a new crime fiction subgenre: a narrative that, through the use of new conventions, forces its readers to confront the limits of canonical forms and to consider violence as a contemporary master narrative.Item Distances and proximities : Havana and San Juan from the point of view of literature and oral histories(2015-05) Mercado Diaz, Mario Edgardo; Salgado, César Augusto; Merabet, Sofian, 1972-Cuba y Puerto Rico have for long been considered sister islands, fighting together against the influences of the Spanish Empire and the United States. The decade of the 1950s, however, proved to be the splitting point for both islands, sending them into very different trajectories of development. In their shared experience of Spanish colonization and USA interventions, how do San Juan and Havana residents perceive and use space today in their particular socio-political contexts and how does this affect the resident's sense of citizenship? I closely engage with the different urban spaces using ethnographic data and photographs taken during my recent fieldwork, creative texts describing said spaces and case studies examining the formation of racial, gender and class identities. Focusing on a specific place on the Malecón, Havana's iconic esplanade, I examine how practices of leisure, intimacy (e.g. erotic homosexual and heterosexual encounters), and self-expression challenge the revolutionary rhetoric of "sameness" (i.e. absence of race, class, crime or gender violence). As for San Juan, I dissect the layers of significance in public visual representation, as exemplified in the artwork painted over an abandoned house in Santurce, the site for queer, artistic and marginal expression. The scene, two black women drinking on the porch, rescues a sense of citizenship lost to the class and racial polarization, fragmentation, and the "ruination" of San Juan. Finally, I argue that an archipelagic city, composed of the descriptions of specific places in different cities, has been created in the sea, a space of crossing, endurance and death, within these inter-capillary exchanges of people, cultures and habits. This archipelagic city, not spoken about directly but referenced semantically, aids in the construction of trans-national identities and perspectives, specific perceptions on time and space, and the production of media and cultural forms of expression. My goal is to tie together these narrative strands linking trans-oceanic places into an urban map surpassing its own geographical context.Item Elements of a sensibility : fitness blogs and postfeminist media culture(2014-05) Stover, Cassandra Marie; Frick, CarolineThis thesis applies a feminist theoretical perspective to interrogate discourses of postfeminism, as well as the position of the female body, fitness, and resistance within contemporary American culture. I argue that women’s fitness blogs are a vehicle for the production of Rosalind Gill’s “postfeminist sensibility,” focusing specifically on fitness bloggers’ use of self-surveillance and monitoring, personal transformation or “makeovers”, and intensified consumerism. Using ideological textual analysis of several fitness blogs as case studies, I examine the ways in which women publicly negotiate their relationships with their body through the documentation and disclosure of their food and exercise lifestyles. This thesis also acknowledges the feminist potential of fitness blogs as spaces in which women may strive towards body positivity and recovery from eating disorders, as well as challenge cultural expectations regarding female body and appetite.Item Enacting citizenship : a literary genealogy of Mexican American manhood, 1848-1959(2012-08) Varon, Alberto, active 2012; González, John Morán; Murphy, Gretchen, 1971-At the conclusion of the U.S. Mexican War in 1848, Mexican Americans across the United States found their disjointed communities struggling to adapt to a newly acquired national status. My project argues that Mexican American literary manhood functioned as a representational strategy that instantiated a Mexican American national public and that sutured regional communities into a national whole. Within a transnational, multilingual archive, Mexican American manhood served as a means through which to articulate multiple forms of citizenship and competing cultural investments in U.S. and Mexican national projects. Between 1848 and the 1960s -- that is, prior to the Chicano movement -- USAmerican writers looked to Mexican American manhood for this purpose because it was inseparable from a rival sovereign state, revealed an inconsistent racial hierarchy, and troubled gendered ideals of the civil participation, yet simultaneously contained such contradictions. For Mexican American writers Manuel C. de Baca, Adolfo Carrillo, Maria Cristina Mena, Jovita González, Américo Paredes and José Antonio Villarreal, manhood offered a tactic for imagining participation in national citizenship, unhindered by institutional or legal impediments, although each represented Mexican American manhood in radically different ways. Conversely, authors Gertrude Atherton, Stephen Crane, and Jack London turned to Mexican American manhood as a powerful tool for disenfranchising or