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This dissertation examines the historical contexts, major themes, and archival practices of queercore, an anti-normative queer and punk subculture comprised of music, zines, film, art, literature and new media that was instigated in 1985 by Bruce LaBruce and G.B. Jones in Toronto, Ontario. Via their fanzine J.D.s., LaBruce and Jones declared “civil war” on the punk and gay and lesbian mainstreams and conjured queercore as a multimedia subculture situated in pointed opposition to the homophobia of mainline punk and the lifeless sexual politics and assimilationist tendencies of dominant gay and lesbian society. In the pages that follow, I engage wider histories of radical queer politics and punk aesthetics and values to reveal the generative and long-standing symbiosis between these two energies – a symbiosis that informs queercore, but that also extends beyond its temporal and material boundaries. Through close analysis of queercore films (e.g. No Skin Off My Ass, The Lollipop Generation, The Living End, By Hook or By Crook), music (e.g., Pansy Division, Tribe 8, Beth Ditto/The Gossip, Nomy Lamm) and zines (e.g., J.D.s, SCAB, Bimbox, Bamboo Girl, i’m so fucking beautiful), I establish queercore’s primary themes: explicit sexuality (the use of risky, erotic queer punk images and performances to undermine heteronormativity and confront accepted notions of gay and punk identity); imagined violence (the deployment of a threatened, as opposed to actualized, violence in the hopes of frightening and, thus, destabilizing powerful white, bourgeois, heterosexual masculinity); and bodily difference (the circulation of affirmative representations of marginalized queer bodies, and specifically those that are fat, disabled and/or gender non-normative). Finally, I conclude with an exploration of the institutions and individuals currently involved in queercore archival efforts, thus placing my project within a crucial lineage of subcultural preservation. Taken as a whole, this study asserts that queercore articulates and disseminates a set of alternative identities, aesthetics, politics and representations for queer folks to occupy and engage within social space, providing a dynamic anti-normative, anti-corporate, D.I.Y. (do-it-yourself) alternative to a consumer-capitalist hetero- and homo-normative mainstream. / text

澳洲原住民已經生存在澳洲大陸長達四萬年。他們有著自成一套的宗教系統、神話、風俗習慣、語言和藝術，遵循著使人和自然都共榮的生存方式。但是，由於白人的入侵，企圖強占他們的土地，使得澳洲原住民幾乎要絕滅。在大規模的屠殺和白人從歐洲帶來的傳染病流行之下，原住民的人口急遽減少，連他們的文化都受到威脅。因此，原住民成為澳洲社會中被邊緣化的少數族群。 因此，此篇論文要援引巴赫汀（Mikhail Bakhtin）提出的「時空型」的概念、法國史學家納拉（Pierre Nora）對於記憶的看法及相關的原住民文化，去探討傑克•戴維斯在《頭生兒三部曲》中，顯示出白澳社會對於原住民的壓迫及原住民在重建文化記憶和原住民本質的強化之下，所表現出來生存的毅力。第一章包含了白人和澳洲原住民接觸的歷史背景、傑克•戴維斯及其劇作的簡介，其他評論家對於《頭生兒三部曲》的評論。第二章中，我要援引巴赫汀的「時空型」的概念來討論在白人政府的壓迫之下，原住民所處嚴酷的社會環境及原住民弱勢的社會地位給原住民帶來的影響。第三章則援用納拉對於記憶的論點來分析戴維斯藉由說故事、舞蹈和夢境來創造「記憶場域」（lieux de mémoire）以保留原住民對於其文化的記憶。第四章則是探討原住民本質所帶來的能力增強。藉由此能力強化，原住民得到了對抗白人迫害的力量，且可以為自己發聲。第五章則是為前四章所論做總結。 / Indigenous Australians have lived in Australia for 40,000 years. They develop their own system of religion and mythology, social conventions, language and arts, observing a life that can make both the environment and human beings prosperous. But Aboriginals are driven to extinction by the White who intend to possess their land. Because of large scale of massacres and diseases, both the number of Aboriginal population and their culture are endangered. Indigenous Australians become the marginalized minority in Australian society. Therefore, with the reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope, Pierre Nora’s concept of memory and related Aboriginal culture, this thesis aims to discuss that Jack Davis, in The First Born trilogy, presents the oppression of White Australian society to Aboriginal people and displays Aboriginals’ persistence in survival through the reconstruction of Aboriginal memory and the empowerment of Aboriginality. Chapter One includes the general historical background of the contact between the White and Aboriginals, the introduction to Jack Davis and his plays, and the criticism on Davis’s trilogy. In Chapter Two, I take advantage of Bakhtin’s idea of the chronotope to discuss the severe social environment of indigenous Australians who are oppressed by the White Australian government and the social consequences of Aboriginals’ disadvantaged position in society. Chapter Three aims to utilize Pierre Nora’s concept of memory to analyze that Davis, through stories, dances, and dream visions, creates lieux de mémoire to preserve Aboriginal memory. Chapter Four concentrates on the empowerment of Aboriginality, which offers a subversive force for Aboriginals to fight against the White persecution and have their voice heard. Chapter Five is the concluding chapter to wrap up these three plays.

