“Affective Economies of Activism: Reimagining Anti-LGBTQ Hate Crime” is a critique of racism and misogyny within the contemporary LGBTQ movement. I argue that the mainstream LGBTQ movement’s narrow focus on street crimes against white gay men has resulted in a hyperreality that distracts us not only from the effects of the actual racialized violence that takes place, but also denies meaningful discussion of structural violence. This dissertation traces the origins of this exclusive and harmful discourse since the late 1960s with each chapter describing different forms of active resistance and possibilities for finding solutions today. I analyze publications gathered from special collections across the country; oral histories I conducted with activists in the South; documentary films; and queer online culture. My scholarship combines theory with everyday lived experience in order to bring social justice to the center of our field of vision. I do not only discuss and theorize about social justice, but also practice what I preach by engaging in archive activism and contributing to a grassroots LGBTQ history.

Radiant Exposure analyzes how American painting, photography, cinema, and graphic design creatively visualized X-rays to represent the body under forms of invasive scrutiny. I will historicize a variety of works produced between 1895 and the present, which consist of actual X-ray photographs and artistic simulations of their visual effects. Visual culture scholars and art historians have identified the X-ray as an important development in modern experience, perception, and the visual arts, but they have situated the X-ray's aesthetic bearing in the first thirty years after Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of the X-ray. I argue that since their invention, X-rays have persisted in the realm of the corporeal spectacle, as a source of aesthetic captivation and a method of social control. My goals are to generate a new language for articulating the rich significance and specific influence of X-rays in American consciousness, through formal and historical analyses of visual culture that draw from X-rays' technological effects or appropriate them in different ways. More broadly, this project reveals how the subjectivity of American identity has projected onto the anonymous irradiated body in the visual arts, whether idealized or pathologized, made culturally visible or cloaked in invisibility. as Americans have become more transparent under modern surveillance, the X-rayed body in art and visual culture has become entangled with ideas about identity and power.

Automata ("self-moving" machines) and reborn dolls (hyperrealistic baby dolls) individually conjure up questions of dynamic and aesthetic realism--external components of the human form as realistically represented or reproduced. as simulacra of humans in movement and appearance, they serve as sites of the uncanny exemplifying the idea in which as varying forms of the cyborg imbue them with troubling yet fantastical qualities that raises questions about our own humanness. My first essay, “Automaton: Movement and Artificial/Mechanical Life” directly addresses the characteristics that define humanness, principally the Rene Descartes mind-body dichotomy, by tracing the evolution of mechanical life, predicated as much on movement as consciousness, via the construction of automata. “Dis/Playing with Dolls: Stigmatization and the Performance of Reborn Dolls” takes the discussion a step further and examines people’s reactions when objects that look human are treated like human. I compare observable behaviors of dolls owners via social mediums like videos posted on YouTube, message boards, blogs, and news sources with responses by observers of this type of doll play, and superimposing a theory of play over this interaction. Whether or not automata and reborn dolls are socially accepted as signifiers of humanness, they already exist within our social space and reality. It is the recognition and acknowledgement of their presences in our everyday life and their agency that puts them squarely in the discourse of life.

Where we live, how long we’ve lived there, and what events we associate with that location all help us define ourselves. Having a hometown celebrated for a particular historical narrative can bring a lot of benefits – an economic boost, national attention, fame, and even fortune. But it also poses problems when national attention and local interests come in conflict. In this dissertation, I explore the ways in which local historical commemorations were shaped by – and came to shape – the towns in which they developed. This has much to tell us about how the historical tourism industry can affect a local community, and also how our understanding of the past is shaped by who gets to tell the stories. In the quest to understand the interaction between communities and commemorations, I look at a series of case studies: Plymouth, MA; Williamsburg, VA; and Salem, MA. I chose these locations because of an important factor they share: all are towns in which a local story (dating broadly to the colonial era) has long held a place in the American imagination. Plymouth is famous for the landing of the Pilgrims in 1620. Williamsburg is noted as one of the birthplaces of the American Revolution. Salem is notorious for the witch trials that rocked the community in 1692-1693. All three sites also share a long history of historical commemoration, and their historical tourism has come to define them. In Chapter 1, Plymouth exemplifies a place with a long tradition of locally-led historical commemoration. This provided a framework for the tercentennial celebrations held there in the 1920s and for the institution of Plimoth Plantation after World War II. The strong local hold on their own story helped townspeople dictate the terms in which Pilgrim history was told. In Chapter 2, I examine a city with a less organized tradition of local commemoration: Williamsburg. While local history was treasured and celebrated, there was not an established framework of commemoration. This made it easier for “outsiders” and professional historians to take control of the narrative. In Chapter 3, Salem serves as a counter-narrative: a place with a notorious and widely-known history, but one which locals generally preferred not to celebrate or commemorate. I show how the community’s treatment of witch trial history affected the development of institutions commemorating the town’s past. My study is further complicated by Chapter 4, in which I consider the treatment of Native American history at these sites. After considering the negotiation between local voices and professional historians at Plymouth, Williamsburg, and Salem, I explore how this minority has struggled to have their own story told. Together, my case studies reveal that the development of living history was not inevitable. Many factors, including local attitudes and traditions, economics and demographics, trends in the historical profession, and even social movements, all played a part. as these commemorations evolve and institutionalize, they have consequences for the communities in which they exist and for the stories we tell ourselves about the past.

