This dissertation is an interdisciplinary historical study of American settler-colonial state formation that focuses on the contentious political relationship between the U.S. and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) after World War II. The central objects of study are three Hawaiʻi-inspired American popular-cultural formations — surfing, tiki culture, and police procedural television — that have very rarely been examined through the analytic lens of indigeneity. In three case studies, I demonstrate how popular-cultural production and consumption has mediated historically specific modes of colonial apprehension. This dissertation develops a methodological approach that merges archival research of undigitized source material with textual and cultural analysis. This dissertation’s central claim is that U.S.-Hawaiian relations, since the end of World War II, have been shaped by a form of knowledge production that I call colonial apprehension: practices for generating and enforcing understandings about Indigenous peoples, places, and epistemologies that ultimately aim (and consistently fail) to neutralize the threat to settler-colonial authority posed by Indigenous sovereignty and knowledge. I draw on the multiple meanings of the word apprehension — comprehension, containment, anxiety — in order to show how settler-colonial knowledge and violence is (re)produced in Americans’ everyday lives and, importantly, how it is made vulnerable by an Indigenous politics of decolonization.

This master’s thesis portfolio is analyzing the music of contemporary hip-hop artists and the autobiographical work of 20th-century Indigenous writer and political activist Zitkala-Ša. A close reading methodology is used to analyze all the writing included in this body of work. The purpose is to examine the importance of community building within Black and Indigenous communities in the wake of political and social injustice. This portfolio uses the theoretical work of Audrey Lorde, Sianne Nagi, and Robert Warrior to provide support for the central thesis. All the subjects in this portfolio are writing from a first-person point of view and discussing topics of death, racism, and injustice. Concurrently, the autobiographical nature of both Zitkala-Sá’s work and hip-hop music promotes an environment where readers and listeners are empowered to discuss issues of emotional trauma due to racist institutional and cultural practices and gender issues. The implication of mental health awareness is drawn from the examination of lyrics from six hip-hop songs released in the last eleven years. Additionally, the vulnerability of Black hip-hop artists encourages the destigmatization of mental health issues within their communities. Lastly, the scientific findings of the effects of music on the human body, while still new and inconclusive, are used to highlight the apparent significance of music in everyday life. This portfolio offers further insight into the lasting and profound impact of community building.

This project explores the relation between American exceptionalism and global ecological crisis of our present. It argues that US exceptionalist narratives of progress begot and/or propelled several markers of the Anthropocene that find their traces in the United States: the nuclear age, climate change, and plastic pollution. I examine the American- Anthropocene histories of the bomb, the automobile, and plastic through the liberal progress narratives of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as an organizing framework. In particular, I analyze literary narratives after 1945 (including film, literature, and art) as sites for revealing the fiction of US progress and surfacing what I call “spectral literary ecologies”—haunting ecological relations across time and space that link our contemporary environmental crises with the oppressive historical, material conditions of the United States. This project thus retells the Anthropocene story three ways in order to emphasize the inter-relationality between social injustice and environmental injustice in US and US-adjacent contexts. Through these retellings, I argue that our inheritances of the nuclear age, climate change, and plastic pollution are bound up in ongoing US structures of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and reproductive labor. While US narratives of progress continue to legitimize social and environmental harm, I argue that literary narratives grant us space to imagine nonlinear relations of accountability with the past and future—to reckon with the ghosts of the American Anthropocene. Ultimately, this project offers an environmental humanities intervention by foregrounding “America” in the Anthropocene, and by underscoring narrative as both a critical mode and restorative framework for understanding how we got here and where we must go for a scholarly-informed justice in the Anthropocene.

