The following essays are two explorations of the role of culture in colonial Hawai‘i and in the American metropole in racializing and dominating Native Hawaiians in terms of a larger history of race-based oppression and romanticization in the US. The first essay draws from Werner Sollors’ Ethnic Modernism, in which he argues that the aesthetic movement of modernism, which has been historically white-washed by scholars, had strong ties to the influx of immigrants and the growing popularity of jazz music and other forms of African American cultural expression in the early twentieth century. The second essay, written for “Politics of Representation” with Professors Danielle Moretti-Langholtz and Jennifer Khan, reflects on the utility of a Museum Studies framework for analyzing U.S. American representations of Pacific Islanders in public displays and in mass culture. I argue that existing analyses of American World’s Fairs and mass print culture typically overlook their pedagogical functions, and that the museum studies framework might offer a more nuanced view of the cultural work done by these technologies of representation to reinforce or even transform how Americans thought about racialized peoples.

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Although it has long been a controversial building, Boston's New City Hall sparked a revolution in both architecture and politics. Designed in 1962 by Gerhard Kallmann, Michael McKinnell, and Edward Knowles, the building boasts a distinctive design that responded to trends in European and American modernism, as well as the politics of 1960s Boston. During the past 50 years, the building has become widely reviled because of its architectural style and political symbolism. At the same time, it has influenced architecture and politics in its hometown, throughout the United States, and abroad. While recent scholarship has explored discrete aspects of the building's design, no comprehensive history of New City Hall has previously been attempted. Moreover, the building's relationship to politics remains under-examined. This dissertation fills these voids by providing an interdisciplinary study of Boston's New City Hall. Using governmental and architectural archives, interviews, and a host of buildings worldwide as primary sources, I argue that the building's checkered architectural history is connected to changing political, economic, and social conditions. Chapter One surveys Boston's political and architectural history during the first half of the twentieth century, explaining how mid-century urban renewal efforts sought to end the corrupt politics and architectural sclerosis that had long afflicted the city. Chapter Two explores Boston's unusual yet consequential method for selecting an architect for the project: an open, national architectural competition. This selection process led to an avant-garde design that reflected the progressive politics of the era. Chapter Three analyzes the design from the competition stage through construction. It not only relates the building to the architects' distinctive philosophy of "Action Architecture," but also situates it within the contexts of local politics and international architecture. Chapter Four delves into the long-standing controversy surrounding the building, assessing the influence of changing political and architectural circumstances and attitudes on the building's reputation during the past five decades. Finally, Chapter Five investigates the building's local and global legacy and significance in terms of political and architectural history. It concludes with a discussion of historic preservation issues presented by unpopular buildings in general and New City Hall in particular.

Between 1878 and 1918, Union and Confederate veterans independently constructed campgrounds and cottages in waterfront locations to support the “Civil War Vacation”—a multi-day, summertime excursion in which veterans and their families combined memorial and leisurely activities. This dissertation argues that some Civil War veterans designed seasonal spaces to solidify their own memory, promote healing, and convey their self-defined legacy to descendants. This interdisciplinary dissertation sheds new light on Civil War veterans and their place in postwar society by looking beyond writings to the physical spaces they created by drawing upon methods of vernacular architecture studies, material culture, environmental history, and cultural history. Buildings as well as their physical contents form core source material, supplemented by historical images and written documents. Chapter One examines the first fifteen postwar years when veterans negotiated their reunion parameters and some converted single-day, all-male affairs into multi-day excursions at leisure landscapes in which wives and children participated. Chapter Two analyzes communal cottages built by Maine’s regimental associations on Peaks Island and Long Island in Casco Bay to demonstrate how veterans employed architecture to make permanent the Civil War Vacation. Chapter Three explores the New Hampshire Veterans Association campus at Weirs Beach on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee to show how a collection of regimental cottages that connected military service to postwar prosperity helped create a public resort. Chapter Four illustrates how the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the largest Union veteran organization, helped commercialize the Civil War Vacation at Weirs Beach, Camp Benson on Lake Sebasticook in Newport, Maine, and the “GAR Camps” on Mousam Lake in Shapleigh, Maine. Chapter Five explores two landscapes created by the United Confederate Veterans in Rockville, Wadmalaw Island, South Carolina, and in Mexia, Texas, to showcase how Confederate veterans utilized recreational landscapes to support the Lost Cause narrative. Chapter Six investigates the 103rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry’s early twentieth-century camp along Lake Erie, near Lorain, Ohio, to demonstrate that descendants helped build a site to promote a Union legacy for their families.

