After the New Left: U.S. Cultural Radicalism and the Central America Solidarity Movement, 1979-1992 examines how the work of intellectuals, journalists and filmmakers combined with that of transnational solidarity activists during the 1980s to negotiate the legacies of the U.S. New Left and create a radical anti-interventionist movement forged around opposition to the policies of the Reagan administration in Central America. The case studies examined include the revisionist historiography of Walter LaFeber and Gabriel Kolko, transnational debates about the meaning of "solidarity" in the pages of several important publications by Verso Books, antiinterventionist journalism at left-liberal magazine The Nation and radical weekly newspaper the Guardian, and political filmmaking including Haskell Wexler's Latino (1985) and Oliver Stone's Salvador (1986), as well as feminist documentaries When the Mountains Tremble (1983) and Maria's Story (1991). Detailed historical analysis of each case study casts light on the relationship that developed between cultural work and political activism during the 1980s, a relationship that helped to sustain the U.S. left through a long and difficult period of Republican ascendency, economic restructuring and decline in trade union militancy. Ultimately, whilst the individuals and institutions examined often used their work to provide representations of the ideas and impulses of the Central America solidarity movement, they also played a sometimes unanticipated role in the constitution of antiinterventionist politics. In other words, the cultural work of intellectuals, journalists and filmmakers played a role not only in reflecting political processes, but also in helping to shape them. Analysis of the uses to which U.S. cultural radicalism was put in the immediate period "after the New Left" therefore provides an excellent opportunity not only to engage with the complex legacies of 1960s radicalism in recent American history, but also to rethink the question of the relationship between radical culture and activist politics.

The Incoherent Neighbour challenges standard narratives of the early Cold War that identify a neglect of the Western Hemisphere in the initial formulations of containment strategy. Such traditional accounts overlook the integral role of George C. Marshall, during his tenure as Secretary of State, in translating the abstract concepts of containment into the specific context of Latin America. Marshall did not introduce a Cold War framework to the Western Hemisphere however; rather he identified the Western Hemisphere as a particular theatre for an asymmetric response in the psychological struggle with the Soviet Union. Marshall sought to project a positive image of the US and demonstrate a symbolic example of solidarity in its sphere of influence through a renewed commitment to the Good Neighbour Policy. A number of significant tensions left unreconciled ensured that incoherence remained the defining feature of this strategic approach however. Marshall failed to understand that the lessons of the Good Neighbour Policy no longer remained applicable to a region transformed by a rising tide of expectations for political and economic development. The legacies of Marshall as the first global strategist and saviour of Europe are undermined by his unsuccessful strategy in the Western Hemisphere between 1947 and 1948.

This thesis is a study of the domestic influences that led to President Nixon's decision to seek a new US relationship with the People's Republic of China. In particular, it concentrates on the role of academics in forcing a policy debate on China policy and the crucial role that they played in creating the environment that led to eventual change. The thesis argues that during the 1960s a climate was created that made it necessary for Nixon to change policy and that traditional accounts of the subject have failed to fully appreciate the role of domestic factors in forcing a change of policy. This thesis throws light on three areas. Firstly, the development of US China policy in the post-war years leading up to 1971 and in particular the domestic influences placed on it. A notable argument of the piece is that many of the policies later adopted by Nixon were discussed and promoted during the Presidency of John F. Kennedy and that in the last year of his life active consideration was given to changing policy. Secondly, it is a study of Sino-American relations in the 1960s, which shows the extent to which it was subject to domestic politics. Finally, it is an exploration of the role of interested academics and the way that they were able to influence US policy in such a sensitive area and the different methods that they used to affect and alter policy. The study has made use of a number of primary archival source holdings in the United States as well as the transcripts of Congressional hearings and studies commissioned by the US Government during the period that informed its China policy. Also, it has made full use of the secondary sources available on Sino-American relations.

