Text in Afrikaans / Constitutional, International and Indigenous Law / LLM

<p>Few symbols of 1950s-1960s America remain as central to our contemporary conception of Cold War culture as the iconic ranch-style suburban home. While the house took center stage in the Nixon/Khrushchev kitchen debates as a symbol of modern efficiency and capitalist values, its popularity depended largely upon its obvious appropriation of vernacular architecture from the 19th century, those California haciendas and Texas dogtrots that dotted the American west. Contractors like William Levitt modernized the historical common houses, hermetically sealing their porous construction, all while using the ranch-style roots of the dwelling to galvanize a myth of an indigenous American culture. At a moment of intense occupational bureaucracy, political uncertainty and atomized social life, the rancher gave a self-identifying white consumer base reason to believe they could master their own plot in the expansive frontier. Only one example of America’s mid-century love affair with commodified vernacular forms, the ranch-style home represents a broad effort on the part of corporate and governmental interest groups to transform the vernacular into a style that expresses a distinctly homogenous vision of American culture. “Other than a Citizen” begins with an anatomy of that transformation, and then turns to the work of four poets who sought to reclaim the vernacular from that process of standardization and use it to countermand the containment-era strategies of Cold War America.</p><p>In four chapters, I trace references to common speech and verbal expressivity in the poetry and poetic theory of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and Gwendolyn Brooks, against the historical backdrop of the Free-Speech Movement and the rise of mass-culture. When poets frame nonliterary speech within the literary page, they encounter the inability of writing to capture the vital ephemerality of verbal expression. Rather than treat this limitation as an impediment, the writers in my study use the poem to dramatize the fugitivity of speech, emphasizing it as a disruptive counterpoint to the technologies of capture. Where critics such as Houston Baker interpret the vernacular strictly in terms of resistance, I take a cue from the poets and argue that the vernacular, rooted etymologically at the intersection of domestic security and enslaved margin, represents a gestalt form, capable at once of establishing centralized power and sparking minor protest. My argument also expands upon Michael North’s exploration of the influence of minstrelsy and regionalism on the development of modernist literary technique in The Dialect of Modernism. As he focuses on writers from the early 20th century, I account for the next generation, whose America was not a culturally inferior collection of immigrants but an imperial power, replete with economic, political and artistic dominance. Instead of settling for an essentially American idiom, the poets in my study saw in the vernacular not phonetic misspellings, slang terminology and fragmented syntax, but the potential to provoke and thereby frame a more ethical mode of social life, straining against the regimentation of citizenship.</p><p>My attention to the vernacular argues for an alignment among writers who have been segregated by the assumption that race and aesthetics are mutually exclusive categories. In reading these writers alongside one another, “Other than a Citizen” shows how the avant-garde concepts of projective poetics and composition by field develop out of an interest in black expressivity. Conversely, I trace black radicalism and its emphasis on sociality back to the communalism practiced at the experimental arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina, where Olson and Duncan taught. In pressing for this connection, my work reveals the racial politics embedded within the speech-based aesthetics of the postwar era, while foregrounding the aesthetic dimension of militant protest.</p><p>Not unlike today, the popular rhetoric of the Cold War insists that to be a citizen involves defending one’s status as a rightful member of an exclusionary nation. To be other than a citizen, as the poets in my study make clear, begins with eschewing the false certainty that accompanies categorical nominalization. In promoting a model of mutually dependent participation, these poets lay the groundwork for an alternative model of civic belonging, where volition and reciprocity replace compliance and self-sufficiency. In reading their lines, we become all the more aware of the cracks that run the length of our load-bearing walls.</p> / Dissertation

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / This study focuses on the history of relations between the Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo during a relatively extensive period, starting with the demise of the Ottoman Empire to present. It examines the process of the division of Kosovo society along ethnic, cultural, and religious lines that eventually made the seizure of power possible by nationalistic conservatives. The study investigates both Serbian and Albanian nationalism and speculates on why nothing had been done by the elite to contain the conflict in the first place. It seeks to explore the origins of the modern conflict and identifies the decisive factors that influenced the development of contradicting positions of two peoples that eventually led to open hostilities in 1998-99. The thesis employs a descriptive approach and reviews contemporary scholarly literature dedicated to the subject. / Major, The Ministry of Ukraine of Emergencies and Affairs of Population Protection from Consequences of Chernobyl Catastrophe

