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- All Subjects: American Literature
- All Subjects: Civil war
- Creators: Lockard, Joe
Description
This dissertation provides a critical reassessment of the historical and modern conceptions of early American novelist Hannah Webster Foster as part of a larger disciplinary move toward recovering authors, primarily women, whose work has been lost or neglected by scholars. Although Foster is a fairly prominent writer from this early national period, remarkably little is known about her life due to her desire for anonymity and personal privacy. As a result, much of Foster’s legacy has been constructed through a combination of problematic assumptions related to the author’s class and gender as well as biases by those attempting to refashion the author according to contemporary approaches. While these concerns are examined in this study, much of this dissertation hinges on new opportunities for Foster scholarship by offering historical evidence related to and annotation of a recovered text to present a fuller perspective of Foster than has previously been available. Through an analysis of this recovered text, this dissertation challenges modern perceptions of Foster to show that Foster may best be understood through the ways she consistently models republicanism through her writings.
ContributorsHurley, Jeremy A (Author) / Wertheimer, Eric (Thesis advisor) / Lockard, Joe (Committee member) / O'Donnell, Catherine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
This dissertation analyzes two regional systems of involuntary servitude (Indian captive slavery and Mexican debt peonage) over a period spanning roughly two centuries. Following a chronological framework, it examines the development of captive slavery in the Southwest beginning in the early 1700s and lasting through the mid-1800s, by which time debt peonage emerged as a secondary form of coerced servitude that augmented Indian slavery in order to meet increasing demand for labor. While both peonage and captive slavery had an indelible impact on cultural and social systems in the Southwest, this dissertation places those two labor systems within the context of North American slavery and sectional agitation during the antebellum period. The existence of debt bondage and Indian captivity in New Mexico had a significant impact on America's judicial and political institutions during the Reconstruction era.
Debt peonage and Indian slavery had a lasting influence on American politics during the period 1846 to 1867, forcing lawmakers to acknowledge the fact that slavery existed in many forms. Following the Civil War, legislators realized that the Thirteenth Amendment did not cast a wide enough net, because peonage and captive slavery were represented as voluntary in nature and remained commonplace throughout New Mexico. When Congress passed a measure in 1867 explicitly outlawing peonage and captive slavery in New Mexico, they implicitly acknowledged the shortcomings of the Thirteenth Amendment. The preexistence of peonage and Indian slavery in the Southwest inculcated a broader understanding of involuntary labor in post-Civil War America and helped to expand political and judicial philosophy regarding free labor. These two systems played a crucial role in America's transition from free to unfree labor in the mid-1800s and contributed to the judicial and political frameworks that undermined slavery.
Debt peonage and Indian slavery had a lasting influence on American politics during the period 1846 to 1867, forcing lawmakers to acknowledge the fact that slavery existed in many forms. Following the Civil War, legislators realized that the Thirteenth Amendment did not cast a wide enough net, because peonage and captive slavery were represented as voluntary in nature and remained commonplace throughout New Mexico. When Congress passed a measure in 1867 explicitly outlawing peonage and captive slavery in New Mexico, they implicitly acknowledged the shortcomings of the Thirteenth Amendment. The preexistence of peonage and Indian slavery in the Southwest inculcated a broader understanding of involuntary labor in post-Civil War America and helped to expand political and judicial philosophy regarding free labor. These two systems played a crucial role in America's transition from free to unfree labor in the mid-1800s and contributed to the judicial and political frameworks that undermined slavery.
ContributorsKiser, William S., 1986- (Author) / Fixico, Donald L. (Thesis advisor) / Simpson, Brooks (Committee member) / Schermerhorn, Calvin (Committee member) / Lockard, Joe (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Modern and contemporary African American writers employ science fiction in order to recast ideas on past, present, and future black culture. This dissertation examines Afrofuturism’s cultural aesthetics, which appropriate devices from science fiction and fantasy in order to revise, interrogate, and re-examine historical events insufficiently treated by literary realism. The dissertation includes treatments of George Schuyler, Ishmael Reed, Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Nalo Hopkinson, and Chicana/ofuturism.
The original contribution of this research is to highlight how imagination of a posthuman world has made it possible for African American writers to envision how racial power can be re-configured and re-negotiated. Focusing on shifting racial dynamics caught up in the swirl of technological changes, this research illuminates a complex process of literary production in which black culture and identity have been continuously re-interpreted.
