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Architectural knowledge of Japan, although often implicitly considered to be objective, is the product of personal, political, and subjective circumstances. Ralph Adams Cram's works and writings suggest that the dominant American attitudes depended on the Orientalist assumption of the essential difference between East and West, the textual treatment of Japan, and American political hegemony. The critical reaction of the work of Greene & Greene reveals that early twentieth-century American knowledge of Japanese architecture was extremely cursory and heavily stereotyped by Arts and Crafts filters. Frank Lloyd Wright's writings suggest that his attitudes were originally derived from the same context as Cram's, but from this Orientalist base he created a complex and frequently contradictory architectural and cultural understanding of Japan. The work of all of these architects implies that American architectural knowledge of Japan is tightly confined by Orientalist assumptions and narrow, Western architectural frameworks.

Screaming Azaleas is a set of songs about life in the South. The focus of this work is similar to a common thematic motif in classic southern literature--the idea of being trapped in an endless cycle of disasters. The first poem reflects images of life and light through the eyes of a mother's child. The second poem deals with the sharp reality of death and the disbelief of a mother who has lost her son. Finally, the last song is the mother's last moment with her son, a moment which takes place at the gravesite. The recurring azalea, a southern flower which blooms only once a year for a very short time, reflects the fragile, temporary existence of life.

abstract: This thesis is an ecocritical, art historical inquiry into colonization, globalization, climate change as well as perceptions of American nationalism and Manifest Destiny through the overarching concept of the Anthropocene. The focus is on the United States specifically and entails an analysis of American society and culture from a global standpoint. First, an overview of origins and impacts of the Anthropocene concept is given. The thesis then explores works of visual culture by ten different artists through diverse subconcepts. Colonial history, neocolonialism, and globalization are examined through the Roanoke watercolors (1585) by John White, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby (May-July 2014) by African American artist Kara Walker, and the Insertions into Ideological Circuits series (1970-ongoing) by Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles. In a further step, anthropogenic environmental destruction as part of visual and conceptual art is traced over a period of 130 years. The works Lower Manhattan from Communipaw, New Jersey (1880) by Thomas Moran, Erosion No. 2 - Mother Earth Laid Bare (1936) by Alexandre Hogue, and HighWaterLine (2007) by contemporary artist Eve Mosher provide a basis for this analysis. Finally, The Consummation of Empire and Destruction from The Course of Empire series (1836) by Thomas Cole, Emanuel Leutze’s Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (1862), John Gast’s American Progress (1872), and Amy Balkin’s Sell Us Your Liberty, or We’ll Subcontract Your Death (2008) are examined to reveal how American exceptionalism and nationalism have influenced domestic policy as well as foreign policy in the past and the present. Visual works have agency while, on the one hand, functioning as a means for propagandizing Anthropocene symptoms and consequences. On the other hand, they can serve as leverage for ecocritical readings and as catalysts for social change. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Art History 2017

abstract: Oral Tradition is a concept that is often discussed in American Indian Studies (AIS). However, much of the writing and scholarship in AIS is constructed using a Western academic framework. With this in mind, I embarked on an approximate nine hundred mile loop that circled much of the ancestral lands of the Northern Paiute and Western Shoshone of Nevada. I passed through sixteen towns, stopping at ten reservations (Walker River Paiute Tribe, Yerington Paiute Tribe, Stuart Indian School, Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, Lovelock Paiute Tribe, Fort McDermitt Paiute-Shoshone, Duck Valley, Yomba Shoshone, Fallon Paiute-Shoshone) and two colleges (University of Nevada, Reno and Great Basin College). At each location I engaged with community members, discussed prevalent themes in American Indian Studies, and in riding my bicycle, I was able to reconnect with the land. To guide my bicycle journey, I used a theoretical framework consisting of four components: history, story, Red Power, and the physical body. Using these concepts, the intent was to re-center the narrative of my experience around the Paiute-Shoshone community of Nevada as opposed to me as an individual actor. Ultimately, this thesis embodies theoretical scholarship in a pragmatic manner in an effort to provide an example of contemporary Indigenous Oral Tradition. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis American Indian Studies 2017

“Everybody is a Star: Uplift, Citizenship and the Cross-Racial Politics of 1970s U.S. Popular Culture,” examines the ways in which popular culture in the mid-1970s operated as a site of citizenship formation for marginalized subjects, particularly African Americans, in the decade after the Civil Rights advances of the 1960s. Historically, the cultural production of black people in the United States has occupied a curious position, cohering as both a foundation of and marginal to the larger narrative of American popular culture. As a result of that positioning, African American popular culture often strikes a balance between expressing both “national” and “racial” identities. My dissertation looks at the tensions inherent in such a balancing act, and contemplates what roles history, cultural appropriation and citizenship formation as a process of “cultural adaptation” play in the production, dissemination and maintenance of African American cultural production. I first analyze this work—popular music, Hollywood film and Broadway theater aimed at mainstream audiences—as cultural citizenship work, broadly defined as the production of and interaction with culture by marginalized individuals as a way to negotiate the terms of citizenship alongside the more formal, political arenas in which citizenship is enacted. In the first chapter, I use a case study of the 1976 musical Bubbling Brown Sugar to argue that the aesthetic labor of this cultural citizenship work was used by African American culture producers to align the divergent strands of the “national” and the “racial.” Through analysis of The Wiz and Saturday Night Fever my second and third chapters ask a similar question yet from different, perhaps opposing textual vantage points: how does cross-racial cultural sharing enhance yet critique the American project? How can we theorize what I call the “usability” of race across the “color line” to critique embodied practices of cultural belonging? / American Studies

Between 1805 and 1837, the image of America assumed very different meanings within French-Canadian political discourse. America, which had appeared as a globally negative model before 1815, came in the 1830's to serve as an inspiration for the establishment of a French-Canadian republic, resistance to colonial rule and eventually the necessity of rebellion against that rule. Essentially though, these changes were effected within the same pattern of political discourse, one emphasizing the continuing conflict between the forces of virtue and corruption. Indeed, it is this very pattern which can explain the prominent place of the American image. Once virtue was associated with North America and corruption with Europe, no other political image could acquire the meaning which was ultimately associated with that of the United States. The failure of the Rebellions and the survival of the French-Canadian identity under British rule should not obscure this important stage in the development of French-Canadian political discourse.

Abstract not available.

The American television show COPS has been the precursor for what is rapidly becoming an expanding form of popular television programming. This quasi-documentary-styled television show contains a combination of both news and entertainment formats. The main purpose of this thesis is to assess the degree to which this so-called "reality-based" television police program reflects "real-life" or typical representations of crime and police work in the United States. This study critically examines and draws attention to the many biases, stereotypes, inaccuracies, and distortions contained in "reality-based" television depictions of crime and policing. The study is based on a media content analysis of thirty-six episodes of COPS, airing over a period of six months during 1993. Official crime statistics serve as the primary benchmark for comparison to the television episodes. Likewise, the television results are compared with the findings of selected academic studies. The analysis probes several key areas including: the types of crime portrayed on television; the manner in which police work is depicted; the racial and gender make-up of police officers, suspects, and victims appearing on the program; solution or clearance rates for television crimes. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)