Dissertations

Author: Monika Gosin

Title: (Re)Framing the Nation: The Afro-Cuban Challenge to Black and Latino Struggles for American Identity
Degree: Ph.D., 2009
Doctoral Committee: Ana Celia Zentella, Chair; Charles Briggs; Jane Rhodes; Raul Fernandez; Daniel Hallin; Sara Johnson

Abstract: This dissertation interrogates the complexity of late 20th and early 21st century racial projects, focusing on conflict and convergence among African Americans, Cuban exiles, and Afro-Cubans in the United States. A textual analysis of the African American Miami Times and the Spanish language El Herald/El Nuevo Herald during the 1980 Mariel exodus and 1994 Balsero crisis, reveals the concerns of Miami African Americans and Cubans related to issues of race, immigration, and national belonging. The dissertation argues that the racializing discourses found in the Miami Times, which painted Cuban immigrants as an economic threat, and discourses in the Herald, which affirmed the presumed inferiority of blackness and superiority of whiteness, reproduce the centrality of ideologies of exclusivity and white supremacy in the construction of the U.S. nation. These discourses rely on three principle racializing frames: the black/white frame, the morality framing of good and bad citizens, and the native/foreigner dichotomy. Despite often antagonistic attitudes between African Americans, exile Cubans, and newer Cuban immigrants, however, the findings expose a shared underlying critique of the continued disenfranchisement of people of color. The analysis of newspaper text is supplemented by an analysis of talk, i.e., in-depth interviews conducted with black Cubans from Miami and Los Angeles, in order to understand their negotiations of the U.S. racial structure. The experiences that Afro-Cubans recount contradict the tenets of exclusivity upon which definitions of “authentic” U.S. citizenship rests, and their positioning as blacks and as Cubans challenges the notion that African American and Cuban American communities are bounded, racially distinct groups. The dissertation makes the case that we must root out and expose white supremacy in all its covert manifestations, in order to understand interethnic conflict more broadly, and Black/Latino conflict specifically. Though the study focuses on Miami and Los Angeles, it has national implications, as it concerns the ways in which the power of whitenessprevails even as the nation’s population shifts from majority white to “majority minority.”

Biography: Monika Gosin has been appointed a Postdoctoral Associate for the Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South at Duke University beginning August 15, 2009.

Author: Natchee Blu Barnd

Title: Inhabiting Indianness: US Colonialism and Indigenous Geographies
Degree: Ph.D., 2008
Doctoral Committee: Ross Frank, Chair; Yen Le Espiritu; David Naguib Pellow; Rosemary George, Paul Spickard

Abstract: This comparative study demonstrates a uniquely spatial phenomenon targeting American Indian peoples and communities that I call “inhabiting Indianness.” Inhabiting Indianness refers to the ways that everyday citizens deploy notions of Indianness in the creation of White residential spaces and in reasserting national and therefore colonial geographies.

Chapter three serves as the core of the study, examining the construction of a racialized American geography through mundane American Indian-inspired spatial markers. I document and analyze the use of Indian-themed street names throughout the United States, and compare their uses and meanings to street names referencing other racialized groups, including African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos. After reviewing nationwide data, I provide a more detailed case study of Clairemont, California, a suburb of San Diego.

Chapter two serves as an intellectual and pedagogical bridge for my study of the street names. This chapter documents how Indianness functions not only through visual and spectacular representations, but also through more mundane cultural practices. I analyze the use of Indianness at two northern California high schools, one that uses a non-caricatured mascot derived from a historical figure and a second where the school name itself recognizes a local native person.

In my final chapter, I present a reading of four American Indian artists. Framed in reference to the use of Indianness for marking US-claimed land, I examine how these artists articulate resistance to the production of colonial space, and reveal how their works reflect a shared effort to reassert and recognize indigenous geographies. I present the film and writing of Sherman Alexie, the poetry of Louise Erdrich, a visual art piece from Bunky Echo-Hawk, and a series of installation art works by Edgar Heap of Birds. These works of art illustrate that the artists not only speak back to appropriated notions of Indianness, but also creatively interrogate how American space must be seen as the ongoing work of colonization.

Author: Ofelia Ortiz Cuevas

Title: Mortifications of the Flesh: Racial Discipline in a Time of Crisis
Degree: Ph.D., 2008
Doctoral Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Chair; Denise Ferreira da Silva, Co-Chair; Ross Frank; Rosaura Sanchez; Abel Valenzuela; Laura Pulido; Maurice Stevens

Abstract: In this dissertation I examine the continuity of racial discipline in the US at the turn of the 20 th century and the turn of the 21 st century. I treat the television program COPS and the photo art book and museum exhibition Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America as complex visual objects enrolled in the continuity and maintenance of the violent practice of racial discipline. I argue that although the mechanisms through which the body is disciplined and visually consumed have changed, the violent practice of racial discipline and its function remain remarkably similar. The focus and use of the visual and fields of vision directs this project to the body as both centrally symbolic and material as race is actualized in the spectacle of racial disciplining in a time of crisis, recuperation and becoming. My analysis relies on the two historical periods of crisis; the era Reconstruction and Manifest Destiny and the era of late capital, to consider the conditions of possibility from which the racially disciplined body exists as a locus of political and economic evidence of legitimation and order. This dissertation provides the proper theoretical framework for the interpretative work the dissertation will undertake, as well as considers related work that examines the relationship between race, representation and disciplinary state systems. The geneology of the spectacle of racial discipline is mapped out focusing on the conditions of possibility from which this practice is productive of race at the turn of the 20th and 21st century.

Biography: Ofelia Ortiz Cuevas is a U.C. President's Post-Doctoral Fellow in the University of California, Riverside, Ethnic Studies Department, 2008-2010.

