Since 1986, the Catholic Our Lady of Victory (OLV) parish of Lackawanna, NY and the diocese of Buffalo have been working to secure canonization for Father Nelson H. Baker (1842-1936), founder of the North American branch of the Association of Our Lady of Victory and the OLV Basilica and Institutes, which, among other services, included a hospital, orphanage and school. Lackawanna is also the site of the Bethlehem Steel Plant closings of the early 1980s, which have come to symbolize the Buffalo region's difficult and troubled transition to a post-industrial economy. Thus, I frame my dissertation with the overall idea that the possibility of Baker's sainthood offers hope for economic recovery to the city of Lackawanna. Specifically, this work seeks to combine the study of material history with the study of lived religion by using performativity as a theoretical tool. Through a comprehensive presentation of the material history of Father Nelson H. Baker from the 1880s to 2006, I demonstrate that material history is a significant, integral and vital component of lived religion. Further, I make the case that devotional practices include creative acts that both provide evidence of Baker¹s sanctity for his cause and contribute to the performative nature of his material history. As such, this work attempts 1)to fill in a gap in the scholarship about contemporary Catholic sainthood in the U.S. by focusing on a specific cause for sainthood, 2) to further develop an understanding of the communal processes of representing sanctity,3) to offer a way of combining analyses of the built environment, material, print and visual culture with the study of lived religion, and 4) to expand the scope of scholarly approaches to Catholic devotional practices by demonstrating that in the Baker case, devotional practices involve a cooperative effort by both official and popular agents in the creation of material items to promote and further a cause. Visual materials are presented in the body of the text in JPEG format

As the United States began to expand imperially beyond the continent, conflicts grew over control of what terms such as “America” and “American” represented—and how to depict them. The so-called “Golden Age of American Imperialism” spawned excited, jingoistic texts that asserted an American identity predicated on exceptionalism and beneficence. Meanwhile, protests arose from, and in, the margins of American literature. Though scholars have rigorously examined the fingerprints left by empire in U.S. culture and literature, we now need to dust for its protestors: the elements and aesthetics of the forces resisting it require further examination. “War in the Margins: Illustrating Anti-Imperialism in American Culture” demonstrates the interplay of grapheme, graphics, and propaganda integral to the anti-imperialist movement in American literature and culture. It argues that hybrid media was essential to anti-imperialist propaganda in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Beginning with Mark Twain's adventure novels and ending with W. E. B. Du Bois's work with the Crisis, “War in the Margins” analyzes intermedia dynamics to highlight how currents of empire play out between aesthetics and imperial politics across and through the page. Each chapter considers intergroup dynamics central to the annexation debates, relying particularly on visual theory, neoformalism, and humor studies, but also attending to book history, especially in the development of imaging technologies. I open by discussing the fluctuating space of home created by narratives in Mark Twain and Daniel Carter Beard's Tom Sawyer Abroad. The second chapter addresses the impact of humor and empathy on intergroup dynamics in Ernest Howard Crosby and Daniel Carter Beard's Captain Jinks, Hero. I move beyond the domestic in my third and fourth chapters. The third examines the use of photography and hybrid media in the battle between Mark Twain and King Leopold II, a conflict exemplified in King Leopold's Soliloquy and its response, An Answer to Mark Twain. The final chapter returns to the United States through the proto-modernist periodical work of Pauline Hopkins and W. E. B. Du Bois. I emphasize the ways textual aesthetics articulate national and international dynamics central to conceptions of what it means to be an American, concentrating on the ways aesthetic concerns amplify currents and voices that would ordinarily be marginalized. I contend that a close attention to multimodal aesthetics significantly contributes to discourses surrounding narratives of national and transnational communities and provides a deepened understanding of the struggles surrounding constructions of American citizenry.

Mixed Race Antecedents: Black Hybridity in Cultural Production, 1960-1989 looks at how cultural producers of African descent in the U.S. from the 1960s through the 1980s conceptualized racial and cultural hybridity. I analyze writers and artists who were grappling with how to think about their multiple heritages while simultaneously considering the political implications of their racial hybridity. Before the Census Movement of the 1990s narrowed the discussion of racial hybridity to boxes on government forms, these playwrights, authors, and visual artists were thinking about hybridity in a different register. They explored connections between personal and political identities, the relationships between experiences and art, and the significance of having multiple racial/ethnic heritages when race in America was still very much operating under the auspices of the one-drop rule. Their creative explorations during this time distinguishes them as mixed race antecedents, those who were looking for the political and aesthetic uses of black hybridity during the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s and Gay Liberation, and their corollary art movements. I draw from critical race theory, performance studies, autobiography studies, and cultural studies to understand the complex relationship artists and writers had to the social movements that defined their historical moment while asserting their own conceptions of how racial hybridity functions for those of African descent in the U.S. In so doing, this project challenges the predominant narrative of critical mixed race studies by arguing that mixed race identity formations were emerging in American culture during and after the civil rights era, not just during the Census Movement. Particularly, I focus on the possibility of racial and cultural hybridity not replacing blackness, like what a post-racial world would ask us to do, but instead, prompting further exploration and expansion of blackness.

