The spread of democracy is one of the most important and impressive occurrences in Latin American politics in the last two decades. However, scholars may, and do, question the degree to which democratization has truly occurred and been institutionalized. This dissertation examines the quality of citizenship for Afro-Dominicans and Afro-Brazilians, groups that have been traditionally considered marginalized, with the belief that an analysis of the quality of citizenship for these peoples will make visible the depth of democratization in these two countries. The dissertation examines the citizenship of Afro-Dominicans and Afro-Brazilians by using two distinct models of citizenship: the first is a Liberal model which focuses on individual rights and negative freedoms that are protected by a state; the second is a Republican model which emphasizes positive rights, political activity and community. Combining empirical research and observations, secondary sources and statistics (when available), the dissertation finds that neither Liberal nor Republican versions of citizenship are adequately institutionalized for Afro-Dominicans and Afro-Brazilians. In an attempt to examine what sort of citizenship does exist for Afro-Dominicans and Afro-Brazilians, the dissertation finds that citizenship is ‘privatized’ and that this privatization is deepened by political culture and the adoption of neo-liberal economic programs. This privatization takes place on three fronts: first, power is largely extra-institutional and, despite democratization, political agendas and decisions are often orchestrated in private space; second, citizenship is considered an exclusive status, related to one's socio-economic identity, rather than an inclusive and universal political identity; third, services traditionally associated with the state have become cut as the state “down-sizes,” and NGOs and organs of civil society are now taking the place of the state on a micro-political level, in some areas.

The power of the system we call whiteness, as Toni Morrison points out in Playing in the Dark, has long resided in its invisibility—or, more specifically, in the invisibility of its reliance on the racialized Other in order to articulate what we take to be “the norm.” All of the issues and themes that we take to be particularly “American” rely upon the presence that Morrison names “Africanist,” and that embodied presence carries the burden of our culture's anxiety about the unpredictable, explosive, vulnerable and mortal condition of all bodies. Further, our conception of the U.S. as a nation and of whiteness as a racial category both rely upon fictionalized instances of racial contact that the reader finds sentimentally “touching.” In this dissertation, I argue that contemporary ethnic American novelists Toni Morrison, Chang-Rae Lee and Philip Roth have designed their narratives to revise the terms of that contact and revise the nature of that “touching.” In so doing, they seek to revise our ability to incorporate their narratives into a U.S. nationalism that valorizes whiteness. Generally speaking, works by “minority” authors are read in terms of what I call “ethical content”; that is, they are used to explain or elucidate historical injustices or consequences of difference such as “double-consciousness.” Such readings, ostensibly presented to “touch” the reader with a sense of outrage at the consequences of racism, often inspire much less feeling than that and always leave the structure of “whiteness” intact. I read Morrison, Lee and Roth as challenging this use of their narratives by structuring them in such a way as to make “ethical contact” with the reader. This contact is designed to translate the sympathetic relationship historically set up between whiteness and the racial other into a phenomenological relationship wherein whiteness is revealed to be not only visible, but touchable. In other words, these narratives reach out to the reader in order to implicate each of us in the material histories and racialized present that the characters (and authors) must contend with, and that includes the ghosts and the grief that attach themselves to racialized bodies.

This dissertation presents a case study of journalism as persuasion through a triangulated examination of ABC 20/20's story "Hollywood's Unlikely Hero" (December 1998), which reports on the death penalty case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. The methodology includes rhetorical analysis, experimental design, and focus group audience research. It also examines the impact of a media literacy intervention---showing the video "Framing an Execution: the Media and Mumia Abu-Jamal"---on audience perceptions of the 20/20 story. This study begins with an introduction addressing the interplay of race, media representation of crime, and record levels of incarceration in the U.S. It then provides an account of the 1982 murder trial of Mumia Abu-Jamal in connection with the killing of a Philadelphia police officer. It places the genre of television news magazines in their economic and cultural setting. Following further discussion of the theoretical foundations of the study in rhetoric, cultural studies, media framing, and cultivation analysis, the paper reports the findings of the three analytical approaches. The rhetorical analysis of the 20/20 story draws from Aristotle's categories persuasion--- ethos, pathos, and logos---and from Kenneth Burke's dramatist pentad. The experimental design portion of the study involved the administration of pretest and posttest questionnaires to some 333 college students in Massachusetts, separated into three different treatment groups: one viewing the 20/20 story only; one viewing the "Framing an Execution" video only; and one viewing both videos. Four focus groups were also conducted in which participants viewed first the 20/20 story and then the "Framing an Execution" video and discussed each. The groups were divided by age and race: adult African-American; college-student African-American; white adult; and white college-student. The study situates the rise of law-and-order rhetoric and the decline in journalistic standards within trends toward conservative consolidation of political power and increasing concentration of media ownership and the commercialization of news programming. It concludes with a plea to journalists to regenerate an ethical commitment to professional standards of responsibility to report fairly and accurately, and it argues forcefully for the need to institute critical media literacy education at all levels of the educational system.