assimilating Mexican American communities from and into the U.S. nation. For these authors, Mexican American manhood was instrumental in the dissemination of narratives of American progress because it facilitated claims to continental and imperial expansion, reinforcing ideals of Anglo American manhood and masking claims to whiteness. Through analysis of prose fiction in both English and Spanish, my dissertation explicates the cultural creation of Mexican American literary manhood as a constitutive category of American manhood and as a textual strategy that positions Mexican Americans as national citizens.Item Once upon a time in South Central Los Angeles : race, gender and narrative in John Singleton's Hood trilogy(2010-05) Cunningham, Mark Douglas; Watkins, S. Craig (Samuel Craig); Neal, Mark A.; Ramirez-Berg, Charles; Wilkins, Karin G.; Woodard, HelenaAs a result of the groundbreaking success of his debut film Boyz N the Hood (1991), filmmaker John Singleton gained worldwide acclaim, the respect of major film industry figures and became the topic of both scholarly and popular culture film conversations. He also made history, becoming the youngest and the first African-American to be nominated for the Academy Award for excellence in directing. However, the lukewarm critical reception for his sophomore release Poetic Justice (1993) countered the promise many felt he had shown earlier and initiated a lack of interest in Singleton’s subsequent films, rendering him almost obsolete from any future cinematic analysis. This dissertation seeks to resurrect the discussion of John Singleton as a substantial contributor to the world of cinema by bringing attention to the voice that he has given young African-American men and women in the works that comprise what he calls his “hood trilogy,” which includes the aforementioned films and Baby Boy (2001). Specifically, the dissertation addresses this topic by examining how Singleton’s own discussion of black masculinity via film is an extension of the same conversation about maleness began by writers Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, how the South Central Los Angeles environment has had a tremendous effect on the behaviors and attitudes of the young people that populate the area, the influence of hip hop culture on gender dynamics, and the strain often placed on black male/female relationships in urban settings. The methodological approach of the dissertation combines film, literature, music, and cultural and sociological studies in the effort to locate Singleton and these films as meaningful components in the investigation of film, popular culture and African-American history and culture. In analyzing these films that, as a result of their subject matter and setting, find the filmmaker at his most assured both narratively and cinematically, the intent of the dissertation is to confirm the potential that Singleton revealed in his debut and also bring awareness to the significant effect his work has on African-American youth culture at large.Item Permanent underground : radical sounds and social formations in 20th century American musicking(2012-05) Cline, John F.; Smith, Mark C.; Hagstrom Miller, Karl; Thompson, Shirley; Hoelscher, Steven; Lewis, RandolphMusical labor entered a new phase of alienation following the advent of recording technology in the late 19th century. Whereas prior to recording musicians had a relatively direct relationship with their audience—the sum of the two groups constituting “musicking”—sound reproduction created a spatial and temporal dislocation between them. Most narratives of American popular music trace out a particular genre formation, and relate it to the culture from whence it emerged. By contrast, this dissertation begins from the point where musicking began to disengage from commodification, both at the level of social formation and of the creation of sound itself. Drawing on anthropologist Pierre Clastres’ notion of “Anti-State” modes of organization and cultural critic Ivan Illich’s concept of “conviviality,” or a human-centered rather than mass production-oriented use of tools—in this case musical instruments both handmade and modified—each chapter of this project tackles a different dimension of the quest for autonomous musicking, or a “permanent underground.” Chapter 1 examines the organizational principles that have run in parallel to the bureaucratic, capitalist manifestation of a “music industry” in the 20th century. Beginning with a critique of either/or fallacy of the opposition posited between “modernism” and “nostalgia,” the reminder of the chapter demonstrates the reconciliation between these two aesthetic and political positions; topics include the seizure of public space by itinerant blues musicians in the rural-industrial prewar South, the self-released recordings of gospel artists after WWII, the formation of experimental jazz collectives in the 1960s, and the relationship between psychedelic music and cults/communes in the 1960s. Chapter 2 critiques the function of genre in musicking as means to a reproducible sonic commodity, and argues for “noise” as an aesthetic intervention that disrupts the saleable nature of music—a political act in itself. Chapter 