Browsing by Subject "American Studies"

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Anxieties of the fictive: the immigrant and Asian American politics of visibility.
(2011-06) Hyon, Soyoung Sonjia
Anxieties of the Fictive: The Immigrant and Asian American Politics of Visibility analyzes Asian American literature and film to theorize the limits of representational politics that depend on visibility and recognition. Dominant discourses in Asian American studies examine the Asian immigrant as a contentious figure in U.S. national politics and culture. This dissertation departs from those frameworks to assess how the figure of the Asian immigrant is touted and suppressed for recognition and legitimacy in the nation and its cultural spheres, and emerges as a source of anxiety in Asian American cultural politics. In historical narratives, the Asian immigrant as a laborer and as a contributor to the nation is used to legitimate the place of Asians in America, but she is also a liminal figure that stands in excess to subjections of visibilities as American as well as Asian American and all its constituent ideals: Asian, Korean, individual, masculine, to name a few. Using cultural analysis, historical contexts, and critical race and gender theory, this project intervenes in common perceptions of the Asian immigrant as only reproductive of politics (i.e. Asian American activisms), culture (i.e. ethnicity and race), labor (i.e. capital), and nationalism (i.e. American dream) to illustrate how the Asian immigrant cannot be reconciled under nationalist tropes, narratives, and aesthetics as a subject. Instead, she emerges as a dangerously transgressive and excessive figure that produces critiques of normative formations of subjectivity and identity. This dissertation periodizes these desires for subjectivity and identity produced against the immigrant as occurring in the late 1970s following the institutionalization of Asian American as a racial and cultural category. I look at how Asian American film and literature, through specific examples and as generic categories, have represented and been defined as “Asian American” in relation to the immigrant to draw out contradictory notions of domestic, racial, and artistic politics and identities. As such, Asian American cultural production cannot guarantee prescriptive and reconciliatory notions of identity between the Asian American, American, and the immigrant. Rather than reading these excesses as failures of America and its legal and cultural apparatuses, the impossibility of subjectivity for Asians in the U.S. points to how Asian American cultural productions reveal alternative and heterogeneous representations of Asian America that are imperceptible, spectacular, and innovative, challenging the disciplinary terms of visibility administered and authorized by institutions and the markets. I observe these excesses through four cases: Eric Liu’s memoir The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker considers how his racial somatic challenges his claims to national identity underwritten by his articulations of English and its acoustic individualism; in Patti Kim’s A Cab Called Reliable, the protagonist, Ahn Joo’s subjectivity as a “Korean-American woman” exceeds the limned terms available by the authorizing narratives of belonging produced by the nation and diaspora; in Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow, the Asian immigrant stands in the shadows of heteromasculinities to critique discourses of equality produced by the state and markets; and Deann Borshay Liem’s adoptee autoethnography First Person Plural reconceives the Asian immigrant as a Korean adoptee to disrupt the naturalizing tendencies of family and nation to think of immigrant labors as generative of new formations of belonging and identity.
Condemned to be free: the cultural life of capital punishment in the United States, 1945-present.
(2011-01) LaChance, Daniel
This dissertation examines the waning of capital punishment in the immediate post-World War II period and its resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s. Some scholars understand the revival of the death penalty in the United States as part of a socially conservative backlash in a society undergoing immense social change. Qualifying and building upon these accounts, I argue that the migration of Americans' sense of political community away from the public sphere and a concomitant resurgence of individualism in the post-World War II period played an under-examined role in the growth of the American demand for capital punishment. State killing, I show, was compatible with a cultural consensus that social problems could be solved only by individual acts of will and not by large-scale social engineering. The revival of the death penalty reflected Americans' discomfort with the way that modern, utilitarian approaches to punishment, which peaked in the years after World War II, failed to take individuals seriously, prioritizing social goals over individual autonomy. In this context, capital punishment legitimized, rather than simply masked, the state's withdrawal of its claim to being the central provider of social, economic, and personal security. And it denied, rather than endorsed, the state's role as a dispenser of traditional morality. Contradictory understandings of the role of the killing state as normatively and descriptively strong and weak worked, moreover, to sustain the practice of capital punishment in the United States.
