This thesis explores the economist Walter W. Heller’s career and maps the rise, ascendancy, and eclipse of Keynesian liberalism in the United States. Heller served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He successfully persuaded both to deploy Keynesian policies to underwrite the liberal expansion of the 1960s. Consequently, Heller was one of the most significant and influential political economists in US history. However, historians have curiously overlooked him. This thesis reasserts Heller’s importance to the making of modern America. It shows that Heller was a more significant figure in the rise of Keynesianism than existing scholarship has appreciated and demonstrates how he educated two presidents in the merits of Keynesian ideas. It illuminates the role Heller played in the formulation of the Great Society and explores how he adapted his Keynesian views during the more conservative times of the 1970s and 1980s. Through examining Heller’s career, this thesis assesses how Keynesianism interacted with liberalism in the United States. It illustrates how both merged in the 1930s, demonstrates how liberals utilised Keynesian thinking during World War II, and shows how Keynesian ideas intersected with liberal policies during the post-war period. In doing so, this thesis adds to recent scholarship that argues liberalism was a much stronger force in post-war American politics than assumed, especially since the scholarly ‘rediscovery’ of conservatism in the 1990s. A positive appraisal of Heller emerges from this thesis. It also provides an overview of the rise and decline of Keynesianism in the United States, breaking new ground in explaining the significance of a presidential adviser who has not hitherto been the subject of specialist study.

At the end of the twentieth century, indigenous inhabitants across Latin America rose up to form organisations, participate in mass mobilisations, and successfully enter into electoral politics as never before. However, amongst the Latin American countries with significant indigenous populations, one group of indigenous citizens remained conspicuously quiet. Peru's indigenous people did not produce a strong national indigenous movement or an electorally viable ethnic party, nor did they mobilise to challenge government policy in sustained fashion. This study offers a new approach to explaining Peru's 'exceptionalism' within the continent-wide rise of indigenous movements. It begins by questioning sweeping generalisations that characterise Peruvian indigenous politics as 'weak' and by identifying eight principal trends that represent the pattern of indigenous political participation at the national and subnational levels in Peru. The study then seeks to explain these eight trends through an innovative, cultural reinterpretation of political process theory. Moving beyond the limitations of pre-existing arguments, which have been largely based on a structural reading of political process theory, it examines the role that the subjective understandings held by indigenous peasant actors play in shaping the pattern of indigenous political participation. Based on fieldwork carried out in three regions situated in the Andes and the Amazon, the thesis illustrates how imaginaries of the state, understandings of political parties and non-governmental organisations, and conceptualisations of ethnic-identity categories help to explain the pattern of indigenous political participation observed in the Peruvian case. The thesis not only provides new insights into indigenous politics at the national and subnational levels in Peru, but it also demonstrates the utility of a more cultural, interpretivist elucidation of how social organisations, mobilising groups, and political parties are actively encouraged, shaped, and discouraged at the micro-level.

What does it mean to perform an American identity? From the time of his breakout play, FOB, in 1980, playwright David Henry Hwang has grappled with this question. Over the 35 years of his career, he has consistently been described as a Chinese American, or Asian American, playwright and his work does indeed reflect aspects of the Asian American drama movement of the 1980’s and 1990’s, as it does also aspects of US multiculturalism in general. He has staged stories of the Chinese American experience and explored questions of race, culture, and identity. The term Asian American is itself, however, contested and complex. Meanwhile, Hwang’s privileged and Christian upbringing has bred suspicion of his right to interpret and stage the experience of the broader Asian American community. In his plays, Hwang reinforces stereotypes, while simultaneously undermining them. The result is a view of identity defined by, but resistant to, definitions based on race, culture, and gender. Few playwrights from marginalized ethnic groups have enjoyed mainstream success in the US. Hwang has. In contrast to previous Asian American playwrights, who have struggled to find an audience beyond their identity-based theatre companies, Hwang’s plays seem to transcend specific personal, racial, or cultural experience, and as a consequence have been widely produced, published, studied, and anthologized. Most of Hwang’s plays are inspired by works in the American dramatic canon, suggesting his desire to situate the Asian American experience in the broader American narrative. In this study, I will analyze selected plays by David Henry Hwang. I will consider Hwang’s role as a voice for Asian Americans and the implications of that role. I will place his work in the context of the broader discourse on American identity and argue that is it insufficient to overly privilege his Asian identity in reading his work. Finally, I will explore some of the reasons his work transcends the confines of racial or cultural identity, and has found a place in the American dramatic canon.