3 suggests several strategies for achieving “noise.” These include the re-purposing of industrial machines as musical instruments, the incorporation of foreign musical traditions, and the use of collage as a formal principle. The final chapter profiles six collectives that have emerged since the late 1960s that adhere to the aesthetic and political values established throughout this dissertation.Item Psychobilly : imagining and realizing a "culture of survival" through mutant rockabilly(2011-05) Kattari, Kimberly Adele; Moore, Robin D.; Erlmann, Veit; Menchaca, Martha; Miller, Karl; Seeman, SoniaIdentifying simultaneously with the cool 1950s greaser, the punk rebel, and the zombies, murderers, and monsters of horror lore, psychobillies (“psychos”) cobble together an identity that expresses their subcultural subjectivity. They construct and cultivate an alternative present, a participatory culture that offers multiple strategies for relieving the pressures of working-class life, for experiencing pleasure despite hardship. As one research participant put it, “psychobilly is a culture of survival.” This dissertation explores the interwoven, multiple reasons why musicians and fans identify with this alternative, underground culture, tracing the integral role it plays in their lives and the ways in which psychobillies creatively reconstitute aspects of the cultural past in the present. I focus on the advantages that a tight-knit social community confers and on the ways in which various fantasies and lived practices provide transcendental escape as well as feelings of control and power. My research draws both from a long line of cultural studies and from more recent trends in popular music scholarship that focus on musical meaning in everyday life. Accordingly, I employ an ethnographic writing style that privileges the multiple voices and identities of my research associates.Item So far from home : portraits of Mexican-origin scholarship boys(2010-05) Carrillo, Juan Fernando; Urrieta, Luis; Valenzuela, Angela; Salinas, Cynthia S.; MacDonald, Victoria M.; Alan�s, IlianaUtilizing elements of Lightfoot and Davis’s (1997) portraiture method and life history interviews, this qualitative research study explores the portraits of four Mexican-origin scholarship boys. Two Mexican-origin students and two professors were selected from a snowball sample. A snowball sample consisted of gathering referrals from graduate students and faculty who contacted me through email to comment on their personal identification with the scholarship boy themes discussed in the essay I authored, "Lost in Degree: a Chicano PhD Student’s Search for Missing Clothes" (2007). I use the term “Mexican-origin” as a concept that identifies the subjects of this study as being of Mexican descent. All of the participants were born and raised in low SES, urban settings in the United States and they are children of Mexican-born parents. Hoggart’s (1957/2006) scholarship boy framework serves as the primary theoretical lens guiding this work. Rodriguez’s (1982) seminal work on this topic, Hunger of Memory, enumerates how this concept may apply to Mexican-origin scholarship boys. This study also utilizes Dubois’s (1903) double consciousness and Anzaldúa’s (1999) mestiza consciousness to analyze the ways in which Mexican-origin scholarship boys used culturally situated constructions of giftedness, “ghetto nerd” (Diaz, 2007) masculinities, and philosophical perspectives related to “home” to pursue academic excellence and cope/challenge the microgressions they experienced in K-12 schooling and higher education. The scholarship boys in this research provide critical information germane to the struggles and strategies used by academically successful Mexican-origin students as they negotiate the experiences related to the contrasting working-class culture of their upbringing and the middle-class culture of academia. While studies often focus on academically low-performing Latino students, this work explores the narratives of working-class Latino students who attained a graduate level education. Moreover, this research complicates clean “victory narratives” by unearthing various aspects of loss and gain inherent to the Mexican-origin scholarship boy trajectory. Findings inform scholarship in the areas of pedagogy, education reform, philosophy of education, education policy, curriculum, and revisionist conceptualizations of giftedness and human development.Item Social violence, social healing : the merging of the political and the spiritual in Chicano/a literary production(2012-05) Lopez, Christina Garcia; Cordova, Cary, 1970-; Limón, José Eduardo; Lieu, Nhi; Perez, Domino; Cox, JamesThis dissertation argues that spiritual and religious worldviews (i.e. Mexican Catholicism, indigenous spiritualities, and popular religion) have historically intersected with social and political realities in the development of Mexican origin communities of the United States. More specifically, as creative writers from these communities have endeavored to express and represent Mexican American experience, they have consistently engaged these intersections of the spiritual and the material. While Chicano/a criticism has often