Author: Thuy Vo Dang

Title: Anticommunism as Cultural Praxis: South Vietnam, War, and Refugee Memories in the Vietnamese American Community
Degree: Ph.D., 2008
Doctoral Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Chair; Robert R. Alvarez; Lisa Sun-Hee Park; Lisa Yoneyama, Rosemary George

Abstract: In dialogue with new critical scholarship on immigration, refugee, war, and memory studies as well as drawing from the methodologies of cultural studies and ethnography, this dissertation examines “anticommunism” as a set of cultural discourses and practices that shape the past, present, and future of Vietnamese diasporic communities by exploring when, where, and for what purposes South Vietnam emerges in refugee memories. That anticommunism continues to be an important paradigm for Vietnamese diasporic identity and community formations more than thirty years after the official end of the war and despite increased transnational relations between Vietnam and its diaspora suggests the need to theorize the multiplicity of meanings that it has amassed through the years. Through ethnographic interviews, participation in and observation of Vietnamese American community events in San Diego and analysis of its cultural productions, I examine how the refugee (or first) generation apprehend and deploy anticommunism in community spaces and in their private lives in order to engage with conversations about how memory, history and silence intersect and reveal hidden dynamics of institutional power and violence. How can acts of collective remembrance and the burdened silences of the first generation regarding the Vietnam-American war and post-war traumas work as alternatives to state sanctioned narratives (in Vietnam and the US) that erase a or disavow South Vietnamese perspectives? Can we read differently the public face of anticommunist politics that has authorized community censorship and violence in the past thirty years? This dissertation takes apart what has been academically and generally dismissed as conservative exile politics and looks to everyday community meaning-making practices as a legitimate and important site of knowledge. Thinking of Vietnamese American anticommunism as a cultural praxis—a mode for engaging in memory and meaning-making practices—it becomes possible to discuss the complexity of post-war grappling with death, loss, exile, and survival for those on the ground.

Biography: Thuy Vo Dang has received the Institute of American Cultures/Asian American Studies Center postdoctoral fellowship at University of California Los Angeles for the 2009-2010 academic year.

Author: Denise Khor

Title: Asian Americans at the Movies: Race, Labor, and Migration in the Transpacific West, 1900-1945
Degree: Ph.D., 2008
Doctoral Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Co-Chair; Nayan Shah, Co-Chair; Ross Frank, Natalia Molina, Lesley Stern

Abstract: This dissertation explores the vibrant world of motion picture amusements in Asian immigrant communities in the United States between 1900 and 1945. It traces a circuit of movie-going that spanned from the migrant cities of Seattle and Stockton to the rural plantation towns of the Hawaiian islands . Starting in the nickelodeon era, Japanese showmen crafted a world of cheap attractions in major spots of Asian migration and settlement in the transpacific West. The cultural politics of first generation elites, alongside their struggles with local and national communities, shaped these entertainment spheres. Racial segregation, alien land laws, and prewar governmental surveillance also demarcated the possibilities for a viable public culture during the first half of the twentieth century. In Hawaii , the cultural sphere of movie-going emerged in relation to sugar planters, Japanese showmen, and the thousands of immigrant laborers who crowded into the show houses to view a diverse program of moving pictures from Hollywood as well as Japan and the Philippines . With the first major labor strike in 1909, sugar planters sought to promote the movies on plantations as a means to appease labor unrest and create a docile labor force. With the increasing threat of organized labor, however, sugar planters grew increasingly distrustful. I trace the apprehensions and anxieties that planters exhibited over the movies, the showmen, and their spectators in order to suggest that this film scene comprised an alternative sphere in rural Hawaii . Beyond simple pleasures, the dangers of Japanese run amusements extended a counter public for laborers beyond the union hall and into the world of leisure and attractions. This study of early film culture in Asian immigrant communities brings together the field of film studies with Asian American history, U.S. social and cultural history, migration studies, and urban studies. It sheds insight into the ways that race, labor, and migration formed the public sphere of the cinema in the first decades of its inception. The project illuminates how the social experience of the movies, and the engagement with the pleasures and fantasies of the cinema, shaped the relationships of Asian immigrants to both their national communities and American modernity.

Biography: Denise Khor currently holds the position of Postdoctoral Fellow in the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University.

Author: Jesse Mills

Title: Racing to Refuge: Ethnicity, Gendered Violence, and Somali Youth in San Diego
Degree: Ph.D., 2008
Doctoral Committee : Yen Espiritu, Chair; Roberto Alvarez, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Nayan Shah, Daniel Widener

Abstract: This dissertation is a study of youth programs as structures of refuge for Somalis in San Diego, CA. Somali youth stand at the nexus of the notions of, on the one hand, "refugees" as traumatized and deserving of humanitarian aid, and on the other hand as "Somalis" feared to be violent or threats in the war on terror. What appear to be contradictory constructions are complementary aspects of violent racial subject-making that position in every significant capacity "first" world (coded as white heteropatriarchal) above "third" world and other (coded as "of color" and "foreign"). Media and popular culture reinforce these constructs while programs in the nonprofit sector market themselves and orient their programming toward discourses on rescue that reproduce the status quo. Meanwhile, resettled Somalis in urban areas like City Heights, San Diego face everyday environments shaped by legacies of race and class discrimination. Beyond the simplistic construct of benevolent helpers and their incapacitated wards lies a more complex field of struggle where neighborhood residents, resettlement officials, and newcomers contest the meanings of race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Striving for a social justice-informed ecological view of refugees, this study explores the complexities of youth program structures of refuge in the areas of law enforcement, sexual health and masculinity, and public education. This study contributes to public policy and education literature on a sizeable and significant minority group concentrated in an urban US inner city.

