Browsing by Subject "Imperialism"
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Item American wasteland : a social and cultural history of excrement, 1860-1920(2012-05) Gerling, Daniel Max; Davis, Janet M.; Engelhardt, Elizabeth D.; Hartigan, John; Meikle, Jeffrey L.; Smith, Mark C.Human excrement is seldom considered to be an integral part of the human condition. Despite the relative silence regarding it, however, excrement has played a significant role in American history. Today the U.S. has more than two million miles of sewer pipes underneath it. Every year Americans flush more than a trillion gallons of water and fertilizer down the toilet, and farmers spend billions of dollars to buy artificial fertilizer. Furthermore, excrement is bound up in many complicated power relationships regarding race, gender, and ethnicity. This dissertation examines the period in American history, from the Civil War through the Progressive Era, when excrement transformed from commodity to waste. More specifically, it examines the cultural and social factors that led to its formulation as waste and the roles it played in the histories of American health, architecture, and imperialism. The first chapter assesses the vast changes to the country’s infrastructure and social fabric beginning in the late nineteenth century. On the subterranean level, much of America’s immense network of sewers was constructed during this era—making it one of the largest public works projects in U.S. history. Above ground, the United States Sanitary Commission, founded at the onset of the Civil War, commenced a widespread creation of sanitary commissions in municipalities, regions, and even internationally, that regulated defecation habits. Chapter Two assesses the social and architectural change that occurred as the toilet moved from the outhouse to inside the house—specifically, how awkwardly newly built homes accommodated this novel room and how the toilet’s move inside actually hastened its removal. The third chapter shifts focus to the way Americans considered their excrement in relation to their body in a time when efficiency a great virtue. Americans feared ailments related to “autointoxication” (constipation) and went to absurd lengths to rid their bodies of excrement. The fourth chapter analyzes the way excrement was racialized and the role it had in the various projects of American imperialism. The colonial subjects and potential American citizens—from Native Americans to Cubans, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans—were regularly scrutinized, punished, and re-educated regarding their defecation habits.Item Empire's bodies: images of suffering in nineteenth and twentieth-century India and Ireland(2004) Herman, Jeanette Marie; Moore, Lisa LynneItem German imperialism in the ottoman empire: a comparative study(2009-05-15) Illich, Niles StefanThe conventional understanding of German expansion abroad, between unification (1871) and the First World War (1914), is that Germany established colonies in Africa, the Pacific Islands, and to a lesser degree in China. This colonialism began in 1884 with the recognition of German Southwest Africa. This dissertation challenges these conventionally accepted notions about German expansion abroad. The challenge presented by this dissertation is a claim that German expansionism included imperial activity in the Ottoman Empire. Although the Germans did not develop colonies in the Ottoman Empire, German activity in the Middle East conformed closely to the established model for imperialism in the Ottoman Empire; the British established this model in the 1840s. By considering the economic, political, military, educational, and cultural activities of the Germans in the Ottoman Empire it is evident that the Ottoman Empire must be considered in the historiography of German expansionism. When expanding into the Ottoman Empire the Germans followed the model established by the British. Although deeply involved in the Ottoman Empire, German activity was not militaristic or even aggressive. Indeed, the Germans asserted themselves less successfully than the British or the French. Thus, this German expansion into the Ottoman Empire simultaneously addresses the question of German exceptionalism.Item Imperial authorship and eighteenth-century transatlantic literary production(2011-08) Hardy, Molly O'Hagan, 1977-; Cohen, Matt, 1970-; Moore, Lisa L. (Lisa Lynne); Baker, Samuel; Bertelsen, Lance; Harlow, BarbaraMy project examines eighteenth-century struggles over literary property and its part in England’s control over its colonies. Debates over literary property set in the context of the larger colonial struggles over ownership help us to understand the relationship between authority and authorship: in the colonies, booksellers and authors worked together to make authority and authorship local, to separate it from England, English constructions of authorship, and the book trade system in London. The figures I analyze––Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and Mathew Carey––brought new models of print capitalism to the colonies, dispersing an understanding of copyright that was an assertion of local affiliations. In the case of Ireland, these affiliations manifested themselves in a nationalist movement, and in Scotland, in an assertion of equality under the union of Great Britain. In the newly formed United States, the affiliations were among those still struggling for legal recognition after the American Revolution. Using book history in the service of literary analysis, my study is