This dissertation examines African American women's gender-specific theorizing and intellectual production during the black power era. Previous histories of this period have focused primarily on the theoretical and activist roles of African American men. This study shows how black women radicals shaped the movement through an examination of their written and cultural production within various black power political ideologies, including cultural nationalism, revolutionary nationalism, and black power feminism. / African and African American Studies

published_or_final_version / Politics and Public Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), a twentieth-century Jewish-German intellectual, has recently achieved iconic status; however, during his lifetime, many scholars considered him to be a failure. This substantial shift in scholarly attitude invites questions concerning how intellectual figures are understood and constructed within academia. Cultural studies has renewed and enlarged the sphere of interest in Benjamin's work while, at the same time, canonizing and thus freezing it. This dissertation addresses the non-canonical side of the production of Walter Benjamin and, in so doing, shows what traditional scholarship has overlooked — the effect of the so-called "private" sphere on so-called "public" intellectuals. The dominant model for traditional scholarly studies remains both abstract and linear: it consists of tracing the influence of one (usually male) scholar upon another. This dissertation disrupts the tacit assumptions behind such an approach to knowledge by showing how intellectuals are produced both by and at the intersections o f the public and the private. The general scholarly acceptance of this false dichotomy, commonly referred to as the public/private split, has resulted in viewing scholars as though they exist in an abstract realm of ideas rather than in a concrete realm of lived reality. I draw on and add to the insights of feminist and cultural studies scholars who have attempted to show how people's interested contradictory locations, defined, as they are, by class, religion, ethnicity, gender, and so on, intersect with and affect their publicly constructed identities. To this end, my study provides a concrete example of how one particular intellectual, Walter Benjamin, has been (and continues to be) produced within specific historical, social, and cultural contexts.

The idea to analyse Soviet intellectuals appeared while considering the history of Sąjūdis and the reestablishment of Lithuanian independence. The intellectuals, who shared nationalist and public ideas, consolidated on June 3, 1988 and mobilized all Lithuanian society, had to base their activities on social relations, values and certain attitudes, which existed and evolutionized in one or another form during the whole period of annexation. The aim of this thesis is to examine the features of informal groups of Lithuanian intellectuals and the development of the philosophical thought in informal and official environment in the period of 1956-1988. The novelty of the dissertation is the fact that the intellectuals and their activities during the Soviet times are not viewed individually but by the dynamics of their created groups, which operated both in informal and official sphere, and had the features of primary and secondary groups. It was easy to notice and emphasize the peculiarities of alternative collective identity formation. Besides, the described manifestation of philosophical consciousness and philosophical research are provided as an alternative to the Soviet regime for the first time in the Lithuanian historiography. In addition, the research seeks to describe the social, professional, intellectual and theoretical activities of the same social layer. Other researchers should also be interested in the dimension of citizenship and of informal intellectual groups... [to full text] / Idėja tyrinėti sovietmečio intelektualus kilo žvelgiant į Sąjūdžio ir Lietuvos nepriklausomybės atkūrimo istoriją. Lietuvoje. Tautiškai, pilietiškai nusiteikę inteligentai, intelektualai, susivieniję 1988 birželio 3 d. ir gana greitai mobilizavę visą to meto Lietuvos visuomenę, turėjo remtis socialiniais ryšiais, vertybėmis bei atitinkamomis nuostatomis, kurios vienokia ar kitokia forma egzistavo ir evoliucionavo per visą aneksijos laikotarpį. Šio darbo tikslas – ištirti sovietų Lietuvos intelektualų neformalių grupių veikimo bruožus ir filosofinės minties raidą neformalioje ir oficialioje erdvėje 1956-88 m. Šio darbo naujumas yra tai, kad į intelektualus ir jų veiklą sovietmečiu žiūrima ne individualiai, bet per jų sukurtų neformalių grupių, kurios veikė tiek neformalioje, tiek oficialioje erdvėje, ir turėjo tiek pirminės, tiek antrinės grupės bruožus, dinamiką. Šituo keliu einant buvo labai lengvai pastebėti ir plačiau artikuliuoti alternatyvios kolektyvinės tapatybės formavimosi ypatumai. Taip pat aprašyti filosofinės sąmonės apraiškos ir filosofiniai tyrimai pirmąkart lietuviškoje istoriografijoje pateikiami kaip alternatyva sovietiniam režimui. Nauja yra tai, kad tyrime siekta aprėpti intelektualų tiek socialinę, profesinę, tiek intelektinę, teorinę veiklą. Taip pat turėtų kitus tyrinėtojus sudominti šio darbo autoriaus pastebėta ir plačiau analizuota neformalių intelektualų grupių pilietiškumo dimensija ir gyvenimo šalia sistemos elgsenos modelis.