overlooked, and in some ways dismissed, the significant role which spiritual and religious discourses have played in the political development of Mexican American communities, I examine how the works of creative writers pose important questions about the role of religious faith and spirituality in healing the wounds of social violence. By placing literary texts in conversation with scholarship from multiple disciplines, this project links literary narratives to their historical, social, and political frameworks, and ultimately endeavors to situate literary production as an expressive cultural product. Historical and regional in approach, the dissertation examines diverse literary narratives penned by writers of Mexican descent between the 1930s and the current decade. Selected textual pairings recall pivotal moments and relations in the history of Mexico, America, and their shared geographical borderlands. Through the lens of religion and spirituality, a broad array of social discourses emerges, including: gender and sexuality, landscape and memory, nation-formation, race and ethnicity, popular traditions, and material culture.Item THE DYNAMICS OF FAT ACCEPTANCE: RHETORIC AND RESISTANCE TO THE OBESITY EPIDEMIC(2010-12) Mcmichael, Lonie R.; Koerber, Amy; Baehr, Craig; Rickly, Rebecca; Beard, Laura J.Our current solutions to the obesity epidemic are only making individuals less healthy in their pursuit for thinness while creating an environment of prejudice towards fat individuals. In response, a group of fat individuals are banding together in informal, online communities, which they call “the Fatosphere,” rejecting the belief that they must lose weight to be healthy, a proposition that fails 95% of the time, and embracing ideas such as Health At Every Size, a non-weight-centric health approach with much better results than dieting. Using bell hooks’ ideology of domination as a theoretical basis, I examined these ideas through digital interviews of Fatosphere participants and a rhetorical analysis of Fatosphere blogs. In conclusion, I assert that fat individuals experience domination much as other oppressed groups with a significant exception: the belief that the majority of fat bodies can be permanently made thinner – a belief that has no scientific evidence backing it. This societal belief leads fat individuals to experience a particular bind – a Sisyphean bind – demanding that the individual succeed at a futile task, one that must be performed over and over again, before being considered worthy to receive what others are granted automatically.Item Tras à memwa : the emergence and development of French Caribbean cinema(2010-05) Wright, Meredith Nell; Tissières, Hélène; Sherzer, Dina; Wilks, Jennifer; Staiger, Janet; Cauvin, Jean-PierreIn December 1899, the Italian camera operator Giuseppe Filippi, trained by the famous French Lumière brothers, arrived in Haiti and began conducting film screenings for local audiences. Within the next two years, his Caribbean travels led him to Guadeloupe and Martinique, where he left behind him a seed of interest in an art form that, as I will demonstrate, would alternately develop and wane over the course of the twentieth century depending on funding and the turbulence of the fluctuating French Caribbean political and cultural climate. Chapters one and two provide a thorough roadmap of the development of the French Caribbean film industry and conclude chronologically, arriving at the current state of cinema in these islands. Though the debate over the existence of the industry still carries on amongst local film professionals, particularly in Guadeloupan and Martinican circles, these chapters offer compelling evidence of distinct and verifiable cinematic production. The final two chapters consist of an analysis of a set of five films, chosen for their relatively recent release as well as their thematic, aesthetic, and structural variety. This set of films constitutes evidence of a wave of films unified by their preoccupation with memory, an orientation that mirrors and reinforces a contemporary cultural movement in these islands, and by their advancement of overt, contextually relevant postcolonial political agenda.Item Wrestling hierarchy : performance of race, nation, and body surrounding a case study of Rey Mysterio(2014-05) Krebs, Matthew Edward; Mallapragada, MadhaviThis project explores luchador Rey Mysterio’s cultural figure and the way it is formed institutionally via ringside commentary and through the WWE’s approach to its media market; through his dialogue and performance of body; as well as the myriad ways his performance is interpreted by U.S. fans and around the world. Through the content analysis of four primary WWE texts, this thesis works to better understand how tropes of geography, space, and body interact with underlying (and sometimes very overt) themes of race, U.S. racial hierarchy, ethnicity, and nation presented via the spectacular theater of WWE performance. Important over-arching questions that this project strives to explicate upon focus on how embodiment and racial difference are presented in the U.S. historically and how Mexican American diaspora are represented through U.S. professional wrestling.