This dissertation examines the life and work of jazz drummer/composer Paul Motian, tracing his journey from sideman to bandleader as a musician laboring in the American twentieth century. I argue that Motian used his status as an Armenian American to float outside jazz’s black/white binary. Throughout his working life, Motian transformed his musical experiences into what I term “performance capital.” I call upon Pierre Bourdieu’s dual concepts of cultural and social capital to contend that Motian’s gathering of performance capital was simultaneously tethered to tropes of the jazz musician’s quest for originality and the process of “paying dues.” I explore the ways in which Motian used his accumulated performance capital to become an influential composer and bandleader during the mid-1970s and beyond. My study utilizes a wide array of materials in the Paul Motian Archive, including his unpublished memoir, Drum Music, as well as interviews conducted with musicians that worked closely with Motian. Situated within the interdisciplinary discourse of American studies, this project employs cultural and musical analysis to unpack the racial identity, economic agency, and artistic expression of a key figure within jazz culture.

Ghosts haunt historic sites in metaphorical and literal ways. Visitors, regional communities, museum staff, historic preservationists, interpreters, anthropologists, archeologists, folklorists, tourism bureaus, and schoolchildren tell the stories. Some scholars attribute these specters to the nation’s repressed histories as they disrupt linear narratives of American progress. Ghost stories tend to depict histories missing from archives constructed by universities, historical societies, and other research institutions. Public history’s ghost stories also highlight the field’s long practice of delineating race through the creation of a specific American history. This project illustrates how ghost stories operate in museum discourse and how they reach out through a myriad of interpretive efforts: in exhibit panels, on guided tours, via tourist publications and online articles, with first-person actor interpretation, through program development and architectural reconstruction. These “new histories” require museums and public history sites to acknowledge openly who and what haunts their institutional narratives and the larger public discourse. Public history’s ghosts gesture towards the layered histories at locations obsessed with mythic white nationalism. Using Virginia’s sites of public history, this dissertation explores how ghostly discourse preserves lesser-known histories only recently shared at museums. Despite their problematic elements, ghost stories document how the public understands historic sites and who is missing from museum interpretations. The sites examined are varied, from physical locations to literary fictions, and transdisicplinary. Ultimately, “Ghosts in the Museum” argues that an acknowledgement of ghosts benefits the project(s) of public history. It re-places narratives of enslavement, genocide, dispossession, and violence on commemorative landscapes initially designed to privilege whiteness.

“Insurgents on the Bayou: Hurricane Katrina, Counterterrorism, and Literary Dissent on America’s Gulf Coast” examines Hurricane Katrina as a crucial moment of social, political, and cultural negotiation between counterterror policy and public resistance to it. Using a combination of literary and historical analysis with emphasis on close reading, critical race studies, and cultural studies, this project puts forth a three-pronged argument. First, post-9/11 governance prioritized the protection of critical infrastructure (e.g., electrical grids, communication networks, etc.) and counterterror preparedness over social and environmental precarities such as poverty, eroding wetlands, and crumbling civic architecture. At the same time, counterterror governance reinvigorated anti-Black and anti-Arab racisms that led to the militarization of post-Katrina New Orleans. Second, I draw from the Department of Defense’s concept of asymmetric warfare to contend that post-Katrina authors engaged in “narrative insurgency,” or a type of discursive guerilla warfare or resistance, against the rhetoric and practices deployed by government officials, para/military actors, and the media in the wake of the storm. Against the might of the counterterror state, post-Katrina authors and filmmakers condemned counterterror rhetoric and practice, as well as humanized hurricane survivors to contravene narratives of Black and Arab criminality. Finally, I argue that post-Katrina texts function as early expressions of counterterror literature by positioning the storm’s aftermath within a framework of global racialized violence. Texts including Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke (2007), Jesmyn Ward’s Bois Sauvage trilogy, Dave Egger’s Zeitoun (2010), and Omar el Akkad’s American War (2017) not only connect the storm to domestic apparatuses of slavery and mass incarceration, but also to international systems of counterterror detention and overseas occupation. In doing so, post-Katrina authors and filmmakers forged transnational and trans-temporal networks of solidarity and resistance to contemporary racial and imperial violence.