Biography: Jesse Mills is currently Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of San Diego, 5998 Alcala Park, San Diego, CA 92110-2492; telephone: (619) 260-7740; fax: (619) 260-7625 FAX; web: http://www.sandiego.edu/es/Mills.php

Author: Theresa Cenidoza Suarez

Title: The Language of Militarism: Engendering Filipino Masculinity in the U.S. Empire
Degree: Ph.D., 2008
Doctoral Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Chair; Lisa Sun-Hee Park; Ana Celia Zentella; John D. Blanco; Nayan B. Shah

Abstract: My dissertation examines the relationship between militarism and domesticity in the United States through the everyday lives of multigenerational Filipino Navy families in San Diego, California. The militarization and domestication of Filipino Navy families have engendered affective and effective desires to constitute themselves as legible subjects despite the violence of U.S. empire in the Philippines and the demands of resettlement in the U.S. imperial center. Arguably, the desire for such legibility in an imperial milieu (as Filipino/ American subjects) challenges the language of belonging (or inclusion) common to analyses of U.S. empire. From the epistemological perspectives of Filipino Navy families in my sample, I posit that such discursive legibility in the U.S. imperial center relies on inventing quotidian expressions of heteronormative Filipino masculinity and manhood alongside co-constructions of heteronormative womanhood and childhood. My analyses is based on original recorded interview data with approximately twenty Filipino Navy families residing in San Diego over a nine-month period between 2004 and 2005. Three members of each family (male enlistee, spouse, and adult child) were interviewed, for a total of sixty participants with a cumulative affiliation with the U.S. Navy that spans fifty years. In “Militarized Filipino Masculinity and the Language of Citizenship,” I examine how Filipino masculinity and manhood are constituted in and through a distinctly masculine framework for familial relationships, and explore the legibility of U.S. patriarchy and militarism in the lives of Filipino men. I show how the domestic space is always overseen, authorized, and enabled by U.S. authority—regardless of how and whether the Filipino Navy men in my sample identify, cope with, and resolve their expectations of themselves as men through the language of citizenship and the patriotic. In “Militarized Filipino Motherhood and the Language of Mothering,” I examine how domesticity, intimacy, and morality are imagined, staged, reproduced, and transferred intergenerationally by women to constitute a distinctly masculine framework for Filipino Navy families. Specifically, I look at how the incongruities of class consolidation and white bourgeois domesticity in everyday life gesture towards the everyday expressions of dissent and critique of U.S. empire, as well as the limitations. Finally, in “Militarized Filipino Youth and the Language of Respect,” I examine how gendered experiences of militarized childhood both enable and disable the possibilities of demilitarization from within the U.S. imperial center.

Biography: Theresa Cenidoza Suarez is an Assistant Professor of Critical Race Studies in the Department of Sociology at California State University, San Marcos

Author: Theo Verinakis

Title: Barbaric Sovereignty: States of Emergency and Their Colonial Legacies
Degree: Ph.D., 2008
Doctoral Committee: Ross Frank, Chair; Denise Ferreira da Silva; Pal Ahluwalia; Takashi Fujitani, Yen Le Espiritu

Abstract: This dissertation develops the concept of Barbaric Sovereignty to demonstrate the generative aspects of white settler colonialism, and how this process served as the social, cultural, and political mechanisms of the United States, and Australia.  The categories of barbarians and savages have been disassociated from modern categories, and Barbaric Sovereignty reassembles barbarism and savagery to reveal how critical these categories are for a former white settler society like the United States.  Barbaric Sovereignty explains how barbarians and savages are indispensable themes that produce a new category of knowledge that serves as a basis of power for both the state and its residents.  The focus of this dissertation is to elucidate the kind of knowledge contained in Barbaric Sovereignty, and to determine what powers this category engenders.  White settler societies employ barbaric sovereignty as a means of transforming themselves into nation-states through the destruction of a previous group to create a new settlement that is not an exact replica of a European society.  The settlers may not know the extent of what they are producing in terms of settlement, but the barbaric destruction is generative of a new society and state.  Since total destruction of the past is not possible, a continual source of apprehension haunts the nation.  Former white settler societies are persistently forced to legitimate their violent histories and reconcile their national anxieties, while disavowing any connections to a larger legacy of colonialism.

Abstract: Mr. Verinakis is apostdoctoral fellow at the Centre For Diaspora and Transnational Studies at the University of Toronto.

Author: Faye Caronan

Title:"Making History from U.S. Colonial Amnesia: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Poetic Genealogies"
Degree: Ph.D., 2007
Doctoral Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Chair; Ana Celia Zentella, Lisa Sun-Hee Park, Lisa M. Lowe, John D. Blanco

Abstract: United States national narratives deploy a selective memory in order to construct the U.S. as a benevolent global power and enable its political and economic interests abroad. In the case of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, the U.S. relied on U.S. styled education systems established during the colonial period, to function as "technologies of forgetting" and suppress memories that counter the narrative of U.S. imperial benevolence. This dissertation explores how Los Angeles Filipino American and New York Puerto Rican performance poets remember U.S. imperialism in the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the face of institutionalized efforts and social pressure that encourage systematic forgetting. These performance poets educate their communities about forgotten and current histories of U.S. imperialism to organize for social change but these histories are not institutionally recognized. My analysis relies on Foucauldian conceptualizations of the power of institutionalizing knowledge and the disqualified or subjugated knowledges that institutionalizing processes such as language policies, public education and assimilationist paradigms produce. Despite the U.S. nation state's resources for reproducing institutionalized histories, neither resistance to the narrative of U.S. colonial benevolence nor the histories this narrative omits can be completely eradicated. Instead, the reproduction of these subjugated knowledges takes place in alternative spaces and through alternative pedagogical practices. Examining the spaces and transnational practices that enable Los Angeles Filipino American and New York Puerto Rican performance poets to construct and reproduce historical narratives challenging institutionalized U.S. history, I argue that these performance poets trace a genealogy of global power that engages the politics of remembering U.S. imperialism to enable social change. Put simply, these poets reconstruct the past to imagine and work towards a different future. "Making History from U.S. Colonial Amnesia" acknowledges both how Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican performance poets make history by intervening in a politics of remembering U.S. imperialism and make history by actively participating in local and transnational social movements.

