Perhaps more than any other major American city in the 1970s, New York represented the decline of an urban existence. Job loss from factors related to deindustrialization and intense crime occupied local and national news, reflecting the increasing anxiety of America's future. New York City was positioned at the center of this frightening chaos. Films made during this period, known by film scholars and journalists as the "New Hollywood" captured the collective temperament of the people and the physical space they inhabit during its disintegration. The depiction of New York during the 1970s has been widely discussed in the writing on two key New York City directors, Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese. Scholars like Ellis Cashmore and Charles Silet have argued about Allen and Scorsese's depiction of New York respectively, however, they have not adequately offered a fully comprehensive study of their works collected together in order to uncover New York's decline. Specifically, this Thesis, examines the films made by Allen and Scorsese during the 1970s, specifically, Annie Hall, Manhattan, Mean Streets, and Taxi Driver. I explore the disparities and philosophies that both auteurs express in their depiction of the same urban space. Although the films are not documentaries, they do however; offer a faithful portrayal of a city in transition. By closely examining their works together, I offer a new perspective of New York's culturally diverse population transforming from a working class industrial landscape to one influenced by the principles of Neoliberalism.

This thesis examines the reputation the 1970s have as a renaissance era for New Zealand public art galleries.It does this by considering the formation and development of galleries in the period as well as their approaches. Public and community involvement, energy, innovation, activism, and engagement with contemporary New Zealand art are key areas of approach investigated since increases in each are associated with galleries in the seventies.The notion of a renaissance is also particularly associated with provincial galleries. In order to examine this idea in detail three "provincial" galleries are taken as case studies. They are the (then named) Dowse Art Gallery, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Manawatu Art Gallery.The seventies are revealed as a "culture change" era for public art galleries in New Zealand. New ones were founded, many were rebuilt or substantially altered, and there was a shift from the rule of the amateur to that of the professional. The majority of existing galleries went from being static institutions with few staff, neglected collections, and unchanging exhibitions, to become much more publicly oriented and professionally run operations. Moreover, while change occurred across nearly all institutions, it tended to be led from the provinces.Several reasons are suggested for the forward-looking nature of the three case study galleries. One is that they reflected the energy and flexibility that goes with new, small organisations. Another is that all three existed in cities with little appreciation of art and culture and so had to strenuously prove themselves to gain community acceptance and civic support.Other galleries, particularly the metropolitans, are shown to have followed the lead of the progressive focus institutions. Influencing factors on changes in all New Zealand galleries are therefore also sought. They include the growth in new, well educated, sophisticated, and internationally-aware audiences; greater production and public awareness of New Zealand art; interest in exploring a New Zealand identity; world-wide revolutionary social changes in the '60s and '70s; and increased government funding for building projects.The changes that took place in New Zealand art galleries in the 1970s are shown to sit within the wider contexts of increasing trends towards public orientation by museums internationally, both before and during the decade, and in New Zealand since the seventies. However, the very notion of public orientation is also suggested to be historically relative and, ultimately, politically driven.

This thesis examines Jane Fonda’s antiwar activism during the Vietnam War, focusing on the period from late 1969 through 1973. Her early activism was characterized by frequent protests against the war, speeches at antiwar rallies and college campuses, and involvement with the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In 1971 Fonda organized an antiwar troupe, FTA, which performed antiwar songs and sketches to active-duty servicemen in America and Southeast Asia. Fonda’s notorious trip to North Vietnam is examined in detail, as are her comments in 1973 regarding American POWs. Negative reaction to Fonda’s activism is examined, and the myth of “Hanoi Jane” is traced from its wartime origins through its postwar evolution. The John Kerry-Jane Fonda photograph incident of 2004 is reviewed, and treated as a symptom of decades-long anti-Hanoi Jane ideas, rather than an isolated incident. Fonda’s gender, the media’s treatment of her at various stages, and her own missteps all receive consideration in determining where Jane Fonda ends and the myth of Hanoi Jane begins.

