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This research aims to understand socio-environmental conflicts and mobilisations generated by extractive projects. Theoretically, this research locates itself within the contentious politics perspective. It seeks to understand socio-environmental conflicts taking into consideration the interaction between political opportunities, organisational resources and discursive frames developed by communities that oppose extractive projects. The study argues that socio-environmental conflicts are reproductions of power relations between companies, state and communities over territories and the environment. The environmental and political-economy transformations provoked by extractive projects allow the generation of discourses and frames about environment and community which usually end up in forms of direct mobilisation and protest. In line with recent developments in the social movements literature, I complement the understanding of social mobilisation by analysing the mechanism at work, i.e. the micro foundations of contentious politics, specifically analysing how the geographical location, phase of the project and constituents of the movement, shape the aims, means and capacities of communities that mobilise against extractive projects. As one of Latin America's most institutionally stable countries, Chile represents the paradigmatic case for exploring the micro foundations of contentious politics that lies at the heart of this study. Precisely because of the economic and political stability and low levels of threats when compared to other countries in the region, and the historical economic and political dependence on extractivism, we should expect to find a strong case of social mobilisations. Thus, Chile offers an ideal, or 'most likely', case for evaluating patterns of mobilisation. More specifically, the exploratory aim of this work is to advance a broader theoretical argument about the distinctiveness of the socio-environmental movement, developed through the analysis of three social contestation pocesses in the country (Caimanes, No Alto Maipo and Chiloé). These are cases that offer variation in terms of geographical location, aims, means of mobilisation and resources; in other words, they offer a useful variation on the dimensions of theoretical interest for this thesis. The comparison of the empirical cases adds important subtleties and empirical evidence to complement classical theories of social mobilisation, such as the role of counter-mobilisation in closing political opportunities, and the role that territory and environment plays in generating resources and frames. The study also lays the groundwork for future extensions of this framework by briefly examining how well the main propositions work in explaining socio-environmental mobilisation in other Latin American countries.

This thesis seeks to contribute to knowledge on Peru’s internal armed conflict (1980-2000), in which the insurgent group Shining Path attempted to destroy and replace the existing Peruvian state, by analysing the key themes of violence, culture and memory through the lens of space. By deploying this spatial analysis, the thesis demonstrates that insurgent and state violence were shaped by the politics and production of space, that cultural responses to the conflict have articulated spatialised understandings of violence and the Peruvian nation, and that commemorative sites exist within a broader geography of memory (or commemorative “city-text”) which can support or challenge memory narratives in unintended ways. Whereas previous literature on the Peruvian conflict, by Carlos Iván Degregori, Nelson Manrique and Peru’s Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, has emphasised the fundamentalist nature of Shining Path’s Maoist ideology, this thesis highlights the ways in which party militants interpreted this ideology in their own way and adapted it to local realities. I also argue that counterinsurgent violence was premised upon a spatialised understanding of Peruvian society which conflated indigeneity with Leftist radicalism. Using a broadly Foucauldian framework, I argue that the state created spaces of exception in order to eliminate political and biopolitical enemies. In approaching cultural responses to the conflict, I use the work of Butler on grievability to argue that the perceived non-grievability of insurgents and indigenous communities has been produced by the vast (and to some extent imagined) cultural distances which exist between Peru’s disparate communities. I also tie these issues of grievability to post-conflict memory practice, arguing that commemorative sites have not only been shaped by spatialised understanding of the conflict and by two distinct memory narratives in Peru, but also by the politics and production of urban space in which each of these sites has been created.

This research explores the creation and dissemination of the South-South cooperation (SSC) norm regime as an alternative to the Northern-led cooperation model of the OECD Development Assistance Committee. Using Finnemore and Sikkink’s theory of the norm life cycle, it tracks SSC from its origins at Bandung in 1955 to its “tipping point” in 2009, as demonstrated in the Nairobi Resolution that solidified the SSC principles of respect for sovereignty, partnership, solidarity and mutual benefit. The aim of this research is to determine how the SSC norm regime was perceived in the South over the period 2005–2016. The focus is on the Latin American and Caribbean context, with Brazil and Venezuela identified as the two major actors in the region that emerged as SSC norm leaders during this time. Both countries used the tools of persuasion and demonstration to portray the value of SSC and promote the core SSC principles; however, they differed greatly in approach. These similarities and differences are explored via the case studies of two small Eastern Caribbean nations, St Lucia and Grenada. Using extensive interview data and programme information, the research examines how government officials and stakeholders in these two states, and throughout the region, perceived Brazil and Venezuela’s programmes and the SSC norm regime in general over this time period, and attempts to determine whether the regime gained traction in the South and to what extent.

This thesis provides a critical analysis of shifting US foreign policy toward India. The study covers the period from the end of the Second World War up to the end of the first Obama administration. With Indo-US relations since India's independence in 1947 used as a backdrop, the focus is on policy from the end of the Cold war and, specifically, from the time of the 9/11 attack. The thesis explores, in both conceptual and empirical terms, the reasons for United States growing involvement in the South Asian region and its enhanced engagement with India. The principle aim of the study is to determine whether the ramifications of 9/11 were mainly responsible for present state of Indo-US relations, or whether US policy toward India was driven by the broader changes in international affairs associated with globalisation, among which the rise of China is paramount. The approach taken is a critical historical analysis that has involved review of secondary literature and close examination of a range of primary US and Indian government material, supplemented by field work conducted in the US that involved interviews with policy makers and academics. This thesis shows that US policy toward India has two major dimensions: the first is the US adaptation of its foreign policy in response to the changed international political climate after the Cold War, a shift in which the question of its relative decline from sole superpower status was critical. The second dimension is India's rise, which has given it growing geo-strategic importance in the 21st century and has created the potential for India to become an essential partner in US attempts to maintain the stability of the international order and its own hegemonic role with this order. The argument of the thesis is that US policy toward India is more one of continuity than change, and that the driving force behind recent Indo-US relations is not primarily the consequences of 9/11, but is rather the result of power shifts within a more globalised world. In this changed context both the US and India have looked for closer, strategic relationships with countries that share their interests. While far from being united in this respect, their interests are sufficiently common so that from the end of the Cold War the US and India have developed a closer partnership. The effects of 9/11 contributed to an environment conducive to this partnership, but they were not the primary factor.

While Maya Angelou has been recognized as a feminist icon and a successful author, publishing more than thirty books and winning numerous awards, the aim of this research is to bring attention to her role as a writer/activist. This thesis analyses her six-volume serial autobiography, which was written over 33 years, and traces the development of Angelou's activism through her life writing. In so doing, this project argues that the success of the first volume, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has obscured the integrity of the series, which consists in the use of Angelou's political voice that has not been recognised before. This research places Angelou in the African American political autobiography tradition, which combines life writing with consciousness raising from the slave narratives onwards. Following the conceptualisation of Patricia Hill Collins, this research theorises Angelou's political voice as a mode of intellectual activism. Adopting an American Studies approach, it shows how Angelou's self-representation as a black artist seeks to intervene in the social and political context of its writing and demonstrates how her life writing is in turn shaped by African American history and activism. While she is known as a pioneer of black feminism, this research, building on recent scholarship in intersectionality, argues that Angelou's work not only addresses the intersection of race and gender, but also class through what Patricia Hill Collins calls the "matrix of domination". Angelou started her writing career with the Black Arts movement, and this thesis traces the influence of this movement beyond the Black Arts era and shows how the debate of art versus propaganda continued to inform her autobiographical work. Since one of the movement's main principles was "art for people's sake", this thesis reads Angelou's life writing through differentiating the narrating "I" from the narrated "I", in which the former functions didactically as a vehicle for Angelou's political consciousness raising of a younger generation.