Author: Cecilia Rivas

Title:"Imaginaries of Transnationalism: Media and Cultures of Consumption in El Salvador"
Degree: Ph.D., 2007
Doctoral Committee : Charles Briggs, Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Co-Chairs; Denise Ferreira da Silva, Daniel C. Hallin, Elana Zilberg

Abstract: "Imaginaries of Transnationalism: Media and Cultures of Consumption in El Salvador" is a study of how some peoples and narratives become transnational and global, while others are excluded from this condition. The dissertation examines the Salvadoran transnational imaginary by juxtaposing three research sites, spaces where Salvadorans come together and "make sense" of globalization: the "Departamento 15" section of the Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Gráfica, the growing bilingual call center sector in San Salvador, and shopping malls and cultures of consumption in San Salvador. Media, consumption, and migration practices become constitutive and central in the production of certain global subjects. Through interviews, media content analysis, and observation, I analyze these sites as emblematic of the interactions people engage in as part of daily life in a globalized world. The research sites relocate El Salvador in different ways within economic, social, and cultural dimensions of globalization. The shopping mall recreates the city even as it often turns its back on it, imagining and idealizing other times and places. The call center "exports" the voice of the Salvadoran employee, as this employee remains immobile. By retelling narratives of emigration and return to El Salvador, the newspaper re-spatializes the nation and incorporates the diaspora into the Salvadoran territory as a transnational "fifteenth department." While people can "freely" participate in these sites, however, the mall, the newspaper, and the call center are spaces of constraint and exclusion, where practices are regulated and people become particular kinds of subjects. Beyond a simple account of domination, however, this dissertation looks at these sites and practices closely, and asks how and why some media representations, work cultures, and ideas of language ability constituted in these sites have become part of the dominant narrative of globalization, while other narratives are marginalized. Ultimately this dissertation is about the implications of certain discourses of migration, commodity consumption, and media, and how these narratives become effective in the disciplinary dimensions of globalization.

Biography: Cecilia Rivas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies at Univerisity of California, Santa Cruz.

Author: Sandra Angeleri

Title: Women Weaving the Dream of the Revolution in the American Continent
Degree: Ph.D., 2006
Doctoral Committee: Robert Alvarez, George Lipsitz, Co-Chairs; Denise Ferreira da Silva, Ramón Gutiérrez, Rosaura Sanchez, Jaime Concha

Abstract: The U.S. third world women's movement proposes the Chicana new mestiza identity as a methodology of (post) modern social movements. García Canclini differentiates modern national identities from transnational citizens' identifications emerging from hybrid cultures' (post) modern consumption of cultural products. Drawing on the contributions and limitations of these two proposals, the dissertation examines the contrast between a masculinist and a womanist articulation of politics of mestiza community making in the Americas. This strategy bears relevance to the meaning of women's agency within the relationships between production and (re) production while providing visibility to the significance of sexuality politics if one wants to qualitatively change the notion and the practice of democracy. In the first part of this dissertation I examine the Mexican Revolution's politics of mestizaje through the study of anthropologist Manuel Gamio's inscription of the new Mexico. I introduce the Mexican Revolution politics of mestizaje as historical references both of Sandoval and García Canclini's mestizaje and hybridity frameworks, which these authors see as the methodological instruments of/for (post) modern social movements. In the second part of the dissertation, I conceive the framework that bridges the mestizaje that the Mexican Revolution consolidated and that the U.Sled. Pan-American project supported. I examine mestizaje politics as a common feature of Latin American politics of community making. At the middle of the twentieth century, when indigenist Pan-Americanism was projected to the entire continent, Venezuela consolidated the modern institutionalisation of its state and the oil production character of the nation. Mestizaje is again the center of this process of community making and is deeply related to the land that produces the resources of the nation state. After providing this historical and conceptual information about Venezuela, the third and last part of the dissertation focuses on the Venezuelan Wayuu Indigenous Women's movement. The study of this concrete social movement introduces new questions and answers on contemporary ethnic and women's politics in the Americas. These questions and answers re-introduce the importance of evaluating the political and epistemological consequences of sexuality and racial politics within social movements which become concrete revolutionary political projects. By studying the Wayuu indigenous women social movement within the Bolivarian Revolution's domestic as well as sub-continental community re-making efforts, the dissertation's objective is to provide evidence of the importance of sexuality politics within contemporary neo-decolonizing hemispheric political efforts.

Author: Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr.

Title: Filipino Youth Cultural Politics and DJ Culture
Degree: Ph.D., 2006
Doctoral Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Jane Rhodes, Co-Chairs; Lisa Sun-Hee Park, Anthony Davis, Rick Bonus, Dylan Rodriguez

Abstract: In this study, I aim to make sense of an emergent form of youth expression that has come to be associated with Filipino youth and in many ways, a constitutive element of Filipino youth identities. I’m particularly interested in those complex forms of identification taking place among Filipino youth which revolve around questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and generation and what they reveal about the racialization of Filipinos in the U.S. and contours of the Filipino diaspora. This study employs multiple methods including an analysis of interviews conducted with Filipino DJs, observations of DJ events, as well as a wide range of secondary sources including historical and popular accounts of hip hop and magazine interviews with Filipino DJs. The objective is to develop insights into the ways Filipino youth go about contesting the terms by which they are inserted into the racial hierarchies and economic structures of the U.S. and imagining new ways of being Filipino that both accommodate and challenge the normative boundaries of Filipinoness.

Biography: Antonio Tiongson is the CSMP Scholar and Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts.