This thesis aims to examine the experiences of the resistance committees organized by a revolutionary Movement, Devrimci Yol (Revolutionary Way), in Turkey in the late 1970s. More specifically it focuses on Devrimci Yol&rsquo / s formulations concerning the issue of revolutionary organization, how it and the resistance committee experiences &ndash / within their contexts- embodied the tension between being organized in accordance with initiating change within the social relations of everyday life and being organized in accordance with a strategy of state takeover. The study argues that Devrimci Yol&rsquo / s attempt towards the reconciliation of these two understandings gave the Movement its peculiarity within the left in Turkey. With all their constraints the resistance committees and accompanying experiences of people&rsquo / s and workplace committees pointed out a logic of revolutionary organization different from the predominant one in which any kind of revolutionary transformation was postponed until the forthcoming revolution. When examining Devrimci Yol and the resistance committees, the study refers to different approaches to the question of revolutionary organization in Marxist theory and practice.

Guatemalan Kairos chronicles the rise of the discourse of liberation in Guatemala’s Catholic Church in the decade following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). In these years, as this study reveals, faith and human history comprised a double helix, constituting two interdependent and mutually supporting sides of the same soteriological vision. Rooted in Vatican II’s call to read the “signs of the times,” this historically conscious theological framework not only propelled Guatemala’s burgeoning progressive Catholic Church to redirect its pastoral practices toward the poor and the marginalized, especially Guatemala’s indigenous majority through an indigenized Catholicism. That new approach also sought to reshape the nation’s history by redrawing its socioeconomic, epistemological, and cultural landscape, in part through the formation of socially engaged lay leaders (catechists). Scholarship on the liberationist church has largely focused on how, as Guatemala’s Cold War civil war (1960-1996) sunk to its nadir in the late 1970s, state repression targeted the church as “subversive.” This dissertation, by contrast, seeks to step back from this prevailing attention on later repression to reconstruct the social and cultural liberative imagination prior to this religious revolution and state counterrevolution. In so doing, it cautions against historical interpretations that have ineluctably connected liberationist praxis in the decade after Vatican II to the—often catechist-led—armed or covert revolutionary activity of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Moreover, intensified by the defeat of the Guatemalan Left, the post-Peace Accords (December 1996) entrenchment of neoliberalism has brought hard times for critical historical consciousness. Indeed, as this study’s concluding chapter outlines, how to read the signs of the current historically fragmented times and craft a narrative for liberation amid today’s deep structural injustice remains a formidable obstacle. Perhaps the most daunting hurdle in this endeavor is to raise awareness of the need itself, particularly given that Guatemala’s historical record remains confronted by the perils inherent in harnessing faith and history in order to shape contemporary circumstances. / text

This dissertation examines a recently discovered archive of films, recordings, photographs and documents relating to the New York jazz lofts of the 1970s. The work not only reconstructs historical details about the lofts, but also explores the significance of the archival project itself, an independent venture founded in 2005 by musician and former loft organizer Juma Sultan. By combining historical research in the Sultan archive and ethnographic engagement with former loft artists, the study examines the continued symbolic significance of the loft era for musicians, listeners and historians. The jazz lofts were independently owned, musician-run spaces in lower Manhattan that served as performance venues, rehearsal halls, living quarters, classrooms and in a variety of other functions. Their emergence is best considered as part of a widespread, politically informed impetus among musicians of the period to organize their own concerts and collective organizations. While the activities shared many similarities with other artist-organized groups emerging in Chicago, St. Louis and elsewhere, the lofts’ independence and lack of a central organizing body led to a more diffuse set of activities than manifested in other cities. The dissertation is structured around two primary goals. First, through archival study and ethnographic engagement, the text traces the musical and social significance of the loft period. Following a basic historical chapter, two thematic discourses are examined at length. The first deals with multivalent forms of freedom envisioned by artists, while the second explores ways that participants conceptualized community and social cohesion. The choice of these discourses is informed by descriptions offered in ethnographic interviews with former loft artists. Second, the research considers the role of the archive itself in the re/construction of historical discourses. A notable self-archiving impulse emerged among jazz artists during the years under study, resulting in thousands of amateur recordings in dozens of private collections. Using the Sultan Archive as the primary case study, the dissertation argues that this self-archiving impulse acts as an artist-initiated intervention into historiographic processes that mirrors the musician-organized ethos of the lofts themselves. / Music