Community Acts: Locating Pilipino American Theater and Performance explores Pilipino American subject and community formation through the creative work of Pilipino American theater artists from the 1970s to the present. I contend that performance functions as the paradigmatic site of resistance and contestation in Pilipino American community formation. Community Acts locates the emergence of Pilipino American theater in multiple geopolitical and critical contexts, and is thus informed by studies of theater in U.S. diasporic communities of color and by studies of theater in the Philippines. This study accounts for a transnational formation of Pilipino American culture, from the historical legacy of multiple colonialisms to the current movements of global capitalism. Chapter One focuses on Sining Bayan, a theater group that existed as a cultural arm to the progressive political organization Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino (KDP). In its eight-year existence, Sining Bayan was the only theater group that consistently critiqued U.S. imperial practices from the perspective of working-class Pilipino America. Chapter Two examines the early works of two performance artists and writers, Jessica Hagedorn and Paul Stephen Lim, to foreground their construction of Pilipino American subjectivity as always mediated through multiple and often competing racial formations. In Chapter Three, I read the works of contemporary theater productions of Pilipino American artists vis a vis the long-running Broadway show Miss Saigon. I argue that there is a mutually generative relationship between what is often produced as oppositional sites of mainstream productions such as Miss Saigon and feminist performances. Chapter Four discusses the formation of professional and community-based theater companies in the 1990s. I argue that the establishment of organizations such as the Ma-yi Theater Ensemble and QBd Ink both provides and problematizes the project and ideology of community structures. By focusing on different contemporary artistic mobilizations around performance and Pilipino racial identity, this project foregrounds a new archive in the study of Pilipino diasporas, both in the U.S. and elsewhere. Community Acts thus extends and contributes to the growing body of scholarly writings on race and performativity, as well as the role of community-based cultural projects in social change.

The various elements that make up the individual's sense of cultural identity require a certain amount of negotiation and management in even the most straightforward of circumstances. This is particularly true for people who have multiple and/or contrasting identity claims. Group interviews with 72 allophone and anglophone Montreal residents were used to find patterns in strategies for negotiating these claims, given that these populations must contend with competing discourses about nation, language, ethnicity/race, religion, etc. A number of strategies were located and discussed, including modification of memory and performativity, strategic blindness, constitutive contradiction, constitutive contrast, and identification through exclusion. Individuals facing greater degrees of contradiction required increasing levels of cognitive labour and more sophisticated strategies of negotiation to make sense of their cultural identities; failure to do so was marked by feeling of isolation and alienation. Issues of “difference” and “authenticity” marked participants' discussions of identity, and a passionate attachment to Montreal was revealed to transcend for many any feelings of belongingness to either Canada and/or Québec.

This dissertation proposes a culturally-informed, communication approach to the study of Latina/o unity in the United States by exploring the politics, purposes, and problematics of Latina/o coherence and charting the negative regimes of representation that define Latinidad in general market cultural expressions. The author argues for a consideration of theories of articulation and classification to address the unifying problematic in expressions of Latinidad in mainstream culture, and discusses different domains that communication scholars interrogate to study the possibilities and consequences of Latina/o coherence. This dissertation investigates the articulation of Latinidad within a United States national imaginary at the turn of the 21st century by conducting a focused study of Americanos, a multimedia documentary project undertaken by Edward J. Olmos and his partners, Time Warner and the Smithsonian Institution. Americanos attempts to combat the negative stereotypes and marginalization that characterize Latina/o media representation by using positive and depoliticized imagery. Informed by a review of the emergent field of Latina/o media studies and through semiotic textual analysis and audience research in the cultural studies tradition, this dissertation finds that the positive lens of Americanos, like other instances of the so-called "Latin pop explosion," works within liberal multiculturalism to produce a transcultural and celebratory Latinidad without addressing structural power. Interviews with visitors to the Americanos photography exhibit in Los Angeles demonstrate the seduction of positive imagery, but Chicana/o college student responses also show how cultural competence can cultivate more critical and oppositional readings of difference.

This study examines how South African labour markets changed during the first decade in the post-Apartheid era. The results show the emergence of a new form of racial inequality, as witnessed by sharply divergent patterns in the returns to education between Whites and Blacks. Moreover, while this has occurred, the incomes of Blacks are shown to have been far more stagnant over the first five years after democracy than typically thought to be the case, with chance events playing a major role in generating changes that are observed. Finally, chance appears to also be strongly related to changes in employment status, though in this case, its effect is mediated through access to parental resources and risk-sharing networks. These findings suggest that without active policy on a variety of fronts, dealing with persistent labour market discrimination, the poor quality of black schooling, and unemployment and social security provision, little change can be expected in the near future for the vast majority of South Africans. Indeed, the results suggest that emerging trends in South African labour markets could possibly even reverse gains made over the past decade in some areas of social service provision.

