This dissertation calls into question the critique that has depicted the Francophone literary movement known as Negritude as a sole vehicle of black essentialism. By looking at recently published anthologies, archival documents, and lesser-known texts from 1935 to 1966, I show that in addition to the discourse on a fixed ‘blackness’ engraved in the neologism ‘Negritude,’ there is another set of discourses that forces us to rethink the movement as a philosophy of becoming. In particular, this dissertation stages the year 1948, when Jean-Paul Sartre gave Negritude its fame with the publication of his influential essay “Black Orpheus,” as a pivot for the definition of the movement as well as its reception. Since 1948, most of the critical engagement with Negritude has happened either through a reading of Sartre’s essay or the limited corpus that was available at the time. I thus argue that, by reading a broader range of the poets of Negritude’s literary and cultural production, one gets a sense that their vindication of Blackness is not only an essentialized invocation of a romanticized past, it is also an imagined unity within an evolving postcoloniality. This dissertation covers three areas within which this constantly reimagined unity is staged, from the youthful local publications of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor from 1935 to 1948, to their mature global interactions as statesmen in Dakar, Fort-de-France, Paris and Rome from 1948 to 1966. First, it looks at language and analyzes the relation of the poets to French. While the choice to adopt the idiom of the former colonizer has been criticized by merely every reader of Negritude, I show that they used French as a tool enabling violation, negotiating their relation to the metropole as well as other colonies. Second, it interrogates the often overlooked concept of métissage as common element for colonized subjects. With particular attention to problems of translation, I analyze how the poets used métissage as a political and ethical concept in order to reach to the African diaspora without referring to Europe as the unavoidable mediator. Third, it focuses on the First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar in 1966 as instrument for political practice. By investigating extensive documentation on the Festival’s organization, especially the influential role and presence of the United States, I show that art was used as a political tool to stage postcolonial unity in an otherwise global and competitive diversity.

This dissertation traces the reception of Antonio Gramsci’s works over a series of critical moments in the development of the Latin American left, including the transitions to democracy in Argentina and Brazil, Latin American subaltern studies in the academic sphere, and the rhetoric of Pink Tide governments of the twenty-first century, with a focus on Bolivia. My central argument is that Gramsci has appealed to Latin American intellectuals as a theorist of the state—notwithstanding his more frequent characterization as primarily a theorist of civil society—and that the different appropriations and deployments of Gramscian concepts such as the war of position and the integral state have been oriented, in one way or another, toward a defense of constituted as opposed to constituent power, and more generally toward the closure of constituted political subjectivities. The project is intended at once as a study of the historico-political conditions of intellectual production in Latin America, and more specifically as a contribution to the scholarship on the long history of the centrality of the state in Latin American politics, as well as an examination, focused on a particular theoretical field, of modes of appropriation and resignification of political concepts in the construction and contestation of power.

This dissertation avers that the circulation of manuscript copies and printed editions of the works of Ramon Llull had a key role in Iberian cultural history and signaled a shift from a Christian logic of conversion to a universal key for organizing all the disciplines of knowledge. As copies of Ramon Llull’s manuscripts traveled from the Black Forest, Majorca, and Paris to be housed in the libraries of early modern institutions, such as the Colegio de San Ildefonso and the Monastery of El Escorial, they formed what I call portable archives of the Art. By reading the inventories of the libraries of these institutions, along with copies of the works of Ramon Llull preserved at the Escorial, the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid, and the University of Freiburg, my dissertation combines the study of the place of Ramon Llull in the medieval history of ideas and the material features of said portable archives. My dissertation contributes to history of the book studies as it examines a unique case among medieval traditions and shows that the compilation of manuscripts and the elaboration of printed editions repurpose the original idea of the Art. I work with primary sources in Latin, Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese, attributed to Ramon Llull and to other authors, to trace his influence on early modern authors, such as Pedro de Guevara, Juan de Herrera, Diego de Valadés, and João de Barros.

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In The Holy Kinship (1500-1510), the artist Matthäus Gutrecht the Younger defies convention by portraying the importance of matriarchy, via the semiotics of the nimbus. Within Christian art, the nimbus has been widely used as a signifier of divinity. Saints and angels, as well as members of the Holy Family, are often depicted nimbed in the history of art. In particular, men of divine status are frequently nimbed, as Christianity was predominantly patriarchal. However, there are several cases in which women are also represented with this divine signifier. One work in which the nimbus as a signifier of matriarchal status and lineage is epitomized is Gutrecht's portrayal of The Holy Kinship, in which the women, but not the men, are shown nimbed. This thesis explores the varied significance of the matriarchal nimbus. Furthermore, it challenges traditional patriarchal analyses of late medieval, German culture in order to examine how this altarpiece both reflects and constructs attitudes regarding a celebration of women's spiritual and secular roles. In this way, the painting presents a direct challenge to the more familiar representation of patriarchal lineage and power in Tree of Jesse images.

In 1941 a large cache of papyri preserving the writings of Origen and Didymus the Blind were discovered in Tura, Egypt. 43 years later 22 signatures from the Tura papryi containing Ps. 26:10–29:2, 36:1–3 from Didymus the Blinds' commentary on Psalms were acquired by Brigham Young University. These signatures remain unpublished at present. This paper examines Didymus' use of the New Testament in this hitherto unpublished section of his commentary and seeks to reevaluate past scholarship on the New Testament text of Didymus in light of this new data. In addition to providing an inventory of all the New Testament references and significant textual variants used by Didymus in this section of his commentary, this paper will also analyze the consistency, or lack thereof, with which Didymus referenced the New Testament throughout his five Tura commentaries. This analysis will show that previous conclusions on the New Testament text of Didymus the Blind need to be reevaluated in a manner that takes into account the significant lack of consistency with which he referenced the New Testament in his classroom lectures as opposed to his published works that were intended for circulation.

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In contemporary America the haunted house appears regularly as a figure in literature, film, and tourism. The increasing popularity of the haunted house is in direct correlation with the disintegration of the home as a refuge from the harsh elements of the world. The mass media populates society with dark images and subjects, portraying America as a dark place to live. Americans create fictional narratives of terror and violence as a means of coping with their own modern horrors. Their horrors are psychologically displaced within these narratives. The haunted house is therefore a manifestation of contemporary anxieties surrounding the dissolution of the home, a symbol of the infusion of terror and violence into domestic space.

My dissertation investigates American images of Japan in the aftermath of World War Two. My premise: Japan represents America’s last clear victory, militarily and culturally. In the decades since the cessation of active hostilities, Japan has served in the American regard as an Other that reinforces and perpetuates an American mythos that is rooted in masculine narratives that depict righteous, regenerative violence. I emphasize images that legitimate American excesses during World War Two, reflecting earlier “Yellow Peril” periods of anti-Japanese immigration scares. American excess is sanitized during the SCAP Occupation period, after which American—and ancillary—images posit Japan as an exoticized site for Western self-affirmation. Japan remains thus marginalized until the late eighties, at which point Japan’s burgeoning economic power engenders American images that regress to the demonization of wartime propaganda. My hope for the dissertation is to assert American images of Japan as a negative paradigm. The example of how Japan has been manipulated for American purposes should be considered cautionary. America must be concerned about the ramifications of its continued reliance on a mythos narrative of redemptive masculine violence. The relocation of Japanese culture may prove prescient if America does not learn how to deal more appropriately with other Others that do not conform to America’s mythos-based Self-sustaining narrative.