This research is concerned with Langston Hughes' professional and personal contacts and their impact on his cultural production. One of the foremost African American writers of his generation, Hughes has been mainly considered in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, with scholars critically assessing his writings. This thesis, by contrast, takes a ‘network approach' to Hughes' work and argues that his inter and intra-racial relationships, international collaborations and friendships, and the strategies (e.g. professional contacts, financial resources) served to sustain and protect first Hughes' black cultural production and second, to build a ‘black cultural infrastructure'.In the introduction, ‘network' and social capital are theorized using the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Mark Granovetter. The first chapter examines Hughes' working relationship with his black and white patronsand their impact on his early years as a poet. In Chapter Two, this thesis examines how Hughes,in an effort to find other means than just private patronage to sustain his literary career,became involved in the wider political networks of the American left. In Chapter Three, I continue the examination of Hughes' efforts to find alternative means tosustain his literary career but also create more opportunities for black artistic expression in the dominant literary fieldby assessing his professional network ties. In Chapter Four, I examine how Hughes, during the last two decades of his life, in the face ofpolitical persecution, reclaimed control over his artistic rights, and engaged through his writings, speeches and mentoring a new generation of black writers and artists. The thesis as a whole thus demonstrates how, with the expansion of his socialcapital (aka network ties), Hughes was able to build a writing career, defend his artistic rights, create alternative black cultural spaces, and nurture the development of future black writers and artists.

The central aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that A.R. Ammons, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, and W.S. Merwin commit to a pragmatic poetic project of working language to facilitate cultural renewal. In illuminating this shared pragmatic work in poems from the turn of the 1990s, the thesis contradicts ecocritical assertions about the inimical relationship between ecopoetry and postmodern poetries such as Language. As ecocriticism established itself as a school of literary criticism in the 1990s, its proponents were damning of the influence postmodern literary theory was exerting on American poetry. Ecocritics argued that postmodernism had dangerously devalued the referential relationship between word and world at a time of escalating environmental crises. Taking Bernstein and Howe as representatives of Language poetry, and Ammons and Merwin as representatives of ecopoetry, the thesis will contest this ecocritical argument by illustrating that these four poets share a vision of poetry as a uniquely positioned medium for rejuvenating language and, subsequently, shifting cultural attitudes in a politically progressive manner. In order to make this argument, the thesis builds on a body of literary criticism which explores American poetry’s debt to American pragmatism. Critics connecting poetry to pragmatism have argued that pragmatists such as William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Ralph Waldo Emerson have helped American poets establish an epistemological middle ground between foundationalism and the sceptical side of postmodernism. The poets studied in this thesis extend this tradition of pragmatic poetry by using their writing to engage in an ongoing poetic rejuvenation of language and ideology. Furthermore, the thesis shows how these poets’ pragmatic approach to language and epistemology aligns them the ‘progressive’ side of the Culture Wars which were erupting in the early 1990s.

This thesis explores literary representations of the ways in which Mexican American women negotiate feminisms in the family across generations through the maintenance, contestation, and adaptation of traditional gender roles. Using the lens of negotiation to read the texts of Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros, this thesis analyses the ways in which intergenerational women are active participants in the complex interventions and mediations that make up family life. The term ‘negotiation’ is used to denote the ways in which intergenerational women resist patriarchal oppression. Negotiation in mothering is central in Chicana feminist writings for as Gloria Anzaldúa states, “[la] gente Chicana tiene tres madres. [The Chicana people have three mothers.] All three are mediators.”1 In their writings, Cisneros and Castillo explore the complex mediations taking place within the Mexican American family and the various devices and strategies employed by women to reveal the nuances of the Chicana experience. These characters are compelled to negotiate their place in the family on unequal terms, within the confines of a framework that stifles the development of women by prescribing them restrictive and limited roles in their capacity as grandmothers, mothers, and daughters. The writing of Cisneros and Castillo demonstrates a politics of negotiation that critiques the gendered ideologies and roles of the family set-up. Close readings of these texts allow for nuanced analyses of the variety of tactics employed by women to survive, and oftentimes thrive, in the oppressive environment of the patriarchal family. In order to persist in an often misogynist environment they undertake feminist negotiations to forge meaningful identities. Their contestation is further complicated by the desire to remain connected to a Mexican heritage in a hostile Anglo American society. This thesis not only engages with the literary representations of the experiences of women in the family, but connects these experiences to the contexts in which these families are found. In the struggle to realise independent and yet interdependent identities, women look to the stories of the lineage of marginalised women in the family for inspiration, foregrounding the stories of grandmothers, mothers, and daughters. This thesis calls for a rethinking of women characters beyond limited, and limiting, familial roles and uses the framework of feminist negotiation as a means to explore the empowering possibilities of intergenerational female relationships.

What does it mean to perform an American identity? From the time of his breakout play, FOB, in 1980, playwright David Henry Hwang has grappled with this question. Over the 35 years of his career, he has consistently been described as a Chinese American, or Asian American, playwright and his work does indeed reflect aspects of the Asian American drama movement of the 1980’s and 1990’s, as it does also aspects of US multiculturalism in general. He has staged stories of the Chinese American experience and explored questions of race, culture, and identity. The term Asian American is itself, however, contested and complex. Meanwhile, Hwang’s privileged and Christian upbringing has bred suspicion of his right to interpret and stage the experience of the broader Asian American community. In his plays, Hwang reinforces stereotypes, while simultaneously undermining them. The result is a view of identity defined by, but resistant to, definitions based on race, culture, and gender. Few playwrights from marginalized ethnic groups have enjoyed mainstream success in the US. Hwang has. In contrast to previous Asian American playwrights, who have struggled to find an audience beyond their identity-based theatre companies, Hwang’s plays seem to transcend specific personal, racial, or cultural experience, and as a consequence have been widely produced, published, studied, and anthologized. Most of Hwang’s plays are inspired by works in the American dramatic canon, suggesting his desire to situate the Asian American experience in the broader American narrative. In this study, I will analyze selected plays by David Henry Hwang. I will consider Hwang’s role as a voice for Asian Americans and the implications of that role. I will place his work in the context of the broader discourse on American identity and argue that is it insufficient to overly privilege his Asian identity in reading his work. Finally, I will explore some of the reasons his work transcends the confines of racial or cultural identity, and has found a place in the American dramatic canon.

This thesis explores the economist Walter W. Heller’s career and maps the rise, ascendancy, and eclipse of Keynesian liberalism in the United States. Heller served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He successfully persuaded both to deploy Keynesian policies to underwrite the liberal expansion of the 1960s. Consequently, Heller was one of the most significant and influential political economists in US history. However, historians have curiously overlooked him. This thesis reasserts Heller’s importance to the making of modern America. It shows that Heller was a more significant figure in the rise of Keynesianism than existing scholarship has appreciated and demonstrates how he educated two presidents in the merits of Keynesian ideas. It illuminates the role Heller played in the formulation of the Great Society and explores how he adapted his Keynesian views during the more conservative times of the 1970s and 1980s. Through examining Heller’s career, this thesis assesses how Keynesianism interacted with liberalism in the United States. It illustrates how both merged in the 1930s, demonstrates how liberals utilised Keynesian thinking during World War II, and shows how Keynesian ideas intersected with liberal policies during the post-war period. In doing so, this thesis adds to recent scholarship that argues liberalism was a much stronger force in post-war American politics than assumed, especially since the scholarly ‘rediscovery’ of conservatism in the 1990s. A positive appraisal of Heller emerges from this thesis. It also provides an overview of the rise and decline of Keynesianism in the United States, breaking new ground in explaining the significance of a presidential adviser who has not hitherto been the subject of specialist study.