In this qualitative study, I examined the experiences of second-generation, Chinese American women who are between the ages of 20 and 30. In particular, I examined the experiences of these women with cultural stereotypes and parental expectations. A sample of 39 women completed surveys. Five of these women also participated in interviews, which served as the basis for detailed biographies focusing on (1) the women's views of existing stereotypes and parental expectations and (2) the effects of those stereotypes and parental expectations on their lives. Most of the participants described compelling stereotypes they have encountered in the dominant culture including the “model minority” stereotype as well as gender-specific stereotypes such as the perception that Asian women are exotic, sexual toys. Daughters described their parents as expecting them to attain financial security, practice filial piety, marry acceptable men, and be thin and feminine. Daughters who are the oldest children in the family also described expectations that they should care for their younger siblings and help their parents navigate the English-speaking world. In addition, the participants expressed mixed feelings about the stereotypes and parental expectations. Building upon the surveys and the interviews, questions and directions regarding future research are proposed.

This dissertation explores works by 1.5 (immigrant or refugee children who were born in Viet Nam but spent their childhood in the U.S.) or second-generation Vietnamese Americans or Vietnamese living in the diaspora that are written in or translated into English, between the years of 1990 to 2003. Given the heterogeneity of authors whose works I examine, my dissertation analyzes the literature of this globalized Vietnamese community, paying particular attention to members who have made the U.S. their home yet may view themselves as transnational, diasporic subjects. My research is also based upon various genres of literature. I use texts such as autobiographies and memoirs as well as fictional novels, short stories, and poetry. They also include articles and essays from the internet and in various mainstream newspapers and “alternative” presses and journals. The reason for looking at different venues of documentation is due to the scarcity of published writings by 1.5 and second-generation Vietnamese American authors. By utilizing both internet sites and materials in print media and juxtaposing these documents with published books and anthologies, I show the contradictions, reveal the fissures, and disclose the multiplicity of voices of these 1.5 and second-generation Vietnamese American writers. Especially vital to this study is how writers who are part of the 1.5 or second-generation are invested in creating new models of representation for reading, writing, and understanding their respective communities. The reason that I study the ways in which these writers interrogate, negotiate, and re-define both themselves and communities in which they live is largely due to the perception of the dominant U.S. culture and its fixed view of Viet Nam and the Vietnamese people. The dominant U.S. cultural perception sees those living in Viet Nam and in the diaspora as representatives of a twenty-year war that was fought more than 25 years ago. In my research, I argue that these 1.5 and second-generation Vietnamese diasporic writers challenge this hegemonic image.

In recent decades, increased attention has been turned to tensions and conflicts between African Americans and American Jews on the individual, organizational, and societal levels. When investigating the perceptions each group has of the other, however, research has focused disproportionately on African American perceptions of Jews (and specifically on African American anti-Semitism) without a corresponding indepth investigation of Jewish attitudes, opinions, and beliefs about African Americans and how Jews make meaning of the relationship or conflict. The current study, which was exploratory and descriptive, employed a qualitative research methodology and attempted to identify, describe, and analyze intergenerational Jewish perceptions the concepts of “race” and “white privilege,” and perceptions of African Americans and the relationships and/or conflict between African Americans and Jewish Americans. The study used a methodology consisting of two one-and-one-half hour interview session with each participant. The interview framework was consistent with, for example, Coffey and Atkinson, 1996; Marshall and Rossman, 1998; Maxwell, 1996; Patton, 1980; Seidman, 1998. It provided the opportunity to delve deeply into the often subtle themes expressed by research participants, and provided a greater understanding of their lived experiences and the ways they made meaning of these experiences in their own words. This methodology also helped in examining the ways in which people's experiences interacted with social and institutional forces, and aided in discovering the interconnections between and among individuals within a shared context and between generations. The study had as its theoretical foundation a taxonomy of intergroup conflict theory based on four distinct though interrelated levels: Realistic-Group-Conflict Theory, Sociopsychological Theories of Intergroup Conflict, Social Identity Theory, and Theories of Cross-Cultural Styles in Conflict. Research participants included sixteen Jewish Americans (primarily of Ashkenazic heritage), with an equal number of females and males of disparate ages (from 19 to 56), and across a wide spectrum of Jewish religious affiliations (from Orthodox Hasidic to Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, to those approaching Secular). This study will contribute to the educational literature base, and will it hold theoretical and practical significance for classroom educators, conflict resolution and mediation specialists, and community-based coalition organizers. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)