The central aim of this thesis is to demonstrate that A.R. Ammons, Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe, and W.S. Merwin commit to a pragmatic poetic project of working language to facilitate cultural renewal. In illuminating this shared pragmatic work in poems from the turn of the 1990s, the thesis contradicts ecocritical assertions about the inimical relationship between ecopoetry and postmodern poetries such as Language. As ecocriticism established itself as a school of literary criticism in the 1990s, its proponents were damning of the influence postmodern literary theory was exerting on American poetry. Ecocritics argued that postmodernism had dangerously devalued the referential relationship between word and world at a time of escalating environmental crises. Taking Bernstein and Howe as representatives of Language poetry, and Ammons and Merwin as representatives of ecopoetry, the thesis will contest this ecocritical argument by illustrating that these four poets share a vision of poetry as a uniquely positioned medium for rejuvenating language and, subsequently, shifting cultural attitudes in a politically progressive manner. In order to make this argument, the thesis builds on a body of literary criticism which explores American poetry’s debt to American pragmatism. Critics connecting poetry to pragmatism have argued that pragmatists such as William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Ralph Waldo Emerson have helped American poets establish an epistemological middle ground between foundationalism and the sceptical side of postmodernism. The poets studied in this thesis extend this tradition of pragmatic poetry by using their writing to engage in an ongoing poetic rejuvenation of language and ideology. Furthermore, the thesis shows how these poets’ pragmatic approach to language and epistemology aligns them the ‘progressive’ side of the Culture Wars which were erupting in the early 1990s.

This research explores the creation and dissemination of the South-South cooperation (SSC) norm regime as an alternative to the Northern-led cooperation model of the OECD Development Assistance Committee. Using Finnemore and Sikkink’s theory of the norm life cycle, it tracks SSC from its origins at Bandung in 1955 to its “tipping point” in 2009, as demonstrated in the Nairobi Resolution that solidified the SSC principles of respect for sovereignty, partnership, solidarity and mutual benefit. The aim of this research is to determine how the SSC norm regime was perceived in the South over the period 2005–2016. The focus is on the Latin American and Caribbean context, with Brazil and Venezuela identified as the two major actors in the region that emerged as SSC norm leaders during this time. Both countries used the tools of persuasion and demonstration to portray the value of SSC and promote the core SSC principles; however, they differed greatly in approach. These similarities and differences are explored via the case studies of two small Eastern Caribbean nations, St Lucia and Grenada. Using extensive interview data and programme information, the research examines how government officials and stakeholders in these two states, and throughout the region, perceived Brazil and Venezuela’s programmes and the SSC norm regime in general over this time period, and attempts to determine whether the regime gained traction in the South and to what extent.

This thesis places the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission, formed in 1942, within the context of the Anglo-American wartime 'special relationship' and examines the political, economic and security motives which lay at the heart of this unique collaboration. Promoted as means for rectifying the problems of a region of extreme need, the AACC only exposed and exacerbated the underlying antagonisms between Britain and the US over the economic and political structure of the world. Debates within the AACC over the role of the West Indian sugar industry, the regulation of tariffs and trade and the future of civil aviation mirrored wider rivalries between Britain and the US over the post-war world economy, the colonial world and their respective roles within a new economic order. What emerges is a picture of the AACC as a vehicle for maintaining the regional security interests of the US and for promoting its broader ambitions for the post-war world in the British territories of the Caribbean. For Britain, who resisted the collaboration, the AACC was part of the price which had to be paid for obtaining American friendship and material assistance in the war effort. The story of the AACC is significant not only for the light it shed upon the Anglo-American wartime relationship and how it exposed the antagonisms which lay so close to its surface, but also for the way it revealed the determination of the US to use the exigencies of war to impose its economic ideals upon Britain and of the tenacity of the Empire to defend even the smallest and least regarded of its possessions. The AACC was a battleground of conflicting British and American visions of a 'new' West Indies, a struggle that scarred the AACC from its inception and eventually led to its death as a truly Anglo-American enterprise.

This thesis is about the movement of Scottish Gaels from the Highlands of Scotland to Prince Edward Island during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It demonstrates that for many Scottish Gaels emigration represented a well-informed and considered response to the imposition of unacceptable forms of social control in the Gàidhealtachd. Studies of this subject have usually ignored or discounted the Gaelic perspective and therefore have underestimated the impact of the long and bitter social, political and cultural conflict which was occurring between the Gàidhealtachd and the non-Gaelic centres of power in Britain. This thesis demonstrates that the Gaelic reaction to the economic restructuring of the Highlands during this period was not simply a negative, conservative agrarian protest against "progress"; it was, more importantly, an energetic response to a definition of progress which entailed the extermination of Gaelic culture. This thesis reveals that Gaels actively chose to emigrate rather than face economic and cultural marginalization and that for the first six decades of that movement to Prince Edward Island (c. 1770-c.1830) many landlords, supported by the state, made vigorous efforts to force them to remain in Britain. It also shows that these early emigrants were generally neither destitute nor helpless and that their initial choice of settlement sites was based on a considerable knowledge of the New World and an eagerness to leave Scotland. After initial settlement, emigration and settlement history reveals, to an extraordinary degree, a familial and community based form of chain migration. That history also reflects the continued fragmentation and decline of Gaelic society and illustrates the need for precision regarding time and place when examining migration and cultural transfer.

