Matching Items (13)
Description
This document highlights the increased involvement of “ college boys ” or “ white college boys ” - better-educated middle-class white and light-skinned persons - in steelbands in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Following an introductory overview of the demography of Trinidad and Tobago, the history of Carnival, and the interregnum of the temporary instruments used between the ban of indigenous drums in the 1880s and the invention of the steelpan at the end of the 1930s, this document will examine the history and membership of these college boy bands, with particular emphasis on the Hit Paraders. Two factors that highlight the vital role played by these college boy steelbands are discussed: commercial sponsorship of bands, and support that bands received from the People's National Movement Party. A detailed timeline of steelpan invention and innovations is also included.
ContributorsDeLamater, Elizabeth (Author) / Smith, Jeffery B (Thesis advisor) / Sunkett, Mark (Committee member) / Bush, Jeff (Committee member) / Hackbarth, Glenn (Committee member) / Solís, Ted (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
La escritura de José Martí en sus primeros años como escritor y periodista se desenvuelve en una atmósfera política tan dinámica como el entorno cultural al que se expone a su llegada a México desde su experiencia diaspórica en España. Por ello, este estudio propone situar la etapa mexicana de Martí desde marzo de 1875 hasta diciembre de 1875 como un episodio clave en el desarrollo crítico de sus ideas centrales. Por lo tanto, esta investigación radica en el estudio de los elementos que participan en la formulación martiana en torno al concepto de cultura como síntoma de las nuevas sociedades latinoamericanas, mismo que aparece acorde y en intrínseca relación con el concepto de independencia que Martí articula particularmente en "Nuestra América" (1891). Por lo tanto, para los propósitos de esta investigación y partiendo del reconocimiento de la ausencia de un acercamiento crítico a esta etapa de Martí, es necesario observar detenidamente las relaciones entre el ámbito político y social tanto en México como en Cuba para así comprender sus aportes literario-periodísticos. Asimismo, es imprescindible un acercamiento múltiple en distintos niveles que permitan comprender el panorama intelectual y los debates que se formulan durante el siglo XIX en México y en los cuales Martí participa activamente. Dichos elementos en conjunto son fundamentales para comprender la expresión martiana como una de las vías de transmisión tanto de su estética como de sus preocupaciones e intereses modernistas.
Se incluye en este análisis la escritura pública de los diarios capitalinos tales como El Partido Liberal y El Federalista, en los que Martí publica de manera prolífica durante los casi dos años de estancia en el país. Asimismo, ha sido pertinente observar su anotaciones privadas pertenecientes a los Cuadernos de Apuntes, los cuales escritos durante los mismos años en México, no fueron destinados originalmente para su publicación. Añadir las anotaciones personales de Martí a este estudio contribuye a enriquecer la perspectiva de este periodo. Como se observa, las formulaciones críticas de Martí conviven con los debates que circulaban en la capital mexicana en relación a los procesos de descolonización e independencia. Por lo tanto, la importancia de reevaluar los elementos que inmortalizan a José Martí no solo como un ícono cubano y figura emblemática transnacional permiten observar sus primigenias acepciones en torno a la identidad hispanoamericana. Asimismo, el aporte académico que añade este estudio reside en la presentación de conflictos y discursos heterogéneos que impactan las definiciones en torno a prensa y literatura de José Martí, una de las mentes más innovadoras y perspicaces del siglo XIX, cuya relevancia literaria continúa siendo pertinente.
Se incluye en este análisis la escritura pública de los diarios capitalinos tales como El Partido Liberal y El Federalista, en los que Martí publica de manera prolífica durante los casi dos años de estancia en el país. Asimismo, ha sido pertinente observar su anotaciones privadas pertenecientes a los Cuadernos de Apuntes, los cuales escritos durante los mismos años en México, no fueron destinados originalmente para su publicación. Añadir las anotaciones personales de Martí a este estudio contribuye a enriquecer la perspectiva de este periodo. Como se observa, las formulaciones críticas de Martí conviven con los debates que circulaban en la capital mexicana en relación a los procesos de descolonización e independencia. Por lo tanto, la importancia de reevaluar los elementos que inmortalizan a José Martí no solo como un ícono cubano y figura emblemática transnacional permiten observar sus primigenias acepciones en torno a la identidad hispanoamericana. Asimismo, el aporte académico que añade este estudio reside en la presentación de conflictos y discursos heterogéneos que impactan las definiciones en torno a prensa y literatura de José Martí, una de las mentes más innovadoras y perspicaces del siglo XIX, cuya relevancia literaria continúa siendo pertinente.