"Excuse the mess, but we live here": class, gender, and identity in the post-Cold War working-class family sitcom.
(2009-03) Williams, Melissa Drue
American television became a national medium in the late 1940s and, at its inception, foregrounded both the family and the American Dream as cornerstones of American culture and identity. An explicitly commercial medium, television used middle- and working-class family sitcoms to promote the commodities necessary for middle-class assimilation, but also to position working-class characters as stern object lessons in the battle to promote a "classless" American post-World War II idyll. Although 1970s television ushered in a much more visible (and in some ways, sympathetic) image of American working-class life, the era's programming nevertheless continued to promote the American Dream through material accumulation and behavioral assimilation in its representations of socio-economic class. A new representation of class, however, emerged just as the Cold War was grinding to a halt. Beginning in the late1980s and continuing into the late 1990s, working-class family sitcoms began to challenge the American Dream paradigm by presenting working-class cultures to be equally valid to the middle-class American culture that television had always promoted. This dissertation explores the rise and fall of this phenomenon, and how the politics, economics, history, and technological developments of the era facilitated this challenge to the hegemonic, middle-class norm.
Genealogies of Korean adoption: American Empire, militarization, and Yellow Desire
(2010-05) Pate, SooJin
This dissertation traces genealogies of Korean adoption that disrupt the dominant narrative of Korean adoption as a) a humanitarian rescue project and b) a reproduction of white heteronormative kinship in order to track the subject formation of the Korean orphan and adoptee. It does so by situating the emergence of Korean adoption neither in the Korean War (1950-1953) nor in the postwar recovery efforts of the U.S. but within the context of U.S. military occupation of the southern portion of Korea that began in 1945—five years prior to the Korean War and ten years before the “official” beginning of Korean adoption. In so doing, I argue that the figures of the Korean orphan and adoptee have defined neocolonial relations between the U.S. and Korea, as well as fostered white heteronormative constructions of the American family and nation. In Chapter One, I link the development of U.S. neocolonialism in South Korea to the neocolonial practice of Korean adoption by demonstrating how U.S. militarism and its policies of militarized humanitarianism became the precursors to this form of child welfare. I suggest that the Korean orphan ushered the arrival of what I call “American humanitarianism empire,” which enabled the U.S. to promote the myth of American exceptionalism while, at the same time, participate in imperial activities in the newly decolonized Korea. In Chapter Two, I argue that the discursive practice of, what I call, “yellow desire” facilitated the inclusion of Korean orphans into the U.S. domestic and national family. Informed by the 1950s Cold War Orientalist policies of racial integration, yellow desire runs on the logic that differences can be absorbed through assimilation. I contend that yellow desire is what compelled average white Americans to adopt Korean children during the era of Asian exclusion. In Chapter Three, I examine the process in which orphans became adoptees. As an institution of discipline and normalization, the orphanage as a “processing station” prepared the child to be incorporated into the white American home. It became the site where Korea’s social outcasts were shaped into useful subjects for the state: economically profitable for Korea and politically beneficial for the U.S. In this way, Korean adoption can be regarded as a civilizing project of modernity that ensures its success as a racially integrative project. Finally, in Chapter Four, I argue that the figure of the Korean adoptee—upon entrance into her new American family—documents the excesses, limits, and contradictions of Korean adoption as a project of empire and as a project of white normativity. Even though the adoptee is disciplined in the orphanage to seamlessly assimilate into her new adoptive family, the very presence of the adoptee’s body within the adoptive family disrupts the semblance of the all-American (read white) nuclear family. As a result, the adoptee’s presence exposes the nonnormative, queer dimensions of Korean adoption. Understanding the figures of the orphan and adoptee as geopolitical and socioeconomic constructions is significant because it not only denaturalizes Korean adoption but also illuminates the pivotal roles they played in building and preserving neocolonial relations between the U.S. and Korea. The dominant narrative of Korean adoption that depicts it as a “humanitarian project” or “rescue mission,” however, makes illegible the material conditions that produced it. By reorienting Korean adoption as a project of empire, I make legible the material conditions of U.S. military intervention and occupation, war, neocolonialism, and militarized humanitarianism—the very conditions that enabled the emergence and persistence of Korean adoption, as well as the subject formations of the orphan and adoptee.
