This paper examines Djuna Barnes's Modernist masterpiece, Nightwood, by exploring the author's particular styles of writing. As an ironist, a master of spectacle, and a visual artist, Barnes's distinct stylistic roles allow the writer to construct a strange fictional world that transcends simple categorization and demands close reading. Through textual analysis, consideration of how Barnes's characterization, and engagement with key critical interpretations lead to the conclusion that Nightwood's primary aim is to present the reader with an image of his or her own individual estrangement.

This dissertation studies the earliest years of photography’s invention. Attention to the earliest conceptions of photography reveals a more complex and contested understanding of the nature and significance of photographic representation than has previously been attributed to the Victorians of the early nineteenth century, providing not only a more comprehensive picture of the history of the new technology, but also new insights into the interactions of Victorian photography and visual culture. The earliest representations and receptions of photography are gathered from inventors’ reports, the first photographic texts produced for a specialist and general audience, and periodical articles that reveal the popular reception of photography by a non-specialist audience. The evolving representations and reception of photography are traced throughout the 1840s, as the medium grew increasingly popular, with a particular focus on photographic portraiture. Arguing that the earliest figurations of a new medium directly inform or “premediate” how the medium is negotiated as it becomes established in the culture – that is, even though the technology and use of photography changed quite rapidly, the earliest perceptions of the medium powerfully influenced how it was used, perceived, and resisted – I examine the central anxieties raised by photography that persisted throughout the 1840s and early 1850s. Using Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as a case study, I then turn to literature of the realist genre to assess how photography is imagined and contested in novelistic form. This not only provides a model with which to examine the incorporation of photographic allusions and themes into the realist novel, but also contributes new insights into the ways in which the issues of photography and other aspects of visuality intersected with the literary realist enterprise.

In recent years, film, art, new media, and music video works created by black makers have demonstrated an increasingly “post-black” impulse. The term “post-black” was originally coined in response to innovative practices and works created by a generation of black artists who were shaped by hip-hop culture and Afro-modernist thinking. I use the term as a theoretical tool to discuss what lies beyond the racial character of a work, image, or body. Using a post-black theoretical methodology I examine a range of works by black filmmakers Kathleen Collins Prettyman and Lee Daniels, visual artists Wangechi Mutu and Jean-Michel Basquiat, new media artist Nettrice Gaskins, and music video works of hip-hop artists and performer Erykah Badu. I discuss how black artists and filmmakers have moved through Darby English’s notion of “black representational space” as a sphere where bodies and works are beholden to specific historical and aesthetic expectations and limitations. I posit that black representational space has been challenged by what I describe as “metaphysical space” where bodies produce a new set of possibilities as procreative, fluid, liberated, and otherworldly forces. These bodies are neither positive nor negative; instead they occupy the in-between spaces between life and death, time and space, digital and analog, interiority and exteriority, vulnerability and empowerment. Post-black visual culture displays the capacities of black bodies as creative forces that shape how we see and experience visual culture. My methodology employs textual analysis of visual objects that articulate a post-black impulse, paying close attention to how these works compel viewers to see other dimensions of experience. In three chapters I draw from theoretical work in race and visuality, affect theory, phenomenology, and interiority from the likes of Charles Johnson, Frantz Fanon, Elena del Río, Sara Ahmed, Saidiya Hartman, and Elizabeth Alexander. This study aims to create an interdisciplinary analysis that charts new directions for exploring and re-imaging black bodies as subjects and objects of endless knowledge and creative potential.

This dissertation studies the earliest years of photography’s invention. Attention to the earliest conceptions of photography reveals a more complex and contested understanding of the nature and significance of photographic representation than has previously been attributed to the Victorians of the early nineteenth century, providing not only a more comprehensive picture of the history of the new technology, but also new insights into the interactions of Victorian photography and visual culture. The earliest representations and receptions of photography are gathered from inventors’ reports, the first photographic texts produced for a specialist and general audience, and periodical articles that reveal the popular reception of photography by a non-specialist audience. The evolving representations and reception of photography are traced throughout the 1840s, as the medium grew increasingly popular, with a particular focus on photographic portraiture. Arguing that the earliest figurations of a new medium directly inform or “premediate” how the medium is negotiated as it becomes established in the culture – that is, even though the technology and use of photography changed quite rapidly, the earliest perceptions of the medium powerfully influenced how it was used, perceived, and resisted – I examine the central anxieties raised by photography that persisted throughout the 1840s and early 1850s. Using Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as a case study, I then turn to literature of the realist genre to assess how photography is imagined and contested in novelistic form. This not only provides a model with which to examine the incorporation of photographic allusions and themes into the realist novel, but also contributes new insights into the ways in which the issues of photography and other aspects of visuality intersected with the literary realist enterprise.