Author: Julietta Y. Hua

Title: The Object of "Rights": Third World Women and the Production of Global Human Rights Discourse
Degree: Ph.D., 2006
Doctoral Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Co-Chairs; David Pellow, Lisa Yoneyama, Laura Hyun-Yi Kang

Abstract: The US women's rights as human rights doctrine continues to represent campaigns for international women's rights through the stories and images of Asian, African, and Latin American women. As both the idea of global human rights, and the place of women within the context of international human rights discourse become more powerful in framing a U.S. national identity, it seems that only certain issues (located in Other places that are always assumed to be behind) come to define the US women's human rights campaign.
Even while human rights and feminist literatures recognize the fallacy of assuming a western gaze in evaluating Other people and places, the reality of the representation of women's human rights issues, asylum law, and US governmental aid for victims of violations continue to place Third World women in a double-bind, where she must argue her own backward-ness in order to garner aid. This dissertation asks, Why and how do certain issues become synonymous with women's human rights' while others do not? What is the role of liberal feminist discourses in articulating what and who constitutes human rights? How and why do the women of Other' places become the central victims' of human rights violation?
This dissertation examines three case studies the representation of Southeast Asian women victim to sex trafficking as hapless victim, the signification of the woman/girl victim to China's One Child Per Couple policy as trapped by her traditional cultural conditions, and the casting of Muslim women victim to Islamic cultural laws as needing to be saved in order to protect the idea of a global democracy. The analysis engages with the politics of identity, particularly in terms of how the logic of exclusion works to inform the US feminist mobilization around the issues identified as women's human rights violations. Each case study outlines the ideological processes at work in defining who constitutes the victim of women's human rights violations that is, the discursive effects that allow the US to imagine itself as having progressed beyond the problems of patriarchy and racism.

Biography: Julietta Y. Hua is an assistant professor in the Department of Women's Studies at San Francisco State University

Author: Ashley Lucas

Title: Performing the (Un)Imagined Nation: The Emergence of Ethnographic Theatre in the LateTwentieth Century
Degree: Ph.D., 2006
Doctoral Committee: Jorge Huerta, Ana Celia Zentella, Co-Ch
airs; Robert R. Alvarez, George Lipsitz, Nadine George-Graves, Janelle Reinelt

Abstract: Ethnographic theatre emerged in the U.S. in the early 1990s and argues for the inclusion of marginalized, oppressed, and excluded subjects in the national cultural imaginary and full rights of citizenship. This dissertation provides a functional definition of ethnographic theatre as a type of performance based in extensive ethnographic research, which uses stylized, non-naturalistic staging and which bears accountability to the studied community. Ethnographic theatre combines anthropological research data with the creative editing, and often the fictional writing, of the playwright(s). This results in a performed rendering of a particular community's life and captures aspects of people's speech, movement, and interactions which could not be fully depicted by the written word. Because ethnographic plays tend to focus on marginalized communities, these performances shed light on the daily lives, identities, and personal, social, political, and historical struggles of people who are often stereotyped and misrepresented. In this manner, ethnographic theatre makes a public, cultural intervention in the traditional discourse, or silence, surrounding the community depicted in a given play. As a means of investigating the significance of ethnographic theatre and the politics of representation, I analyze the work of Anna Deavere Smith, Culture Clash, Michael Keck, Jessica Blank, and Erik Jensen, as well as my own ethnographic play, in terms of how these plays depict and expand notions of community and the nation.

Biography: Ashley Lucas is also the author of an ethnographic play about the families of prisoners entitled "Doin' Time: Through the Visiting Glass," which she has performed as a one-woman show in Texas, California, and New Mexico as well as Dublin and Limerick, Ireland. Upcoming performances include the Sol Arts Gallery and Performance Space in Albuquerque, NM, on October 7, 2006 and the University of Northern Iowa on April 12 and 14, 2007. She is currently holding a two-year post-doctoral appointment in the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Author: Lilia Fernández

Title: Latina/o Migration and Community Formation in Postwar Chicago: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Gender, and Politics, 1945-1975
Degree: Ph.D., 2005
Doctoral Committee: Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Vicki L. Ruiz, Co-Chairs; George Lipsitz, Yen Le Espiritu, David G Gutiérrez

Abstract: This dissertation documents the history of Mexican and Puerto Rican (im)migration and community formation in Chicago after World War II. It examines connections between race, gender, class, and space and how such dynamics affected emerging Mexican and Puerto Rican (im)migrant communities and politics. Beginning with World War II, Mexican and Puerto Rican workers traveled to the Midwest through varying migrant streams, as a targeted class of temporary gendered and racialized labor. These parallel migrations created historically unique communities where both groups encountered one another in the mid-twentieth century. By the 1950s and 1960s, both groupsincluding earlier (im)migrants, their children, and continuing (im)migrantshad settled in cities like Chicago. As racialized, working class (im)migrants, they experienced repeated displacements and dislocations from the Near West Side, the Near North Side and the Lincoln Park neighborhood. At the macro level, Mexican and Puerto Rican workers' life chances were shaped by federal policies regarding immigration, labor, and citizenship. At the local level, they felt the impact of municipal government policies, which had specific racial dimensions. As these populations relocated from one neighborhood to the next, they made efforts to shape their own communities and their futures. During the period of the Civil Rights Movement, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans engaged in social struggles, both in coalition with one another but also as separate, distinct, national minorities. They created organizations and institutions such asCasa Aztlán, the Young Lords Organization, Mujeres Latinas en Acción, the Latin American Defense Organization, and El Centro de la Causa. These organizations drew upon differing strategies based on notions of nation, gender, and class, and at times produced inter-ethnic and inter-racial coalitions. This study emphasizes the overlapping and layered nature of Mexican and Puerto Rican histories in Chicago. It calls for a reconceptualization of Latina/o historiography that complicates the models of Chicana/o History of the southwest and Puerto Rican History in the east. The project demonstrates how the historically unique context of the Midwest demands a type of historical inquiry that is comparative and relational in its scope.

Biography: Lilia Fernández received her bachelor’s degree in Government from Harvard University (1994) and completed a master’s degree in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2000) before pursuing her Ph.D. In the 2005-2006 academic year, Fernández holds the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Latina/Latino Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign. In 2006-2007, she will be joining the History Department at Ohio State University as an assistant professor.