Homeland developments: Filipino America and the politics of Diaspora giving.
(2011-10) Mariano, L. Joyce Zapanta
"Homeland Developments: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving" explores the implications of varying and situated giving practices in processes of diaspora formation. Annually, hundreds of Filipino American organizations, foundations, and associations give monetarily, of members' time, and in kind to or in solidarity with projects, movements and nongovernmental organizations in the Philippines. Moving away from an initial premise of giving as simple charity, this dissertation understands organized and public efforts by Filipino Americans to better, help, or fight for a cause in the Philippines to be forms of giving that necessarily entail frameworks of human and social need, sanctioning attendant visions of societal transformation and, at times, the maintenance of the social order. This work insists on bringing together often disparate mechanisms--for example, philanthropy, emergency relief, humanitarianism, environmentalism, or social justice work--in an analysis of the discursivity of giving and its implications for counter-hegemonic practices and frameworks of social transformation. With a transnational and diasporic analysis, this dissertation interrogates how dominant relationships of giving manifest in the spaces of and between Filipino America and the Philippines and impact the possibilities of diaspora politics, identities, belonging and imaginations.
Humanizing the Cold War campus: the battle for hearts and minds at MIT, 1945-1965.
(2009-11) Kizilos-Clift, Peter Justin
Abstract not available.
The insolence of the Filipinas: mothering nationalism, globalization, and literature.
(2010-12) Suarez, Harrod J
My dissertation reads diasporic Filipina/o literatures that destabilize the dominant representations which position Filipinas as "mothers" in and of the global economy and Philippine nationalism. The project is situated after the moment of US imperialism, as attempts to deliver a materially prosperous and psychologically uplifting national identity coincided with the rise of post-fordist global economic strategies, the results of which were the brokering and exporting of Filipina/os overseas. As the nation struggled to assert itself under poor and corrupt leaders, as the social unrest of anti-imperialist organizing did not wane but transformed into anti-capitalist critiques, establishing a formal global visibility for Filipina/o workers became imperative to assuage political, economic, and cultural uncertainties. The turmoil would culminate in the 1974 Presidential Decree 442, which authorized and institutionalized overseas employment as a state-managed program. The role diasporic Filipina/os play in the global economy--participating in older, traditional industries such as logging, manufacturing, and shipping, to newer service industries such as nursing, domestic help, and call centers--has been well-documented in recent scholarship, identifying the national service being performed. As numerous reports indicate, Filipina/os send more than ten billion dollars in remittances not just to families, but also to the nation. Such financing is so critical for the national economy that Philippine presidents have hailed them as both "national heroes" and "overseas investors." This workforce is not only highly gendered insofar as it is predominantly feminized, but it may be further specified as having a maternal character--literally but also, more broadly, symbolically. If nationalism and globalization work in tandem to inscribe Filipinas as a transnational, maternal underclass, what is the significance of texts that do not cohere with this inscription? My dissertation contends that in order to disrupt the authority of nationalism and globalization, which despite their differences collude to represent and employ Filipinas, one must destabilize those racialized, gendered, and sexualized representations. My dissertation thus seeks to bring to crisis the transparent and empiricist epistemologies that underwrite nationalism and globalization, outlining the ways that diasporic Filipina/o literatures critique these state-sanctioned ways of knowing and being. My first chapter, "Mother, Navel, Nation: Disseminating the Dictionary of Philippine Heteronationalist Globalization," lays out the theoretico-political scope of the project by reading Nick Joaquin's short story, "The Woman Who Had Two Navels." It is an appropriate text with which to begin, given both Joaquin's role as a leading nationalist writer in the early phase of independence as well as given the dubious rumor that circulates in the story, spread by a young woman who, along with her mother, entices and repulses various male suitors. The story represents the postwar Philippines as a gendered landscape, newly independent and luring Filipino men who have left for other shores to return--only to offend and threaten them, driving them back overseas. While it explicitly negates the role of Filipina mothers, I draw on certain moments that reveal a more complex theorization of gender and sexuality for both nationalism and global capitalism. The contemporary neoliberal consensus collaborates with Philippine