From the 1880s to the early 1920s, hundreds of artists left Japan for the United States. The length of their stays varied from several months to several decades. Some had studied art in Tokyo, but others became interested in art after working in California. Some became successful in the American art world, some in the Japanese art world, and some in both. They used oil paints on canvas, sumi ink on silk, and Leica cameras. They created images of Buddhist deities, labor protests, farmers harvesting rice, cabaret dancers, and the K.K.K. They saw themselves and were seen by others as Japanese nationals, but whether what they created should be called Japanese art proved a difficult and personal question, The case of Japanese artists in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century demonstrates that there is a national art - a Japanese art and an American art - but that the category is not fixed. A painting can be classified in the 1910s as Japanese, but the same painting can be included in a show of American art a few decades later. An artist can proclaim himself to be American, but can then be exhibited as a Japanese artist after his death. National constructions of art and artists serve the art market's purpose of selling a work. Categories set along national lines also reinforce the state's projection of a distinct, homogeneous culture to the international community. For non-Western artists, assigning themselves with a national aesthetic allows for easy identification. But for modern Japanese artists like Kuniyoshi Yasuo, Ishigaki Eitarô, and Shimizu Toshi and others, national categories often posed barriers to creativity and to their success in the art world. Shimizu Toshi was awarded for painting a night scene of Yokohama, but his award was rescinded because he was Japanese. Savvy artists like Yoshida Hiroshi and Obata Chiura worked within national aesthetic categories to better market his work. Kuniyoshi Yasuo remained enigmatic, willing to fall into any category that a critic or dealer might determine they should be cast in, while Ishigaki Eitarô associated himself with international leftist politics that precluded notions of Japanese art. Exploring their histories brings several themes to the fore. First, any attempt to use a single, or hyphenated, national category to describe them or their art is problematic and misleading. An artist's "Japaneseness" was not a fixed characteristic: at different points in his career, he might be classified as a Japanese, American, or even a proletarian artist. Artists could sometimes choose to align themselves with one national culture or eschew both, but the denizens of the art world - critics, museum and gallery curators, schools, and other artists - as well as the public nearly always ascribed a national, or at best hybrid, aesthetic character to their work. During the 1910s and 1920s, when Japanese art had fallen out of fashion and modernism was the vanguard, Japanese artists were freer to transcend the preconceptions of what had become by then conventionally defined as a "Japanese aesthetic," which was based in good part on the works of Japanaiserie of earlier years. Artists of many nationalities strove to be "modern" by consciously rejecting "tradition," which for Japanese artists meant the styles and techniques of traditional Japanese painting. Many of the artists from Japan who wanted to make modern art had little practice in traditional art in any case, since they had received their artistic training in the United States. Indeed, it was their American mentors who taught them what Japanese art was supposed to look like. Modern art did not just set itself against the artistic conventions of the past; it also sought to comment on, and intervene in, the rapidly changing ways of modern life. Japanese artists in New York and Los Angeles joined their colleagues in turning to city streets and everyday life for their subjects, rather than reflecting on a safely imagined past. Portraying the streets they walked, in the techniques they learned in American art schools, came more naturally to them than making a woodblock print of a geisha strolling in a Kyoto garden. They used oils to paint flappers they saw on Fourteenth Street, but had no experience with woodblock printing, geisha, or the gardens of Kyoto.

This dissertation analyzes early attempts by the Chinese Communist Party to integrate Zeku (Tsékhok) County, an ethnically Tibetan, pastoral region located in southeastern Qinghai/Amdo, into the People's Republic of China. Employing county-level archival materials, it argues that during the immediate post-Liberation period, Party leaders implicitly understood both the administrative and epistemological obstacles to transforming a vast multiethnic empire into a unitary, socialist nation-state. For much of the 1950s it therefore employed a "subimperial" strategy, referred to as the United Front, as a means to gradually and voluntarily bridge the gap between empire and nation. However, the United Front ultimately lost out to a revolutionary impatience that demanded immediate national integration and socialist transformation, leading in 1958 to communization, democratic reforms and rebellion. Despite successfully identifying the tensions between empire and nation, and attempting to creatively resolve them, empire was eliminated before the process of de-imperialization and nationalization was completed. This failure occurred at both the level of policy and narrative, leaving Amdo's Tibetan population unevenly absorbed into the modern Chinese nation-state.