the first devoted to reading the way that liminal figures such as George Faulkner, Alexander Donaldson, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen have influenced the work of these largely canonical authors, and thus local politics, through their literary production practices.Item Imperialism and the Emerging White State in the Early Colony of Virginia(2014-05-08) Becker, Stuart DavidWhat accounts for the reality of U.S. imperialism and race today? How, and to what extent, is today?s system of racial domination and U.S. imperialism prefigured by the early English colonization of Virginia during the time period 1607-1669? I examine primary documents such as narratives and laws from the colony Virginia. Through this case study of the colony of Virginia, I utilize anti-colonial, internal colonialism theory, and a Black Marxist approach to show its effectiveness explaining that capitalism and systemic racism are two sides of the same coin. Through the dialectical method, I show the elite colonists? efforts at uniting all colonists as ?white? against the indigenous people and the African servants and slaves in an early emergence of a ?white state.? The white people?s state is a unification of the white ruling class and white laborers against colonized people. Through this case study of the colony of Virginia, I show some key characteristics of Euro-American imperialism such as the white elite imperialists? attempt to attain wealth through stealing land and natural resources of peoples throughout the world. These white imperialists use violence and terrorism in order to steal the land and extract natural resources from peoples around the world. I also utilize the Marxist-Leninist theory of the imperialist state and apply it to my analysis of the Virginia General Assembly. The function of the state is to protect private property and to protect the interests of the elite exploiting class. For instance, this alien state power legalizes the usurpation of land of the indigenous people. It also legalizes the enslavement of Africans and indigenous people and the exploitation of European indentured servants. The largest planters sat on the Virginia General Assembly and wrote laws in their own selfish interests of profitmaking. Through primary sources, I show the early emergence of the white racial frame in the narratives of the elite colonists of Virginia and how it rationalizes stealing the land, natural resources, and labor of colonized people of color.Item Leonard Wood and the American Empire(2012-07-16) Pruitt, James HermanDuring the ten years following the Spanish American War (1898 to 1908), Major General Leonard Wood served as the primary agent of American imperialism. Wood was not only a proconsul of the new American Empire; he was a symbol of the empire and the age in which he served. He had the distinction of directing civil and military government in Cuba and the Philippines where he implemented the imperial policies given to him by the administrations of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. In Cuba, he labored to rebuild a state and a civil society crippled by decades of revolutionary ferment and guided the administration's policy through the dangerous channels of Cuban politics in a way that satisfied ? at least to the point of avoiding another revolution ? both the Cubans and the United States. In the Philippines, Wood took control of the Moro Province and attempted to smash the tribal-religious leadership of Moro society in order to bring it under direct American rule. His personal ideology, the imperial policies he shepherded, and the guidance he provided to fellow military officers and the administrations he served in matters of colonial administration and defense shaped the American Empire and endowed it with his personal stamp.Item Life, land, and labor on Avery Island in the 1920s and 1930s(2011-05) Boutte, Charity Michelle; Thompson, Shirley Elizabeth; Tang, EricAvery Island, Louisiana and McIlhenny Company provide a lens through which to understand how performances of masculinity and paternalism operated in the New South and were deployed for U. S. empire-building projects. Focusing on the tenure of Edward Avery McIlhenny as President of McIlhenny Company, this paper utilizes primary documents from the McIlhenny Company & Avery Island, Inc. Archives to construct a narrative based on correspondence between E. A. and his Wall Street investment banker, Ernest B. Tracy, revealing how E.A. confronted disaster capitalism and influenced the production of cultural tourism amidst environmental and economic crises in the 1920s and 1930s.Item Negotiating documentary space(2012-05) Rudin, Daniel; Perzyński, Bogdan, 1954-; Lewis, RandolphThis essay attempts to propose an art practice based on an ethical and aesthetic relation of author, subject, and viewer. This relationship is productive of results that are seen as critical to a precise, useful, and ethical representation of social problems.Item Northern exposures: Canada and culture on display in the imperial exhibitions(2011-05) Strickland, Jonathan D.; Wong, Aliza S.; Schmidt, EthanNorthern Exposures: Canada and Culture on Display in the Imperial Exhibitions - "Northern Exposures" provides a review of the development of Canadian identity expressed within the British Empire. This thesis studies the compatibility of nation and empire in the formulation of Dominion status.Item Obama’s Conflict: A Close Textual Analysis of the President’s Discourse on the 2011 Libyan Civil War(2013-05) Starkey, Kathryn; Langford, Catherine L.; Gring, Mark