nationalism to produce Filipina-as-mothers as ideal subjects according to particular racial, gender, and sexual categories. This reading contributes to the genealogy of hetero-masculinist nationalism I trace within the chapter. As many scholars have analyzed and often reproduced, "revolution" has circulated as an "unfinished" discourse emerging from within anti-imperialist mobilizing in the Philippines. Not unlike both liberal and revolutionary nationalisms around the globe, the dominant character of such discourse has proven to be profoundly and constitutively heteropatriarchal. The mourning that is concomitant with the notion of an "unfinished" or "incomplete" "revolution" can thus be understood as a mourning and failure of native masculinities to protect their families, women, and land. Building on postcolonial feminist critiques of nationalism as well as recent conceptualizations of the rhizomatic, biopolitical field of global empire, the chapter critiques nationalism not only for its unexamined heteropatriarchy, but also its potential obsolescence given the complicity of revolutionary and liberal Philippine nationalisms with global capital. My second chapter, "Letting the Cat(achresis) Out of the Bag: Transnational Filipina Motherhood," reads two texts that represent motherhood in distinct ways. In Eleanor Coppola's published diary of the filming of Apocalypse Now, the narrator aspires to overcome the inequality between her and her husband's professional work by conceptualizing an ambitious marriage dependent on imperialist strategies and settings. Her writings probe the assertion of an empowered identity that, strikingly, only seeks that liberation in the Philippines; when returning to the national-domestic space, she appears content to return to her own national-domestic-maternal duties. Rizalina, the young Filipina mother of Jessica Hagedorn's novel Dream Jungle, the second half of which fictionalizes the Apocalypse Now film production, distances herself from maternal, nationalist, and imperialist norms. In this way, she resists being recodified into a visible, legible, rational representation that reproduces either Coppola's imperialist feminism or an equally unexamined nationalist feminism. The terms of her liberation are not spelled out, but neither can one deny the happiness she claims; what can be specified is her obsession with a white tiger that is flown in for the film shoot. That cat, rather than a Filipina elder or Coppola's fictional counterpart, inspires Lina most of all. In doing so, Lina performs a catachresis on the production of racialized, gendered freedom. My third chapter, "Carlos in Medford and Gabe in Meridan: Attempted Erasures of the Filipina Mother for Hetero/Homonational Masculinity," examines two novels, Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart and Brian Ascalon Roley's American Son, to consider how multiple efforts to represent freedom and agency draw from and reproduce imperialist and heteronormative authority. Even as Roley's novel stages an unannounced but noticeable homonationalism--which can be understood as a contemporary revision of the heteronationalism of Bulosan's novel--it is quickly rescinded back into a heteropatriarchal space. Neither narrator can liberate themselves on the grounds of masculinist identifications, whether heteronational or homonational. Whereas the masculine characters of both texts thus struggle in the attempt to speak for themselves, the mother in the second text recognizes the dilemmas representational strategies pose. Many characters try to speak for her, on her behalf, but she renders their attempts futile and does not aspire to represent herself. She rejects representations that interpret her as a redemptive figure for either national heteronormativity or globalization. Such a move does not mean she accepts invisibility; to the contrary, her presence persistently disrupts the text and stymies its efforts at resolution. The fourth and final chapter, "Learning to Listen: Nation, Film, and Children in Kidlat Tahimik's Mababangong Bangungot," reads the eponymous film, which demands critical audiences who listen as well as they watch. I argue that listening to a film is just as significant as watching it; in spite of what seems like a formalist argument, I examine in what ways such an approach intervenes in the production of Philippine history and Filipina/o bodies, especially as those bodies get translated for the interests of nationalism and globalization. In the film, an overprivileging of the visual aids and abets the film's masculinist nationalism, which is promoted as a liberatory alternative to globalization and imperialism. In this chapter, the visual pathos of the Filipina mother--neglected, then remembered, by her son after warning him of the seductions of the west--fails to complicate her identity, employing her strictly for the purposes of nationalist mourning. But in the aural rendering of Filipina/o children, which works in sharp contrast to their visual rendering, it is possible to discern a critique of the film's heteronormative nationalism. That is, by listening to the film, one can hear a moment of liberatory potential not in the service of heteronationalist global empire.
