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

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

Understanding how race shapes the lives of individuals and transforms institutions is central to social science. Yet, for many scholars, race is widely understood as a fixed and monolithic category that is resistant to manipulation. As a result, making causal claims about "immutable characteristics" such as race or ethnicity has been strongly discouraged by statisticians and experts of causal inference. In contrast to previous literature, I propose a different framework that, in some cases, reconciles race and causation. Using a lab experiment and observational data about the urban uprisings of the 1960s, I test whether racialized and politicized cues from a subordinate group (in this case, blacks) can change psychological, behavioral and attitudinal measures among a dominant group (in this case, whites). Looking at more than 750 violent protests that flared up in black neighborhoods across the United States, I examine whether increased exposure to signals of black unrest is associated with decreased support for the Democratic party. In the 1964, 1968, and 1972 presidential elections, I find a strong negative relationship between exposure to civil unrest and the county-level Democratic vote share. I find a similar negative relationship between exposure to violent protests and Democratic vote share in congressional elections between 1968 and 1972. Finally, I find that in counterfactual scenarios of fewer violent protests the Democratic presidential nominee, Hubert Humphrey, would have beaten the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, in the 1968 election. In the lab experiment, I test how exposure to images of politicized and armed white and black men changes psychological, behavioral and attitudinal measures among subjects in the dominant (white) group. Methodologically, this study investigates the degree to which at least some aspects of race are better operationalized as variable, divisible, continuous and responsive to manipulation. Substantively, this experiment also attempts to assess the degree to which media representations of violence and politics might increase the salience of ethnic/racial identities, particularly in a dominant group. In the context of the 1960s urban uprisings, such a result might help explain why a significant subset of white voters switched away from the Democratic party, that had become identified with black interests, and towards candidates promising "law and order." / African and African American Studies

This dissertation examines African American women's gender-specific theorizing and intellectual production during the black power era. Previous histories of this period have focused primarily on the theoretical and activist roles of African American men. This study shows how black women radicals shaped the movement through an examination of their written and cultural production within various black power political ideologies, including cultural nationalism, revolutionary nationalism, and black power feminism. / African and African American Studies

My dissertation examines the work of George C. Wolfe, August Wilson, Lorna Simpson and Glenn Ligon, theater and visual artists working in the 1980s and 1990s who feature representations of the Middle Passage in their work. Despite their different mediums--Wolfe and Wilson created plays for the proscenium stage and Simpson and Ligon crafted art installations--all four critiqued the racialized social retrenchment of their historical moment by linking it to the slave trade, and each did so through an engagement with black performance traditions. / African and African American Studies

"Matters of State: American Literature in the Civil Rights Era" argues that American writers engaged with the American civil rights movement as it unfolded by turning their attention to the state and the state's relationship to its subjects and by imagining new forms for both. Postwar American literary culture, then, understood racial inequality not solely as a problem of identity and difference, nor simply as an economic problem, but as a problem of formal citizenship. Between around 1948 and around 1968, that problem as such spurred diverse and unruly literary inquiries into a range of matters of state, each taken up in dialogue with American constitutional law and each also a meditation on the particular capacities of literary art as a site for political thinking. William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor tried to reimagine the structure of federalism; James Baldwin and Harper Lee interrogated the real workings of democracy; Chester Himes and Sam Greenlee asked whether social movements ought to collaborate with the existing U.S. state in the first place; Norman Mailer, William Styron, Amiri Baraka, and others reoriented literary culture toward a new, post-civil-rights set of questions. Read as one archive, the novels and plays and essays that they produced tell a new story about American literature at midcentury: a story about literature's quasi-autonomous engagement with the political-theoretical questions that racial inequality had rendered urgent. They remind us of the complexity of history itself, and of the difficulty and uncertainty obscured by triumphalist narratives of democratic liberalism's inevitable civil-rights redemption. And they afford a glimpse into the kaleidoscopic legal worldmaking for which literary art in general can be an arena.