This dissertation examines the professional lives of African American studio photographers, recovering the history of an important industry in African American community life during segregation and the long Civil Rights Movement. It builds on previous scholarship of black photography by analyzing photographers’ business and personal records in concert with their images in order to more critically consider the circumstances under which African Americans produced and consumed photographs every day. During the first half of the twentieth century, urban photography studios constituted essential spaces where African Americans considered ideas of commerce, art, labor, leisure, class, gender, and group identity; “Cameras at Work” situates studio photographers in the history of photography, twentieth-century black cultural politics, and the trajectory of African American business history. The rich records of the Scurlock Studio in Washington, DC center and focus my analysis, which I develop via close comparison of the Scurlocks with a number of other professionals including Morgan and Marvin Smith, Austin Hansen, Louise Martin, and Ernest Withers. These men and women acted locally while empowering African Americans to share their own images nationally, thus contributing to the creation of a wholly American visual culture. Throughout, I treat photographs as objects through which camera operators, consumers, and viewers articulated an understanding of themselves as well as the historical moment in which they negotiated the making of the photograph.

The fantasy genre, which can apply to narratives in literature and in other media, provides unique opportunities to engage with liberation, in particular creative freedom and the ability to engineer new futures. Black girls, as protagonists and creators of fantasy narratives, who have formerly been all but absent in the field with the exception of a few prominent examples, have suddenly begun to saturate the field. This explosion of activity prompted this investigation on why and how Black girls are flocking to fantasy, futuristic and digital narratives. In this dissertation, I use a series of case studies from a variety of media that were created by Black women and which center Black girls as protagonists to explore these questions and more. This project is a quintessential American Studies project in that it depends on a melange of methods and theories to adequately investigate these problems. It takes an autoethnographic approach, as I center my own experiences as a Black girl fan of these fantasy narratives and how it shaped my understanding of self, as well as tools from literary scholarship, such as close readings paired with historical context. In addition, it draws strength from Black feminist theory, Black girls’ literacy scholarship, Afrofuturism, and my own conceptualization of the intersections of fantasy and technology: technomagic girlhood. Chapter 1 explores the landscape of trade publishing’s young adult fantasy narratives for Black girls in the last five years. It charts a lineage of Black women in speculative fiction up to the recent explosion, with close readings of two books which make a case for self-definition and Black girls’ agency using legends, myths and retellings. Chapter 2 argues for a term which specifically characterizes Black girls’ creative self-expression and self-definition in a contemporary moment defined by digital media: technomagic girlhood. This chapter uses Eve Ewing’s Riri Williams: Ironheart comic books as a case study for how modern Black girls use both technology and fantasy to chart their own conceptions of their girlhoods. Chapter 3 argues for a poetics of technomagic girlhood that we see often in our media, built around three key themes: glitches (the digital), ghosts (memory and generational ties) and gulfs (water). The visual albums Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe and Lemonade by Beyoncé provide this chapter’s case study. Chapter 4 underscores how the digital provides fertile ground for experimentation, self-definition and relational group identity by locating Micah Ariel Watson’s Black Enough as a genre-defying piece of art which relies on multiple media forms. I argue that Micah Ariel Watson’s Black Enough webseries uses a combination of digital and analogue technologies and alchemies to produce a rich, multifaceted narrative about Black girls’ selfhood that is reflected on the screen and behind the scenes. The fifth chapter on pedagogy argues that technomagic enables educators to acknowledge the contemporary digital landscape in which Black girls find themselves and encourage the alchemic creation they produce.

These two essays explore the ways in which cultural identities are impacted by external forces within an environment, specifically grief and storytelling. In the first essay, the cultural identity of American Muslims is examined through the lens of the post-9/11 protests against the Córdoba House Muslim Community Center in New York City. The “grief-wrath” that was utilized against the Muslim Community by Islamophobic protesters is then explored in other instances within the United States, relating to the identity formation and expression that can happen in ways that refute discrimination and oppression. The second essay details the ways storytelling can express cultural identity through genre-specific decisions and the mode of blockbuster filmmaking, specifically in the Marvel film Black Panther. The marrying of Afrofuturist and Africanfuturist motifs within the film reveals diasporic nuances that reflect many experiences of those within the Black/African diaspora, in ways that have not been seen in large-scale productions in Hollywood.

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