The purpose of this study is to explore the interconnectedness between the history and cultural memory of the United States-Mexico border with a focus on the period 1821 – 1854. In 1821, Mexico gained its independence from Spain; in 1836 it lost its northern province of Texas and in 1848 it acceded half of its existing territory to the United States. The study will explore the connections between this historical narrative and the cultural memory using three cases: Texas, California, and Arizona. The study provides an overview of the historical narrative demonstrating how such narratives are constructed. A model of Hispanicism based on Edward Said’s Orientalism will also be used to provide an understanding of how the cultural constructs and cultural memory reveal an hegemonic framework to the process. The thesis also sets this particular study within the context of limology, the interdisciplinary study of borders and borderlands. It will focus particularly upon Emanuel Brunt-Jailly’s 4 lens model of borders in order to provide a framework for the study. A range of cultural artefacts will be analysed in each case study to demonstrate how cultural memory structures the historical narrative. The main cultural focus for the Texas case study will be that of the Alamo cenotaph and Alamo films. The California case study will explore the cultural construct of the California Pastoral, a romanticised memory of the state’s Hispanic past. The artefacts examined include public festivals that celebrate California’s Hispanic past, the California novels of Gertrude Atherton and the myth of Joaquín Murrieta. The Arizona case study explores the concept of cultural amnesia though an examination of the process by which the Hispanic past is excluded from cultural memory. Finally the project seeks to apply the result in an exploration of the contemporary political framework.

This thesis engages with and intervenes in a number of insurgent, emergent, and re-emergent, pedagogies and theoretical frameworks of increasing relevance to area studies and, more broadly, challenges the discipline of American Studies to expand its theoretical and textual bases. Here the challenges of transnationalism (as a concern which all area studies need to address) and hemispherism (a concern more specifically related to American Studies) are the key motivating factors for the proposed reconfiguration of the discipline outlined in the thesis. These are pervasive and important strands of political, economic, social, cultural, and academic life, but which the discipline of American Studies has been slow to recognise and incorporate in any meaningful way. The problem here lies in the fact that for American Studies the nation remains an unquestioned and seemingly immoveable priority: studies of the U.S. become as exceptionalist as the object of their study. This project proposes that this subservience to the centre (the nation-state) at the expense of the periphery (the nation’s borders) can be redressed by returning to a much narrower sphere of experience: the region. Paradoxically, this will allow for an expansion of the purview of American Studies, enabling centrifugal readings of American (in its continental sense) culture to develop, rather than the centripetal analyses which have been the subject of much vexed discussion amongst scholars over recent years. By focusing on borders – regions which are always already transnational – this thesis aims to demonstrate that in shifting our focus only slightly beyond national boundaries, new critical techniques might be developed which can revitalise American Studies. The study’s introductory chapter contextualises the theoretical framework from which the entire thesis proceeds, and develops and articulates the broader challenge to the discipline of American Studies which motivates the research. U.S. regionalism is introduced and interrogated through short case studies of New Mexico (the region considered the capital of early twentieth-century regionalism) and The Federal Writers Project (the New Deal venture that sought to tap into the potential of regionalism). Herein, regionalism is demonstrated to be far from autonomous of nation and nationalism. Woven alongside these studies is an overview of the founding principles of American Studies, demonstrating how the concept of region always collapses into the broader concept of nation in both regionalism and American Studies itself. In counterpoint to these homogenising moves, the real-and-imagined cross-border North American territories of Cascadia and Aztlán are introduced and make way for an examination of the concept and practise of regionalism in both Canada and Mexico, revealing its manifestations in these territories to be much closer to the supposedly oppositional stance which U.S. regionalism originally suggests as its primary intention. With this potential oppositional regionalism outlined, the thesis moves to answer the various calls for new critical vocabularies to articulate the heterogeneous cultural life of North America and finds such a language in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Taking their concepts of the rhizome, nomadism and minor literature – as ideas that are designed with the task of challenging binary and hierarchical theorising specifically in mind – the thesis demonstrates that such concepts are immanent in a number of literary texts that emerge from and engage with North America’s borders. Works by Américo Paredes, Laurie Ricou and Guillermo Verdecchia are thus positioned as texts that simultaneously produce and enact narrative strategies that give voice to alternative identities that are not beholden to singular national identities. Having thus dislodged the nation-state as the predominant determiner of identity and ideology the thesis, via an in-depth discussion of nomadism, then seeks to draw an alternative critical cartography through which the Mexican and Canadian borders with the U.S. can enter into dialogue with one another in ways that disrupt the privileged subjectivity that U.S. ideology holds over representations of these sites. Tracing the shared histories of the trickster Coyote, and coyote the people smuggler, the thesis gestures towards ways in which critics can subvert (in the manner of Coyote) understandings of border regions, and smuggle new perspectives on region into view (in the manner of the coyote). Finally the thesis moves to answer its key hypothesis: whether canonical material can be opened up to new avenues of interpretation if it is considered from a borderlands position and, relatedly, whether crossing the borders of North America can allow more marginal material to speak more loudly within the field of American Studies. Studying the music of Bruce Springsteen and The Band, the thesis argues that, in so doing, a multitude of alternative understandings of nation and unconventional regional affiliations can be uncovered. This has much to offer, in particular, to recently re-emergent considerations of Indigenous sovereignty in North America and the thesis concludes by gesturing towards possible further avenues of research that place regional considerations above those of nations.