The rise of ethnic politics has been a prominent feature of Latin America's recent history, particularly in the Andes where much of the population claim some indigenous descent. Prominent politicians use ethnicity to frame important aspects of their political projects and identities, survey data show an emerging ethnic voting gap in several countries, and political protests, debates, and media coverage periodically expose strong ethnic undercurrents. Yet existing scholarship has not examined the precise nature or implications of ethnicity's role in electoral processes, and thus key questions about ethnic politics in Latin America remain unanswered. How and why do voters use ethnic information in their decision-making? What is the impact of ethnic voting on both the quality and terms of democratic representation? And how do wider contextual factors affect the occurrence and nature of ethnic voting? These questions have important implications for assessing how (and how well) elections fulfil their representational and accountability functions, how candidates can and do appeal to different sectors of the electorate, and the wider prospects for democratic stability in the region. This thesis addresses these questions through a comparative study of ethnic politics and electoral democracy in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, with a focus on presidential voting. The research design combines statistical analysis of nationally representative survey data, a computer-based 'mock election' experiment, and a range of materials from candidates' campaign publicity, mainstream and social media, and other sources. By examining the ways in which ethnicity shapes the preferences and electoral decision-making of individual voters, the thesis aims to provide new insight into the underlying processes that drive such political behaviour. Although the empirical focus is on three Latin American countries, the thesis has broader theoretical ambitions, and its analysis builds on, and seeks to contribute to, a wider comparative politics literature.

At the end of the twentieth century, indigenous inhabitants across Latin America rose up to form organisations, participate in mass mobilisations, and successfully enter into electoral politics as never before. However, amongst the Latin American countries with significant indigenous populations, one group of indigenous citizens remained conspicuously quiet. Peru's indigenous people did not produce a strong national indigenous movement or an electorally viable ethnic party, nor did they mobilise to challenge government policy in sustained fashion. This study offers a new approach to explaining Peru's 'exceptionalism' within the continent-wide rise of indigenous movements. It begins by questioning sweeping generalisations that characterise Peruvian indigenous politics as 'weak' and by identifying eight principal trends that represent the pattern of indigenous political participation at the national and subnational levels in Peru. The study then seeks to explain these eight trends through an innovative, cultural reinterpretation of political process theory. Moving beyond the limitations of pre-existing arguments, which have been largely based on a structural reading of political process theory, it examines the role that the subjective understandings held by indigenous peasant actors play in shaping the pattern of indigenous political participation. Based on fieldwork carried out in three regions situated in the Andes and the Amazon, the thesis illustrates how imaginaries of the state, understandings of political parties and non-governmental organisations, and conceptualisations of ethnic-identity categories help to explain the pattern of indigenous political participation observed in the Peruvian case. The thesis not only provides new insights into indigenous politics at the national and subnational levels in Peru, but it also demonstrates the utility of a more cultural, interpretivist elucidation of how social organisations, mobilising groups, and political parties are actively encouraged, shaped, and discouraged at the micro-level.

A case study of US policy towards Afghanistan from the Soviet intervention of 1979 to the exit of US/ISAF combat troops in 2014, this thesis examines how the United States’ discursive construction of its interests and identity have moulded its long-term involvement with that country. It demonstrates how Washington used language to justify, represent and normalise its foreign policy practices. In this way, the intertwining of language and social practices provided policymakers’ with shared meanings and tools for how to operate. This sets it apart from the existing literature, which predominantly argues that the US has been motivated by its own self-interest in its dealings with Afghanistan. Whilst it does not entirely reject the importance of both realist and neo-realist assumptions, this thesis mainly deploys a constructivist theoretical approach to achieve its objectives. A relatively new framework in the field of international relations, constructivism provides a more nuanced and well-rounded perspective around which a nation’s foreign policy can be understood. It contends that collectively shared beliefs about a nation’s character and identity, rooted in its history, institutions, and its people explain both how it interprets and why it engages in the foreign policies that it does. In the case of Afghanistan, Washington believed that it is the only nation capable of positively effecting change. This sense of US exceptionalism has continuously informed America’s policies towards that country, whether that was during the Cold War when it constructed the ‘freedom fighters’ struggle against the Soviet Union's occupation or of a noble US helping Afghanistan fight against transnational terrorism in the post 9/11 context. Thus, although this thesis acknowledges how America's self-interest has played an important role in shaping its policies towards Afghanistan, the author seeks to explain Washington's long-term involvement with that country by focusing primarily upon America’s narratives, values and beliefs. This will enrich our understanding of US policy towards Afghanistan by providing a new perspective through which both nations’ continuous, evolving and complex relationship can be both historically and contemporarily understood. The work also aims to contribute more broadly to international relations and US foreign policy scholarship through its interdisciplinary approach.

Southwest Louisiana Creoles underwent great change between World Wars I and II as they confronted American culture, people, and norms. This work examines that cultural transformation, paying particular attention to the processes of cultural assimilation and resistance to the introduction and imposition of American social values and its southern racial corollary: Jim Crow. As this work makes clear, the transition to American identity transmuted the cultural foundations of French- and Creole-speaking Creole communities. World War I signalled early transformative changes and over the next three decades, the region saw the introduction of English language, new industries, an increasing number of Protestant denominations, and the forceful imposition of racialized identities and racial segregation. Assimilation and cultural resistance characterized the Creole response, but by 1945, southwest Louisiana more closely resembled much of the American South. Creole leaders in churches, schools, and the tourism industry offered divergent reactions; some elite Creoles began looking to Francophone Canada for whitened ethnic identity support while others turned toward the Catholic establishment in Baltimore, Maryland to bolster their faith. Creoles were not the only distinct community to undergo Americanization, but Louisiana Creoles were singular in their response. As this study makes clear - in ways no historian has previously documented - Louisiana Creoles bifurcated as a result of Americanization. This study also contributes to, and broadens, the literature on Acadian identity. Previously, scholars simply assumed that whitened Latins in Louisiana had always identified with Acadia and their black-racialized brethren with Haiti. This thesis, however, suggests that Cajun and Creole are not opposites. Rather, they derive from the same people and culture, and their perceived and articulated difference emerged in response to Americanization. Through a critical analysis of that bifurcation process, this thesis demonstrates how Acadianized identity and culture emerged in the first half of the 20th century.

Contraception (EC) in Chile during the administrations of Ricardo Lagos (2000-2005) and Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010). For more than ten years, this policy process was marked by a series of political and legal battles at the centre of which were women's sexual and reproductive rights. The legalisation and distribution of EC had the effect of alerting conservative and religious groups opposing EC for its alleged abortive effect. What could have been considered a minor policy issue by many political analysts became a particularly visible and influential issue, especially once Michelle Bachelet, Chile's first female president, took power in 2006. Feminists, the Catholic Church, lawyers and doctors became the main players in front of tribunals supporting or opposing the public policy. The main concern of this research is to understand why the EC policy was such a contentious issue in Chile and elucidate which were the main factors affecting the advancement of this progressive social policy and its final gendered outcome. The central research question driving this study is what does the EC policy process tell us about the role of institutions in the advancement of women's sexual and reproductive rights in Chile? The thesis shows that both formal and informal institutions played a major role in the policy environment in which feminist and sexual and reproductive health and rights advocates had to engage. The role of formal institutions such as the Constitutional Tribunal and the power held by the executive were matched by the power of informal institutions such as the consensus rule, the role of judges and informal lobbying by social actors, as well as the presence of the first female president. Bachelet's profile as a doctor, feminist and woman mixed with her presidential power provides an important explanation to the positive outcome of the policy process.

The Reconstruction era has been subject to countless studies seeking to vilify or celebrate citizens and politicians of the time. From an initial consensus on its immorality and opportunism, to a revisionism where its achievements were celebrated, and a post-revisionism where the cause of its downfall became the focus, the racial, social and political aspects of Reconstruction have been subject to over a century of debate. Within this historiography, though, the significance of Ulysses S. Grant has been predominantly ignored. Challenging the view that Grant lacked political and racial ideals, the aim of this thesis, and my original contribution to knowledge, is to define his Southern Policy in the context of a personal political and racial philosophy, rather than a record of achievement. An examination of the development of his viewpoint on Reconstruction, the rights of the freedmen, and the power of the President and Federal Government, reveals a struggle at the heart of Grant’s Southern policy as he sought to protect the results of the Civil War whilst hastening a close to the work or Reconstruction. Furthermore, careful study of his correspondence reveal him to be an egalitarian who, if permitted, would have been willing to manage the South with greater force and in far more absolute terms. The tension of his ideals and the dichotomy between thought and action resulted in an inconsistent approach to Southern state crises, counter-productive policy choices and ill-timed changes of course. The outcome was a Southern policy that was not only a political failure for Southern Republicans but, as revealed by a study of Grant’s philosophy on the political and racial issues of the day, a personal one for the President.

