This dissertation presents a comprehensive business and social history of cinema-going in urban Gold Coast/Ghana from 1914 to 1982, the local beginning and end points of mass participation in that form of leisure. Local business owners invested capital and energy to create an audience for a new leisure form, and they built the sector from a single screen in 1914 to more than seventy cinemas by the early 1960s. Entrepreneurs confronted state regulators, whether colonial or post-colonial, who viewed the cinema as a negative force to be managed - but never embraced. Officials feared that the emergence of a popular leisure form could challenge their efforts to impose particular models of behavior. Successive governments characterized the cinema as a potential source of criminal inspiration. Officials treated expatriate entrepreneurs of the post-war period with equal disdain, profiting from their business know-how but rejecting them when expedient. As the gatekeeper for foreign films, most of which came from the US, the state had a position of considerable legal power. Governments regulated imports, developed censorship policies, and policed screenings. They could not, however, restrain the popular imagination. Ghanaians embraced the cinema from its inception, seeing in it a cheap leisure outlet in urban areas that were reorienting social and familial lives, as well as a means for reflection on their modern selves. Where officials feared imagery of luxury, adventure and romance on the big screen, Ghanaians saw the opportunity for comparison and analysis in addition to rich entertainment. Ghanaian audiences created their own cinema-going culture. They thrived on constant rotation of new films and old favorites to the point of forcing compromise on an American industry eager to impose its own business model in the early 1960s. Ghana's status in the vanguard of African independence prompted internal and external observers to analyze local cinema-going culture to understand and to control the audience in the cheap seats. However, the urban audience fought against this impulse, seeing in the cinema space a place to configure new relationships and to give voice to a joyous engagement with a vibrant, ever-changing art form.

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The dissertation is a primarily statistical investigation of the demographic dimensions of the slave population of northern Virginia from 1750 until 1860, and the resulting opportunity for formation of slave families and development of slave culture. It attempts to determine the continuity of slave families in the nineteenth century, and to assess the effect of family breakup caused by bequest or sale to traders involved in the interstate slave trade. It determines that favorable conditions existed for development of slave families and culture, which persisted into the nineteenth century in spite of significant family disruption due to sale and bequest.

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The Mau Mau Uprising was a violent anticolonial struggle that took place in Kenya between 1952 and 1960. During the Uprising, firearms were extremely difficult for Mau Mau fighters to obtain. The few precision weapons they could acquire came from raided government armories or those found on the battlefield. In order to make up the difference, the Mau Mau leadership turned to resources that were more readily available and relied on the ingenuity of their supporters. The result was a series of homemade firearms manufactured by Mau Mau fighters and sympathizers. This thesis argues that homemade guns were a unique example of the successful adaptation of firearms technology. In addition, the Mau Mau made the guns integral to their military efforts. To this day, the guns hold a prominent place within Mau Mau historical memory.

Virginia Society’s Response to Revolution Era Manumission and Emancipation Legislation Through Petitions, 1782-1806 Using manumission petitions filed by or on behalf of enslaved Virginians seeking freedom, pro-manumission and emancipation petitions proffered by religious organizations, and anti-emancipation petitions submitted by local enslavers and politicians, this study examines how Virginians, both White and Black, free and enslaved, responded to Virginia’s 1782 manumission act. This law facilitated the liberation of thousands of people in bondage during the first twenty-four years of the early republic period. My analysis highlights a contentious period in Virginia’s early history – a period that began with tenuous hopes of emancipation for the state’s enslaved Black community and ended with the entrenchment of slavery within Virginia society in less than thirty years. Fancy Fantasy: An Examination of the Antebellum Fancy Trade The fancy girl trade, the trade in generally young and light-skinned, enslaved women and girls for sex and concubinage, represented one of the most profitable niche markets within the domestic trade of enslaved people in early republic America. With the use of a wide variety of primary sources such as newspaper advertisements, personal correspondence, and autobiographical narratives, this study ties together the geographically expansive nature of the fancy girl trade, explains the exploitative culture of the trade, details market practices and profitability, and most-importantly provides accounts of the enslaved women and girls abused within this system.