From Ship to Sarcophagus: The USS Arizona as a Navy War Memorial and Active Burial Ground On December 7, 1941, the Japanese government launched an aerial attack on Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. The attack destroyed several ships, including the USS Arizona. Today, a memorial straddles the wreck of the Arizona, paying homage to the 1,177 men that perished aboard the ship. In this paper, I will discuss the history of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the creation of the present memorial, and the interment ceremony that takes place there at the request of a USS Arizona survivor upon his death. Furthermore, I explain why the USS Arizona Memorial is unique when compared with other war memorials in the United States and across the world. “A Date Which Will Live in Infamy”: Community Engagement at Pearl Harbor National Memorial and Museum World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument is operated by the National Park Service (NPS) and includes the USS Arizona Memorial as well as several exhibits discussing the attack on Pearl Harbor and the repercussions of the attack. Presently, the exhibits depict life before the attack, the attack itself, and the results of the attack. In this essay, I will explain how the NPS has both succeed and failed in telling an inclusive and representative history of Pearl Harbor. I will also discuss why following guidance from the field of archaeology regarding community engagement is the best path for future development of the World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument.

“All the Work without the Workers: Robotic Labor in the American Imaginary” critically reexamines American labor history through the ideologies and mechanisms of deskilling and dehumanizing labor. Using a combination of literary and historical analysis to trace the historical relationship between mechanization and human labor in concert with questions of race, gender and design, this project uses the figure of the robot to think through how the post humanism of the past is both raced and gendered. I argue that despite our imagined pre-technological past, America has always been a cyborg nation. The technological and mechanical labor we have come to expect from our machines and robots has always been enacted onto the bodies of American laborers through how they have been trained and taught to work. Connecting different domains of labor within situations of biopolitical precarity, the dissertation utilizes three case studies of the enslaved worker, the migrant worker, the domestic worker to examine human-machine interaction, cooperation, and co-existence. Through these cases studies, this project examines how the processes of mechanization are superimposed onto laboring bodies while at the same time maintaining a continual denial of their mechanized bodies. By looking at who has been marginalized and their labor erased and eclipsed, this project emphasizes colonialism's continued influence to reframe and decentralize bodies of color and the racial and gendered violence done to them. The recognition of our robotic or cyborg self and all its hybridity dismantles the power structures that place the Western subject (and the human itself) at the ontological center of the ecosystem.

The question “Are you Black first, or Deaf first?” is worth exploring for a variety of reasons; the most basic of which is that it is often asked of Black Deaf people. Black Deaf overwhelmingly report that the questioners in these situations are white Deaf. The question “Are you Black first or Deaf first?” asks Black Deaf individuals to justify their Deafness because of their Blackness--implying that both categories demand exclusive cultural loyalty and that they cannot overlap. This categorization is interesting because Black Deaf, and only Black Deaf, are grouped in this manner. This thesis sets out to contextualize the question “Are you Black first, or Deaf first?” and finds that this question is the result of the combination of binary thinking, boundary-policing, and discursive racism.

However infirm “the public” may be as a political body in America today, its presence as idea in American life is still potent. This thesis seeks to take a first step in developing an idea of what a contemporary American public looks like and how it functions, using concepts developed by Jürgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe, and Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. The Habermasian “public sphere” is a major reference point for popular thinking about the public, and The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is indeed an exemplary historical and critical account of the wide range of forces that cohered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to form the liberal bourgeois public sphere, whose remnants exist in the constitutional governments of today. Yet later thinkers have critiqued Habermas’ account of its transformation into a contemporary public sphere as containing a normativity that idealizes the bourgeois character of the original public sphere. This thesis uses the public presented by the 2022 American film Kimi, directed by Stephen Soderbergh, to highlight the ways the public sphere has difficulty accounting for the specific undemocratic forces—which deter the type of rational communication the public sphere needs to function—that are most prevalent today. The thesis then spotlights an especially prevalent explanation for the sphere’s normative idealism—that the public sphere’s bourgeois class function facilitates a unity of opinion at its center, which is then explained by the collective exercise of innate human rationality—and the alternative conception of a public that most explicitly factors this critique into its structure: the agonist public, or one in which disagreement among participants is built into political proceedings. Although agonism is perceptive in diagnosing the problems posed by the public sphere’s idealism, its argument that the sphere’s necessary unity is the cause of this idealism (which can therefore be excised it by facilitating disagreement through the concept of the “adversary”), is less convincing—much more potent are the claims that the structure of “the public” as an idea requires some sort of normativity to exist. A more fruitful comparison between the public sphere and the agonist sphere can be done by mediating their relationship through the lens of the fascicular. This notion, formulated by Deleuze & Guattari, describes the tendency to maintain a fundamental unity even as it splits and forms new connections in seemingly rhizomatic ways. The arboreal characteristics of liberalism are well described in Structural Transformation and are thus built into the object of the public sphere (and account for much of the previously described critiques); because the “root” of the agonist sphere is in these same characteristics, they cannot be overcome to achieve the sort of democratic goals agonism intends to foster even as it explicitly addresses them. The nature of fascicular tendencies can be more clearly seen in Kimi, where the fascicular weakness of screen-based communication allows Soderbergh to continue his career-long tendency to comment on the norms of Hollywood cinema and the medium of film itself. The conclusion of this thesis suggests a shared goal of the seemingly incongruous Habermas and Deleuze & Guattari, “to escape the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one,” and identifies areas where a further partnership between these two sets of thinkers about the public can proceed.