This dissertation will argue that the novels of Cormac McCarthy represent a sustained attack on American literature's abiding fixation with pastoral. It further argues that such a fixation is very much a national allegory, one that, paradoxically, cannot help but produce a sense of doubt lurking beneath the numerous assertions of individual and national confidence. Cormac McCarthy very much engages with the antinomies of this national allegory. His use of pastoral allegory comes in the form of a broken allegory: a strategy that is very much in keeping with Walter Benjamin's vision of allegorical fragmentation resulting from permanent historical crisis. This crisis, as McCarthy shows, reaches tipping-point in the modern era: the pastoral's dream of ‘pure-utility' is shown to be completely incompatible with the predominance of exchange value and commoditized social relations. The study is in four parts. The first section divides the first four novels in order to explore how they shatter the South's notion of uniqueness through a depiction of a desecrated pastoral. The second section considers the novel Blood Meridian on its own in order to demonstrate how the novel's absurdist renunciation of pastoral and the western mythos helps set up the late novels themes of generic and cultural termination. The third looks at the Border Trilogy, and discusses how recourse to the more open wildernesses of the south-west curiously introduces a countervailing theme of disenchantment and pastoral attenuation. The fourth and final section groups together No Country for Old Men and The Road, in order to argue that these late novels elicit a final rejection of pastoral as it collides headlong with the imaginary of late-capitalism.

Dismemberment in the Fiction of Toni Morrison investigates the motif of dismemberment in Morrison's fiction from multiple perspectives—historical, psychological and cultural. My first chapter on A Mercy focusses on the aspect of historical dismemberment in the context of colonialism and slavery. I look at the forced separation of African Americans from their families and motherland in terms of originary experiences of racism and dismemberment. This entailed fragmentation for African Americans who struggled to develop strategies of survival in the New World. My second chapter on Jazz focuses on the impact of transgenerationally transmitted trauma. I argue that experiences of dismemberment – such as feelings of amputation and phantom limbs – arise not from physical amputation but from traumatic experiences and the unconscious of preceding generations as the result of trasgenerational hauntings. I borrow from the psychoanalytic insights of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok in my explanation of phantom limbs in Jazz. The third section of my project looks at how social order is brought about in the fictive community of Sula through the scapegoating mechanism. I define the scapegoating principle in Sula in terms of cultural dismemberment because of the ways the community members symbolically cut a pariah figure, like Sula, off by performing symbolic acts of violence. The characterization of Sula emphasizes the psychological need for a scapegoat figure who can give an outlet to the defensive tendencies of the community following discrimination. My final chapter focusses on Morrison's most recent novel Home, which is about homecoming. In this novel, Morrison continues with her project of imagining a space of domestic and social comfort which is physically and psychically safe in the broad sense of a homeland for African Americans. Home offers a place of salvation from social, historical and psychic fragmentation or the traumas of racism which result in experiences of disruption, amputation and dismemberment.

This research is concerned with the question of embodiment and body representation in plays written by African American women playwrights during the twentieth century. It starts with the early 1920s and ends around the turn of the twentyfirst century. This project negotiates issues of bodily manifestations and the evolvement of this manifestation from one decade to the next. My research is divided into an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion; each chapter is concerned with examining bodily representation in a certain era. Chronologically presented, the chapters attempt to answer how embodiment at the beginning and at the close of the twentieth century differs. Although the better-known playwrights Susan-Lori Parks, Adrienne Kennedy and Ntozake Shange and the lesser-known playwrights Alice Childress, Sonia Sanchez (better known as a poet), and Marita Bonner share a concern with what might be called the “raced body,” they also seem to share a certain type of maternal heritage passed from one playwright to another. Therefore, this research contributes to the existing scholarship by, firstly, establishing a literary genealogy between African American women playwrights through their shared interest in the utilisation of the body-in-the-world as a form of resistance. Secondly, I present these playwrights as phenomenologists; through using this political body as a way of experiencing the world and experimenting with it, as a way of being in the world, those playwrights –in both modern and postmodern eras—become interpreters of and experimenters with meaning. Their perpetual commitment to defining the position of African American subject, especially that of African American woman, is entwined with an experimental approach of a black body that lives, registers, interprets, and attempts to re-write the hyphenated body (body-in-the-world).

Pound scholars have tended to assume that questions of state power, and of the relationship between the state and the individual, only become central to his work during the inter-war period. The present thesis, however, argues that these questions are a major concern in Pound's writing during the years immediately preceding the First World War, and that questions of state power significantly colour Pound's imagist and vorticist work. Chapter one reads Pound's translation of the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer as a contribution to the radical Edwardian debate about the expansion of the state's bureaucratic power and the threat it might pose to individual autonomy. I also consider the way Pound's translation links state power to the division of labour. Chapter two reassesses Pound's instigation of the imagist movement, against the backdrop of his concurrent fascination with the First Balkan War, an episode all but ignored in previous Pound scholarship. I argue that Pound interpreted the Balkan states as undertaking on the battlefield the very same modernizing struggle that he saw himself as embarking upon in the field of letters. Chapter three argues that as Pound's pursuit of the ‘new' intensifies, his identity as an American—as, in his words, ‘a citizen of a free State, a member of the sovereign people'—takes on a dual significance. Poetically, America's perceived national youthfulness and virility become important tropes for novelty and modernity in his poetry. Politically, though, Pound casts the unfolding national, political and nascent imperial project of the United States as a metonym for modernity itself, scoffing at the Italian Futurist's ‘automobilism' as essentially provincial, and proposing instead his own ‘American Risorgimento'. Methodologically, this thesis strives to combine close readings of Pound's poetry and prose, seen within its original publication context (that is, largely in little magazines), with careful reference to the broader historical context. Please note: For the purpose of online publication, all copyrighted material reproduced in the examination copy of this thesis (except that considered ‘fair use') has been removed. The redacted material is collected in a supplementary volume.

This thesis is about the Southern plantation in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha fiction: how it is represented and constructed, how it is narratively articulated and experienced as both space and symbol. But as its full title suggests, Building Yoknapatawpha is equally about narrative structures and spaces too: about how Yoknapatawpha textually fits together; about how this spreading oeuvre was constructed by Faulkner and how it may equally be reconstructed by the reader. It is about both the reading of space and the space of reading – about how the architectural spaces and social order of the Southern plantation and the narrative structures of the novel inform, complement, and challenge one another, and how their affinity may ultimately be used to generate a new “spatialized” model of literary reading. Foregrounding tensions between narrative “details” and “design” and conceptions of “ruin” and “restoration”, this thesis explores how Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels function simultaneously as “open” and “closed”. It considers how Absalom, Absalom! (1936) attempts to recuperate the repressed historical connections present in Flags in the Dust (1929), only to erase them once more through death, destruction, and narrative closure. It considers how Go Down, Moses (1942) offers models of black domesticity that resist the oppressions of segregation and lynching – but which are dispersed through black diaspora and narrative exclusion. It considers how The Mansion (1959) revises and integrates details from earlier Yoknapatawpha texts to create a richly layered textual space – but which is in constant tension with the process of the historical “whitening” of the Southern post-plantation landscape which it ultimately depicts. Building Yoknapatawpha concludes by attempting to resolve these tensions into a new model of literary reading: deconstructing Yoknapatawpha to reassemble it as a layered “mapping” of multiple parallel narrative paths and connective links, which resist the mastery – and erasure – imposed by linearity and closure.