This thesis addresses the practice of historic preservation, situating preservation and tourism as substantial arms of the Lost Cause movement in the late nineteenth-century. Through this case study of the Association of the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA), I illustrate how, in the aftermath of the Civil War, southern historic preservation efforts were primarily acts of self-preservation. The APVA exemplifies how identity can be created and maintained through the very performance of it – by securing of a stage on which to do so. Heralding a specific brand of tradition, the APVA reached for the more distant grandeur of colonial and early America. Their conjuring of a pre-existing white, elite identity enabled them to forge a broader identity that unified whiteness across class boundaries through their preservation and performance. An elite women’s organization based in Williamsburg, Virginia, the APVA deployed their femininity and whiteness dexterously in the service of broader white supremacy. In the context of the post-Civil War South, I show the intentionality with which the APVA selectively preserved sites from which white elites traditionally wielded power and the ways in which nostalgia and memory have been embraced as historical reality. What results from these methods are sanitized depictions of slavery and the glorification of white male figures. This thesis serves to problematize the authority with which heritage tourism sites are afforded by exposing the ideological and exclusionary praxes, which undergird the entire operation.

Paying attention to the ways digital tools mediate the pedagogic encounter is to attend to the inherently emotional process of teaching and learning. This thesis investigates the implications of bringing eLearning tools into the online classroom with reference to bell hooks’ and Paulo Freire’s work on radical pedagogy and Aimi Hamraie’s notion of the “normate template” to investigate three eLearning tools called “Proctorio,” “FlipGrid,” and “Panopto”.

Titled Settler States of Ability: Assimilation, Incarceration, and Native Women’s Crip Interventions, my dissertation examines narratives of Native women and youth incarcerated in federal institutions such as boarding schools and psychiatric facilities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Native women and youth have been subject to forms of assimilation that assert gender conformity and ablebodiedness/ablemindedness as qualifications for inclusion in U.S. national life. Nevertheless, they were and have remained key narrators of Native/Indigenous cultural histories and the long-term effects of historic and ongoing colonization and incarceration. Each chapter focuses on a particular historical moment in which narratives—memoir, literature, congressional testimony, and archival records—critique settler techniques of gender assimilation that have historically relied on ableism, a system of oppression that targets disabled people. For example, Native women and youth have long been at the forefront of health and environmental activism. Throughout 2016 Native women and youth led the opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). Considering the centrality of their activism, this project examines how the federal government has long recognized Native women and youths’ political power. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) targeted them as the primary subjects of assimilation projects intended to mold ablebodied/ableminded, healthy, productive, and gender conforming subjects beginning with sites of homemaking and domesticity. In other words, understanding the significance of Native/Indigenous health and environmental activism requires uncovering the ways in which the settler state has historically undermined Native/Indigenous political agency. My dissertation traces how this biopolitical management of Native/Indigenous life, or what I call processes of settler ableism, targets Native women and youth in different ways and in multiple time periods. To tell the story of Native women and youths’ rhetorical resistance to ableist gender assimilation methods, I analyze and do close readings of nineteenth-century American literature, Native/Indigenous memoir, congressional testimony, and archival records. I foreground this study of assimilation tactics with Native/Indigenous scholarship on settler colonialism, a framework for recognizing that Indigenous tribal nations predate the formation of the United States. Additionally, I draw on critical disability theory to examine state institutions as spaces and contexts for enforcing Native/Indigenous assimilation as an embodied process, and settler cultures and political forms, such as heteronormative nuclear family structures. I argue that Native narratives of colonization and incarceration critique federal modes of assimilation such as the boarding school system and contest historical arguments that Native women and youth required rigorous training in order to embody industrious forms of settler domesticity.

Scholars have studied American advertising in terms of collectible Americana, histories of printing technology, and consumer culture. These approaches leave a gap in our understanding of American advertising in terms of its role as a powerful carrier of ideological value and a critical participant in national discourses on race and American identity. My study examines nineteenth- and twentieth-century advertising imagery and visual culture—including postcards, prints, and other related ephemera—reading such images as conscious commentary on contemporary racial, social, and economic issues. I employ traditional art historical methods to examine advertising imagery and ephemera, bridging the fields of labor, food, health, and race studies to generate a complex discussion of the myriad stereotypes employed to oppress and limit African Americans’ participation in the American dream. I argue that stereotype comprised a potent method—technologically and ideologically—of identifying and qualifying humanity and “Americanness.” Bred by pseudoscience and propagated throughout the first half of the twentieth century, in particular, stereotypes targeting African Americans argued for their supposed inherent backwardness, inferiority, and suitability for the labors and livelihoods considered unsuitable for white Americans. Picturing black figures in American advertising and visual culture as out-of-control, insatiable, unclean, inexhaustible, and nostalgic bodies created a salve for white anxieties concerning the increasing opportunities afforded black Americans socially, politically, and economically. By closely reading advertising cards, postcards, prints, and other related ephemera as contributors to national discourses on race, I shed new light on their creation, use, and dissemination as powerful tools for selling ideologies about human value, identity, and participation in American life.