Author: May Chuan Fu

Title: Keeping Close to the Ground: Politics and Coalition in Asian American Community Organizing, 1969-1977
Degree: Ph.D., 2005
Doctoral Committee: George Lipsitz, Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Co-Chairs; Ross H. Frank, Jane Rhodes, Lisa M. Lowe, Yen Le Espiritu

Abstract: My dissertation explores the multiple, complex and gradual work that Asian American women and men did in their ethnic, pan-ethnic and multiracial communities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Drawing from in-depth interviews with movement activists, it analyzes the local conditions that gave rise to grassroots radicalism in three disparate sites -- Los Angeles, Detroit, and San Francisco -- and examines the political praxis that organizers developed to generate consciousness and change in Asian American communities.
Chapter One locates my dissertation within the small, growing field of Asian American social movements and evaluates the historiography and methodology through an interdisciplinary lens. Chapter Two examines how Sansei women in Los Angeles launched an anti-drug offensive that fostered a transformative praxis that linked self-help to community self-determination. Chapter Three analyzes the Asian Political Alliance in Detroit and documents how Asian American identities nurtured across generations, ethnicities, and countries might dissolve without sustained community engagement. Chapter Four argues that the ideologically varied and often conflicting work of Asian American revolutionary organizations in the International Hotel in San Francisco prepared the groundwork for the Hotel's massive anti-eviction movement. Chapter Five explores the possibilities and challenges of Asian American panethnic radicalism. Together, these chapters examine the particular dynamics of Asian American racial formation, place and radicalism, emphasizing how local organizers situated their struggles within a broader movement of aggrieved peoples in the United States, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. They suggest that the ethnic, linguistic, geographic, and cultural diversity characteristic of Asian American racial formation also mark their history of radical organizing. By tracing the histories and affiliations that gave rise to those formations, this dissertation reveals the continuities and contradictions of Asian American organizing in the 1960s and 1970s and their important lessons for our present.

Biography: May Fu is an Assistant Professor with Center for the Applied Study of American Ethnicity and the Department of History at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO. Her teaching and research interests include the comparative histories of racialized groups, social movements, gender and labor, and the politics of historiography. Her current research examines Asian American community organizing during the 1970s and explores the panethnic, interracial, and international affiliations that shaped Asian American radicalism.

Author: Ralina Landwehr Joseph

Title: New Millennium "Mulattas": Post-Ethnicity, Post-Feminism, and the Mixed-Race Excuse
Degree: Ph.D., 2005
Doctoral Committee: Jane Rhodes, Chair; Yen Le Espiritu, Ross H. Frank, Nicole R. King, Zeinabu Davis

Abstract: The idea of a post-Civil Rights era has entered the US public sphere in the last decade. In the service of a neo-conservative agenda, post-Civil Rights America argues for an end to race, a celebration of multiculturalism, and a utilization of colorblind doctrine in law, public policy, and popular culture. Simultaneously, racial difference is feared and structural racism is ignored. In many ways the multiracial subject, embodying "all races," is imagined to be the quintessential post-Civil Rights American. This dissertation examines how cultural representations of Black/white women, sexualized embodiments of the US racial dichotomy, rely upon two extremes: a post-racial ideology of colorblindness (being "beyond race" or raceless) and a hyper-racialized ideology of hybridity (being "in-between races" or super-raced). I examine the linkages between popular representations of Black-white women and larger US urges to ignore the "gray" role that race and gender can play in the new millennium. Current structural racism is allowed to flourish unfettered because "true" racism only happens in the Jim Crow South and between ignorant individuals. In my readings of cross-sections of cultural sites, I utilize theory in literary, cultural, women's and ethnic studies, and rely heavily upon history. In each of my readings of contemporary cultural sites, I draw upon eighteenth and nineteenth century portrayals of "the mulatta." My dissertation argues that polarization of Black/white female images into a colorblindness/hybridity paradigm ignores the reality of contemporary race relations, which occurs in middle, in-between spaces, and not neatly polarized ends of an imagined racial spectrum.

Biography: Dr. Joseph is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at University of Washington in Seattle.

Author: John D. Márquez

Title: "Black Gold and Brown Lives: Racial Violence, Memory, and Multiracial Activism In Baytown, Texas."
Degree: Ph.D., 2004
Doctoral Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Chair; Denise Ferreira da Silva, Robert R. Alvarez, David G. Gutiérrez, Rosaura Sanchez, George Sanchez

Abstract: Seemingly emboldened by their growing numbers in the past decade, a coalition of non-white residents of Baytown, Texas recently formed the United Concerned Citizens of Baytown (UCCB). The UCCB is the first grass roots anti-racist organization of its kind in Baytown and was established to combat a pervasive legacy of police brutality. Baytown thus makes a good site to study the effects of recent demographic change on majority-minority relations. It also makes a good site to study the effects of these changes on inter-minority, specifically black-brown, relations. Adhering to the resource competition theory, most recent scholarship on changing black-brown relations posits that a rapidly growing Latino/a population has intensified competition between blacks and Latinos/as over scarce material resources, resulting in new black-brown tensions. Although this literature reveals a crucial reality about contemporary race relations, the relative dearth of counter examples leaves the impression that these groups are so consumed by economic disparity that they fail to recognize the many similar plights that they share. The establishment of the UCCB refutes this notion by showing how Blacks and Latinos/as have formed an inter-minority alliance based on their shared experience with racial violencea type of racial injustice that I propose is irreducible to resource competition and seems capable of shaping majority-minority and inter-minority relations in distinct ways. This dissertation seeks to understand the historic and contemporary circumstances that enable the emergence of a black-brown coalition at this moment in time and to understand the impact such circumstances might have on contemporary racial politics in Baytown and perhaps beyond.