This thesis explores the cultural history of microfilm and microphotography during the period 1900–1970, thus contributing to the broader field of research on the history of 20th century information management in the era before digital technology. The aim is to study how microfilm repeatedly, in various contexts and over time, was described and perceived as a new medium. To this end the book examines and analyses the plans, dreams and visionary prognostics put forth by various historical actors with an interest in microfilm – using case studies situated at different junctures and periods (1904–1910, 1937, 1940–1952, 1950–1970), while also ranging geographically from the United States to Europe and Sweden. From a theoretical and methodological point of view the thesis seeks to understand the historical formation of microfilm by developing the notions of configuration and reconfiguration, employing a perspective which emphasizes the continuous ontological interplay and interdependence of materiality and discourse in the formation of media. Thus, at the empirical level, the analysis takes into account realized technological materialities as well as unrealized imaginary articulations, dreams and expectations integral to the configuration of microfilm within a broader culture of paperwork. As a result of this approach the study draws on scientific texts and articles in journals, as well as newspaper reports, commercial messages, ads, handbooks and various archival documents. The analysis reveals a close relationship between microfilm and experiences of entropy connected to information systems based on paper and paperwork. It is argued that, within the dreams and plans that are studied, the most important function of microfilm was to regulate noise, decay and disorder associated with the materiality of paper – through ordering, operating on and modifying the capacities of paper media. It is also noted that microfilm was perceived and articulated as a new medium over a long period of time, even though very little changed at the technological level. From a historiographical point of view, it is thus argued, microfilm can be characterized as a simultaneously continuous and discontinuous phenomenon, taking part in a history that unfolded through repetitions, returns and non-linear steps rather than along an uninterrupted, linear path.

This thesis examines the effect regionalism had upon North Carolina and Virginia during the 1847-1862 legislative battles over the Danville, Virginia, to Greensboro, North Carolina, railroad connection. The first chapter examines the rivalry between eastern and western North Carolina for internal improvement legislation, namely westerners’ wish to connect with Virginia and easterners’ desire to remain economically relevant. The second chapter investigates the Tidewater region of Virginia and its battle against the Southside to create a rail connection with North Carolina. The third chapter examines the legislation for the Danville Connection during the American Civil War in the Virginia, North Carolina, and Confederate legislatures. Through an examination of voting patterns and public opinion, this thesis finds that, despite Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s designation of the Danville connection as a military necessity, regionalism overcame Confederate nationalism during this instance.

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In 1891, an Englishman named William Beer arrived in New Orleans, Louisiana, to take up the position as librarian of Tulane University's Howard Library. Beer quickly gained a reputation as a competent and knowledgeable librarian by bolstering the Louisiana collection at the Howard Library with maps, rare books and Louisiana historical documents. In 1896, Beer played a central role in the organization and opening of the first free and public library in New Orleans, the Fisk Free and Public Library. Beer befriended many well-known authors of New Orleans literature including George Washington Cable, Grace King, Mollie Moore Davis and Mary Ashley Townsend. Beer's influence in New Orleans and its literature, and his roles as librarian and instigator of literature have hitherto been largely ignored. This paper will argue that Beer created the foundations of a New Orleans literary culture.

The Mushuau Innu of Utshimassits (Davis Inlet), Nitassinan (Labrador), are at present in the midst of several key shifts in their political, economic, socio-cultural and environmental relations. Involuntarily settled at the coast since 1967, the Mushuau Innu have been removed from their traditional way of life through the circumstances of sedentarisation, while concurrently being marginalised with respect to mainstream Canadian and global economies. Currently, they are in the late stages of settling a comprehensive land claim agreement, near completion of a new village settlement in Natuashish at Shango Pond, and involved in Impact Benefit negotiations over the Voisey's Bay mine. This thesis explores the potential for implementing a Harvesters' Support Programme for Innu hunters as a tool within the Mushuau Innu's emerging development contexts. It is concluded, based on considerations of tradition, social organisation, sensitivity to contemporary gender realities, and emerging social and economic realities, that a programme differing from any currently extant could be appropriately implemented.

It is not uncommon to read claims of music’s ability to affect our sense of time and its rate of passage. Indeed, such effects are often considered among the most distinctive and prized aspects of musical aesthetics. Yet when it comes to the similarly abstract notion of space and its manipulation by musical structures, theorists are generally silent. My dissertation addresses this gap in the literature and shows how music’s spatial effects arise through an affective engagement with musical works. In this study, I examine an eclectic selection of compositions to determine how the spaces we inhabit are transformed by the music we hear within them. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of embodied perception, as well as research on acoustics, sound studies, and media theory, I deploy an affective model of spatial perception—a model that links the sense of space with the moment-to-moment needs and desires of the perceiver— to explain how these musical modulations of space occur. My claim is that the manner in which the music solicits our engagement affects how we respond, which in turn affects what we perceive. I begin by discussing the development of recording technology and how fixed media works deemed “spatial music” reinforce a particular conception of space as an empty container in which sound sources are arrayed in specific locations relative to a fixed listening position. After showing how innovative studio techniques have been used to unsettle this conventional spatial configuration, I then discuss examples of Renaissance vocal music, instrumental chamber music, and 20th century electronic music in order to develop a richer understanding of the range of spatial interactions that musical textures and timbres can provide. In my final chapter, I draw upon these varieties of affective engagement to construct a hermeneutic analysis of the spatial experience afforded by Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, thereby modeling a phenomenological method for grounding interpretation in embodied, rather than strictly discursive, practices. By soliciting movement through the call for bodily action, music allows us an opportunity to fit together one world of possibilities with another, thereby providing an occasion for grasping new meanings presented through the work. The spatial aspect of music, therefore, does not consist in merely recognizing an environmental setting populated by individual sound sources. Through the embodied practices of music perception and the malleability of space they reveal, we are afforded an opportunity to reshape our understanding of the world around us.