This dissertation examines Republican China's state-led revolution under the Guomindang. Since the anti-Communist purge in 1927, the party-state had strived to re-energize mass activism and dissolve proletarian political subjectivity with a rightwing program that stressed interclass and national unity. Under Chiang Kai-shek's leadership, the Guomindang put an end to the ideological ambiguity of Sun Yat-sen's national revolution, broke ties the party forged with the Communist International in 1923, and launched an all-round assault on the fledging Chinese Communist Party. Refusing to challenge unequal power relationships domestically and abroad, Guomindang leaders promised to bring China and Asia back to their cultural essence and towards a superior ethical order. Despite its conservative socio-economic agenda, the party retained a radical organizational mode it derived from revolutionary socialism that prized Leninist vanguardism, reliance on mass involvement and cultural transformation. The Chinese nation-state under Guomindang rule experienced a conservative revolution and partook in a global fascist current that swept across Asia, Europe and Latin America during the second quarter of the twentieth century. The distinctiveness of China's conservative revolution is demonstrated in this dissertation through a multilayered study of its ideological formulations, mass mobilization programs, and ability to garner support from outside the Guomindang domestically and abroad. Senior party ideologues among radical conservatives, who produced tracts attacking the Guomindang's Communist allies in the mid-1920s, provided theoretical justifications for the April 1927 purge and heralded the party-state's drastic shift to the right. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Guomindang state deployed the scouting and wartime spiritual mobilization movements to re-channel mass activism towards strengthening the nation's organic unity and consolidating defense against Japanese invasion. Potentially subversive popular demands were diffused through a new focus on refining and rationalizing consumption habits, time management and other social mores. Instead of political participation, popular will found expression in public rituals, physical recreation and cultural entertainments. Conservative revolutionaries were adept in building elite support. The state's goal of disciplining everyday life converged with liberal intellectual fear over a social order collapsing under mob rule. While uncomfortable with some authoritarian behaviors on the Guomindang's part, prominent liberals such as Zhu Guangqian shared the state's priority of reining in an intransigent mass society. Internationally, China's repudiation of Soviet-supported anti-imperialist activities led the Guomindang to appeal to cultural affinities in the overtures it extended to the Indian independence movement. The regime's celebration of Eastern spiritual superiority proved attractive to Pan-Asianists like Rabindranath Tagore and informed exchanges between the Guomindang and Indian National Congress at the height of the Second World War. In highlighting the ascendency of radical conservatism in China and its transnational circulation across Asia, this dissertation sheds light on the distinct qualities, often downplayed in the historical literature, of the Guomindang's revolutionary enterprise vis-à-vis the radical left.

My dissertation focuses on the legal recognition of the Shi'i sect by the Mandate state as a pivotal point in generating increased sectarian awareness, particularly as it related to the domain of the family. I analyze the impact this had on the space of the family during the French Mandate and the creation of the new Lebanese nation-state from 1918-1943 as growing concerns to reform Shi'i families emerged. I explore how the family became intertwined in the system of sectarianism and became vital to the understanding of Shi'as as a Lebanese sect. This study examines three sites, the Shi'i press, Ja'fari shari'a courts, and Shi'i educational institutions, in order to reveal how familial and gendered relationships were defined, performed, and constructed during this period. All three sites represent different forms of producing Shi'i families and gender relationships. By exposing the differences in these spaces, I disclose how multiple notions of masculinity and femininity were deployed in the formation of the Shi'as as a collective entity and citizens of the nation-state. By concentrating on the locus of the family, my dissertation highlights how marital and gender roles became intertwined in sectarian and national categories of practices for the Shi'i Muslims of Lebanon. This study seeks to place the family space and everyday experiences of Shi'i Muslims in the understandings and articulations of sectarian and nationalist concepts of identity. The multiple productions of Shi'i families in the press, Ja'fari shari'a court records, and Shi'i educational institutions reveal how fluid and mutable gendered, sectarian, and national modes of identification were during this period

This dissertation examines how and why food consumption and nutrition became legitimate public policy issues in Mexico between the 1930s to the 1980s. In the post-revolutionary era, Mexican public officials began to systematically consider diet a social problem that affected not only individual well-being but could influence the economic development of the nation. This belief resulted in the implementation of policies with the goal of improving the quality of the Mexican diet. Several government actors participated in formulating and executing food and nutrition policies. Economic authorities, doctors and nutritional experts became convinced that food consumption could be managed, rationalized and perfected to obtain optimal results both in terms of expenses and health benefits. For economic officials, the primary goal of food policies was to maintain the stability of the factors of production, primarily labor costs, to encourage industrialization. Thus, from the early 1930s, the Mexican government regulated prices and intervened in food markets to control the supply side. Since the 1970s, government officials also sought to influence the demand side through the behavior of consumers. Diet came to be regarded not only as an object of health intervention and macroeconomic policy, but also as a crucial component of the new consumer culture. The Mexican government also promoted the study of food consumption scientifically, looking for ways to optimize food consumption with low wages. This scientific research done at public hospitals helped solidify diets as a legitimate sphere of intervention. Most doctors and nutritional experts agreed that Mexicans in general were malnourished due to the quality of their diets, which lacked animal proteins. Based on the findings of their studies, which indicated that diets had effects on mental development, these experts insisted that malnourishment was the explanation for the poverty and backwardness of Mexican society. Milk production and distribution is presented as a case study of the multiplicity of processes and actors involved in food consumption and nutrition policies in Mexico. For both doctors and economic planners, it was not enough to recommend increased consumption of animal proteins if these products were not available in the market or were not affordable enough for low income consumers to buy them. Government officials implemented policies to increase the production and consumption of the product. This dissertation traces how the milk sector was transformed and how the interactions between local producers, government agencies and transnational companies shaped an incipient industry in the early twentieth century into an important economic sector in several regions of Mexico.