This thesis explores land reform, land markets and indigenous mobilisation in Highland Ecuador (1964-1994) through the lens of Karl Polanyi’s concept of the “double movement”. The concept suggests modern capitalist societies comprise two forces: the movement towards the creation, expansion and liberalisation of markets (commodification) and the countermovement towards the regulation of markets, the strengthening of the state, and the promotion of non-market forms of organisation (decommodification). The thesis adopts a radical reading of the concept which sees the double movement as a fundamental contradiction in modern capitalist societies. The empirical investigation offers support for this reading and provides fresh insights into the use of the concept. The value of narrowing the lens of the double movement to examine struggles that emerge around specific economic issues and involve particular social groups is also demonstrated. The thesis also sheds new light on Ecuadorian land reform and the role indigenous peoples performed in the process. Greater clarity is provided on the impact of land reform in the highland region and the land redistributed to indigenous families and communities. One of the central points to emerge from the analysis is that the collective organisation and mobilisation of indigenous peoples were required to secure land through agrarian reform. The relationship between indigenous peoples and land markets is also explored. A new concept is developed which provides insights into the opportunities and threats land markets created for indigenous peoples. The thesis places the 1990 and 1994 indigenous levantamientos within a long-term struggle over land which contrasts with accounts that interpret the uprisings as reactions to structural adjustment and neoliberal reform. The contemporary relevance of the research is demonstrated through the analysis of recent developments in Ecuador, concentrating on indigenous and peasant attempts to bring the use and distribution of land under social control.

This thesis analyses the interrelated concepts of diasporic postmemory and how they apply to the oral narratives of a small group of second generation Chileans and Argentineans living in the UK, whose parents were political exiles and economic migrants linked to the Chilean (1973-1990), and Argentinean (1976-1983) dictatorships. Diasporic postmemory as a ‘multidirectional’ theory is used to discuss these narratives in a ‘delocalised’ context where it is argued that two central memory fields overlap: the first being the field of the ‘politics of memory’ in the Southern Cone, and the second the ‘diaspora field’. It will be argued that these narratives occupy a mobile and situated diasporic ‘in-between’ space, indicative of ‘translocational positionalities’ that shift between a UK context and abroad. By presenting these postmemory narratives together, we can come to explore how the legacies of the dictatorships in Chile and Argentina continue to have resonances beyond the stable boundaries of the field of the politics of memory in those countries. As such, they hold the possibility to move beyond the direct victims of state terrorism and their kin, encompassing a wider ‘affective community’ of diasporic positionalities and subjectivities tied to wider societal responses to the legacy of state terrorism and trauma. Furthermore, I will also discuss how in this diaspora space, the positionalities of the researcher and interviewees are intertwined, and form part of subjectivities that can become ethical and reflexive subjects of postmemory, in mutually articulating alternative possibilities for more diversified and collective forms of multidirectional memories to emerge.

Security is a universal human right and a highly valued societal good. It is crucial for the preservation of human life and is of inestimable value for our societies. However, in Latin America, the right to security is far from being universally established. The aim of this sequential, exploratory mixed methods study is to explore the logic of security provision in six neighbourhoods in Rio de Janeiro (Vidigal, Santíssimo, Complexo do Alemão, Tabuleiro*, Botafogo and Novo Leblon) and assess its implications for citizens’ right to security. The findings from the research show that, on a city level, Rio de Janeiro’s security network can best be understood as an oligopoly because different security providers (police, municipal guards, military, private security companies, militias and drug trafficking factions) are connected through cooperative, neutral or conflictual relationships and need to consider the actions and reactions of other groups when taking strategic decisions. On a neighbourhood level, the preferred option for security providers are monopolistic-type constellations, characterised by relative peace and stability. However, all actors are willing to engage in violence if the perceived political and/or economic benefits are great enough. The thesis shows that the relative power and influence of the security providers are primarily determined by the way they are perceived by the local communities and by their capacity to use violence effectively. Despite its appearance as chaotic, violence is therefore an instrument which is negotiated and managed quite carefully. The thesis concludes that insecurity and violence in Rio de Janeiro are primarily fuelled by the struggle for territorial control between conflicting security providers within the oligopoly. The oligopolistic constellation of security providers leads to an inequality of security, defined as a condition in which the right to security is not enjoyed by all residents to the same extent.

Cormac McCarthy seeks to understand human community, the bonds of love which mark humanity, and the impact when those bonds are broken. Throughout his career, however, his work has increasingly focused on a quest for some spiritual core to existence, unfolding against a backdrop of modernity in crisis. These preoccupations can be read in the context of St Augustine’s City of Man and the search for passage into the City of God: there is the dualistic nature of man, with his ability to love and his capacity for destructiveness, driven by the promise of salvation beyond the material realm. I examine what appears to be a sustained sense of hostility in McCarthy’s fiction to modernity. I use the philosophy of Eric Voegelin to demonstrate that McCarthy’s fiction synthesises elements of what Voegelin describes as modern gnosticism, a sense that modern humanity has usurped God and seeks to establish an immanent heaven-on-earth. These preoccupations begin to dominate McCarthy’s writing and, in his continual search for passage to the City of God, he begins to lose those notions of community which informed his earlier work. McCarthy’s understanding of human community is acute and challenging. Suttree is a search for love, meaning and redemption in a hostile world. However, when his preoccupation with spiritual understanding is at its fullest, notably in Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy, it runs the risk of overwhelming the narrative. There is, in the relentless malignancy of judge Holden or the failed prophets of the Trilogy, a tendency towards didacticism which ultimately compromises the fiction. Therefore, despite the consensus among most McCarthy scholars that Blood Meridian is his masterpiece, I argue that it is flawed. Moreover, it marks a development in his writing which means that, in subsequent fiction, he fails to reach the heights achieved in Suttree.

This thesis defines the poetics of a strand within contemporary American poetry, generally described as “mainstream” by literary critics that I define as “the poetics of immanence and experience”. I delineate the genealogy of this poetics from the late 1950s to the end of the 1990s, focusing on four poets who, I contend, best represent “the situation of poetry” in each of the decades during this period. Each of these poets will be shown to sustain and extend this vibrant, and according to literary scholarship, still dominant tradition in American poetry. Robert Lowell, James Wright, Richard Hugo and Jorie Graham are analyzed in the literary context of a particular decade as the most representative poet of this strand of poetry. Defining and tracing a stable poetic model within the vast poetic, aesthetic and cultural input and output in America during the second half of the twentieth century, contributes to a better understanding of American culture as susceptible to generating experiential types of poetry. Drawing from Altieri’s concept of immanence, I define the poem as immanent when it reveals a presence/immanence of a human consciousness as an individuated and particularized agent/protagonist who narrates his/her personal story in a primarily causal, narrative language generated by the structures of the depicted story. The result is the realistic illusion that the poem captures the experience as “it happened”, which is then only transferred to the poem-world from the Object-world. Altieri’s idea about the general turn in American poetry towards the Wordsworthian Order of Nature and my argument about experience as value-generating principles for the poets, are manifested in Lowell’s photographically “objective” surface descriptions and narrations, Wright’s transcendental moments inspired by numinous nature, Hugo’s projections of the human self upon the Object-towns and Graham’s experiential frames of reference filled with the meditations and speculations of her discursive voice.

The central aim of this study is to examine ‘non-normative’ masculinities constructed and represented in American drama, theatre and performance throughout the second half of the twentieth century, thus assessing the ‘queer’ challenges these masculinities present to hegemonic ‘heteronormativity.’ To identify the historical, social and cultural constraints that shaped the manifestations of ‘gay’ male identities on the American stage from the postwar to the 1990s, I will offer extended analysis and close reading of selected texts. I will examine Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Suddenly, Last Summer (1958), Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968), Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985), Tony Kushner’s two Angels in America (1992) plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), and David Drake’s The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me (1994). My analysis of the selected texts will demonstrate that some of these particular plays represent ‘gay’ male individuals who challenge, and others, who identify themselves with ideological principals of a hegemonic ‘heteronormativity.’ Consequently, in this study I partially outline a history of ‘queer’ drama, theatre and performance in America throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and examine how ‘gay’ male identities were represented particularly by ‘gay’ male authors during this period. I will also analyse to what extent these representations were subversive, assimilative, or had a hidden agenda, and most importantly, I seek to deconstruct established conceptions of the works here analysed, considered to be the most assimilative, which through a ‘queer’-inflected close reading can be in fact read as the most subversive.