"Performative Circulations of St. Martín de Porres in the African Diaspora" examines the significance of the first American Catholic saint of African descent, the Peruvian friar Martín de Porres (1579-1639), through several case studies that track iconographic circulations and ritual-performative restagings of Martín across the African Diaspora between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. I approach Martín de Porres as both an historical figure and a figure of repetition and re-figuration in Black Diasporic cultures. Martín's material life and the diffusion of his cult of devotion following his death form a prism for interrogating the (re)formations of Diasporic Catholicism, when the impositions of chattel slavery and capitalism catalyzed a repertoire of practices including networking and ethical affiliation, resource circulation, project mobilization, and collective memory work within communities of enslaved Africans and their descendants. I place this research solidly within an African Diasporic framework that views African-descendant populations as differentiated but interrelated via "hidden" patterns of memory, affect, aesthetic, kinesthetic, and cultural connection. Though sometimes these patterns are hidden from view to those outside the community, they are always sensible to those "in the know." I flesh out Martín de Porres as a cultural site and emblem of spiritual power collectively worked out by Afro-Anglo and Afro-Latina/o communities owing to mutual recognition of their entangled histories. "Performative Circulations of St. Martín de Porres in the African Diaspora" highlights the creative ways Diasporic practitioners have appropriated Catholic resources in their quests to generate meaningfulness out of the fragments of the Middle Passage across the longue durée of life in the African Americas. This work contributes to the understanding of how African Diasporic communities make use of ritual performance to construct memory, animate everyday politics, and populate integrated social worlds that span spiritual and material planes, returning the potentiality of the divine to those most-marginalized on Earth.

This study was an investigation of how national newspapers contributed to the reproduction of racism as they reported on Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and the need for more Black Americans in STEM programs. The existence of racism in newspaper discourse reaffirms the long-standing perception that HBCUs, and the Black Americans they serve, do not deserve full educational participation in society. The lack of diversity in STEM fields represents a key area where a critical exploration of how HBCUs are described is needed. Specifically, four national newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, printed during the period of March 7, 1979, to December 12, 1980 were explored. Critical race theory provided the theoretical foundation of the study to explain why racism is a continued aspect of society that limits the STEM access of HBCUs. The research question for the study sought to understand the constructed images of HBCUs and Black students present in national newspaper discourse with respect to STEM topics. Using a critical discourse analysis approach, the study included 15 articles relevant to the topic. A key marker of relevant discourse was the passing of the 1980 National Science Foundation Authorization and Science and Technology Equal Opportunities Act, which provided HBCU students with additional access to science and technology curriculums and degrees. The study found discourse that represented a battle for HBCU continued existence, images of Black students as academically incapable, and implicit uses of racism to uphold notions of White supremacy. Implications to the field include a need for a more critical lens to be taken when framing events about HBCUs and Black students as these contribute to the collective perception of these groups as inferior.

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This dissertation examines how the regime of Mobutu Sese Seko used language, especially Lingala, to rule Congo-Zaire from 1965 to 1997, and how Congolese from across the Ciluba, Kikongo, Kiswahili, and Lingala language zones experienced and navigated the Mobutu regime’s use of Lingala. Mobutu seized power in a 1965 military coup, and his regime immediately began to impose Lingala, the language of Congo’s army under Belgian colonial rule as what Congolese termed the “language of power,” meaning the language used by Mobutu and members of his regime. Failing to gain support for a change in language policy, the Mobutu regime’s imposed Lingala by effect as a by-product of the language practices of officials and other state agents combined with the regime’s non-language policies. Officials spoke Lingala to demonstrate loyalty and proximity to Mobutu, followed Mobutu’s lead as they used Lingala for speeches, political rallies, slogans, and music nation-wide. Soldiers, militiamen, and national police all used Lingala as they extracted wealth and labor from Zairian civilians, while politicians used Lingala as they corruptly accumulated wealth and power at the expense of their subjects. Lingala came to be associated with the regime’s worst excesses even as the language’s expansion under Mobutu’s rule strengthened many Zairians’ sense of national identity. This research draws from three-hundred and twelve oral history interviews conducted in seven provinces, in Congo’s four national languages, as well as archival research conducted in Belgium, Congo, and the United States. I argue that the Mobutu regime’s use of Lingala enabled his long-lasting rule, by providing Mobutu and his officials with an effective means to communicate nationwide and creating continuity of rule amid the regime’s repeated reinventions. The imposition of Lingala produced divergent effects, strengthening Zairian (and later Congolese) national identity, by providing a shared speech community but it also fracturing Zairian society, as some Zairians, particularly Swahili speakers, experienced the regime’s use of Lingala as an oppressive imposition. Congolese Swahili speakers then spear-headed the AFDL rebellion which ended Mobutu’s regime in 1997. This dissertation contributes to African history first, by developing a new methodological approach drawing from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and second, by providing a new vantage point to understand the relationship between language and power in post-colonial Africa.