This dissertation is developed around questions of how cultural fascinations with seeing the city from above are intertwined with the birth and development of the city planning profession. To explore this question, I examine three contexts linked to already-familiar episodes from the history of city planning: Paris in the aftermath of Haussmann-ization, the visual approach of proto-planner Daniel H. Burnham, and the New York region in advance of the rise of master-planner Robert Moses. These settings serve as a basis for a reoriented approach to understanding how and why a new category of experts tasked with intervening in urban conditions emerged. Among other views, Paris is seen from the height of a tethered hot air balloon; San Francisco and Chicago from Twin Peaks and the roof of the Railway Exchange Building, respectively; and New York from the lens of a Fairchild aerial camera, as well as from the 86th story of the Empire State Building. The sublime experience facilitated by such vistas undergirds the discussion. It is employed to recast existing historical accounts of the birth of the city-planning profession at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries to more deeply reflect its interaction with the proliferation and subsequent breakdown of a visual culture of "the city" from above shared amongst experts and citizens alike.

As an interdisciplinary project that integrates African and African American Studies, critical race theory, and Art History, this dissertation attempts to enrich our understanding of the politics of difference in contemporary art by interrogating the formal practices of artists and the social significance of their work. The artwork discussed reflects a pattern of creative engagement with archival institutions and documents that is characteristic of contemporary artists who are concerned with questions of consumption and the body; representation and erasure; the social construction of race and space; and the relationship between history, memory, and identity. Taken together, these themes constitute a discursive landscape within contemporary art that is central to the principle question raised here—namely, how do social genres of difference and relations of power influence artistic practices of representation, curatorial display, and reception? In an attempt to both answer and reverse the direction of this question, this text presents insightful perspectives from different artists on the complex relationship between art and society. Using the politics of difference as a lens through which to examine the aforementioned themes in contemporary art, I argue that the artists under consideration are transforming the meaning of race in post-slavery societies throughout the black diaspora. Through various creative practices, these artists are shifting the terms, coordinates, and representations of difference seen in the archive in order to reimagine the language of identity in the twenty-first century. Fundamentally, their work challenges the way certain bodies are recognized—compelling us, as viewers, to reinterpret the past from alternative and critical perspectives. Moreover, by focusing on the disclosure of a black presence in western cultures through the comparative formal and historical analysis of contemporary works of art that call our attention to misrepresentation, commodification, invisibility, and displacement, this dissertation contributes to developing conversations about how contemporary artists challenge dominant narratives and representational aesthetics. Through their work, these artists expand our conception of the archive—disclosing the overlapping ways in which objects, images, words, signs, ideas, ads, bodies, and spaces register social and historical meaning through the demarcation of racialized difference. Ultimately, this project demonstrates how art can transform the way we see and represent ideas of difference, and therein, the way we see and represent ourselves. / African and African American Studies

Debates over Mormons in the nineteenth century United States were rarely solely about Mormonism. This dissertation examines the ways in which Utah-oriented discourses of outsider groups influenced political debates at the local, regional, and national levels between 1848 and 1893. As recent studies by Sarah Barringer Gordon and Terryl Givens have shown, the conflicts around which these discourses developed pertained to Mormons and polygamy specifically, but also to broader questions of religious freedom, racial diversity, and the extent to which a community might operate autonomously within the United States. The dissertation expands on decades-old analyses of visual and literary representations of Mormons, considering intertextual dynamics and drawing on a broad source base including non-traditional artifacts such as government reports, objects, maps, and personal writing. My analysis of the changing attitudes towards and representations of Mormon settlement is informed by the growing historiographies of anti-polygamy, anti-Mormonism, and the relationship between gender, family and empire. Examining anti-polygamy discourse through the lens of settler colonialism offers a fresh perspective on the motives, anxieties, and priorities of United States policymakers seeking control of the resources and people of the Great Basin. I will argue that this analytical viewpoint, which has been used primarily in indigenous and subaltern studies, can also be meaningfully applied to a religious sect that was part of the racial majority. Exploring objections to Mormon settlement over time reveals the extent to which Mormon self-fashioning was seen as potentially destabilizing to Anglo-American categories of race and gender—and the profound implications of those categories in political and economic terms. Overall, my analysis reinforces the significance of monogamy as a means of maintaining political control and enforcing racial order. The resolution of the “Mormon Question” in favor of the prevailing kinship model contributed to gendered imperial practices of the United States in the subsequent period of overseas expansion. As a site of confrontation between United States expansionism and distinct social and cultural configurations, the Great Basin was a principal laboratory for the development and testing of issues of United States colonial policy prior to the Spanish-American War.