This dissertation examines the role of manhood in the programme to “civilise” the Indian at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Using gender and race theory as a frame for archival research, it argues that the model of manhood in operation at Carlisle was contested and changed throughout the school’s history. The hegemonic model at Carlisle’s beginning reflected the school’s focus on civilised manliness, which included the ideals of self-sufficiency, individualism, and Christian morality. This model was progressively displaced by an athletic version, which promoted masculinity in the form of physical power and victory. The dissertation will show how the contest between these two models of manhood came to a head in the 1914 Congressional Investigation of Carlisle. During this investigation, the extent to which sex and alcohol had become inseparable from the athletic model of manhood as well as their prevalence among Carlisle students was revealed. As a result, school officials worked to return Carlisle to the original ideal of civilised manliness, but by this time the school was out of step with the wider demands of government Indian policy; in 1918 it was closed This work extends previous academic examinations of gender at non-reservation boarding schools through its focus on masculinity. Specifically, it identifies, defines and explores how Carlisle’s models of manhood changed according to the demands of the school, government officials and the wider public. It also examines how the school used these different models of manhood to promote the success of the institution. After Carlisle’s commitment to rapid Indian assimilation was called into question by government policy, the school increasingly utilised the athletic model of manhood to demonstrate the school’s success. Manhood was a central component of the school’s programme to eliminate Indian savagery. As such, the analysis of manhood at Carlisle provides critical insight into government Indian policy and white definitions of gender, as well as illuminating the centrality of manhood to the concept of civilisation.

This thesis defines the poetics of a strand within contemporary American poetry, generally described as “mainstream” by literary critics that I define as “the poetics of immanence and experience”. I delineate the genealogy of this poetics from the late 1950s to the end of the 1990s, focusing on four poets who, I contend, best represent “the situation of poetry” in each of the decades during this period. Each of these poets will be shown to sustain and extend this vibrant, and according to literary scholarship, still dominant tradition in American poetry. Robert Lowell, James Wright, Richard Hugo and Jorie Graham are analyzed in the literary context of a particular decade as the most representative poet of this strand of poetry. Defining and tracing a stable poetic model within the vast poetic, aesthetic and cultural input and output in America during the second half of the twentieth century, contributes to a better understanding of American culture as susceptible to generating experiential types of poetry. Drawing from Altieri’s concept of immanence, I define the poem as immanent when it reveals a presence/immanence of a human consciousness as an individuated and particularized agent/protagonist who narrates his/her personal story in a primarily causal, narrative language generated by the structures of the depicted story. The result is the realistic illusion that the poem captures the experience as “it happened”, which is then only transferred to the poem-world from the Object-world. Altieri’s idea about the general turn in American poetry towards the Wordsworthian Order of Nature and my argument about experience as value-generating principles for the poets, are manifested in Lowell’s photographically “objective” surface descriptions and narrations, Wright’s transcendental moments inspired by numinous nature, Hugo’s projections of the human self upon the Object-towns and Graham’s experiential frames of reference filled with the meditations and speculations of her discursive voice.

The central aim of this study is to examine ‘non-normative’ masculinities constructed and represented in American drama, theatre and performance throughout the second half of the twentieth century, thus assessing the ‘queer’ challenges these masculinities present to hegemonic ‘heteronormativity.’ To identify the historical, social and cultural constraints that shaped the manifestations of ‘gay’ male identities on the American stage from the postwar to the 1990s, I will offer extended analysis and close reading of selected texts. I will examine Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Suddenly, Last Summer (1958), Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968), Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985), Tony Kushner’s two Angels in America (1992) plays, Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, Terrence McNally’s Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), and David Drake’s The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me (1994). My analysis of the selected texts will demonstrate that some of these particular plays represent ‘gay’ male individuals who challenge, and others, who identify themselves with ideological principals of a hegemonic ‘heteronormativity.’ Consequently, in this study I partially outline a history of ‘queer’ drama, theatre and performance in America throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and examine how ‘gay’ male identities were represented particularly by ‘gay’ male authors during this period. I will also analyse to what extent these representations were subversive, assimilative, or had a hidden agenda, and most importantly, I seek to deconstruct established conceptions of the works here analysed, considered to be the most assimilative, which through a ‘queer’-inflected close reading can be in fact read as the most subversive.