The act of wearing a mask, of concealing one’s identity, has been one of the most enticing but controversial cultural practices since the 1500s. Masking evoked an even bolder act of self-fashioning when enacted by the female sex, since the gesture came to be read as a materialization of the deceitful and duplicitous character of woman’s nature, proclaimed by the major state and religious institutions of the early modern era. The ubiquity of this cultural and religious trope, however, has overshadowed a parallel dimension of this phenomenon: women’s appropriation of masking as means to obtain cultural agency and public (in)visibility in the context of a number of sartorial, theatrical, and entertainment practices. How visual representations of female masking served both maskers and audiences to navigate the social, moral, and cultural implications of this reality constitutes the subject of the present study. This dissertation explores the gendering of the act of (un)masking and its dissemination in visual culture during the early modern period in England, looking at four different cultural and chronological settings: the Carnival, the Stuart court masque, the Restoration urban space, and the Georgian masquerade. Through the examination of women’s uses of masks and their artistic representations in these different contexts, the author argues that the iconography of the (un)masked woman not only pervaded contemporary imagery, but also acted as a primary vehicle to comment on, formulate, and negotiate models of femininity throughout the early modern period. As this was a quintessential form of self-fashioning, central to a number of pageants, entertainments, and rituals, the analysis of women’s masking and its depictions reveals the core of early modern attitudes to power, gender, and class, in both the public and private realms. In order to flesh out such ideological discourses, this study considers a wide range of visual depictions and cultural practices, including drawings, prints, paintings, ephemera, costumes, fashion accessories, cosmetic customs, and architectural settings. In methodological terms, this dissertation applies an interdisciplinary, feminist, and art-historical perspective to the study of early modern masking in England, engaging at the same time with a number of interpretative tools from the fields of the history of costume, dance, theatre, and literature.

This dissertation traces a half-century of interactions between motion pictures and other visual media, using scenery as a node of meaning-making that affected key aspects of cinema as a medium: narrative, mode of documenting the natural world, propaganda tool, conduit of ‘ experience’ for American modernity. Exploring often-ignored aspects of visual culture like set design, moving panoramas and art exhibitions, it argues for the cross-disciplinary importance of landscape in debates around nationhood, empire, environmental blight and the relation between style and ideology, as they played out in the United States from the 1890s to the 1930s. As an inquiry, it takes its cue from concrete historical artifacts, artworks and their reception, bringing what is usually relegated to the backdrop (scenery) into the foreground of cultural history. An iconological approach is put forth that places the motion picture in the context of broader contemporaneous developments in American art. Depictions of the natural landscape had been the principal artistic means of crafting an identity for the “republic of nature” that the United States aspired to be long before the advent of cinema. To a major extent, cinema became the legitimate heir to photography and painting because of its attempt to realize the uneasy but productive co-existence of nature and artifice. Drawing from the methodology of visual studies and adopting a comparative, historically-grounded perspective, this cultural history focuses on the natural and urban landscape as a motif and a certain way of looking at the world that cuts across media and anchors cinema to late nineteenth and twentieth century visual culture in the U.S. It is thus an intervention in the visual rhetoric of space that looks for the afterlives of the nineteenth century popular obsession with nature, beyond the familiar trope of the Western genre in cinema. The impact that the early landscape photography of Eadweard Muybridge had for his subsequent experiments in chronophotography is examined by comparing the two phases of his career in technical and conceptual terms. The collaboration between railroad companies and movie studios for the promotion of Western scenery is as important to a history of landscape in early and silent America cinema as a consideration of the studios’ own layout ad their occasional function as amusement parks. Moving into the 1920s, “city symphonies” like Manhatta (1921) and documentaries of the American Southwest are placed against the background of Paul Strand’s photography and Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings, works that addressed the same issues and locales. F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise is examined as a complex “landscape text” with a collaborative visual authorship and Warren Newcombe’s Hollywood career as a effects technician and exhibiting painter is presented as a case were landscape catalyzed a crosspollination of cinematic and painterly aesthetics. This cultural history culminates with a survey of landscape’s status as a national theme (from a political, economic and artistic point of view) during the years of the Franklin Roosevelt administration in the 1930s, drawing from a variety of government-produced documentaries on themes like the dustbowl and New Deal agricultural revitalization efforts (as seen in Pare Lorentz’s The River, 1938). A major retrospective exhibition of American art staged in Paris in 1938 reveals the crucial importance attributed to landscape as a national motif around which various art forms, styles and periods in the cultural production of the United States were assembled and made intelligible for an international public.