ContributorsMinjárez Sesma, Solem (Author) / Volek, Emil (Thesis advisor) / García Fernández, Carlos (Committee member) / Rosales, Jesus (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
The following thesis tries to rescue the novels Sab and Dos mujeres, written by the XIX century writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, from the hegemonic discourse offered by the contemporary critics. This is possible by comparing the Epistolar novel Tu amante ultrajada no puede ser tu amiga with the two novels analyzed. Also, this thesis examines the epistolary novel as a set of documents that creates a literary work on their own. That is to say, it studies how these letters, written to her lovers during the years 1839 to 1854, create an autobiographical fiction, a novel of the romantic period, and a character that makes a myth out of the writer and poet Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda.
ContributorsGarcia Varela, Indira Yadira Ariana (Author) / Volek, Emil (Thesis advisor) / Rosales, Jesus (Committee member) / Garcia-Fernandez, Carlos-Javier (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Unmanned aerial vehicles have received increased attention in the last decade due to their versatility, as well as the availability of inexpensive sensors (e.g. GPS, IMU) for their navigation and control. Multirotor vehicles, specifically quadrotors, have formed a fast growing field in robotics, with the range of applications spanning from surveil- lance and reconnaissance to agriculture and large area mapping. Although in most applications single quadrotors are used, there is an increasing interest in architectures controlling multiple quadrotors executing a collaborative task. This thesis introduces a new concept of control involving more than one quadrotors, according to which two quadrotors can be physically coupled in mid-flight. This concept equips the quadro- tors with new capabilities, e.g. increased payload or pursuit and capturing of other quadrotors. A comprehensive simulation of the approach is built to simulate coupled quadrotors. The dynamics and modeling of the coupled system is presented together with a discussion regarding the coupling mechanism, impact modeling and additional considerations that have been investigated. Simulation results are presented for cases of static coupling as well as enemy quadrotor pursuit and capture, together with an analysis of control methodology and gain tuning. Practical implementations are introduced as results show the feasibility of this design.
ContributorsLarsson, Daniel (Author) / Artemiadis, Panagiotis (Thesis advisor) / Marvi, Hamidreza (Committee member) / Berman, Spring (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Historically, colonizers, immigrants, and enslaved Africans served as carriers of Islamic culture to Puerto Rico, and today, that Islamic element is often unassumingly intertwined with the Puerto Rican culture. Using Bourdieu's concept of habitus as the framework, this dissertation engages customs and mannerisms of Puerto Ricans to reveal the imprint and legacy of Muslim Spain and the Islamic heritage of West Africa in Puerto Rico. It makes a study of the Spanish language to include vocabulary, proverbs, songs, and games that carry vestiges of Arabic language and culture. Most importantly, it also addresses an inherited religious and cultural tradition rooted in the history and legacy of Islam and Christianity and the human experience of cultural and religious phenomena of conflicts within Medieval Spain. Of particular focus, Fiestas de Santiago Apóstol in Loíza, Puerto Rico (a Moor and Christian celebration in honor of St. James, the Moor Slayer) offer a uniquely different expression. The celebration not only displays remnants of cultural and religious practices influenced by several world traditions such as folk Catholicism, Santería, Espiritismo, and Islam, but embraces the Vejigantes character which symbolizes the Muslim. The implications of these celebrations attest to a historically covert Muslim presence or at least a less biased conceptualization by the Puerto Rican people regarding Muslims. Unlike Medieval Spain, where Muslims were deemed invaders from 711-1600's, the religious, cultural, and political history of Puerto Rico does not suggest a deeper legacy of conflict that includes Islam as an adverse religious and cultural tradition.
ContributorsSaez, Lourdes (Author) / Gallab, Abdullahi (Thesis advisor) / Moore, Moses (Committee member) / Ali, Souad (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Great disasters can often serve as birthing grounds for national transformation. As communities work to recover and rebuild, opportunities to reassess of prevailing development theories and programs may arise. As traditional development programs, supported by top-down development theories and billions in foreign aid, have not changed Haiti's impoverished status, such an opportunity has been presented to the Caribbean nation. Just a few months removed from the devastating 7.0 earthquake of Jan 12, 2010, this study identified the emergent thinking about development as expressed by key informants (N=21) from six entity types involved in Haiti's rebuilding efforts - government agencies, social ventures, grassroots, diaspora, foreign, and hybrid nonprofits. Findings were supplemented by participant observation of a civil society meeting in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Sustainable Livelihoods (SL) Framework was used as a lens with which to understand the causes of Haiti's social, institutional, environmental, and economic vulnerabilities. Modified grounded theory was used as the qualitative data analytical method from which five themes emerged: Haitian government, rebuilding, aid work and its effects, Haitian society, and international interference. Participants called for a refoundation, the building a nation from the ground up, of Haiti. Based on these findings, four transformative processes were identified as fundamental to Haiti's refoundation: 1) communication and collaboration with the Haitian government, 2) engagement of the Haitian people and the Haitian diaspora in the redevelopment work, 3) a broad vision of development for the nation, and 4) coordination and collaboration among NGOs.