Biography: John D. Márquez is a 2004 graduate of the University of California, San Diego's Ph.D. program in Ethnic Studies where he was mentored by Yen Le Espiritu, Denise Ferreira da Silva, David Naguib Pellow, Rosaura Sánchez, and Jorge Mariscal. Dr. Márquez's research specializes in comparative twentieth century race and ethnic relations with a specific focus on racial violence and relations between African Americans and Latinas/os. His other areas of expertise/specialization include: social theory, critical race theory, globalization, and anti-racist movements. Dr. Márquez is currently working on book length manuscript titled, Black Gold and Brown Lives: Racial Violence, Memory, and Multiracial Activism in Baytown, Texas. It analyzes the effects of a long legacy of anti-black and anti-brown vigilante violence and police brutality on the memory, identity formation, political consciousness, and activism of African Americans and Mexicanas/os in Baytown, Texas. Dr. Márquez considers himself an activist scholar. He has been invited to speak at various academic and community based forums throughout the U.S., has been interviewed by publications such as The Crisis, and also been featured on local and nationally syndicated television and radio programs to speak about his research and advocacy. Dr. Márquez is an assistant professor in African American Studies at Northwestern University.

Author: Michael H. Truong

Title: On Their Own: Asian Americans, Public Assistance, and Constructions of Self-Reliance
Degree: Ph.D., 2004
Doctoral Committee: Yen Le Espiritu, Chair; Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Charles Briggs, Jane Rhodes, Richard P. Madsen, Claire Jean Kim

Abstract: This dissertation is a study of public assistance , race , and cultural citizenship. It examines the processes involved in the racialization of ethnic minorities in the United States, focusing on how public assistance recipients of color are stigmatized as inferior and problematic members of society. Put differently, this project looks at how being an ethnic minority and being on public assistance negatively impacts one's cultural citizenship, or membership within a society. The subject of this project is Asian Americans and their relationship to the American welfare state. Based primarily on the examination of popular new presses, I show how the cultural citizenship of Asian Americans has been defined largely by their ability to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, their demonstration of non-reliance and non-demands on the welfare state. This was clearly illustrated in a 1966 article in the U.S. News and World Report. The magazine story reported, At a time when it is being proposed that hundreds of billions be spent to uplift Negroes and other minorities, the nation's 300,000 Chinese Americans are moving ahead on their own with no help from anyone else. The article claimed that Chinese Americans depend on their own efforts not a welfare check in order to reach America's promised land.' In this study, I treat the concept of welfare dependency as a social phenomenon to be critically studied, rather than as a social problem to be eradicated. One of the main goals of this dissertation is to elucidate the often-elusive relationship between Asian Americans and the American welfare state. It is my hope that this study will help progressive poverty researchers, policy makers, welfare administrators, and social workers better understand and therefore be more equipped to respond to the powerful role racialized constructs play in the politics surrounding welfare recipients, policies, and provisions in the United States.

Biography: Michael H. Truong is a Founding Lecturer in the Writing Program for the newly built UC Merced. As the first major U.S. research university built in the 21st century, one of its uniquenesses is to foster interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary scholarship and learning. Thus, UC Merced will not have traditional departments, only three schools Engineering, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities. Given such structure, the Writing Program will play a central role in helping students develop critical writing, reading, and thinking skills to be successful across the disciplines. Truong's interdisciplinary training in the Ethnic Studies Department from UCSD has uniquely equipped and prepared him for such a role! One of the major themes of the new university is World Cultures focusing on the contributions of Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Hmong Americans in the Central Valley of California. He will be teaching courses and doing research that will contribute to that theme.

Author: Paula Marie Seniors

Title: Beyond lift every voice and sing: The culture of uplift, identity, and politics in Black musical theater (James Weldon Johnson, J. Rosamond Johnson, Bob Cole)
Degree: Ph.D., 2003
Doctoral Committee : George Lipsitz, Chair; Ross H. Frank, Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Jane Rhodes, Anthony C. Davis, George Lewis, Bennetta Jules-Rosette

Abstract: During the early twentieth century, the African American musical theater team of James Weldon Johnson, J. Rosamond Johnson and Bob Cole communicated a politics of uplift in offering audiences Black men as heroes and Black women as heroines in their Broadway theatrical productions of Shoo Fly Regiment (1906) and The Red Moon (1908). The settings, situations and plot lines in these productions linked the communal Black struggle for social advancement, education, and citizenship to images of heroic Black masculinity in the service of the United States, and Black female respectability to legitimate Black women in U.S. society. Through their music Cole and Johnson worked to help uplift other racialized communities. Booker T. Washington's agenda of educational uplift and gender equality appears as the thread that weaves through Cole and Johnson's social, political, and theatrical thought. The Johnson Brothers wrote "Lift Every Voice and Sing" in 1896 in honor of Booker T. Washington. Their two Broadway shows paid homage to Washington and reflected the message of "Lift Every Voice and Sing." Drawing on historical archival materials, textual study of sheet music, theater playbills, programs, and material from secondary sources, as well as utilizing structural semiotics, historical analysis, literary theory, social history research methods, and cultural studies, this project explores how roles and representations in Black musical theater both reflected and challenged the dominant social order. Many may dismiss Cole and Johnson as passive conformists or active participants in an agenda which included self-debasement and deference to Whites, but Cole and Johnson in reality worked as a part of a collective culture of uplift that combined conservative and progressive ideas in a complex and historically specific strategy for overcoming racism and its effects. The uplift ideology was well intentioned and humanistically motivated, but it was not enough to combat the white racism that produced the struggle for power and representation in the first place. Yet despite the fact that the uplift ideology remains flawed, Cole and Johnson's contributions in changing the representative images of African Americans on stage were incredibly important and the gains made should not be overlooked or ignored.

Biography: The Center for Africana Studies and Race and Social Policy Research at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University honored Dr. Paula Marie Seniors with a post- doctoral fellowship for 2007-2008; she will begin an appointment as assistant professor there in July, 2008. Seniors's forthcoming book, Beyond "Lift Every Voice and Sing:" The Culture of Uplift, Identity, and Politics in Black Musical Theater, will be released in July, 2009 by Ohio State University Press. The book explores the realities of African American life during the first half of the twentieth century as refracted through the musical theater works of Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon Johnson who tried to communicate to their audiences a politics of uplift and racial pride in offering theatergoers Black men as heroes and Black women as heroines in their all Black Broadway theatrical productions of Shoo Fly Regiment (1906) and The Red Moon (1908).