This thesis analyses debates over the economic future of postbellum Utah Territory, in order to demonstrate the connection between economic expansion and the promotion of a homogenous ‘American’ identity. Following the American Civil War, a dominant Republican establishment sought to reform Utah Mormons, whose practices of polygamy, theocratic government and economic protectionism represented a rejection of key party values. While support for reforming Mormonism was widespread, anti-Mormon advocates struggled to pass stronger legislation due to the limits of federal authority. Many Republicans came to believe that economic integration offered the potential for a gradual reformation of Utah. Creating systems of economic reciprocity and demonstrating the benefits of capitalist culture would weaken Mormons’ desire for isolationism and erode their peculiarities. The development of a transcontinental railroad and promotion of mining in Utah became tools of assimilation, ways to spread the values of the dominant political power. The Mormon leadership made efforts to resist these market pressures, both rhetorically and practically. It warned its followers of the long-term risks of economic integration and tried to introduce redistributionist initiatives which would foster group spirit and create a more equitable society. However, the reluctance of many Saints to adhere to Church regulation would repeatedly undermine these efforts, as the attractions of the free market made inroads that political reform had struggled to achieve. By the end of the century, a transformation had taken place within Mormon society. The encroachment of capitalist networks into Utah had damaged the Church’s ability to maintain regional autonomy and resulted in the adoption of more ‘American’ business practices. While Mormon economic discourse demonstrated how fringe groups could respond to the pressure to adopt free-labour capitalism, the Church’s inability to create an alternative socioeconomic model shows how the expansion of trading networks formed a key part of postbellum Republican nationalisation.

This thesis examines the lives of single, white, slaveholding women in the nineteenth-century American South from 1830-1870. The central hypothesis is that singleness, in spite of its restrictions, was a route to female autonomy that had its roots in the antebellum era and that was intensified during the Civil War and post-war years. The Civil War acted as a catalyst for accelerating personal, social, economic, and legal changes in single women’s lives. It helped to revise and expand traditional gender models by destroying slavery that had tied to the patriarchal structure of the Old South. Many of the single women discussed in this thesis did not automatically fit into the traditional model of southern womanhood. They were either permanently single, or had married late, were widowed, divorced or separated. Yet they operated their lives within a tight framework of traditional gender conventions that gradually broke down in the antebellum, Civil War and post-war years. Single women clearly understood the importance of adhering to gender conventions. However, they were often able to manipulate them to their advantage, gaining acceptance and respect in southern society that provided an effective springboard to enhance personal autonomy. In the post-war period these processes continued to gain pace, as female autonomy was heightened by protection tradition ideals about women that could be used to their advantage in seeking a divorce or to gain their due in widowhood. Thus, from conservative ideology sprang radical social change. This thesis provides a wealth of evidence in the form of letters, diaries and court records in support of the central hypothesis that in spite of its restrictions, singleness was a route to greater autonomy for women in the nineteenth-century South.