ContributorsInnocent, Darlye Élise (Author) / Knopf, Richard (Thesis advisor) / Phillips, Rhonda (Committee member) / Aggarwal, Rimjhim (Committee member) / Wang, Lili (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010
Description
During the mid-1930s in Cuba, Ernest Hemingway befriended Cuban artist Antonio Gattorno (1904-1980) during Hemingway's most active period of Gulf Stream fishing trips. Their relationship soon transcended ocean sojourns, and the two exchanged letters, eight of which reside in the Hemingway Collection at the J.F.K. Library in Boston. Written between 1935 and 1937, the Hemingway-Gattorno correspondence showcases the relationship that came to fruition between the American writer and Cuban artist in the 1930s. It also presents a lens through which to examine the cultural contact that occurred between Americans and Cubans during a decade of great political, social, and economic exchange between the two nations. In addition, the Hemingway-Gattorno correspondence elucidates each country's tendency to romanticize the other before the Cuban Revolution and provides a template with which to examine current U.S.-Cuban relationships today. This thesis endeavors to first discuss the Hemingway-Gattorno relationship via a close examination of the correspondence that occurred between them. It then attests that the Hemingway-Gattorno correspondence exemplifies the transatlantic glamorization that characterized pre-revolutionary U.S.-Cuban relations. The thesis explores the replay of this act of romanticizing in real time, arguing that despite governmental injunctions since 1961, Americans and Cubans alike have continued to ingeniously find ways to communicate with one another in much the same way Hemingway and Gattorno did in the 1930s. One mechanism for doing so is remembering Ernest Hemingway's life in Cuba and the home he owned there, Finca Vigía, a performance of memory that often occurs through the conduits of either the Hemingway Archives in Boston or the Finca Vigía Museum in Cuba. American and Cuban longing for the cultural contact enjoyed by Hemingway and Gattorno is expressed and performed through a glorification of Hemingway and the Finca Vigía, despite the severance of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1961. In addition, for Cubans in particular, Hemingway and the Finca Vigía present an opportunity to imagine the much more unified pre-revolutionary Cuba. Although certainly Hemingway and his home represent different realities for Cubans and Americans, in all, the thesis will show that citizens from both countries continue to find ways to create and imagine themselves in pre-revolutionary contexts like those embodied by Hemingway and Gattorno in the 1930s.
ContributorsDriscoll, Sarah (Author) / Horan, Elizabeth (Thesis advisor) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member) / Tobin, Beth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Ethnogeology is the scientific study of human relationships with the Earth as a system, typically conducted within the context of a specific culture. Indigenous or historically resident people may perceive local places differently from outside observers trained in the Western tradition. Ethnogeologic knowledge includes traditional indigenous knowledge (alternatively referred to as traditional ecological knowledge or TEK), which exceeds the boundaries of non-Indigenous ideas of physical characteristics of the world, tends to be more holistic, and is culturally framed. In this ethnogeological study, I have implemented several methods of participatory rapid assessment (PRA) from the discipline of field ethnography to collect culturally framed geological knowledge, as well to measure the authenticity of the knowledge collected. I constructed a cultural consensus model (CCM) about karst as a domain of knowledge. The study area is located in the karst physiographic region of the Caribbean countries of the Dominican Republic (DR) and Puerto Rico (PR). Ethnogeological data collected and analyzed using CCM satisfied the requirements of a model where I have found statistically significance among participant’s agreement and competence values. Analysis of the competence means in the population of DR and PR results in p < 0.05 validating the methods adapted for this study. I discuss the CCM for the domain of karst (in its majority) that is shared among consultants in the countries of PR and the DR that is in the form of metaphors and other forms of culturally framed descriptions. This work continuing insufficient representation of minority groups such as Indigenous people, Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Hispanic/Latinxs in the Earth Sciences.
ContributorsGarcia, Angel Antonio (Author) / Semken, Steven (Thesis advisor) / Brandt, Elizabeth, (Committee member) / Shock, Everett (Committee member) / Bowman, Catherine (Committee member) / Anbar, Ariel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
There has been a vast increase in applications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in civilian domains. To operate in the civilian airspace, a UAV must be able to sense and avoid both static and moving obstacles for flight safety. While indoor and low-altitude environments are mainly occupied by static obstacles, risks in space of higher altitude primarily come from moving obstacles such as other aircraft or flying vehicles in the airspace. Therefore, the ability to avoid moving obstacles becomes a necessity
for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.