Darbe analizuojama intelektualo geba ir būtinybė kritiškai mąstyti disciplinarinės valdžios salygomis. Šios valdžios objektas yra visuomenės gyvenimas, populiacija, žmonių kūnai suprantami kaip vertingi ištekliai. Disciplinarinės valdžios uždavinys yra versti visuomenę augti tam tikra kryptimi, klasifikuoti, kategorizuoti individus taip, kad užtikrinti reguliarų išteklių atsinaujinimą; kai reikia – atsikratyti pertekliaus ir kontroliuoti jų augimą. Populiacija, suvokiama kaip resursai – žmogiškieji resursai, atsinaujinantys resursai – reikia prižiūrėt, kad jie nenunyktų, neišsivaikščiotų. Intelektualo funkcija šiuose procesuose yra nuolat konfrontuoti galios procesams, juos atpažinti, o atpažinus traukyti saitus. Foucault supranta, kad galios santykiai yra neišvengiami ir įvardina intelektualo laikyseną kaip stiprų pesimistinį aktyvizmą. Rezistencija svarbi kaip kritinio klausinėjimo kelias, kuris atveria suvokimą, kad visuomenės negalima aiškinti vien tik pasitelkus techninius galios apibrėžimus. Šis nuolatinės konfrontacijos kelias yra vienintelis, kuris lieka tikrąjam intelektualui. / This work analyzes the possibility and necessity to think critically in the condition of disciplinary government. The object of this kind of government is living in society, it’s population, bodies of people are understood as valuable resources. The aim of disciplinary government is to force society grow in certain direction, to classify and categorize individuals in such form, which can ensure renewal of regular resources. When we understand population as resources - human resources, renewal of resources – it is necessary supervise that these resources wouldn’t vanish. Intellectual’s function in these processes is to recognize and confront to these processes of power, to damage it’s bonds. Foucault understands the manifestations of modern disciplines in terms of power-knowledge relationship. These relationships of power are inevitable and designates intellectual’s attitude as strong pessimistic activism. Resistance is significant as the way of critical questioning, which opens perception, that we can’t treat society only in definitions of technical power. The ongoing confrontation is the only path that remains to the true intellectual.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)--University of Durban-Westville, 2003

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

A recurrent premise of post-war criticism is that World War II marked the end of the American working class novel. This thesis challenges this assumption and argues that the working class novel redeveloped throughout the 1940s and 1950s in response to major social, political, economic and cultural changes in the United States. A prime justification for the obituary on the working class novel was that after 1945 the United States no longer had class divisions. However, as the first two chapters of this study point out, such a view was promulgated by influential literary critics and social scientists who, as former Marxists, were keen to distance themselves from class politics. Insisting that the working class novel was hamstrung by a dogmatic Marxist politics and a fealty to social realism, these critics argued that the genre's relevance depended on the outdated politics and conditions of the 1930s. As such they were able to use literary criticism as a means of justifying their own ambiguous politics and deflecting any close scrutiny of their accommodation with the post-war liberal consensus. In a close examination of four writers in the subsequent chapters it is shown that, in fact, working class writers were extremely successful in adapting to post-war conditions. Harvey Swados, in his novel On the Line (1957) and in his journalism, provides crucial insights into the effects of the transition from a Fordist to a post-industrial society on the identity of the industrial worker. In The Dollmaker (1954) Harriette Arnow dramatises an important migration from the rural South to Detroit during World War II which exposes the ways in which American capitalism was able to diffuse a national working class identity. Chester Himes' novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), and his experiences as an African American writer in the 1940s, highlight the intersections between race (and racism) and class in the United States. Hubert Selby, in Last Exit to Brooklyn (1957), undermines the hegemonic ideology of post-war consumerism by drawing attention to the poverty and violence in an urban working class community. All these writers share a common concern with continuing, and re-developing, the dynamic and heterogeneous tradition of American working class cultural production.