Intimate encounters, racial frontiers:stateless GI babies in South Korea and the United States, 1953-1965.
(2010-06) Park, Bongsoo
This dissertation explores the policy implications of statelessness by examining G.I. babies, born of non-marital sexual relations between U.S. soldiers in South Korea and Korean women between 1953 and 1965. Using English and Korean language documents about adoption and immigration of stateless GI babies, my work shows that statelessness reveals a racially exclusionary vision of national belonging that shaped citizenship policies of both nations. The GI babies' presence challenged the myth of racial purity and confounded racial categories in both nations. The dissertation seeks to elucidate some limits of Cold War racial liberalism informed by humanitarian concerns for abandoned Korean war orphans but helped maintain racially exclusionary strategies on citizenship conferral that made the children stateless.
Korean looks, American eyes: Korean American adoptees, race, culture and nation.
(2009-12) Park Nelson, Kim Ja
This project positions Korean adoptees as transnational citizens at intersections within race relations in the United States, as emblems of international geopolitical relationships between the United States and South Korea, and as empowered actors, organizing to take control of racial and cultural discourses about Korean adoption. I make connections between transnational exchanges, American race relations, and Asian American experiences. I argue that though the contradictory experience of Korean adoptees, at once inside and outside bounded racial and national categories of "Asian," "White," "Korean," and "American," the limits of these categories may be explored and critiqued. In understanding Korean adoptees as transnational subjects, single-axis racial and national identity are challenged, where individuals have access to membership and/or face exclusion in more than one political or cultural nation. In addition, this work demonstrates the effects of American political and cultural imperialism both abroad and domestically, by elucidating how the acts of empire-building nations are mapped onto individuals though the regulation of immigration and family formation. My methods are interdisciplinary, drawing from traditions that include ethnography, primary historical sources, and literature. My dissertation work uses Korean adoptees' own life stories that I have collected and recorded in three locations: 1) Minnesota, home to the largest concentration of Korean adoptees in the U.S.; 2) the Pacific Northwest, home to the many of the "first wave" of the oldest living Korean adoptees now in their 40s and 50s; and, 3) Seoul, Korea, home to hundreds of adult Korean adoptees who have traveled back to South Korea to live and work. In addition, I use Korean adoptee published narratives, archive materials documenting the early history of transnational adoption, and secondary sources in sociology, social work, psychology and cultural studies to uncover the many layers of national, racial and cultural belonging and significance for and of Korean adoptees.
On our own: flight attendant labor and the family values economy.
(2010-12) Murphy, Ryan Patrick
This dissertation historically analyzes the working lives and activism of flight attendants in the U.S. airline industry since 1970. During that period, I trace the emergence of what I call the "family values economy." Given three decades of neoliberal reforms, working people have been less able to count on living-wage jobs or on the state for material support. Traditional family relationships have had to make up for such austerity, with fathers, mothers, and children turning the household into a space to pool the resources of multiple low-paying service jobs. Since flight attendants' work schedules keep them away from home for weeks at a time, and because of involvement in feminist and LGBT movements long critical of "family values" agendas, I argue that flight attendants are uniquely positioned to challenge the reorganization of the economy around traditional family. Flight attendants have thus demanded and won new resources for the alternative arrangements in which they live: as single people, as unmarried parents, as same-sex couples, and as cohabitating friends. The dissertation therefore contributes to labor, gender, and sexuality studies by showing how politicizing family has sustained flight attendants' vigorous push to contest economic inequality.