This research aims to explain current high levels of political disaffection among Chilean youth, to understand why youths in Chile are particularly more disaffected than other groups, and to comprehend the apparent new way of doing politics that would be emerging among this group. Since the return to democracy in 1990 Chile has experienced good levels of economic development and political stability. However, with the pass of years, Chilean citizens, and particularly young people, have increased their levels of political disaffection. Moreover, lately these feelings have begun to be expressed through strong social movements. This thesis argues that this phenomenon can be principally explained by a large disconnection between the political class and common citizens in Chile, which would be founded on both several institutional and socio-economic legacies of the dictatorship and the way the political transition was made. The relationship between youths and the political system in Chile is analyzed through both quantitative and qualitative analyses. This is done first through the direct analysis of the association between indicators of political disaffection and perceptions about the way of functioning of the Chilean Political system. Moreover, several case studies that express these feelings of disaffection are also analyzed in order to deepen the argument. First, an analysis of the lack of a youth public policy is done in order to describe a specific case that shows that the political system is particularly more disconnected regarding young people. Additionally, the success among youths of the independent presidential candidature of Marco Enriquez-Ominami in 2009 and the educational movements of 2006 and 2011-2012 are also analyzed. This is done also to more deeply comprehend the engenderment of feelings of disaffection but also in order to examine an apparent new way of doing politics that may be emerging among young people.

Presenting Belize as an illustrative and critical case of clientelist democracy in the Commonwealth Caribbean, this thesis explores the origins of clientelist politics alongside the pre-independence birth of political parties, analyses its rapid expansion after independence in 1981 and assesses its implications for democratic governance. Based on qualitative research, including interviews with major political leaders, the thesis contends that, despite Belize’s positive post-colonial reputation for consolidating formal democracy, the concurrent expansion of clientelism, as both an electoral strategy and a mode of participation, ranks high among the worrying challenges affecting the quality of its democracy. Although intense party competition in a context of persistent poverty is central to explaining the trajectory of clientelism in Belize, the Westminster model of governance, the disappearance of substantive policy distinctions among parties and the embrace of neoliberal economic policies fuelled its expansion. Small-state size and multi-ethnicity have also been contributing factors. Even though the thousands of monthly dyadic transactions in constituencies are largely rational individual choices with short-term distributive benefits, the thesis concludes that, collectively, these practices lead to irrational governance behaviour and damaging macro-political consequences. Political participation is devalued, public resources are wasted, governance reform becomes more difficult and political corruption is facilitated. As a parallel informal welfare system has become embedded, politicians and citizens alike have become trapped in a ‘big game’ of mutual clientelist dependency. A comparative analysis of post-independence political developments in other Commonwealth Caribbean states shows that the expansion of political clientelism in the context of competitive party politics is significantly path dependent. Besides contributing to the political historiography of modern Belize, this thesis demonstrates that national studies of small clientelist democracies can provide valuable insights into the ways in which informal political practices interact with a state’s formal institutions to shape the quality of democracy itself.

The legacy of the Union Party, while small, should not be ignored. Although historians have largely disregarded the role of the Union Party in the 1936 presidential election, the argument presented in this thesis suggests that the Union Party emerged from a wide base of popular political opposition to the New Deal. Its failures were many, both as a party and as a coherent force. Ultimately, the Union Party faced a considerable power in the shape of the New Deal coalition, and the newly formed party proved incapable of draining voters away from the incumbent, President Franklin Roosevelt. The New Deal, moreover, was singularly successful in galvanising the American people. By turning his 1936 election campaign into a referendum on the success of the New Deal, Roosevelt challenged the electorate to choose the nation's future direction: an America where collective prosperity would be maintained, or a return to the divisive, individualistic self-interest that had brought about the Depression. The electorate made their choice clear: over 27.5 million Americans voted for Roosevelt – over 10 million more than for the Republican candidate, Alf Landon. Only 892,000 voted for William Lemke, presidential candidate of the Union Party.

This thesis explores the political and cultural impact of community-level conservative activists during the early Cold War red scare in America. It provides a comprehensive overview of the hitherto overlooked aspect of the so-called McCarthy-era - amateur counter-subversives who contributed to the national mood of anticommunism in obscure but meaningful ways. It also establishes significant philosophical and practical connections between disparate groups - some nakedly right-wing, others more vaguely 'patriotic' - that demonstrate the existence of a loose but genuine grassroots anticommunist network. In the broader historical sense, by contextualising the achievements of the embryonic conservative movement, this thesis builds upon the challenges the body of literature that posits the 1960s as the essential decade in the emergence of the modern, socially conservative Republican right. In the last years of the 1940s, factions within the political and legal establishment used red scare rhetoric and new loyalty regulations to visit brief but potent misery upon their liberal and leftist enemies. At the same time, less well-connected Americans signed up for the ideological struggle. Some were members of influential civic organizations - such as the American Legion - whose long-held enmity towards left-wing politics found fresh urgency in the Cold War age; Others joined newly formed pressure groups with the expressed aim of defending their towns and suburbs from Soviet-inspired subversion. Veterans groups, school board campaigns, religious bodies, and women's patriotic societies: all provided forums for local-level attacks on perceived un-Americanism. This thesis utilizes the literature, letters and ephemera of such organizations, as well as local newspaper reports, legal and political investigations, and the personal recollections of activists, to document and analyze the most significant actions carried out in the name of community anticommunism. It examines how grassroots campaigners worked to reshape what it meant to be American, and finds ways in which their efforts - scorned as absurdly reactionary by contemporary observers - pointed towards a shifting American political landscape.

The standard historiography sees the working class as a passive bystander in the insurrectionary phase of the Cuban revolution, assuming that the real struggle was conducted by a rural guerrilla army. However, an examination of the archival evidence contradicts this view and shows that workers played a much more active role in the defeat of the Batista regime than they are normally given credit for. At the start of the 1950s, Cuba was suffering a crisis in profitability as the world price of sugar declined. This led the employers to conduct a productivity drive backed by the full repressive force of the Cuban state. Going on strike in a dictatorship is a life or death decision and workers need to feel some confidence in their chances of survival and in the possibility of successfully gaining a result that would be in their political and economic interests. Thus, following the defeat of a wave of militantly organised strikes in 1955, significant numbers of working class militants felt of the need for armed support to enable them defend their wages and conditions. Starting from the city of Guantánamo and spreading to cover most of the island, these activists constructed an impressive, clandestine, working class organisation in alliance with the rebel army which, after several failed attempts, proved capable of calling a successful general strike in January 1959. This strike was crucial to the rebel victory. This thesis, based on primary source material found in archives and private collections in Havana, Manzanillo, Guantánamo and Santiago de Cuba, will re-examine working class participation in the Cuban insurrection of the 1950s, concentrating on organised labour rather than the role of individual citizens.

The thesis contends that there is a dominant strand of thinking driving the prevailing metanarrative of American global hegemony. This strand, constructed here as Ameritocracy, taps into three interconnected and fundamental principles concerning the nature of America: that American values are universal, terminal and providential. However, this notion of American universality is contradicted by a troubling parochialism, one that reveals religious, racial and cultural particularities generated from American identity, and from the mythic, providential origin story of America. The thesis expands on the theory of Ameritocracy, its historical derivation and theoretical antecedents, and its application within the soft power realm of Hollywood film. Ameritocracy finds its apotheosis in the popular blockbuster films of the unipolar era. The global aspirations of the blockbuster conflate with the universality of the medium, and thereby function as the perfect conduit for expounding the presumed universality of the American nation, promoting and proselytising on behalf of American primacy, using Ameritocratic arguments to legitimise and normalise U.S. hegemony. Analysis of blockbuster texts reveals that the notions of universality they embed are often partial and particular, featuring an obfuscation of definitions, between ideals and interests, between ends and means, and between the universal and the American.