I intend to analyze in the present study, the status of the intellectuals under varied state traditions. The Volga-Ural region was under the legacy of Chinggis Khan. In the thirteenth century with the invasion of Mongol-Tatar groups under the leadership of Chinggis Khan&amp / #65533 / s grandchild Batu Khan, the Volga-Bulghar state was removed and the Golden Horde was founded. By the collapse period of the Golden Horde at the end of the 14th century and at the beginning of the 15th century, the Khanates period began in the region: Kazan, Astrakhan and Kasim. The struggles among the khanates were used by Russia in her favor and these problems paved the way for inclusion of the region under Russian hegemony. Especially after the collapse of Kazan in 1552, a long period of Russianization and Christianization took place. In the Volga-Ural region, where there was no Islamic state, one observes a deep impact of Turco Mongol political culture, in which distributive economics based on power-sharing mechanisms prevailed, and a lively exchange of ideas among the intellectuals as well as conflicts and clashes became the norm. The Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, was formed with conquests and ideological aggregation, which led to a concentration of powr in the state. In such an environment, dynastic ideology determined the borders of intellectual life and the ways of expression of ideas. In the present study, my concern is on more on the interference of the state in the intellectual life.

The thesis examines the role that Australian graphic satirists play in the theatre of public life. The main focus of the thesis is on newspaper cartoonists but for the purposes of comparative analysis, there is a discussion of a representative selection of satiric texts across different media (essentially, television and radio) since the mid-1960s, and also an historical survey of the development of graphic satire from its origins during the Protestant Reformation in Europe. Apart from a small number of references, this study does not venture into the vast field of on-line satire, a topic more properly addressed in a separate scholarly investigation. Graphic satire in the medium of the newspaper is of particular interest because of its consistent production and wide circulation, its relative freedom from censorship and libel laws, and the ability of the cartoon image to condense and concentrate issues which would be too complex or defamatory in print or on television. Political cartooning as it is understood today emerged during the early nineteenth century, at about the same time as the modern newspaper and the profession of journalism, but graphic satire also has links with a venerable tradition of the artist as social critic and has historically been associated with movements for social justice and democracy. It is in the context of these latter associations that I consider political cartoonists as belonging to the sphere of the public intellectual. The discussion of cartoonists as public intellectuals is framed against a discourse of decline that has been circulating for more than a decade, acquiring an urgency in this country during the later years of the Howard administration. This declinist narrative covers a number of areas of cultural and political life and is not confined to the Australian context; as British writer Helen Small points out, it is “an increasingly transnational conversation” (02:1). Briefly outlined, there is a perception that the terms of public debate have narrowed; that citizens have become disengaged from the democratic process; that between the ‘celebrity intellectual’ and the tenured academic, the life of the mind is not what it used to be, and even political satire itself has been seen by some commentators as being in terminal decline. The different arguments about cultural and social decline can be placed under the more encompassing subject heading of an ongoing debate about democracy and in particular, whether it is functioning as well as it should. With the adoption of neo-liberalism as an overarching political ideology by most western governments in the early 1980s, anxieties about whether the principles of democracy were gradually being usurped or even eroded by the primacy of market values have gathered momentum during the past two decades. The volume of these concerns has been amplified in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent ‘war on terror’, with the state’s increased emphasis on security and control of its citizens being interpreted as threats to some of the basic tenets of the democratic system, such as free speech and the rule of law. In contrast to the various narratives of decline, my thesis proposes that democracy is still very well served by the kind of vigorous and long-standing practice of dissent that the public intellectual represents, and more specifically, the embodiment of this tradition in contemporary newspaper cartoonists. By definition, graphic satire questions and challenges the status quo and at least since Hogarth in the eighteenth century, it has always been a public art-form. Hogarth’s personal involvement in many of the social issues and philanthropic schemes of his day (such as anti-gin legislation and state care for orphans) also exemplifies an important aspect of the extra-professional work of graphic satirists which further links them to the public intellectual. A commitment to social activism and making use of the different platforms available (for example, public speaking and donating work to charities) in order to support, publicise or promote issues of social justice began with Hogarth and continues with contemporary Australian cartoonists.