Before her entrée into academia Dr. Seniors performed professionally with Gallman's Newark Dance Theater, Eleo Pomare's Dance Company, Pepsi Bethel's American Authentic Jazz Dance Theatre, Don Evans Blues for a Gospel Queen as Young Mahalia Jackson at The Billie Holiday Theater, T he Roar of the Greasepaint the Smell of the Crowd at Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, N. J., Theaterworks U.S.A. Louis Braille as Beatrice, the European tour of Hair, Ain't Misbehavin,' Little Shop of Horrors , and Hello Mrs. President at the Theater for a New City with the Rhythm and Blues singer Lavern Baker. She also holds a master’s of art in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego, a master’s in vocal performance from New York University, and a Bachelors of Fine Arts in dance from The City College of New York.

Author: Lisa Marie Cacho

Title: Disciplinary fictions: The sociality of private problems in contemporary California (California)
Degree: Ph.D., 2002
Doctoral Committee : George Lipsitz, Chair; Yen-Le Espiritu, Jane Rhodes, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Lisa M. Lowe, Barbara Tomlinson

Abstract: "Disciplinary Fictions: The Sociality of Private Problems in Contemporary California" argues that privatization, as a material process and a cultural ideology, works on multiple levels to render social and economic problems as personal anxieties. During the 1990s and continuing into the present, California voters passed several initiatives that adversely targeted marginalized individuals, their families, and communities. Such actions constitute evidence of a general disposition to privatize resources, which California's history of suburbanization has already facilitated through local government, zoning ordinances, contract services, and property taxes. For those benefiting most from the concentration and accumulation of wealth and resources, privatization ideologically justifies and distorts the unequal social and spatial relations structured by history and sustained in the present. Yet as an ideology, privatization also relies upon racial, gendered, and sexual fictions that narrate social and economic problems as the personal failures and shortcomings of marginalized individuals, families, and communities. These marginalized and aggrieved groups are neither wholly complicit nor exclusively resistant, rather they develop ways of knowing and methods for acting that are adaptable and instrumental to both survival and struggle. In its entirety, the project reveals how disciplinary fictions about race, gender, and community always work complexly and in complicated ways. My comparative approach to California literature shows the ways in which social problems are rendered private in victim narratives, but exposed as structural and ideological in the stories silenced by these dominant narratives. My work helps to emphasize that our own racial and spatial positions necessarily affect and influence how we are all disciplined by fictions, but in various ways and to different degrees while the interdisciplinary methodology of this work helps to complicate the boundaries between what we assume is fictional and what we think is true. The stake of this work is simple: some people's lives have been defined as worth-less than others, and it is urgent that we begin to challenge, complicate, and interrogate the ways in which unequal valuations have become so ingrained in so many everyday ways of knowing.

Biography: Lisa Marie Cacho is an Assistant Professor of Latina/Latino Studies, Asian American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Department of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Lisa Cacho’s research interests include Asian and Latina/o gendered immigration, comparative race and ethnic studies, militarism, and racial segregation. Cacho is an interdisciplinary scholar, who is engaged in blurring the boundaries between the humanities and social sciences. Her most recent publication examines Proposition 187 through law, print media, and short fiction.

Author: Ruby C. Tapia

Title: Conceiving images: Racialized visions of the maternal (Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey)
Degree: Ph.D., 2002
Doctoral Committee : George Lipsitz, Chair; Charles Briggs, Jane Rhodes, Ellen E. Seiter, Lisa M. Lowe

Abstract: This dissertation examines the co-constitutive and intertextual relationship between apparently separate sites of visual production to examine the "pieces" of imaged objects that make the popular and institutional witnessing of maternal bodies, and the experience of motherhood always, already racialized. Taking different cultural sites as points of departure—including photojournalism, film, and the visual media components of a teen pregnancy prevention initiative—each of the chapters analyzes the role of the visual in eliciting public sentimentality and affect around U.S. national(ist) configurations of "proper maternity." The first chapter contextualizes the posthumous circulation of images of Diana Spencer within a cultural history of racialized sentimentality that has its roots in the late 19th century. By first illuminating the racialized ideological material through which "The Queen of Our Hearts" (Diana) is "resurrected" as an ideal mother in U.S. popular journalism, this discussion sets the stage to investigate this material as it is intertextually, dialogically produced with other visual forms. Chapter 2 focuses on the 1998 film Beloved and considers whether or not the film's attempts to convey alternative experiences and meanings of the maternal are successful, given the racialized discursive terrains within which the construction and reception of its visual narrative occurs. This chapter also considers how the media persona of Oprah Winfrey, and her publicly granted titles of "America's psychiatrist" and "The Conscience of Our Times" impact the sentimental racial codes through which the film's productions of history, memory, and motherhood are read. The third and final chapter incorporates the readings and formulations developed in the rest of the dissertation to illumine the relationship between popular visual and state institutional productions of maternity. This chapter focuses on a California Department of Health Services public health education initiative that, between 1996 and 2000, drew on "citizens'" concerns about changing racial demographics, immigration, and non-traditional family structures to racialize the visual rhetoric of the "teenage pregnancy" problem. The dissertation as a whole demonstrates the co-constitutive role of seemingly disparate visual configurations of maternity to institutional (re)productions of national culture and identity.

Biography: Ruby Tapia is an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Ohio State University. Her research and teaching focuses on women in/and visual culture, engaging in a sustained way the experiences, representations, and cultural production of women of color, as well as the theoretical formulations of critical race feminism and feminist media studies. Her current projects include a monograph entitled Breeding Ghosts: Race, Death, and the Maternal in U.S. Visual Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), and a co-edited anthology, Interrupted Life: The Experiences of Incarcerated Women in the U.S. (University of California Press, 2008).