A.; Williams, David E.In 2011, President Barack Obama was charged with the necessity to respond to the atrocious human rights violations occurring in Libya at the hands of the Muammar al-Qaddafi government. As a result of a U.N. resolution requiring the establishment of a no-fly zone, the Obama administration sent warships to the Mediterranean to eliminate the threat of a tyrant. The following analysis recaps these events from a rhetorical standpoint. President Obama spoke about the conflict and the possibility of U.S. intervention as the civil war grew in scope and became a threat to U.S. national security. Throughout his discourse on the conflict, Obama engages in two rhetorical strategies to justify foreign intervention without a declaration of war. First, Obama creates a rhetorical imperialist strategy for defending U.S. action in Libya. To accomplish such a task, he rhetorically establishes a homogenized notion of democracy, conflating the needs and goals of Libyan democracy with western and American notions of human and civil rights. With this notion of consubstantiation of identity and misinterpretation of Libyan desires, Obama could then frame the threat of democracy failure in Libya as a necessity for intervention, justifying military and economic imperialist action in the name of national security. His second strategy illuminated a spatial panopticon within his rhetoric. Obama frames Qaddafi as the prisoner of Jeremy Bentham’s all-seeing, all-knowing prison structure that was at the will of the international community, the watchtower led by its supervisor, the U.S. and President Obama. For the first time in presidential address, the conception of East versus West was diminished in foreign policy rhetoric as Obama transformed the rhetorical field to new focus of international affairs, the U.S. versus the world.Item Plato and Thucydides on Athenian imperialism(2012-05) Truelove, Scott Matthew; Seung, T. K., 1930-; Martinich, Aloysius; Perry, H. W.; Tulis, Jeffrey; Woodruff, PaulFor over two thousand years, Plato’s superiority to Thucydides was taken as an article of faith in Western philosophy. Nietzsche was the first to challenge this verdict by asserting his view—on philosophical grounds—that Thucydides was the more penetrating analyst of the human condition. Other than Nietzsche’s consideration of the two thinkers, surprisingly little has been done to investigate the connections between the two greatest Greek prose writers. My purpose in this dissertation is to rekindle this debate in light of new evidence to see what—if anything—can be gained by examining the relationship between how Plato and Thucydides treat the problem of Athenian imperialism. More specifically, I believe and attempt to show that: (1) Plato silently but explicitly directs his readers to different parts of the History through the use of textual references and thematic patterns; (2) Plato uses these textual allusions to highlight the common ground between the two thinkers, and that Plato understands Thucydides to be an ally to his philosophic aims; (3) Plato and Thucydides agree that the underlying cause of Athenian imperialism can be attributed to a combination of greed (pleonexia) and the internalization of specific sophistic teachings that, whether intended by the sophists or not, support unbridled appetitiveness as the best way of life; and (4) Plato and Thucydides largely agree on the solution to the problem—that pleonexia must be extirpated from the ruling order.Item The Revolutionaries(2012-12) Basu, Rhituparna; Shea, Andrew Brendan; Stekler, Paul; Schiesari, Nancy; Ramirez-Berg, CharlesThis report outlines the creation of my thesis project “The Revolutionaries: An Untold History of Freedom” from concept to completed film. The Revolutionary Movement was an underground militant movement in pre-independent India which sought to overthrow the British government by force. The film interleaves the interview of an elderly ex-Revolutionary with a high-level history of this mostly-forgotten underground movement.Item Riding Waves of Dissent: Counter-Imperial Impulses in the Age of Fuller and Melville(2010-10-12) Lawrence, Nicholas M.This dissertation examines the interplay between antebellum frontier literature and the counter-imperial impulses that impelled the era's political, cultural, and literary developments. Focusing on selected works by James Fenimore Cooper, Margaret Fuller, Francis Parkman, and Herman Melville, I use historicist methods to reveal how these authors drew upon and contributed to a strong and widespread, though ultimately unsuccessful, resistance to the discourse of Manifest Destiny that now identifies the age. For all their important differences, each of the frontier writings I examine reflects the presence of a culturally-pervasive anxiety over issues such as environmental depletion, slavery, Indian removal, and expansion's impact on the character of a nation ostensibly founded on republican, anti-imperialist principles. Moreover, the later works reflect an intensification of such anxiety as the United States entered into war with Mexico and the slavery debate came to increasingly dominate the political scene. Chapter I emphasizes the ideological contestations bred by the antebellum United States' westward march, and signals a departure from recent critical tendencies to omit those contestations in order to portray a more stable narrative of American imperialism. The chapter concludes by arguing that Cooper established an initial narrative formulation that sought to suppress counter-imperial impulses within