Despite present day attitudes and practices in which combinations of photography and other mediums of art are readily accepted, this was rarely the case during the 1960s and 1970s. The pioneering 1970 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Photography into Sculpture, which is the focus of this dissertation, is a compelling exception. Organized by Peter Bunnell, the exhibition highlighted work by twenty-three artists that mixed photographic imagery with three-dimensional forms. The resulting objects often dislocated "straight" photography’s reliance on the image and optical description as its primary source of meaning, characteristics presumed to be fundamental and fixed by many at the time. Bunnell argued that the physicality of the works in Photography into Sculpture made the medium visible and available for critique. This dissertation establishes the archival record and an oral history for the exhibition. It also finds that Bunnell prepared this unorthodox exhibition with John Szarkowski’s endorsement, therefore contradicting enduring views that Szarkowski’s photography program at the Modern promoted a monolithic ideology that did not include experimental modes. Peter Bunnell and Robert Heinecken are the principal figures in Photography into Sculpture. Bunnell, as curator and historian, and Heinecken, as artist and professor of photography at University of California, Los Angeles, were both committed to the idea that the photograph was not only an image but also an object. In public statements they argued that the attention placed on straight photography by many critics and educators discouraged experimentation and excluded an emerging generation of photographers eager to challenge lingering modernist traditions that emphasized the integrity of the image and conventions of display. Both men and their contemporary Nathan Lyons worked from within photography’s established institutions and organizations–including the Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House, and The Society for Photographic Education–to advocate for alternatives. This dissertation demonstrates that the revolutionary ideas of Bunnell and Heinecken were part of a long rebellion against photographic modernism.

In 1976 two young photographers, Mark Klett and JoAnn Verburg, and a photo-historian named Ellen Manchester came together with an idea to rephotograph sites in the American West that had originally been documented by survey photographers such as William Henry Jackson and Timothy O'Sullivan. By the spring of 1977 and with the support of various organizations they began a project that spanned the next three years and would eventually become known as the Rephotographic Survey Project (RSP). In many ways, the RSP represents an important moment in the history of photography and the representation of the American West. Through analysis of their work, archival documents, contemporary sources, and interviews with the original members of the RSP and several others, this dissertation examines the activities of the project and its various members, which also included Gordon Bushaw and Rick Dingus. More than the RSP, this dissertation also focuses on the growing culture of photography that boomed in the 1970s. Photography was no longer seen as an outsider to the world of art but was benefiting from newfound opportunities and growth. Without such a culture, this work argues, it would not have been possible for the RSP to take place. By the end of their project, however, photography was undergoing another important transition as modernism was giving way to the more critical climate of postmodernism. When the RSP finally published their work In 1984, their project and the community of photography that fostered their ideas was undergoing profound changes. This study also closely examines the RSP's fieldwork in the American West and the various discourses that the project encountered in this meaningful space. Like photography, the West was undergoing significant changes that the RSP was able to observe and document. Through their process that matched images from the past with photographs of their present, the RSP was able to record diverse landscapes that had or had not changed over the subsequent century. Furthermore, it also provided insight into the ways in which the West had been represented and perceived over time and in a new history of the West.

This thesis explores the recognition of institutional racism in Ontario. It examines discourses of institutional racism between the late 1960s and early 1980s and argues that the recognition of institutional racism at the provincial and national levels was facilitated by overt acts of racism in one of Canada’s most populous and diverse cities – Toronto. The targets of overt racism were new immigrants from decolonizing nations who utilized the discourse of rights in the context of an increase in racist incidents to press for state recognition of institutional racism. This rise in racially motivated violence concerned most Canadians as it went against Canadians’ self-perception as a raceless, tolerant and peaceful society. The recognition of structural racism was a gradual and contested process as municipal, provincial and federal government actors often denied its existence and deemed overt acts of racism aberrant. When racist acts did occur, state officials and media reports blamed the increased racial tensions on the personal prejudice of extremists. Activist groups composed of visible minorities and human rights activists were key in the formation of a counter-narrative that challenged this persistent denial of structural racism. These groups played a fundamental role in redefining the nature of racism in Canadian society. A central theme of this dissertation is that disintegrating race relations allowed for a redefinition of the Canadian state. It was the increase in racist incidents in 1970s Toronto that fostered a broad discussion on racism in Canada. This discussion emphasized that Canada’s people of colour experienced second-class citizenship because of structural inequalities which were rooted in Canadian institutions. Racial violence in 1970s Toronto was crucial in the recognition of institutional racism as racist incidents brought visible minorities into the public sphere and gave them an opportunity to identify the existence of systemic and institutional racism in Canadian society. However, the recognition of institutional and systemic racism did not result in a deep transformation of the Canadian racial state as policy changes have not been successful in challenging structural inequality. / Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2012-08-28 21:13:35.14

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal