Based on the author's Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Kansas, 1998. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (p. 297-325) and index.

 This thesis sets to sketch Chinese intellectuals’ sustained efforts to search for an alternative modernity to the Western model throughout the twentieth century, and uncover the interaction between intellectual politics and Chinese modernity discourse by historicizing and contextualizing Chinese modernity discourse. This study starts with delineating the consistence and the inconsistence of Chinese modernity discourses by juxtaposing different historical conditions and examining reappeared trends of thoughts. Three intellectual currents, i.e., cultural conservatism, humanism, and professionalism, which emerged in the May Fourth period and remerged in the post-socialist condition, are examined to mirror the spiral dynamics and the locus of Chinese modernity. Their respective roles in reconstructing Chinese cultural, ethical and academic orders in response to Western model of modernity are highlighted in the research. Cultural conservatism attempts to legitimize the Chinese culture in the framework of global modernity by resetting or reinterpreting the dialectical relation between the whole and part, universalism, and essentialism. Humanism emphasizes the standard, the guidance of authority, and the self-perfection to resist the ethical disorder caused by the so-called “modern spirit”, which is embodied by individualism, romanticism, and the immoderate expansion of desire. Professionalism influences the pattern of producing and reproducing knowledge about modernity by re-standardizing the academic and the discursive fields and by remolding the identity of the agents. After exposing how the “alternative modernity” in China, as a discursive-political device, has been produced and repackaged with various contents and meanings, this thesis proceeds to explore the intellectual pedestal of Chinese modernity discourses from two aspects. First, how do the intellectual strategies of self-positioning and position-taking influence knowledge production and reproduction of the Chinese modernity discourse; second, how articulation and re-articulation of modernity discourse reflect the self-adjustments of intellectual politics as well as identity shifts. Through the comparative and diachronic examinations, it poses that, as Chinese modernity discourse is increasingly served as a symbolic capital or a strategy of intellectual politics, it gradually loses its authenticity or even becomes a signifier without signified. Meanwhile, the state-led modernization practice is reversely becoming homogenous, stable, and less diverse, although the dominant ideology, namely, socialism with Chinese characteristics, is, in itself, hybrid, paradoxical, and strategically manufactured. / published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

No description available.

This study examines the legal struggle over school desegregation in Alabama in the two decades following the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision of 1954. It seeks to better understand the activists who mounted a litigious assault on segregated education, the segregationists who opposed them, and the ways in which law shaped both of these efforts. Inspired by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) campaign to implement Brown, blacks sought access to their constitutional rights in the state’s federal courts, where they were ultimately able to force substantial compliance. Whites, however, converted massive resistance into an ostensibly colorblind movement to preserve “law and order,” while at the same time taking effective measures to preserve segregation and white privilege. As soon as the NAACP implementation campaign began, self-styled moderate segregationists began to abandon self-defeating forms of resistance and to fashion a creed of “law and order.” When black activists achieved a litigious breakthrough in 1963, the developing creed allowed segregationists to reject violence and outright defiance of the law, to accept token desegregation, and to begin to stake their own claims to constitutional rights – all without forcing them to repudiate segregation and white supremacy. When continuing litigation forced school systems to abandon ineffective “freedom of choice” desegregation plans for compulsory pupil assignment plans, these so-called moderates began using their individual rights language to justify flight to private segregationist academies, independent suburban school systems, and otherwise safely white school districts. Political and legal historians have underappreciated the deep and broad roots of the narrative of white racial innocence, the endurance of massive resistance, and the pivotal role which school desegregation litigation played in channeling both into a broader movement towards modern conservatism. The cases considered here – particularly the statewide Lee v. Macon County Board of Education case – demonstrate the effectiveness of litigation in bringing down official state and local barriers to equal opportunity for minorities and in enforcing constitutional law. But they also showcase the limits of litigation in effecting social justice in the face of powerfully constructed narratives of resistance seemingly built upon the nation’s founding principles.

In 2011, National Football League (NFL) quarterback Tim Tebow gripped America when the Denver Broncos reeled off a series of thrilling wins in an unlikely playoff run. Surrounding this stretch of Bronco wins was a media frenzy popularly known as “Tebow Mania”. The media explosion around Tebow can be attributed to his perplexing character and the political, cultural and social circumstances in 2011. This thesis is a critical media discourse analysis of Tebow’s sport star identity. I analyze the ways in which Tebow was described during the heights of his popularity during the 2011 NFL season. I argue that Tebow’s sport star identity naturalized ideologies of rightwing conservatism, (rightwing) conservative Christian fundamentalism and white masculinity into “common sense” notions of social life. To accomplish this, I follow cultural studies methodologies that trace Tebow’s rise to prominence within the context of The Tea Party Movement. I outline two dominant narratives that emerged during Tebow Mania to fabricate an American Dream, underdog story. While the first narrative of polarization criticizes and contemplates Tebow’s muscular Christianity, the counter-narrative repackages the polarization of Tebow by celebrating his white racial identity and conservative American values. / Thesis (Master, Kinesiology & Health Studies) -- Queen's University, 2013-12-27 13:26:52.995