This thesis seeks to examine how a particularly American ideological formation called the frontier myth has been re-enacted, challenged, and redefined in the literary works written by several American authors. Existing researches about the pervasiveness of the frontier mythology in American culture written by scholars such as Richard Slotkin, Richard Drinnon, and others demonstrate that, as the myth of the frontier–––the popular discourse that romanticizes early white settlers’ violent confrontation with American Indians in the New World wilderness–––has been deeply inscribed in America’s collective consciousness, when they faced with the war in a remote Southeast Asian country, many Americans have adopted its conventional narrative patterns, images, and vocabulary to narrate their experiences therein. The word, Indian Country–––a military jargon that US military officers commonly used to designate hostile terrains outside the control of the South Vietnamese government–––would aptly corroborate their argument. Drawing upon Edward Said’s exegesis of a structure of power that privileged Europeans assumed when they gazed at and wrote about the place and people categorized as “Oriental,” I contend that the images of the frontier frequently appearing in US Vietnam War accounts are America’s “imaginative geography” of Vietnam. By closely looking at the Vietnamese landscapes that American authors describe, I intend to investigate the extent to which the authors’ view of Vietnam are informed, or limited, by the cultural imperatives of the myth. At the same time, I will also look for instances in which the authors attempt to challenge the very discourse that they have internalized. I will read several novels and stories of American Vietnam War literature in a loosely chronological manner––from earlyier American Vietnam novels such as William Lederer’s and Eugene Burdick’s The Ugly American (1958), through three notable Vietnam–vet writers’ works published between the late ’70s and ’90s that include Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato (1978) and The Things They Carried (1990), to Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke (2007), a recent novel produced after 9/11. Hereby, I aim to explain the larger cultural/political significances that underlie the images of the frontier appearing in American Vietnam War narratives, and their vicissitude through time. While the authors of early US Vietnam War narratives reproduced stereotypical representations of the land and people of Vietnam that largely reflected the colonial/racist ideologies embedded in the myth, the succeeding generations of authors, with varying degrees of success, have undermined what has conventionally been regarded as America’s master narrative, by, for instance, deliberately subverting the conventional narrative patterns of the frontier myth, or by incorporating into their narratives the Vietnamese points of view that have often been omitted in earlier US Vietnam War accounts.

This thesis offers a reinterpretation of radicalism and reform movements in Scotland and British North America in the first half of the nineteenth century by examining the relationship between ecclesiology and political action. It considers the ways in which Presbyterian political theory and the memory of the seventeenth-century Covenanting movement were used to justify political reform. In particular it examines attitudes in Scotland to Catholic emancipation, the Reform Act of 1832, the disestablishment of the national Churches, and the Chartist movement; and it considers agitation in Upper Canada and Nova Scotia for the disestablishment of the established Church and the institution of responsible government. It emphasises the continued relevance of religion in political culture, tracing the survival of the Scottish Covenanting tradition and charting its significance within the wider British empire. It argues that there existed a transatlantic Presbyterian community and that to some degree Presbyterian-inflected radicalism in this period was a North Atlantic phenomenon.

This thesis analyses the central role of agricultural labour in the construction of personhood, landscape and work in an Andean ayllu. It is an ethnographic study based on fieldwork in a small subsistence farming village in the highlands of Bolivia. In employing a practice‐led approach and emphasising everyday labour, ambiguity and the realities of history and political power play, rather than the ayllu’s ‘core characteristics’ of complementarity and communality, the thesis moves away from the structuralist approaches which have dominated this field of study. In this setting, agricultural activity, llank’ay, (to transform the land), fills and shapes the days and seasons throughout the year. Llank’ay goes beyond economistic definitions of ‘work’ to include leisure, politics and everyday practice: it is bound up with myths of cosmogony, notions of value, the power of the land and a basic belief in what it is to be a human. The thesis examines the importance of llank’ay through several prisms: the tasks of the agricultural year and how these are crucial to the development of personhood; the mediating role of llank’ay in claims to land and inter‐village relationships of reciprocity; the effects of Protestant conversion and the role of llank’ay in sustaining an animate landscape; the intersection of llank’ay with other forms of work; migration and the outcomes of discontinuing llank’ay. I conclude that in this ayllu the practice of agricultural activity transforms people and land, creates belonging and communality and shapes the local concept of what labour is. It in turn creates the structures and limits within which people and land can be transformed.