This research presents results of a multi-year, multi-site investigation into the political ambition of young eligible candidates, with a focus on ambition gaps in gender and race. Using an original survey and interviews with an untested population (law and policy school students at elite / Government

<p> There is an ample amount of research that documents the positive effect of self-esteem on a child established through an affirmative parental or mentoring relationship, verses a specific parent-mentoring approach designed with a curriculum to enhance the positive self-esteem of African-American daughters based on the relationship with their maternal parent. The purpose of this qualitative study was to answer the following research questions: what strategies and behaviors are used by parents in African-American families to affect the self-esteem of female children and adolescents and, how can strategies and behaviors exhibited by African-American parental mentors be organized in a teachable format for African-American families? By utilizing a portraiture research design to study specific parental mentoring techniques and behavior exhibited by five female parents in African-American families which are intended to affect the self-esteem of their biological African-American female children and adolescents. The project focused on a unique group of African-American parents who had been recognized by the court system as <i>parental mentors </i>. They had been trained to use specific strategies and behaviors to assist their daughters in developing confidence in their ability to think and to cope with the basic challenges in life: success, happiness, self-worth, self-esteem, and efficacy. Overall, the results of the study showed supporting evidence of the importance of parenting African-American females in a diverse format which would allow the elements of self-love, confidence, and historical pride to aid in the comprehension of effective coping procedures. The emerging strategies that were a commonality among the mothers throughout the entire process were consistency, behavior representation, love, historical teachings, communication, processes, and involvement. The mentoring component demonstrated by the mothers exposed them and their truths in a transparent form to all that were involved in a Rites of Passage process. This exposure allowed daughters to view them from a humanistic perspective without the authoritative title of mother, which also allowed them to relate more based on gender and cultural commonalities.</p>

<p> This dissertation examines the influence of donor-driven and recipient-driven interests on foreign aid allocation. </p><p> Chapter 1 examines how the donor's trade interests together with elections and the political competitiveness of electoral processes in recipient countries are associated with bilateral foreign aid flows. US gives more aid to its non-competitive larger trade partners, but cuts their aid ahead of elections. It substitutes aid with market access for non-competitive countries for which it is an important export market, but not during election years. Germany, Japan and UK give more aid to countries with competitive electoral systems, but for these countries Japan and UK substitute aid with trade. The substitution disappears for UK during election years. Japan and UK also reward countries for which they are important export markets with more aid, but only during non-election years for Japan. During election years, Germany cuts aid to non-competitive countries, but gives more aid to non-competitive countries for which it is an export destination. There is weak evidence that France substitutes aid with market access for politically competitive countries. </p><p> Chapter 2 focuses on recipient incentives. I extend the Grossman and Helpman (1996) model of elections and special interests by adding foreign aid. I show that with conditional aid when the preferred policy of the donor and that of the special interest group are not aligned, the latter has an incentive to alter election probabilities so that the opposition party wins and implements the lobby's preferred policy. Under these circumstances, the government has an incentive to substitute away from conditional foreign aid. Furthermore, if the government has a higher probability of winning under unconditional aid, the lobby succeeds in asking the government to deviate the most in its policy stance. </p><p> In Chapter 3 I examine how China's growing importance as an export destination is related to countries' UN voting alignment with the US, and whether this relationship is different if the countries export oil and mineral resources that China. I find regional differences in UN voting alignment response. Latin American countries and Sub-Saharan African countries not heavily reliant on exports of oil and minerals show decreased political alignment with increased export dependence on China. UN voting alignment for the resource exporters from Sub-Saharan Africa do not vary with export dependence on China. Instead, they have a lower level of UN alignment with the US.</p>

<p> This study examined the influence of personal networks on the career decision-making of African-American professional women through the lens of social cognitive career theory. A review of the career development literature shows growing interest in social networks, both online and face-to-face, and their relationship to individual career development. While research has been conducted on the career development of African-American women, the network research on African-American women is relatively scarce (Combs, 2003; Young, 2013). Combs (2003) noted that informal socialization activities impact career advancement and that few studies have examined the intersection of race and gender on informal networks. This study sought to address that gap. Furthermore, research on the influence of personal networks on the career decision-making of African-American women could both add to the network literature on African-American women and have implications for the career counseling of African-American women.</p><p> The primary research question addressed in this study was: What is the relationship, if any, between informal personal networks and the career decision-making of African-American professional women? A basic qualitative study was conducted with semi-structured interviews serving as the primary method of data collection. Ten African-American women with at least ten years of professional experience and a minimum of two career decision points were purposefully selected for this study.</p><p> Data was analyzed using coding and thematic analysis to understand and interpret the meaning that each participant construed from their experiences with career decision-making and their personal networks. Themes emerged in four primary areas: (1) the career decision-making process, (2) the composition of the participants' personal networks, (3) the influence participants' personal networks had on their career decisions, and (4) key learnings. Based on the findings, conclusions and recommendations for future research and practice are presented.</p>