The rising popularity of country music in the United States since WWII is a cultural phenomenon intimately related to the ascendance of conservative values, leaders, and movements over the same period. By routinely celebrating themes like heterosexual love, the patriarchal nuclear family, hard work, individualism, freedom, patriotism, religion, and small-town life, country music provided the soundtrack for the insurgent conservatism of politicians like George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. In the sixties and seventies, while other forms of popular music (rock, folk, soul) articulated the values of liberals, socialists, hippies, war protestors, feminists, and civil rights activists, country music alone stood for the "traditional" values cherished by the so-called "silent majority" that powered the rise of the Right. The spread of both country music and conservatism is also a reflection of the "southernization" of America---the diffusion across the nation of cultural and political traits long associated with the South.

The subject of this dissertation is the intellectual European New Right (ENR), also known as the nouvelle droite. A cultural "school of thought" with origins in the revolutionary Right and neo-fascist milieus, the nouvelle droite was born in France in 1968, the year of the spectacular student and worker protests. In order to rid the Right of its negative connotations, the nouvelle droite borrowed from the New Left ideals of the 1968ers. In a Gramscian mould, it situated itself exclusively on the cultural terrain of political contestation in order to challenge what it considered the ideological hegemony of dominant liberal and leftist elites. This metapolitical focus differentiated the nouvelle droite from both the parliamentary and radical, extra-parliamentary forces on the Right. / This dissertation traces the cultural, philosophical, political, and historical trajectories of the French nouvelle droite in particular and the ENR in general. The dissertation argues that the ENR worldview is an ambiguous synthesis of the ideals of the revolutionary Right and New Left, and that it is neither a new form of cultural fascism, nor a completely novel political paradigm. In general, the ENR symbiotically fed off the cultural and political twists of the Left and New Left, thus giving it a degree of novelty. In the 1990s, the ENR has taken on a more left wing and ecological aura rather than a right-wing orientation. As a result, some critics view this development as the formulation of a radically new, post-modern and post-fascist cultural and political paradigm. Yet, other critics contend that the ENR has created a repackaged form of cultural fascism. / The nouvelle droite has been able to challenge the main tenets of its "primary" enemy, namely, the neo-liberal Anglo-American New Right. Moreover, it has restored a measure of cultural respectability to a continental right-wing heritage battered by the burden of 20th century history. In an age of rising economic globalization and cultural homogenization, its anti-capitalist ideas embedded within the framework of cultural preservation might make some political inroads into the Europe of the future.

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The historiographic struggle over the representation of the Paris Commune, as begun by the daily press in 1871 and continued in the works of many subsequent scholars, is in fact part of a larger ideological battle. This thesis argues that in order to understand the significance of the Commune, it is necessary to return to contemporary writings. It studies the bourgeois reaction to the Paris Commune using as source material diaries, correspondence and monographs of upper class observers of the Commune. Through these writings, the Commune is seen as a socialist threat to bourgeois stability, and a sign of the disintegration of the ideals of the French Revolution.

Research on sex discrimination has found consistent support for the idea that women who violate gender roles by succeeding in male-dominated domains elicit hot forms of discrimination. In particular, evidence suggests that a perceivers' conservatism, which represents a preference against gender change toward greater equality, might motivate this kind of discrimination. Therefore, I hypothesized that perceiver conservatism would predict discrimination against female gender role violators. In two studies, I found evidence that conservatism predicts negative evaluations of targets (Study 1), as well as sabotage (Study 2). In addition, Study 2 revealed that the relationship between conservatism and sabotage was partially mediated by the perceivers' anxiety. However, if the discrimination that conservative perceivers direct at gender role violators is motivated by conservatives' preference against social change toward greater equality, then targets who support gender status hierarchies while they violate gender roles should experience less discrimination from conservative perceivers than those who challenge status hierarchies. Consistent with this reasoning, perceivers' conservatism was negatively related to perceived interpersonal hostility of female gender role violators who expressed support for gender hierarchy. In contrast, perceivers' conservatism was positively related to perceived interpersonal hostility of female gender role violators who expressed opposition to gender hierarchy (Study 1). However, targets' expressions of support for gender hierarchy did not have this effect on the relationship between perceivers' conservatism and perceptions of the target's ineffectuality (Study 1), respect for the target (Study 1), or sabotage of the target (Study 2). Moreover, while supporting status hierarchies reduced perceptions of interpersonal hostility from perceivers high in conservatism, it increased perceptions of hostility from those low in conservatism. Thus, supporting gender hierarchies may appear to help in some contexts, but is associated with significant costs, as well. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.