In the field of diplomatic history, scholars have debated how the United States has played an imperial role in the world. Although diplomatic historians have presented many different interpretations, they have never agreed on the defining aspects of U.S. imperialism. My dissertation intervenes in the debate by reviewing how the United States functioned as an imperial power at the start of the twenty-first century. In my dissertation, I make use of a wide array of publicly available sources, including the public remarks of U.S. officials, the public records of the U.S. government, and the diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks, to describe how the United States enforced a global system of imperial order. Specifically, I argue that officials in the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama began the twenty-first century by implementing an imperial grand strategy to keep the international system organized around a dominant center and a subordinate periphery in a global structure of imperialism. By showing that officials in both the Bush and Obama administrations kept each region of the world integrated into a global structure of imperialism, my dissertation intervenes in one of the key debates in diplomatic history to define how the United States functioned as an empire.

Commenting on two distinct bodies of visual culture, this thesis examines how the American South has been depicted in photography, advertisement, and popular media. Exploring images of the South ranging from Depression-era Virginia to present day lower Louisiana, these papers seek to better incorporate views of a region traditionally underrepresented in visual depictions of the American landscape. Underlying both projects is an interest in utilizing visual culture as a means to understand humanity’s relationship with the nonhuman world. Taking a closer look at promotional materials from the early years of Shenandoah National Park, as well as the (post)industrial/posthumanist landscapes of Cary Fukunaga’s television serial True Detective - and the Richard Misrach photographs that inspired them - this thesis works to better understand how Americans came to understand the nonhuman world around them.

Historians consider the years between World War I and World War II to be a period of decline for German America. This dissertation complicates that argument by applying a transnational framework to the history of German immigration to the United States, particularly the period between 1919 and 1939. The author argues that contrary to previous accounts of that period, German migrants continued to be invested in the homeland through a variety of public and private relationships that changed the ways in which they thought about themselves as Germans and Americans. By looking at migration through a transnational lens, the author also moves beyond older conventions that merely saw Germanness in language and culture. Instead, the author suggests a framework that investigates race, class, consumerism, gender and citizenship and finds evidence that German migrants not only utilized their heritage to define their Americanness but that German immigrant values, views and norms did indeed fundamentally shape American national identity.

This dissertation is about a hemispheric understanding of the Americas by foregrounding hybrid literatures written both by Caribbean and U.S. American authors as the space where a transnational slave past of diversity, relation, and cross-cultural influence can be revealed and discussed. I use the term hybrid because these imaginary writings engage with actual events and real-life people that have shaped the history of the Americas, the interpretation of which is re-negotiated here though both history and literature. and literatures because it is not only novels but also epic poetry and oral stories that writers resort to in order to restore narratives that have long been silenced, forgotten, or ignored in official narratives. In this literary analysis creolization, the cross-cultural merging of peoples and their histories, emerges as the characteristic event of American history, allowing for the parallel but different histories of the Americas to come to light. From an American Studies perspective, I thus argue that such is the nature of creolized histories, being parallel in their content and protagonists with the established narratives but perpetually different in their equally valid readings and interpretation.

My Master’s Thesis is comprised of two essays that review two contemporary American texts. Through genres of the gothic and historical fiction, these texts confront America’s violence of the past and present. The first essay, “Desiring and Dispossessing: Whiteness in Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God,” investigates the novel’s reliance on a gothic genre as an affective strategy to confront whiteness’ specter of self-destruction. The second essay, “Escaping Through The Underground Railroad,” reconsiders the movement of escape and theorizes the action as a miraculous but forever-incomplete movement toward alternative ways of being--a theorization that could be useful for the present day. Both essays approach fiction as a way to encounter and reconcile the histories and structures of violence of America.

Through close readings of fiction, film, and television, “The Sacred Ginmill Closes” provides a cultural history of the heavy-drinking hard-boiled detective in his twentieth-century cultural prime. Emergent in the Prohibition era, hard-boiled fiction comprised a cultural response to both the real and imagined effects of national prohibition. In portraying the Prohibition era’s corrupt and violent public sphere, early hard-boiled fiction by authors like Dashiell Hammett contrasted heavy drinking masculine authority figures, often private detectives, with transgressively greedy and excessively thirsty women whose participation in the public sphere and in masculine behaviors like heavy drinking represented both the cause and ongoing effects of the temperance movement’s culminating legislative success. Having helped to pass a Constitutional amendment, temperance women were perceived not only to have eliminated the saloon, the semi-public space for masculine homosocial conviviality. According to the alcoholic semiotics of hard-boiled detective fiction, women also corrupted the public sphere by infusing that previously masculine sphere with transgressive feminine greed, represented by the excessive alcoholic thirst of the genre’s femmes fatales. The gendered semiotics of heavy drinking in hard-boiled detective fiction outlived the genre’s origins in the Prohibition era. Raymond Chandler’s post-Repeal novels cemented the symbolic role of the alcoholic femme fatale, and she and the heavy-drinking detective survived through the post-World War II era despite (and in fact because of) changing ideas about heavy drinking that gained prominence along with the mutual help organization Alcoholics Anonymous. The racial erasures in the genre’s nostalgia for an imagined masculine saloon past were of little consequence for heavy-drinking hard-boiled masculinity’s continued cultural relevance through the mid-twentieth century. By the mid-1970s, however, second-wave feminism and new public health concerns about the harm heavy drinkers caused others fundamentally challenged the moral authority of the heavy-drinking hard-boiled masculine hero. While heavy-drinking detectives like Lawrence Block’s private eye Matthew Scudder grappled with the social harm of which they were capable when drinking, hard-boiled detectives also fought increasingly against masculine serial-killer antagonists rather than the femmes fatales that once had been the genre’s very embodiment of corruption and violence. The proliferation of hard-boiled women detectives since the late twentieth century, and especially heavy-drinking women detectives in recent texts like the HBO series True Detective, suggest that the gendered alcoholic semiotics of mid-twentieth century hard-boiled detective fiction no longer reflect widely shared ideas about white American masculinity and femininity.