a mainline triumphalist vision. Chapter II examines Fuller's first published book, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, in the context of hotbutton controversies over expansion that informed the 1844 presidential contest; employing the metaphor of the dance as her governing trope for engaging unfamiliar landscapes, peoples, and even modes of community, Fuller placed persistently marginalized counter-imperial impulses at the center of her western travelogue. Chapter III discusses Parkman's sub-textual engagement with controversies surrounding the Mexican War; though thoroughly invested in conquest ideologies, Oregon Trail nevertheless resonates with the war's most popular negative associations. Chapter IV explores Melville's attunement to national ambivalences towards rhetorics of Manifest Destiny from the late 1840s through the early 1850s. During this stage of his career, Melville both payed tribute to the Anglo-American triumphalism freighting the antebellum era, and enacted a powerful articulation of the era's counter-imperial impulse.Item A valiant effort : Faisal's failed inculcation of national identity in Iraq(2015-05) Abosch, Tova; Aghaie, Kamran Scot; Minault, GailThe lack of attention to any comprehensive scholarly study of King Faisal I of Iraq since his untimely death in 1933 is interesting, considering that the twelve years in which he ruled Iraq witnessed the imposition and evolution of many of the institutions of the twentieth century state along with their concomitant ideologies and justifications. The construction of the modern Iraqi state belonged solely neither to the British nor to the efforts of the Ottoman-educated ex-Sharifian officers who followed Faisal from his aborted kingdom in Syria to the newly established monarchy in 1921. It was more a mélange of competing ideas, collaborative efforts, and political realities. In all this, Faisal played no small part as he maneuvered delicately among the strategic concerns of two major European powers, a re-emergent Turkish nation, his family's historical nemesis in the Nejd, relations with Iran following the 1921 coup d'état, and a variety of internal separatist ambitions and parochial interests. This paper seeks to redress this lacuna, concentrating on Faisal's efforts to establish a solid base of support and control while crafting an independent, coherently functioning polity from the patchwork of provinces presented him on his accession to the throne of Iraq.Item Writing Woman?s Empire: Imperialism and the Construction of American Femininity in Antebellum Literary Discourse(2014-12-16) Lee, Seung HeeThis dissertation examines the interplay between the language of empire and femininity in antebellum literary culture by focusing on texts that offer gendered meanings of America as a new empire in their depiction and imagination of the types of femininity the novelty of the land would give rise to. Where Amy Kaplan?s ?Manifest Domesticity? posits that the imperial subjectivity of white women took shape in and through the language of domesticity during the time of Manifest Destiny, I start by showing that the imperial construction of white femininity began earlier in the Revolutionary period by revisiting the tenet of Republican Motherhood. In the first chapter, I discuss how the colonial context shapes the question of the divided American female subject in Wieland, the very first text by the first professional American novelist, Charles Brockden Brown. Wieland portrays America as the place where the enlightened white female subject transforms itself through the contact with savage otherness both from within and without. The new type of female subjectivity that Brown depicts as arising from the nation that continuously expands its borders and expels the original inhabitants is the divided subject whose inner psychological terrain resembles and mirrors the exterior terrain?a subject that uncannily anticipates Gloria Anzald?a?s borderland subject. Using Anzald?a?s theory, I trace how Brown disrupts the equation of whiteness with rationality to question white ownership of the land. If C.B. Brown treats white femininity as the site of colonial confusion and anxiety, Lydia Maria Child and Margaret Fuller cast it as the major imperial source for the nation by rewriting the national history as the story of woman?s empire and fusing utopian hope for a better world for women with the nation?s imperial aspirations. Chapter two discusses Hobomok where Child opposes masculine forms of colonial venture to offer feminine forms of colonization as more humane and effective ways of building an empire by feminizing sentimentality. Chapter three traces the development of Fuller?s imperialism from Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 to Woman in the Nineteenth Century. I revise the previous understanding that the two texts represent Fuller?s growing criticism of the American empire by showing that Fuller does not so much disapprove of her nation?s imperial progress as attempt to elevate it through the moral source of white women. Chapter four examines the intersection between emancipation and empire that underwrites the plot of the first Afro-American novel, Clotel. William Wells Brown criticizes the notion of America as a woman?s empire, but he still reproduces the discourse of white women?s moral power and its attendant imperial claims to enlist their support. Rather than giving white women?s moral duty a nationalist cast, however, Clotel puts it in the transatlantic context of the emancipationist politics of the British Empire.