Browsing by Subject "empire"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Adoption and American Empire: Migration, Race-making, and the Child, 1845-1988
    (2017-02) Condit-Shrestha, Kelly
    In the United States, between 1854 and 1929, more than 150,000 working class youth were transported by “orphan trains” from their urban eastern city homes to live with families in the (primarily) rural American West. Since 1953, more than 150,000 adopted Korean children have migrated into U.S. families. Both during and in-between these orphan trains and Korean adoptions, Americans have also experimented with such child placement practices linked to nineteenth century black codes and boarding schools, twentieth century child welfare movements (at home and abroad), and postwar international adoptions. As patterns of mobility and migration have changed alongside technology and transportation modernization, imperial expansion, and the growth and consolidation of nation-states, child placement practices have also changed. Reflecting the specificity of each time and place, adoption and child placement discourse has historically been rife with tensions between sentiment and economics, exploitation and humanitarianism. While adoption implies the permanent transfer of a child away from the biological parent(s) to another person, the reasons, motivations, social practices, as well as the legal and cultural parameters of adoption have changed dramatically and unevenly in the modern era of nation-states. My dissertation utilizes “child placement” as its central frame of analysis to more accurately document the wide array of practices in U.S history that have historically involved the separation of children from their birth parents, to live under the authority of other adults. Adoption and American Empire examines the relationship between migration, race-making, and child placement as central and strategic components in America’s consolidation as a nation-state and expansion as a global empire, between 1845 and 1988. In three parts that transverse the historical periods of U.S. Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, interwar years, and post-World War II, I document continuity and transformation between older forms of child placement undertaken for child labor needs (such as with African American children during Reconstruction) and modern forms of adoption for humanitarian or sentimental reasons (including refugee and “orphan” children from West Germany). By linking these histories, I demonstrate that child placement is always inextricably tied to United States’ practices and discourses of empire and race. Few scholars have explored the linkages between these different forms of child placement. By employing the methods of social and cultural history, as well as multiple scales of analysis (comparative, regional, national, transnational) across an expansive archive of source material (state, immigration, and U.S. military government law, regional and national newspapers, the ethnic press, government reports, the U.S. congressional record, and archival documents), I illuminate the historic continuities and structures of power embedded in these seemingly disconnected practices. Ultimately, my dissertation contends that Americans’ practices of child placement and adoption have served as powerful tools of U.S. empire, employed widely when their implementation would assist the nation’s larger geopolitical and economic objectives. Always undergirded by nationalist racial logics, the children themselves would be increasingly valued as they came to encompass both the real and symbolic vision of how the United States imagined itself, or wished to be imagined, by its global peers.
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    Harmless Pleasure: Feminist Liberation and Whitenormative Conquest for the New Woman Cyclist of the 1890s
    (2020-07) Bachman-Sanders, Christine
    The New Woman cyclist of the 1890s has become an important symbol of feminist liberation. At the turn of the 20th century, she emerged as a figure that resisted traditional gender expectations, and, when paired with the new technology of the bicycle, gained unprecedented mobility. Yet, this liberation narrative fails to account for the white New Woman cyclist’s participation in hegemonic forms of power and ignores the moments of resistance a queer and feminist reading of Other(ed) New Women cyclists makes visible. Building on feminist, critical race, and queer theories, my dissertation challenges the dominant story of feminist liberation by revealing how white women’s progress relies on and contributes to whitenormative narratives of mastery, conquest, and empire, while also making space for a more nuanced reading of the New Woman cyclist’s harms, pleasures, and resistance. To explore this topic, I examine diaries, cycling guides, travelogues, newspapers, and bicycle tourism fieldwork. In chapter one, I read the diary of a woman cyclist from Leeds, England written between 1893 - 1896 and the historical context surrounding it against the grain to reveal an identity for the diarist that contradicts heteropatriarchal romance narratives in the historical archive. I then visualize recent maps of my own cycle tours alongside newly constructed maps based on the records she kept in her diary to explore the intimate embodiment and non-linearity of bicycle tourism, pushing the limits of the “queer object.” In chapter two, I examine the relationship between the bicycle, 19th century white feminist reformers, and the tension between queer possibilities of socialist revolution and the protection of Anglo-Saxon empire. Focusing specifically on the language of conquest used in Frances Willard’s instructional cycling guide, A Wheel Within A Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle (1895), I argue that Willard’s speech acts upon her audience; her words are live and directly impact the political landscape of the New Woman. Thus, Willard’s vision for a reformed civilization is one of celebratory conquest and confers serious harm upon those who are rejected from the moral modernity of the white New Woman cyclist. In chapter three, I offer a close reading of Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s To Gipsyland (1893) to investigate the potentiality of her attachment to the Romany people, language, and culture to offer queer forms of knowledge production. I argue that rather than operate as an agent of queer knowledge production, Pennell’s cycling adventure indulges in the violence of imperialist nostalgia to advance yet another narrative of modernity and empire. In chapter four, I consider the harmlessness of cycling’s pleasures, arguing that pleasure is essential in resisting oppressive structures. Drawing on the stories of cyclists Kittie Knox and Annie Kopchovsky I highlight how pleasure, performance, and spectacle serve to offer moments of resistance.