This thesis explores the role played by the second presidential administration of Grover Cleveland on the evolution of United States foreign policy in the mid-1890s. Coming at the end of a period of rapid industrialisation and national growth for the United States – and culminating in the War of 1898 – the mid-1890s has generally been portrayed as either the end of the post-Civil War era or a precursor to American empire. The second Cleveland administration in particular has often been overlooked by foreign policy historians, but it forms an anomaly in the narrative of a nation preparing to acquire an overseas empire. At a time when much of American politics and society was increasingly in favour of an assertive and expansive foreign policy, Cleveland and his Secretaries of State, Walter Q. Gresham and Richard Olney, enacted a policy which opposed overseas expansion and sought to limit the United States’ involvement in the affairs of other nations. This thesis argues that, confronted by the same changing circumstances for the nation on the world stage which had created the public demand for a more aggressive foreign policy, Cleveland, Gresham and Olney set out a new template for how the United States should conduct itself in global affairs. This template rejected imperialist expansion and proposed a more limited interaction with other nations based upon legalist principles. It also included elements of moral duty and a belief that the United States should be an example to other nations. The template was formulated on a largely ad hoc basis through several foreign policy incidents throughout the term, but its underlying values were present throughout and Cleveland would ultimately propose it to the nation as a future direction for American foreign policy in his final Annual Message. As such, Cleveland’s template for foreign policy stands as an alternative vision for the evolution of U.S. foreign policy in the 1890s.

This dissertation examines the role of manhood in the programme to “civilise” the Indian at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Using gender and race theory as a frame for archival research, it argues that the model of manhood in operation at Carlisle was contested and changed throughout the school’s history. The hegemonic model at Carlisle’s beginning reflected the school’s focus on civilised manliness, which included the ideals of self-sufficiency, individualism, and Christian morality. This model was progressively displaced by an athletic version, which promoted masculinity in the form of physical power and victory. The dissertation will show how the contest between these two models of manhood came to a head in the 1914 Congressional Investigation of Carlisle. During this investigation, the extent to which sex and alcohol had become inseparable from the athletic model of manhood as well as their prevalence among Carlisle students was revealed. As a result, school officials worked to return Carlisle to the original ideal of civilised manliness, but by this time the school was out of step with the wider demands of government Indian policy; in 1918 it was closed This work extends previous academic examinations of gender at non-reservation boarding schools through its focus on masculinity. Specifically, it identifies, defines and explores how Carlisle’s models of manhood changed according to the demands of the school, government officials and the wider public. It also examines how the school used these different models of manhood to promote the success of the institution. After Carlisle’s commitment to rapid Indian assimilation was called into question by government policy, the school increasingly utilised the athletic model of manhood to demonstrate the school’s success. Manhood was a central component of the school’s programme to eliminate Indian savagery. As such, the analysis of manhood at Carlisle provides critical insight into government Indian policy and white definitions of gender, as well as illuminating the centrality of manhood to the concept of civilisation.

This thesis examines womens' poetry of the radical Left and organised labour movement of the Depression-Era United States and investigates the relationship between poetry and politics during this period. In so doing, it shows that women poets were concerned with precisely that problem: of poetry's political function. The work of individual poets and the acts of collective cultural production explored in this thesis articulate a radical, politically transformative poetics at a time when the continued existence of poetry was perceived to be under threat from scientific advance and wider cultural changes. Juxtaposing analysis of Left modernist poets with poets of the labour movement, the chapters focus on three individual poets including Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), Genevieve Taggard (1894-1948) and Miriam Tane (1916-2007). To provide an understanding of the role of poetry within a specific political movement and to establish the context in which Tane's poetry was produced, two chapters are included which analyse the educational culture and the collective cultural production of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. One chapter focuses on the history of the ILGWU's educational and cultural activities and the other analyses collections of poetry which the union produced. This thesis challenges the existing paradigm in which the study of American radical Left and labour poetry has been isolated from any broader enquiry about its relationship to class, American political history and also to literary modernism. This thesis advances two main arguments: that the poets considered in this thesis conceived of poetry as a politically transformative force; that these politically transformative understandings of poetry were rooted in in an engagement with the ideological and material contexts of the social movements to which these writers belonged. Furthermore, this thesis considers poetry in terms of the material context of its publication, and the political uses to which it was put.

This thesis provides a specific insight into the previously unexplored subject of the black fair in Macon, Georgia from 1906 to 1930. It draws on archives, government papers, newspaper reports, and the correspondence of black leaders in order to create a localised study documenting the attempts of Georgia‘s African Americans to further themselves and to improve race relations within their community. Subsequently, the fair creates a microcosm of wider efforts of black uplift and racial politics in the South during this period. The fair reveals the work of Richard Wright, a figure who demonstrated how local African American leaders often straddled the doctrines of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, and adapted their philosophies within everyday life. The fair is also illustrative of how leaders such as Washington also cultivated relationships with black community leaders and fellow educators, while also connecting to the black masses. Similarly the celebration and appearance of national black political figures, such as James Napier, encouraged black pride and determination. Furthermore, such exhibits created powerful symbols which connected black political success with economic wealth. The thesis thereby situates the black fair and its organisers within a significant period of black political development, one which contributed to the later Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Institutions such as the African American fair were vital spaces which fostered a sense of black community, economics and autonomy. This thesis helps draw attention to the importance of such recreational spaces, repositioning them within the political and social studies of black southerners during the early twentieth century.

This thesis examines the countercultural politics expressed within the work of the American novelist Thomas Pynchon, contributing to critical work already published on the subject of Pynchon's politics, in which there has been a recent upsurge of interest. Expressions of sympathy with anarchist and anti-Capitalist principles discerned in Pynchon's work are explored in their connection with the author's experience of particular practices and philosophies of the 1960s counterculture. Furthermore, the ongoing significance of sixties politics in Pynchon's more recent production is demonstrated as ideological connections between earlier and later novels are traced. In Slow Learner Pynchon professed admiration for the motive energy of Beat literature, so influential on the formation of the counterculture. With particular focus on Jack Kerouac's On the Road, chapter one demonstrates the impact of the Beat movement, and its limits, in Pynchon's early novels. New Left thought and tactics as manifested across the decade provide the focus of the second chapter, which engages primarily with Gravity's Rainbow's depiction of Communist revolutionaries in Weimar-era Germany. The following chapter considers the role of psychedelic experience and the philosophies of Timothy Leary in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Against the Day, arguing that the fantastical has a concrete political role in Pynchon's novels. Black Power, and specifically the political theory of the Black Panther Party, is the subject of chapter four. Gravity's Rainbow's framing of Huey P. Newton's concept of “revolutionary suicide” is central to an analysis which offers insights into the novel's perspectives on the use of violence and on leadership in revolutionary groups. The final chapter investigates the dynamics of Pynchon's ambivalent engagement with the Women's Movement. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique is put forward as an important intertext for The Crying of Lot 49, while Vineland is examined in the context of radical feminism.

This thesis examines the relationship between segregationist organisations, publications and individuals in the United States and their pro-apartheid counterparts in southern Africa. It uncovers a sustained and extensive foreign policy of segregationists that has hitherto been overlooked and a relationship between the countries that goes beyond existing analyses of Cold War cooperation or comparative studies of the countries' racial systems. When the civil rights movement began, steadfast segregationists in the American South looked further afield for support, inspiration and ideological affirmation of their belief in white supremacy. They found this in South Africa and its apartheid policies as well as in other right-wing organisations and individuals outside the American South. Through the archives of segregationist organisations, civil rights organisations, anti-communist groups, individuals, governmental records and newspapers, this thesis charts the journey southern segregationists took from the creation of massive resistance in 1954 – a movement focused on regional problems – to a dramatically less isolationist standpoint one decade later. By 1965, white southern Africa had really captured the imagination of segregationists, alliances had been forged and when massive resistance failed, segregationists did not retreat from their international agenda. Although South Africa was a focal point of segregationists' attention during massive resistance, they also became committed to white rule in Rhodesia after 1965. This thesis examines the groups across America that supported the isolated bastions of white supremacy in southern Africa and demonstrates that the Cold War alliance between U.S. and southern African governments inadvertently helped to maintain and conceal the racism that drove segregationists to form fruitful links in southern Africa. The tangible and ideological links segregationists made abroad internationalised a concept of white supremacy in which race trumped nationality. This global white supremacy has endured and reveals that segregationists were not insignificant reactionaries with a short lived movement but people who affected race relations in the long term.