This thesis focuses on the modern Japanese artist Takehisa Yumeji (1884-1934) and his diverse range of graphic production, from illustrations in socialist newspapers and magazines with images of anti-war and leftist sentiment to fashionable images of beautiful women, referred to as "Yumeji-style beauties" (Yumeji-shiki bijin) in newspaper illustrations, coterie magazines, postcards, frontispieces, posters, and advertisements. Such works circulated widely and within the context of a growing female readership and the emergence of a new media environment that transformed the print medium from its "floating world" profile of the previous century into a technically diverse medium of modern visual culture and avant-garde pictorialism. Yumeji's graphic works participated in the generation of new kinds of modern identity. An extensive consideration of Yumeji's life and works reveals his role in the cultivation of a new demography of viewers and readers. / History of Art and Architecture

The concept of realism in visual representation has been defined and deployed largely within the domain of the Western artistic canon. In the field of art history, the term is often used in ways that depend on implicit, culturally coded assumptions about its connection with the formal markers of optical-naturalism. The Persianate tradition of pictorial representation by contrast, has been traditionally characterized in modern scholarship as stylized and decorative, with little acknowledgment of an interest in realism in its own visual language. Furthermore, normative Euro-centric attitudes have perpetuated the assumption that an engagement with realism entered Persianate artistic practices with the advent of Europeanizing modes of depiction in Safavid and Mughal spheres of production around the late sixteenth-century. This dissertation explores the topic of realism from the perspective of Persianate visual culture. In so doing, it proposes to refine our understanding of the concept in terms that accommodate the varied artistic production of cultures that laid claims to cultivating representational realism in their own primary sources. The first chapter draws on multi-disciplinary discussions to challenge art historical treatments of pictorial realism as a style, in favor of a functional definition of the concept as an emergent quality rooted in formal strategies that activate particular patterns of mirror-response in their audiences. The second and third chapters reject the principle of evaluating the realism of Persianate representations according to their degree of proximity to European models. The second chapter discusses the structural conditions of change in visual habitus in cases of inter-cultural encounter between foreign modes of representation and the resulting works of aesthetic hybridity. The third chapter presents material evidence of early modern Safavid and Mughal albums as discourses of aesthetic heterogeneity. The fourth chapter explores the local Persianate roots of realism, including the changes these realism strategies underwent in the early modern period. The fifth and final chapter develops case studies of two seventeenth-century Mughal and Safavid drawings, which cultivate representational enlivenment in depicting harrowing moments of death. The discussion delves in greater detail into the particular patterns of realism developed in the seventeenth-century Persianate visual culture. / History of Art and Architecture

This dissertation explores continuities and transformations in the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood in Cuba between 1902 and 1958. A dynamic and evolving process, the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood encompassed the formal and informal practices that multiple individuals—from lawmakers and professionals to intellectuals and activists to workers and their families—established and challenged through public debates and personal interactions in order to negotiate evolving systems of power. The dissertation argues that Afro-Cuban women were integral to the formation of a modern Cuban identity. Studies of pre-revolutionary Cuba dichotomize race and gender in their analyses of citizenship and national identity formation. As such, they devote insufficient attention to the role of Afro-Cuban women in engendering social transformations. The dissertation’s chapters—on patriarchal discourses of racial progress, photographic representations, la mujer negra (the black woman), and feminist, communist, and labor movements—probe how patriarchy and assumptions of black racial inferiority simultaneously informed discourses of citizenship within a society that sought to project itself as a white masculine nation. Additionally, the dissertation examines how Afro-Cuban women’s writings and social activism shaped legal reforms, perceptions of cubanidad (Cuban identity), and Afro-Cuban community formation. The study utilizes a variety of sources: organizational records, letters from women to politicians, photographic representations, periodicals, literature, and labor and education statistics. Engaging the fields of Latin American history, African diaspora studies, gender studies, and visual culture studies, the dissertation maintains that an intersectional analysis of race, gender, and nation is integral to developing a nuanced understanding of the pre-revolutionary era. / text