In the post-war and post-Civil Rights Movement eras African American writers began reflecting on shifting racial dynamics in light of technological changes. This shift in which black experience became mechanized and digitized explains how technology became a source of new African American fiction. The relationships between humans and their external conditions appear in such futuristic themes as trans-human anamorphosis, cyberspace, and digital souls. These thematic devices, which explore humanity outside its phenotypic boundaries, provide African American writers with tools to demystify deterministic views of race. Afrofuturism has responded to the conceptual transformation of humanity with a race-specific scope, locating the presence of black culture in a high-tech world.
Techno-scientific progress has provided important resources in contemporary theory, yet these theoretical foci too seldom have been drawn into critical race discourses. This discrepancy is due to techno-scientific progress having served as a tool for the legitimation of scientific racism under global capitalism for centuries. Responding to this critical lacuna, the dissertation highlights an under-explored field in which African American literature responds to techno-culture’s involvement in contemporary discussions of race. Rather than repeat nominal assumptions of Eurocentric modernity and its racist hegemony, this dissertation theorizes how modern techno-culture’s outcomes—such as information science, genetic engineering, and computer science—shape minority lives, and how minority groups appropriate these outcomes to enact their own liberation.
The original contribution of this research is to highlight how imagination of a posthuman world has made it possible for African American writers to envision how racial power can be re-configured and re-negotiated. Focusing on shifting racial dynamics caught up in the swirl of technological changes, this research illuminates a complex process of literary production in which black culture and identity have been continuously re-interpreted.
In the post-war and post-Civil Rights Movement eras African American writers began reflecting on shifting racial dynamics in light of technological changes. This shift in which black experience became mechanized and digitized explains how technology became a source of new African American fiction. The relationships between humans and their external conditions appear in such futuristic themes as trans-human anamorphosis, cyberspace, and digital souls. These thematic devices, which explore humanity outside its phenotypic boundaries, provide African American writers with tools to demystify deterministic views of race. Afrofuturism has responded to the conceptual transformation of humanity with a race-specific scope, locating the presence of black culture in a high-tech world.
Techno-scientific progress has provided important resources in contemporary theory, yet these theoretical foci too seldom have been drawn into critical race discourses. This discrepancy is due to techno-scientific progress having served as a tool for the legitimation of scientific racism under global capitalism for centuries. Responding to this critical lacuna, the dissertation highlights an under-explored field in which African American literature responds to techno-culture’s involvement in contemporary discussions of race. Rather than repeat nominal assumptions of Eurocentric modernity and its racist hegemony, this dissertation theorizes how modern techno-culture’s outcomes—such as information science, genetic engineering, and computer science—shape minority lives, and how minority groups appropriate these outcomes to enact their own liberation.
ContributorsKim, Myungsung (Author) / Lockard, Joe (Thesis advisor) / Lester, Neal (Committee member) / Holbo, Christine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
A growing body of literature has sought to explain the nature and effects of conflict-related sexualized violence. However, a critical problem that persists concerns why wartime rape varies both within and across conflicts. Political science literature mainly addresses these questions of variation in sexualized violence through group-level or structural explanations. Yet, clear patterns of combatant non-participation in conflict-related sexualized violence is apparent, even in cases where sexual violence is severe and pervasive. What allows one combatant to refrain, while another combatant, even within the same combat unit, perpetrates sexualized violence? In this dissertation, I argue that critical differences concerning attitudes, beliefs, and motivations exist between individual combatants. In light of these differences, I reintroduce the individual combatant onto the theoretical map as a critical unit of analysis and I explore the implications of gender inequality as an important and relevant factor related to sexualized violence in political conflict. Drawing on findings from social psychology, political psychology, sociology, and political science, the theory developed argues that combatants differentially internalize important norms related to gender that become particularly activated based on primarily externalized contextual influences. To test the theory, I conduct a mixed-method, sub-national comparative analysis of combatants and attitudes and beliefs associated with gender inequality during the Bosnian War (1992 – 1995). I rely on qualitative data generated from semi-structured, comprehensive interviews with psychologists, victim’s advocates, and legal experts managing sexual violence war crimes cases, and combat veterans directly associated with the Bosnian War (1992 – 1995) to assess differences at the individual-level of analysis. To additionally determine the broader effects of gender inequality, I employ an ordered probit regression analysis to ascertain the relationship between gender inequality related to institutional health and education factors and the severity of wartime rape. The combined results of these analyses demonstrate that individual differences between combatants better predicts the likelihood of a combatant to commit sexualized violence compared to structural or institutional accounts alone.
ContributorsWilliamson, Holly, Ph.D (Author) / Kittilson, Miki (Thesis advisor) / Lake, Milli (Committee member) / Wood, Reed (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019