Queer texts and the Cold War: how nationalism shaped U.S. lesbian and gay writing, 1945-1960.
(2009-06) Galik, Angela E.
This dissertation explores the impact of mainstream discourses of nationalism, gender, sexuality, race, and class on the development of lesbian and gay identities and communities in the United States in the early Cold War period (1945-1960) by analyzing the literary productions of several lesbian and gay writers. Placing neglected and forgotten texts alongside works by authors considered "canonical," I show how these writers responded in different ways to the dominant, anti-homosexual discourses that characterized the era. During this critically under-examined period in U.S. LGBT history, paranoia about Communist expansion led to the conflation, in the national imagination, of homosexuals with enemy agents, and government, mass media, the self-help establishment alike promoted the suburban nuclear family headed by a married heterosexual couple as an important line of national defense. Simultaneously, the 1950s saw the formation of the first public gay and lesbian rights organizations in the U.S., the publication of the country's first nationally-distributed lesbian and gay magazines, and an unprecedented flurry of novels published by gay and lesbian authors, ranging from high art to pulp paperback romance. In these conditions of seeming contradiction, of heavy state repression combined with optimism and new possibilities for self-expression, lesbians and gay men participated, through published writing, in a broad national conversation about the meanings of homosexuality. Gay and lesbian writers wrestled with the question of what it meant to be homosexual in the early Cold War United States, contested exclusionary and discriminatory understandings of the homosexual's place in society, and challenged the validity of rigid gender roles - as well as the United States' moral authority as the self-declared protector of democracy. The ways in which each individual author interacted with and responded to these hegemonic national discourses depended, to a great degree, on the author's specific social positioning within the interlocking hierarchies of privilege based on gender, sexuality, race, and class, as well as their larger ideological perspectives and political commitments. My dissertation teases out these specificities, illuminating previously unrecognized contributions to the national conversation about the meanings of homosexuality, examining the ways an author's multiple points of reference often led to the reproduction of competing ideologies within a single work. This project contributes to the work, within the field of LGBTQ Studies, of reclaiming and expanding the boundaries of a queer U.S. literary tradition by re-examining the textual productions of an era usually seen as a "dark age" between the social upheavals of World War II and the emergence of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s. At the same time, by placing the discursive processes by which the meanings of homosexuality were negotiated during this period, highlighting the state of flux itself, my analysis makes it impossible to refer to a unitary gay, lesbian, or "homosexual" experience, viewpoint, or identity.
Spectral materialisms: colonial complexes and the insurgent acts of Chicana/o cultural production.
(2011-07) Watson, Cathryn Merla
This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary lens to theorize the multiple ways in which contemporary forms of Chicana/o cultural production disturb and extend beyond specific "colonial complexes" or seemingly ossified compounds of time and space. Specifically, I examine how Chicana feminist theory in conjunction with Marxian and poststructuralist theory; the literary work of Bárbara Renaud González and Sandra Cisneros; the folklore of La Llorona; the urban legend and social performance of San Antonio's Ghost Tracks; and the visual art of the collaborative Project MASA (MeChicana/o Alliance of Space Artists) disrupt, redistribute, and surge beyond colonial cartographies, re-imagining and enacting alternative horizons of possibility or decolonial imaginaries. I ground my study in San Antonio, Texas, whose Chicana/o cultural production and neo-colonial geography has received scant scholarly attention, to bring to the fore both the specificity of colonial legacies and to connect these legacies to larger neo-colonial (trans)national geographies. I engage and extend diverse theorizations of the ghostly--or, that is, the contingent and ephemeral structures of desire, difference, history, lived experience, and memory--to bring into purview how colonial legacies inhere in the present and collectively enunciate what I term a "spectral materialism": that which is profoundly felt and experienced, but not necessarily visible or intelligible through language. I further argue that although this spectral materialism is animated by particular cultural and socio-spatial logics, it also gestures toward a more general embodied form of knowledge production that acknowledges the ways in which the ostensibly immaterial always already imbues the material world. This dissertation, finally, intervenes in Chicana/o, Latina/o, and American Studies through critiquing the dialectic (a dominant analytic for ascertaining meaning from cultural production) as a binary colonialist ontology that severs the material from the immaterial, as well as articulates a more supple, complex, and inductive analytic for understanding how Chicana/o cultural production generates meaning through lived experience and indexes the potential for other postcolonial futures.