This dissertation is wrapped up in a comparison of book and museum, which raises questions about the visual technology of the printed page itself: a black and white space. Articles and histories on paper production of the nineteenth century stress the necessity of bleaching wood pulp or rags in order to produce “beautiful,” “polished,” “virginal,” “clean” white paper. Bleaching paper to create a normalized, aestheticized whiteness, upon which to craft the cultural capital of the book, largely anticipates the later use of whiteness in the modern art gallery, where whiteness becomes a “neutral” or “objective” or “normal” color upon which to hang visual art or print words. In certain contexts, especially during Reconstruction and later during the Harlem Renaissance, authors saw the black and white contrast of the printed page as a symbol of racial segregation—whiteness and blackness following strictly ordered patterns. This dissertation thus investigates the shifting symbolism of black text on a white visual field between 1880 and 1940. Several of the subjects of my dissertation have been largely overlooked by critics, (Celia Thaxter, Simon Pokagon, Melvin Tolson), although previous studies have examined the way books of modernist poetry become display spaces—the white space of each page like a wall or frame which affords the lyric poem similar attention to modernist visual art, and imitating styles of display made famous by Alfred Stieglitz in his galleries. Poets thus become curators as well as authors. My dissertation expands these studies to include works written before the modernist period (Thaxter and Pokagon), and after it (William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, and Tolson), as well as analyze alternate material technologies of book production that vastly impact the visual experience of reading. Moreover, I also consider the political reasons for these material changes to the book, including racial representation, so that my work simultaneously explores both the aesthetics and politics of printed text.

<p>The main purpose of this essay is to study ideas concerning the concept of ”art” within the discourse of the exhibition space that is part of a fanart community. In order to do so I have used a hermeneutical and to some extent structuralistic, discourse analysis. I have examined structure and rhetorics in two established and popular communities, Fanart-Central and deviantART.</p><p>My conclusions states that personal ideas regarding artistic value are undermined the joint policies, because of a collective rhetoric somewhat inherent in the community structure.</p><p>When a lot of works are being based on internal knowledge of symbolics and historical narratives, this may to some extent have consequences where unfamiliar observers might fail to notice elements of possible significance. Moreover, certain interests in keeping a united front of “quality art” may also affect a general idea immediate to what signifies fanart. By means of for example categorization, censure, and quality control, specific standards of “good art” are framed and conceded within the communities. Trying to sustain specific criteria as emblematic for the entire genre like this seems highly restraining, and also contradicts the essentially liberal principals of fan culture.</p>

The main purpose of this essay is to study ideas concerning the concept of ”art” within the discourse of the exhibition space that is part of a fanart community. In order to do so I have used a hermeneutical and to some extent structuralistic, discourse analysis. I have examined structure and rhetorics in two established and popular communities, Fanart-Central and deviantART. My conclusions states that personal ideas regarding artistic value are undermined the joint policies, because of a collective rhetoric somewhat inherent in the community structure. When a lot of works are being based on internal knowledge of symbolics and historical narratives, this may to some extent have consequences where unfamiliar observers might fail to notice elements of possible significance. Moreover, certain interests in keeping a united front of “quality art” may also affect a general idea immediate to what signifies fanart. By means of for example categorization, censure, and quality control, specific standards of “good art” are framed and conceded within the communities. Trying to sustain specific criteria as emblematic for the entire genre like this seems highly restraining, and also contradicts the essentially liberal principals of fan culture.

This thesis addresses why a comprehensive art education curriculum needs to merge with visual culture in order to better serve current elementary students today. The review of literature supports this theory and proves that the two approaches work together to make learning relevant and effective. The units of study provided make up a guideline that show teachers how to include visual culture into the current comprehensive art education structure. This allows students to bring their own ideas and experiences into the classroom, and results in making the visual arts more personal. Following this curriculum will help students own their education and ultimately gain higher level thinking and learning in the visual arts as well as other subject areas.

This research examines the ways in which the Vancouver Olympics emblem, an Inuit inuksuk, and other Aboriginal symbols have been ‘adopted’ by the organizers of the 2010 Winter Olympics, how visual and textual Aboriginal representations have been incorporated into the public education mandate of the Games, and how this relates to the Aboriginal Participation Goals of the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC). I use Freirian critical cultural pedagogy and Foucauldian theories along with a visual research method, semiotic analysis, as a way to examine the material presented on the official Vancouver 2010 Olympic website and related websites.