This dissertation addresses the unique history of the Free University (School) of New York (FUNY), 1965-1968, in the context of the American radical movement that occurred amidst the international upheaval of national liberations. The Free University of New York was founded by young radical intellectuals who were inspired by the struggles for self-determination that were taking place in Third World countries. Radicals concerned with Third World liberation movements created the anti-Vietnam War group May 2nd Movement, from which the Free University was born. Although FUNY only existed for a short period of time, from 1965 to 1968 it functioned as a center for radical education and politics for intellectuals in leftist circles within New York and in the United States as a whole. The uniqueness of the Free University lay in its experimental education and in its instructors' activities beyond the U.S. borders. The radical education at the Free University clearly reflected the interests of New Left intellectuals in the Sixties in America. The transborder activism of the Free University instructors included organizing an international pacifist movement against the U.S. involvement in the War in Vietnam, discussing the meaning of liberation with European intellectuals, and importing the idea of national liberation from the Third World revolutions. The FUNY activists played a significant role in the International War Crimes (Russell-Sartre) Tribunal in Europe in 1967, which accused the U.S. of atrocities in Vietnam. They also participated in the Dialectics of Liberation Congress in London in 1967 and the Cultural Congress of Havana in 1968 to discuss the relevance of liberation and self-determination in the First and Third worlds. FUNY instructors brought these ideas back with them and built the philosophical foundation for the domestic protest activities in post-1968 America. The activities of the Free University of New York were considered to be part of the larger New Left movement in the United States. However, the mainstream New Leftists in the United States not only rejected the "foreign" ideas of national liberation and the accusation of U.S. war crimes, but also marginalized the New York radical intellectual circle as an extremist fringe of the American left. This conflict reveals the peculiar nature of the American New Left movement in the momentum of the global sixties. Nevertheless, the Free University of New York contributed significantly to the development of the American Sixties by bridging the gap between the intellectual position of leftist activists during the Third World revolutions in the late fifties and beyond and the struggle of people of color for decolonization within the United States in the later sixties and seventies.

Significant changes for the Coloured community have occurred and continue to occur as a result of an ever-changing political landscape in Zimbabwe. These changes reveal a group consciousness or ideology that often translates into daily practices of methods of inclusion and exclusion based on ethnic affiliation and racial organization. Many Coloureds have historically denied the reality of the boundaries that have separated them from whites or Europeans, and more recently, have reinforced the boundaries that have separated them from black Africans. Zimbabwe at Independence was the poster child for progress and change on the African continent. It was a place where, "the wrongs of the past [would] stand forgiven and forgotten... [and] oppression and racism were inequalities that [would] never find scope in the political and social system." Yet thirty years later, amid growing disillusionment over promises of a unified Zimbabwe, a destitute economy, and the perpetuation of racial inequality and oppression, there is an effort among Coloureds themselves to reify the Coloured category. The categorization of people tends to develop in the course of specific histories of particular places. Local nuances color this. In Southern Africa, following the victory of the South African National Party (NP) in 1948, the term "community" was used as a euphemism for racial exclusion. Official categories that were clearly racial were commonly designated "communities": the Indian community, the Coloured community, the white community, and the black community. The NP relied heavily on the idea on distinct peoples bound together by blood and culture and in this context the language of community slid easily into a rhetoric justifying separate development for separate communities (Crehan, 2002). In the anti-apartheid era, opposition to the State often assumed the form of struggles fought out in the name of a particular community. It is here yet again, in the postcolonial context that we witness Coloured struggles around notions of belonging, nationality and citizenship. Why and how have Coloureds or mixed race people in Zimbabwe sought to reclaim, or perpetuate their historic place (category) within the colonial racial hierarchy postcolonially in an ever-changing political landscape? This dissertation examines the ideology of Coloured peoples and the perpetuation and maintenance of the category Coloured in post-colonial Zimbabwe. The framework used here is from a socio-historical perspective, considering the political history of colonial settler policy in Zimbabwe, its subsequent racial ideology, and its effects on the social reality of the Coloured or mixed race population today. Here the conceptualization of race is restricted to settler societies and is not meant to be addressed on a global scale, as the term Coloured in this sense is in and of itself a Southern African phenomenon. This study relies on ethnographic data collected intermittently for approximately twenty-two months between May 2004 and May 2008 in the Matabeleland region of Zimbabwe, in particular, in the city of Bulawayo. Additional ethnographic data was also collected in Cape Town, South Africa in the winter of 2009. Several methods were used in collecting data for this project: household surveys, genealogies, semi-structured and unstructured interviews, participant observation and snowball methodology. This study reveals the historical fluctuations in the meaning of the Coloured category and its overall genealogy to demonstrate that race was a paramount paradigm of identity in Rhodesia and despite changes in heads of state, ideologies, social practices and meanings that define identity, it continues to remain paramount in Zimbabwe today. Further, I argue that Coloureds themselves are major perpetuators of racial difference in the post-colonial context and value Coloured identity above either a national Zimbabwean identity or a continental African identity. The reason for this is that Coloureds hold on to the ideological value of their legal and social status of the past. By examining the Coloured experience within race and space in Bulawayo, this dissertation demonstrates how Coloureds maintain and enforce the familiar boundaries of their community in the post-colonial context via residential, social and cultural enclaves. Given the struggle for "place" in terms of nationalism--socially and economically in post-colonial Zimbabwe-- that is revealed through a study of popular discourse on race and political change in Zimbabwe, one questions whether Coloureds could ever or would ever want to become African.