Stealing fire, scattering ashes: Anishinaabe expressions of sovereignty, nationhood, and land tenure in treaty making with the United States and Canada, 1785--1923
(2008-08) Stark, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik
This dissertation seeks to better understand and explain how the Anishinaabe constructed and expressed their sovereignty, nationhood, and land tenure when they negotiated treaties with the United States and Canada from 1785 to 1923. This trilogy of terms often became convoluted in treaty negotiations during which both native Nations and the two states involved brought their own understandings for these terms into the negotiation processes. I analyze approximately fifty-four ratified treaties negotiated between the Anishinaabe and the United States and Canada. Placing Anishinaabe bands at the center, this study examines how and why treaty provisions dealing with land have affected the political and legal status of aboriginal in treaty rights in both states. Anishinaabe sovereignty was deeply intertwined with conceptions of nationhood and land tenure. A focus on treaty making provides a site where the competing conceptions of these terms held by participating nations must be negotiated. In order to obtain mutual agreements with each other. This dissertation operates from the premise that a re-examination of treaty discourse, when interpreted according to Anishinaabe cultural conceptions and knowledge systems, may help reveal what these peoples ceded or surrendered and what they reserved in these agreements. These findings provide a fresh understanding of bilateral treaty making, which forms the foundation of Anishinaabe-state relations. Furthermore, the insights gleaned from this study may reshape our understandings of Anishinaabe reserved aboriginal and treaty rights and help improve intergovernmental relations.
Tambien Bailamos en el norte: sonidero transnational, lives, and Mexican migrants in the Midwest
(2014-06) Aguilar, Rodolfo
The United States of America holds a legacy of xenophobic attitudes towards Mexican immigrants dating back to the massive repatriations of the 1930s. In response to anti-immigrant actions, Mexican immigrants have often turned to popular culture to document racial violence and labor exploitation. Currently, popular music serves as a means for Mexican immigrants to proclaim a cultural presence in the United States. Tambien Bailamos en el Norte is an interdisciplinary study incorporating ethnography and lyric analysis to examine the intersections between Mexican immigration to the Chicagoland area and the popular social dances known as sonidero. Sonidero dances consist of a Mexican Sonido (DJesque performer) with enormous sound systems playing popular música tropical such as cumbia and salsa for large crowds. Sonidero was born in the urban Mexico City barrios during the late nineteen-fifties when Mexican Sonidos used humble sound systems and Colombian cumbia records to host street bailes (dances). The pioneer sonidos of Mexico City provided Latin American rhythms to working-class residents originally restricted to elite Mexican socialites. The Sonido eventually incorporated saludos (shout-outs) delivered concurrently with the music. Sonidero's popularity expanded to the Mexican immigrant communities of the Chicagoland area and the rest of the U.S., due to accelerated waves of immigration during the 1990s and 2000s. This dissertation argues that sonidero enthusiasts engage in a unique Mexicanidad fusing Mexican nationalism with adopted Latin American cultural codes to create transnational lives in the Chicagoland area. Chicagoland sonidero enthusiasts challenge how scholars study popular music in U.S. Mexican immigrant communities because the Mexicanidad invoked in sonidero, conflicts with the long-standing musical traditions of rural northern Mexican corridos. I use this unique expression of Mexicanidad found in sonidero spaces and in the lives of my research subjects to theorize new ways of studying community formation, transnationalism, cultural citizenship, political economy, and mass communications among recently-arrived Mexican immigrants. In doing so, the participants of my dissertation demonstrate how Mexican immigrants cross cultural borders as well as geographical ones by forging transnational lives, linking Mexico City with the Chicagoland area.