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    Remapping the World: Vine Deloria, Jr. and the Ends of Settler Sovereignty
    (2016-10) Temin, David
    This dissertation reconstructs the political thought of Yankton Dakota activist-intellectual Vine Deloria, Jr. (1933-2005) in order to explore how Indigenous peoples in the Americas have developed a tradition of politically engaged, anti-colonial critique—a politics of decolonization. Since World War II, democratic theorists have mounted accounts of civic inclusion and multicultural representation to both invigorate projects of democratic state- and nation-building and to respond to legacies of racial and cultural injustice. Against these accounts, I argue that settler democracies make their boundaries through colonial projects of replacement and normalized incorporation that disavow and dissolve Indigenous peoples’ separate polities. Beginning with his leadership in the National Congress of American Indians in 1964, Deloria provided a) an analysis of narratives of civic inclusion and multicultural representation as colonial and b) translated practices of decolonization emergent from the Indigenous sovereignty movement into an evolving framework of shared Indigenous concepts. The project traces Deloria’s counter-proposals through three phases: First, Deloria confidently re-theorized democratic state-building as “empire” so as to promote among Indigenous peoples an anti-colonial politics of self-determination (1964-1969). Second, Deloria aggressively reimagined Indigenous sovereignty as a distinctive variant of constituent power (1969-1975). Third, Deloria disappointedly reckoned with the durability of colonialism and capitalism as twin engines of destruction and re-described Indigenous conceptions of sacred territory, relationship, and responsibility as the ethical-political foundations of decolonization (1975-2005). Through this reconstruction of Deloria’s work in conversation with contemporary Indigenous and Settler-Colonial Studies, my project provides a basis for refashioning political theory’s core interpretive commitments to address the questions of dispossession, landlessness, self-determination, and sovereignty most apt for decolonization struggles in settler-colonial contexts.
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    To Enlist or Not, for the Empire: The Citizens of the British Isles and Stories of War from the Four Kingdoms 1798-1853
    (2020-08) Sol, Yon Ji
    I examine the British military activities to reconsider how people of the British Isles formulated concepts of citizenship and nationhood during the earlier half of the nineteenth century. Arguing that literary history of British Romanticism should give stronger recognition to Britain’s internal and external colonies, I investigate how Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Sir Walter Scott, and Charles Dickens incorporate dissenting voices in their fiction to problematize the British Empire’s nation-building process driven by militarism. I aim to offer a postcolonial, feminist, and ecocritical interpretation of the canonical British writers against the conventional narrative of literary history that reads mass mobilization during anti-French military conflicts as a nation-forming experience. My first chapter on Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) examines Fanny Price’s desire to participate in the British imperial project. Because overseas military activity is inaccessible for women, Fanny’s admiration for her brother’s naval accomplishment is mixed with envy and suspicion about the foreign elements that British officers may bring back to England. I suspect that Austen projects her own relationship to her brothers to that between Fanny and William. Austen supports the Royal Navy as a loving sister, yet she withholds a wholehearted consent to British imperial activities as an English gentlewoman. Austen’s admiration for Captain Charles Pasley’s Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire (1811) suggests her own frustrated aspirations. My second chapter investigates Edgeworth’s colonial antimilitarism revealed in her Irish national tale, The Absentee (1812) and her story for children, “The Prussian Vase” (1801). As an Anglo-Irish woman writer, Edgeworth negotiated clashing demands of gender, class, and national/ethnic loyalties during the French Revolution, the 1798 Irish Rebellion, and the Napoleonic Wars. When Anglo-Irish aristocrat Colambre pushes away Pasley’s Essay to read the family genealogy of Grace Nugent, this gesture translates as Edgeworth’s own repudiation of Britain’s colonial expansionism. A truly responsible Anglo-Irish gentleman prioritizes Ireland’s domestic prosperity over British imperial military conflicts. Edgeworth’s children’s tale “The Prussian Vase” (1801) provides an earlier example of her antimilitarism in ambiguous treatment of the young Polish count in the Prussian court, whom I view as Colambre’s (negative) prototype. My third chapter on Guy Mannering (1815) reassesses the traditional militaristic evaluation of the historical novel of Sir Walter Scott’s brand. I reevaluate Scott focusing on his colonial consciousness. The hybridity of Julia Mannering, an English girl born and raised in India, undergirds my reading. The novel’s soldier-artists and the imperial cultural artifacts they produce are scrutinized under the critical eyes of the Colonel’s daughter. On the other hand, the Scottish-born, Dutch-bred soldier Harry Bertram debunks the military participation’s empty promise of equal status with England for Scottish or other non-English British subjects. My final chapter examines William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830) and Dickens’ Bleak House (1853) to consider how nineteenth-century British press journalism and the realist novel challenge British imperialism and its military. Deeply influenced by Cobbett’s radicalism and antimilitarism, Dickens condemns the ruling class that, preoccupied with affairs overseas, neglect the domestic affairs. Dickens associates the military with qualities detrimental to personal and national prosperity. Britain’s future depends on the middle-class domesticity personified by Esther Summerson and her physician husband Allan Woodcourt. Focusing on the characters returning to Britain such as Mrs. Bagnet, I explore how Dickens redefines femininity and masculinity to offer a renewed vision of domestic and national duty.