This thesis is an anthropological exploration of the envy of Aguabuena people, a small rural community of potters in the village of Ráquira, in the Boyacá region of Andean Colombia. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among these potters, I propose an understanding of envy in Aguabuena as an existential experience, shaping relationships between the self and others in the world, crosscutting metaphysical and physical spheres, and balancing between corrosive and more empathetic ways of co-existence. Disclosing the multipresence of envy in Aguabuena's world, its effects on people (including the ethnographer), and the way envy is embodied, performed, reciprocated and circumvented by the potters, I locate envy in various contexts where it is said to be manifested. Furthermore, I discuss the complex spectrum of envy and its multivalent meanings, or oscillations, in the life of Aguabuena people. I also present interactions with people surrounding potters, such as Augustinian monks, crafts middlemen, and municipal authorities, all of whom recount the envy of potters. My research challenges previous anthropological interpretations on envy and provides an alternative reading of this phenomenon. Moving away from labelling and regulatory explanations of envy, performative models, or pathological interpretations of the subject, I analyse the lived experience of envy and how it encompasses different realms of experience as well as flows of social relations. While focusing on the tensions and entanglements that envy brings to potters, as it constrains social life but also activates and reinforces social bonds, I examine the channels through which envy circulates and how it is put into motion by potters. Additionally, my thesis intends to contribute to anthropological studies of rural pottery communities in Andean Colombia. I present my unfolding understanding of envy by using both the potters' concept and material detail, punto, location, referring to a spot from where Aguabuena people enter different vistas of the world, or denoting a precise time when things or materials change their physical qualities. Through this device, I disclose realms of envy, while seeking to immerse the reader in the lived experience of envy.

In the 1970s the Canadian government took a strong stand against apartheid sport policies. Despite Canada’s limited sporting links with South Africa, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and his Liberal government took on a leading Commonwealth position in promoting the isolation of South African sport. The catalyst for this leadership was Canada as host of two ‘mega’ sporting events during the 1970s - the 1976 Montréal Olympics and the 1978 Edmonton Commonwealth Games. This thesis focuses on the progression and adoption of new policies and initiatives which looked to strengthen Canada’s foreign policies dealing with apartheid sport while promoting these initiatives within the Commonwealth. Canada, a senior member of the association, had proved itself to be a key ally of newly independent Commonwealth nations throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. These nations looked to Canada for guidance. Along with taking on a stronger Commonwealth position during the Trudeau era, Canada also looked to increase its international presence by focusing less on its traditional ties with the United States and more on forging relationships with a variety of newer nations. As Canada looked outside its borders to assert itself, within the country regionalism was on the rise with the advent of Québec separatism. All these factors played a major role in the development of Canadian foreign policy during the 1970s. This thesis focuses on the balance between internal and external pressures for change and how changes unfolded in light of Canada holding two mega sporting events in quick progression. From 1968 to 1980, Trudeau dominated Canadian politics. An engaging figure, he came to power promoting his notion of a ‘Just Society’ and looking to expand Canada’s international prestige. Newly opened archives of the External Affairs Department at the Library and Archives Canada show that Trudeau played a key role in the development of Canada’s new policies, especially during the period of 1975 to 1978. The wide range of primary sources consulted, many recently opened through Access to Information and Privacy requests, alongside a variety of sources from voluntary associations, analysed in this thesis provide a fulsome, chronological narrative of how Canada moved to the forefront of the Commonwealth and the association’s movement to isolate South African apartheid sport.

This thesis is a study of how the Richard Nixon administration explained its China policy to its allies and friends in Asia and their reactions towards the major changes in the US-PRC relationship during the early 1970s. These allies and friends are the Republic of China (ROC), the Republic of Korea (ROK), Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. When Nixon came to power in 1969, he was desperate to disengage from the Vietnam War and to reduce the United States (US) formal military presence in Asia. He employed the policies of Vietnamization and the Nixon Doctrine to achieve these objectives, which when combined with the US-PRC rapprochement would serve to reduce tensions in Asia. The Asian states were apprehensive of the future of the US commitment to the region due to the reduction of its military presence in Asia and their worries were compounded when Nixon sought rapprochement with the PRe. Explanations were sought from the US and reassurances were given by the Nixon administration in order to pacify its allies and friends in Asia. The development of the relationships of the Asian states with the PRC, and also with the US, revealed the extent to which Nixon was able to convince these Asian states that his China policy would not be detrimental to their security. The rapprochement did much to alter the relationships the Asian states shared with both the US and the PRC. Nixon's China policy acted as a catalyst for some of the Asia states to establish diplomatic relations with the PRC. These Asian states were either uncertain of the American commitment to Asia or recognised the convergence of interest between the rapprochement and their national interests. They then moved swiftly towards establishing diplomatic ties with the PRe.

This thesis is about the depiction of the damaged male in contemporary American war films in the period 1990 to 2010. All the films in this thesis deploy complex strategies but induce simple and readily accessible pleasures in order to mask, disavow or displace the operations of US imperialism. It is my argument that the premier emotive trope for emblematising and offering up the damaged male as spectacle and political tool is the American war film. I also argue that masochistic subjectivity (and spectatorship) is exploited in these films, sometimes through using it as a radical transformative tool in order to uncover the contradictions and abuses in US imperial power, but mostly through utilizing its distinct narrative and aesthetic qualities in order to make available to spectators the pleasures of consuming these images, and also to portray the damaged male as a seductive and desirable subjectivity to adopt. The contemporary war film offers up fantasies of imperilled male psychologies and then projects these traumatic (or “weak”/“victimised”) states into the white domestic and suburban space of the US. Accordingly this enables identification with the damaged male, and all his attendant narratives of dispossession, innocence, and victimhood, and then doubles and reinforces this identification by threatening the sanctity and security of the US homeland. My argument builds towards addressing ethical questions of spectatorial passivity and culpability that surround our engagement with global media, and mass visual culture in the context of war. I ultimately identify ethical spectatorship of contemporary war films as bolstering a neo-liberal project advancing the “turn to the self”, and hence audiences could unwittingly be engaged in shoring up white male ethno-centricity and the attendant forces of US cultural and geopolitical imperialism.

This thesis is written to promote and pursue an understanding of lesbian fandom and its function on the Internet. It will demonstrate how a particular television text Xena: Warrior Princess (X: WP) and a dedicated online fandom „xenasubtexttalk‟ (XSTT) of diverse lesbian fan membership gained empowerment and agency through their fan practices. Since the screening of the television fantasy series X: WP (1995-2001), there has been a marked increase in academic enquiry into lesbian fan culture on the Internet. This thesis contributes to the lesbian spectatorship of fandom with a specific interest in online fandom. This research suggests there are many readings of X: WP and the dedicated websites set up to discuss the series have increased during and post the series broadcast period. This study explores the contradictions, the gaps, and the differences between fan responses to the series, especially the lesbian discourse and fan fiction that developed during and after the television series ended. This investigation suggests that fan scholarship can obtain a new insight into lesbian Internet fan practices as a virtual space producing new lesbian fan online identities and discourses that challenge traditional forms of lesbian fandom. It does this by presenting three distinct, significant and interrelated layers of lesbian online textual engagement. While interrelated, these layers are separate and important as they each reveal new lesbian online fan performances of identity that challenge traditional performances of reading and writing habits of lesbian fans.