Faced with the very substantial threat of terrorist attack, the United States must ask the question, What actions were taken by other states in the past to successfully combat terrorism? Knowledge of those steps may lead to a greater understanding of what actions are desirable, necessary, or simply unavoidable in its counterterrorism efforts. Having such understanding is needed to plan policies, strategies, and tactics that are effective and acceptable to citizens as well as to the international community. The history of the successful counterterrorism campaigns against the Thugs [1829-1835] and Sikh terrorists [1980-1993] show a number of commonalities in the actions taken by the governments in power at that time. In both cases, abridgement of civil liberties, as per present day standards in the United States, played a major role in the governmentsâ campaigns. These two cases, as well as other historic cases, lead to the conclusion that following successful terrorist attacks, civil liberties will be curtailed. The United States must expect this curtailment and should take actions to ensure these actions are temporary, warranted, effective, and do not transgress more than necessary on the nation's fundamental moral values.

A critical analysis of the film Remember the Titans, released in 2000, shows a preoccupation with nation and national identity through race and football. Set in 1971, it follows the desegregation and integration of a high school football team in Virginia. The film articulates a revisionist racial reconciliation reading of the Civil War based on white suffering and subsequent redemption. At its core it is a story about the progress of race relations and racism, framed as interpersonal relationships and segregation, in the United States.

In this thesis, I attempt to construct a historical overview of the development of Milwaukee's black middle class. Furthermore, I attempt to develop the connection between the migratory movements of African-American's from the South, and the living conditions that materialized in Milwaukee that precipitated the Civil Rights Movement.

An understanding of the development of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 from its beginnings in the Senate to its culmination in April necessitates a few brief statements concerning the condition of the nation and the relations between the President and Congress.

This study develops a model of different types of political regime changes and their effect on life integrity violations. The data covers 147 countries from 1977-1993. Basic bivariate analyses and multivariate pooled cross-sectional time series analyses employing Ordinary Least Squares regression with panel-corrected standard errors are used. The results show that political regime change in general has no effect on state-sponsored violence. Looking at different types of regime changes, the regression analysis indicates that change from democracy to anocracy is positively correlated with levels of repression at the level of p < .001. A change toward democracy from autocracy is negatively related to human rights violations at the level of p < .01, once relevant control variables are considered.

In recent history, the rights of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) persons have been in constant fluctuation. Many states criminalize homosexual behavior while other states legally recognize same-sex marriages and same-sex adoptions. There are also irregular patterns where LGBT interest groups form across the globe. With this research project, I begin to explain why these discrepancies in the treatment of homosexuality and the formation of LGBT interest groups occur. I develop a theory that the most obvious contrast across the globe occurs when analyzing the treatment of homosexuals in OECD member states versus non-OECD countries. OECD nations tend to see the gay community struggle for more advanced civil rights and government protections, while non-OECD states have to worry about fundamental human rights to life and liberty. I find that this specific dichotomization is what causes the irregular LGBT interest group formation pattern across the globe; non-OECD nations tend to have fewer LGBT interest groups than their OECD counterparts. When looking at why non-OECD nations and OECD nations suppress the rights of their gay citizens, I find that religion plays a critical role in the suppression of the gay community. In this analysis, I measure religion several different ways, including the institution of an official state religion as well as the levels of religiosity within a nation. Regardless of how this variable is manipulated and measured, statistical analysis continuously shows that religion’s influence is the single most significant factor in leading to a decrease in both human and civil rights for gays and lesbians across the globe. Further analysis indicates that Judaism plays the most significant role out the three major world religions in the suppression of civil rights for homosexuals in OECD nations.

My thesis covers the details of the development of play Carry Me! and the opportunity I had to explore Anne Bogart's Viewpoints as an approach to devising theatre. I express the challenges, the choices, the process and the presentation of my experience in the project. The subject matter of the script is based on a professional production that failed on Broadway in February of 1968. Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights by Robert Alan Aurthur was Sidney Poitier's directorial debut and starred Louis Gossett, Jr. and Cicely Tyson. The basic plot is a satire about race and role reversal but the overall message to the audience is to promote a better societal understanding of civil rights and cultural differences. My thesis script began with borrowing the premise of the original script but my desire was to make my own artistic choices in developing a new script about race and culture. Through Anne Bogart's Viewpoints process, thirty-seven years of historical distance from the Civil Rights Movement, a clearer understanding of American race relationships and my interest in the style of satire, I wrote and directed Carry Me! as my thesis project.