Trickster skins: narratives of landscape, representation, and the Miami Nation.
(2011-07) Shoemaker, Scott Michael
This dissertation, Trickster Skins: Narratives of Landscape, Representation, and the Miami Nation, reinterprets sites of Miami history through the lenses of narrative and landscape. It combines Miami and Western forms of knowledge to reinterpret the complex relationships of landscape and representation within the Miami struggle against colonization and the narratives that have arisen from this struggle. It tells several stories of a small tribe that remained east of the Mississippi River after the era of Indian removal who have been neglected by the Federal Government and often misunderstood by academia and the general public. The Miami Nation of Indians of Indiana (MNI) has about 5,500 enrolled citizens. Remaining in their homeland after removal of nearly half of the Miami Nation in 1846, the Miami of Indiana struggled to retain their reserve lands and identity in the face of Federal, State, and local governmental efforts to systematically dissolve their land base and their inherent and reserved rights. These efforts hinged upon representations of the Miami people and landscape that worked to ignore and erase their continued presence in Indiana through various cultural and legal narratives ultimately denying their identity as American Indians and their recognition as a sovereign nation. Despite these efforts, this dissertation demonstrates the creative and continued resistance of the Miami in various ways. Drawing upon a myriad of sources, this dissertation focuses upon Miami narratives, pictorial and textual representations, efforts to retain their land base, public performance, museum collections and display, and legal battles. This focus examines how the relationships of the Miami people to land takes many forms and are integral to discussions of tribal sovereignty. The findings in this investigation provide alternative interpretations of these sites of Miami history and are informed by Miami narrative traditions.
“We the Indians of the Turtle Mountain Reservation…” rethinking tribal constitutionalism beyond the colonialist/revolutionary dialectic
(2009-05) Richotte Jr., Keith Steven
Using the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians as a case study, this dissertation argues that the body of scholarship concerning tribal constitutionalism is artificially limited and cannot adequately explain the development of constitutionalism in Indian Country. Scholarship concerning tribal constitutionalism currently exists in what this dissertation calls a colonialist/revolutionary dialectic. The discourse within this dialectic is focused almost exclusively on an examination of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 (IRA). On the "colonialist" side of the dialectic, scholars argue that the IRA has forced a foreign form of government on tribes and that constitutionalism is another form of colonialism. On the "revolutionary" side, scholars argue that the IRA was a positive development in Indian Country that was not allowed to fulfill its potential. This narrow focus neglects to consider the choices made by tribal peoples themselves as it concerns their own constitutional histories. This dissertation examines four episodes in the constitutional history of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. The first episode concerns the McCumber Agreement, or the Ten-Cent Treaty, as it was derisively nicknamed. Tribal discontent with the McCumber Agreement led the people of Turtle Mountain to seek out constitutionalism. The second episode concerns the first tribal constitution, ratified in 1932. While it was a compromised choice, the people of Turtle Mountain decided to adopt the 1932 constitution in order to attempt to begin a claim against the United States. The third episode concerns the second tribal constitution, ratified in 1959. This constitutional moment is an example of the community seeking to reclaim autonomy over their lives and their government during a particularly onerous social and policy period. The fourth episode concerns the efforts at constitutional reform in 2002 and 2003. During an era when constitutional reform has been a growing trend in Indian Country, the people of Turtle Mountain used their constitutional votes to express their displeasure with the activities of the tribal government and with an increasingly controversial tribal chairperson. None of these four episodes fits within the colonialist/revolutionary dialectic. As such, the case study of Turtle Mountain makes clear that the dialectic does not and cannot adequately explain the development of constitutionalism in Indian Country. The Turtle Mountain example provides scholars with an opportunity to reexamine the current discourse concerning tribal constitutionalism and allows scholars to develop a more complex, deeper, richer understanding of tribal constitutionalism and tribal government.

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