During Virginia’s Reconstruction, the freedpeople of the Northern Shenandoah Valley experienced an uneven oppression. They took full advantage of a stable Reconstruction regime and the advocates they found among local Republican reformers, northern missionary society representatives and Freedmen’s Bureau agents to make their freedom meaningful. The control the freedpeople gained over their labor, as well as the success they enjoyed in reclaiming their children from white households and establishing independent institutions assured their status as a free people rather than as emancipated dependents. Nor were the freedpeople plagued with persistent, organized white terrorist tactics. But they did not achieve equal treatment before the law. Moreover, despite the diversity of political sentiments among area whites, there was never a broad consensus among whites that the freedpeople should enjoy full citizenship equality. This study also explores how its regional distinctiveness and its borderland location influenced the course Reconstructing took in the Northern Valley. Based on the hundreds of complaints the freedpeople filed with the Valley’s Freedmen’s Bureau agents, the study also examines the ways in which their efforts to achieve racial progress on one front advanced their progress on other fronts.

This dissertation engages with a neglected group of writers, artists, and intellectuals in the United States who identified with Decadence, a European literary and artistic movement. Decadence was a label, embraced by some, that refers to a state of art and literature that suggests the end of an Empire: luxurious, imitative, corrupt, sensuous, and ultimately worthless. Self-professed Decadents elevated artificiality, morbidity, sensuality, and pessimism. They also lived lives, both imaginary and real, of separation from the world, attempting to fully embody otherness as they watched the world change around them and anticipated the fall of civilization. I question how these supposedly foreign ideas worked in America, in a transatlantic conversation that reveals yet another aspect of the transition to modernity in America. I suggest “morbid love” as key to understanding the cultural work of Decadence, using it to mean both a love of illness and disease that the Decadents evidenced, as well as a love that in itself was doomed to death. In this dissertation I argue the following. First, I build on work establishing the existence of American Decadence by emphasizing the cultural engagement of Decadence despite its self-professed insularity and rarity. Second, I argue that Decadence in America exemplifies a particular moment in the intellectual histories of degeneration theory and sexuality that has been largely ignored. While most studies of degeneration theory emphasize the power of the theorists and the low social status of theorized, Decadents brought degeneration to the upper classes, the learned, those with cultural capital. They acted as both theorists and theorized. In terms of sexuality, Decadence created a space that fit into neither the standard acts paradigm, nor the following identity paradigm, suggesting that sexuality was a matter of artistic and aesthetic choice and taste. Third, I argue that these deviations from standard narratives show that American Decadents performed a political queerness that functioned as a cultural critique and created a space that complicates our understanding of the period. Each chapter of this dissertation explores an aspect of the Decadent cultural criticism, emphasizing the deliberate queerness, or morbidity as they would phrase it, of their stance. It is now standard in studies of structures to examine the construction of the “normative” condition (whiteness, heterosexuality, masculinity, etc.) rather than the deviant. I argue, however, that this approach automatically associates those with power as normative and those without as deviant. I hope in this work to complicate that narrative.

The brutal slaying of Michael Brown on August 9, 2014 by Police officer Darren Wilson is part of an endemic system of institutional racism against Blacks in St. Louis, Missouri. This system takes place in racialized spaces that entail disparate health care, failing schools, commercial redlining, an unjust justice system and several additional oppressive forces. I am seeking to understand the ways in which Hip Hop respond to these systems of oppression. I am interested in Hip Hop’s response because Hip Hoppers are enduring racism. Further, Hip Hop’s representation in popular culture draws attention to misogyny, drugs, violence and the glorification of money. Hip Hop scholars have already provided a significant amount of attention to debunking popular misconceptions and revealing that Hip Hop is so much more. I would like to add to this contribution by focusing on three emcees from St. Louis: Marcus Gray (Flame), Travis Tyler (Thi’sl), and Kareem Jackson (Tef Poe). their unique background of being from St. Louis, couches them as local experts in which they are able to respond to the killing of Michael Brown, the continued oppressive conditions and localized disenfranchisement. Using a performance studies framework, which involves a focus on embodied behaviors and cultural transmission, this paper analyzes the repertoires of Flame’s, Thi’sl’s and Tef Poe’s performances and activism. I contextualize their responses through a thorough examination of their background and their notions of the evils plaguing Ferguson. I argue that the three models of activism revealed by Flame’s, Thi’sl’s and Tef Poe’s performances in response to the killing of Michael Brown present the ways in which Hip Hop artists respond to the killing of Michael Brown. This paper will explore Hip Hop’s role within the larger Black freedom struggle.