This dissertation traces the reconstruction of Nagasaki City after the atomic bombing of August 9, 1945 by concentrating on politics and religion. It follows the various people and groups who contributed to the city's rise from the ashes and shaped its image in Japan and the world. In contrast to Hiroshima, Nagasaki did not make its atomic tragedy the dominant theme of its postwar image, and instead strove to rebuild the city in the light of its past as a center of international trade and culture. The most influential group advocating the focus on "international culture" during the early postwar period was the Roman Catholic community of the northern Urakami Valley, which was ground zero. Although Hiroshima became synonymous with the atomic bomb in national and international discourse, Nagasaki followed its own path, one that illuminates the relationship between mass destruction, city history, religion, and historical remembrance. It is a story that sheds a different light on the atomic bombings and their aftermath, not only in comparison with Hiroshima but with other cities destroyed by area bombing and the course of their subsequent reconstruction.

This dissertation is an exploration of associational life in central Italy, an examination of organizations that were central to the everyday experience of tens of thousands of Italians at a time when social, economic and geographical transformations were upending their everyday lives, 1945-1968. This dissertation examines facets of these transformations: the changing shape of cities, increasing mobility of people, technological changes that made possible new media and new cultural forms, from the perspective of local associations. The many lively groups, the cultural circles and case del popolo of central Italy were critical sites where members encountered new ideas, navigated social change, and experimented with alternative cultures. At the same time, these organizations themselves were being transformed from unitary centers that expressed the broad solidarity of the anti-fascist Resistance to loose federations of fragmentary single-interest groups. They were tangles of intertwined politics, culture, and community, important sites in culture wars and political battles between the Christian Democratic government in Rome and the defiant Leftist opposition that had a stronghold in central Italy. This history of associations is also a history of postwar Italian democracy: highlighting the struggles of ordinary Italians to participate in public life through the associations they constructed and defended, illuminating attempts to organize and control civil society or squelch the autonomy of local groups, and uncovering the ways that demands for democratic participation were dynamic, continuously recast to encompass new meanings of participation.

The Shandong region has been of considerable interest to the study of ancient China due to its location in the eastern periphery of the central culture. For the Western Zhou state, Shandong was the "Far East" and it was a vast region of diverse landscape and complex cultural traditions during the Late Bronze-Age (1000-500 BCE). In this research, the developmental trajectories of three different types of secondary states are examined. The first type is the regional states established by the Zhou court; the second type is the indigenous Non-Zhou states with Dong Yi origins; the third type is the states that may have been formerly Shang polities and accepted Zhou rule after the Zhou conquest of Shang. On the one hand, this dissertation examines the dynamic social and cultural process in the eastern periphery in relation to the expansion and colonization of the Western Zhou state; on the other hand, it emphasizes the agency of the periphery during the formation of secondary states by examining how the polities in the periphery responded to the advances of the Western Zhou state and how local traditions impacted the composition of the local material assemblage which lay the foundation for the future prosperity of the regional culture. By utilizing the rich archaeological data, epigraphic evidence and textual sources, the dissertation focuses on two research questions: First, how did cultural interactions play out in the region through possible processes of cultural adaption, assimilation, persistence, and resistance, and what are their material manifestations in the archaeological record? Second, how did the political relationship between the peripheral states and the dynastic center change in variable degrees of dependency or autonomy? This study provides important insight into the issue of cultural interaction and secondary state formation and, by extension, into the social evolution of the Shandong area.