Towards enabling a UAV to autonomously sense and avoid moving obstacles, this thesis makes the following contributions. Initially, an image-based reactive motion planner is developed for a quadrotor to avoid a fast approaching obstacle. Furthermore, A Dubin’s curve based geometry method is developed as a global path planner for a fixed-wing UAV to avoid collisions with aircraft. The image-based method is unable to produce an optimal path and the geometry method uses a simplified UAV model. To compensate
these two disadvantages, a series of algorithms built upon the Closed-Loop Rapid Exploratory Random Tree are developed as global path planners to generate collision avoidance paths in real time. The algorithms are validated in Software-In-the-Loop (SITL) and Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulations using a fixed-wing UAV model and in real flight experiments using quadrotors. It is observed that the algorithm enables a UAV to avoid moving obstacles approaching to it with different directions and speeds.
for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.
Towards enabling a UAV to autonomously sense and avoid moving obstacles, this thesis makes the following contributions. Initially, an image-based reactive motion planner is developed for a quadrotor to avoid a fast approaching obstacle. Furthermore, A Dubin’s curve based geometry method is developed as a global path planner for a fixed-wing UAV to avoid collisions with aircraft. The image-based method is unable to produce an optimal path and the geometry method uses a simplified UAV model. To compensate
these two disadvantages, a series of algorithms built upon the Closed-Loop Rapid Exploratory Random Tree are developed as global path planners to generate collision avoidance paths in real time. The algorithms are validated in Software-In-the-Loop (SITL) and Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulations using a fixed-wing UAV model and in real flight experiments using quadrotors. It is observed that the algorithm enables a UAV to avoid moving obstacles approaching to it with different directions and speeds.
ContributorsLin, Yucong (Author) / Saripalli, Srikanth (Thesis advisor) / Scowen, Paul (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Thangavelautham, Jekanthan (Committee member) / Youngbull, Cody (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
The primary aim of this dissertation is to make a substantial contribution to the better understanding of the identity formations of Black Caribbean migrant women in Britain. The dissertation outlines a theory of Black female subject formation in Britain. This theory proposes that the process of subject formation in these women is an interrupted one. It further suggests that interruptions are likely to occur at four crucial points in the development of their identities. These four points are: 1) the immigrant identity; 2) the Caribbean identity; 3) “the Jamaican” identity; and 4) the Black British identity.
In order to understand the racial and gendered dynamics of identity formation in these women, I hypothesized that the structure of institutional racism in Britain has taken the form of a “double wall” or a “double portcullis”, which much be scaled by these “immigrants”. My research, based on interviews with 15 Black professional women who identify with a Caribbean ancestry, confirmed very strongly the existence of this double portcullis. It further supported the hypothesis that the above points of identity transition were also points of possible interruption. My research also revealed that through a variety of social movements, cultural and political mobilizations, it has been possible to get over the negative stereotypes of the immigrant identity, the Caribbean identity, “the Jamaican” identity and to succeed getting over the first or the Black British wall of the double portcullis. For me, the most interesting findings of my research, are the continuing difficulties that the women I interviewed have faced in attempting to climb over the second portcullis to achieve the Black English identity. The dissertation concludes with some suggestions about the future of this “unfinished” Black British identity and its prospects for easier access to the Black English identity, and thus to “life success”.
In order to understand the racial and gendered dynamics of identity formation in these women, I hypothesized that the structure of institutional racism in Britain has taken the form of a “double wall” or a “double portcullis”, which much be scaled by these “immigrants”. My research, based on interviews with 15 Black professional women who identify with a Caribbean ancestry, confirmed very strongly the existence of this double portcullis. It further supported the hypothesis that the above points of identity transition were also points of possible interruption. My research also revealed that through a variety of social movements, cultural and political mobilizations, it has been possible to get over the negative stereotypes of the immigrant identity, the Caribbean identity, “the Jamaican” identity and to succeed getting over the first or the Black British wall of the double portcullis. For me, the most interesting findings of my research, are the continuing difficulties that the women I interviewed have faced in attempting to climb over the second portcullis to achieve the Black English identity. The dissertation concludes with some suggestions about the future of this “unfinished” Black British identity and its prospects for easier access to the Black English identity, and thus to “life success”.
ContributorsJohn, Anique (Author) / Swadener, Elizabeth B (Thesis advisor) / Henry, Paget (Thesis advisor) / Hinds, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019