Faced with an economic crisis following the French and Indian War, the British Parliament, along with a young and inexperienced King George III changed its longstanding policy towards the North American colonies. Prior to 1763, Parliament allowed the colonies to generally govern themselves. After 1763, Parliament began to pass legislation aimed at increasing revenue received from the colonies. As the colonies protested these new taxes on constitutional grounds Parliament began a process of implementing and repealing different attempts at controlling the economic system in the colonies. Due to differing interpretations of the British Constitution regarding Parliament's authority over the colonies, resistance to the change in policy by Parliament escalated in the 1760s and 1770s. It is this difference in interpretation that eventually led the colonists to open rebellion in 1775.

The religious book club provides a fascinating location for observing the social construction of reality. This study sets out to discover how religious identities affected reading and how reading affected religious identity through examining social reading. Seven book groups, all in the Boston area, participated. Three groups were affiliated with a church or synagogue, three had no religious affiliation, and the seventh was transitioning away from a religious affiliation. Fieldwork within the groups and individual interviews are analyzed using grounded theory techniques. All readers used reading to pursue aims such as relationships, educational status, and transformations of identity, but only readers within the religiously affiliated groups experienced an "inflection" of those aims. While readers in nonreligious book groups developed friendships, the religious book group members developed a sense of congregational identity. Nonreligious group readers sought to be "well read" religious group members sought to be articulate believers. Many readers sought to transform themselves through books, but religious groups transformed their members through emphasizing boundaries and identities, constructing shared definitions of "religion." Nonreligious group members were unconcerned with tying book club identity to personal identity. Religious groups, through confirming and challenging definitions of religion, developed religious identities that were expected to have deeper relevance to individual lives. Individual religious identity did not inflect the aims of reading, since religious individuals in nonreligious groups did not develop their sense of belonging, status, or identity around religious constructions. Within religious groups, it was not religious doctrines, ethics, or awe that produced the religious inflection of reading's aims. Only the affiliation with a formal religious institution was necessary. This demonstrates that religion functions not as a foundational worldview for its adherents, but as a thin container that offers the opportunity to develop a deeper, more durable identity. Despite reading's construction as a primarily individual activity, these findings also demonstrate how the social infrastructure of reading can have important effects.

The small number and diffuse distribution of sites with intact Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene occupations in the Southeastern United States consequently makes examining Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene settlement patterning in the region difficult (Goodyear 1999). The Hester Site (22MO569), located in northeastern Mississippi, contains intact Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene deposits that can potentially afford archaeologists with a better understanding of late Pleistocene/early Holocene settlement in the region (Brookes 1979; Goodyear 1999:463-465). Investigations at Hester by Brookes (1979) revealed a stratified site containing artifacts that represented the late Paleoindian through Woodland periods in the Southeastern United States. Burris (2006) developed an alternative typology by re-analyzing the Hester biface assemblage, which demonstrated four discrete occupations at the Hester site. I use formation theory to evaluate the degree to which post-depositional processes have impacted the deposits at the Hester site. I have determined that the Hester site has not been significantly altered by post-depositional processes.

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No description available.

This dissertation examines Asian North American rearticulations of the inorganic—a quality that has historically been assigned to Asians, rendering them counterfeit, abstract or not-quite-human—in new media, film and literature. By analyzing circulations of Asian North American disassembled body parts, “copies,” and gendered inter/faces, I argue that the excess, failures and ambivalence of Asian North American labour and performance constitute virtual modes of racialization that disrupt neoliberal, postracial temporalities in the Information Age. Asian American studies has held in tension its critiques of the West’s monopoly of liberal humanism in techno-Orientalist narratives (David S. Roh, Betsy Huang and Greta A. Niu) and the oppositional strategies of reappropriating techno-Orientalist tropes. My project does not seek to recuperate the Asian North American subject from the dehumanizing processes of fragmentation, surplus reproduction or abstraction—an impulse described by Rachel C. Lee as returning the “extracted body part” to the racialized “whole” in order to resolve anxieties about subjective “incoherence” or cultural inauthenticity. Instead, I turn to modes of inorganic life that do not produce an agential, autonomous Asian North American subject, but engender racializing disassemblages that work out survival and wellbeing within the neoliberal, abstracting pulls of the Information Age. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Discovered on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the Little Midden site (8BR1933) is an archaeological site on the coast of the Indian River Culture Area. Previous research in this poorly-understood culture area has identified three types of sites: habitation sites, procurement camps, and single episodes sites. Along the Indian River Culture Area's coast, almost all of the archaeological sites have proven to be procurement camps. While the preliminary analysis of the Little Midden site's assemblage suggested that it, like other coastal sites, was a procurement camp, finds such as imported sherds, ochre, and lithics, indicated that it may have been a habitation site. The focus of this thesis is to test the hypothesis that the Little Midden site was a habitation site, as defined by previous researchers. A formal and functional analysis was undertaken on the 154 ceramic rims from the Little Midden site in order to determine the site's function. Models based on archaeological data, ethnohistoric data, and archaeological analogies were created to develop expected characteristics of a ceramic assemblage for each type of site. Tests of diversity, tests that analyze the size of the site's cooking vessels, and an examination that tests the continuity of use at the site were utilized to determine which model the Little Midden site's assemblage best fit. The ceramic results were equivocal. In many ways the Little Midden site's ceramic assemblage met the expectations for a habitation site. However, in other aspects the Little Midden site's ceramic assemblage better fit the expectations developed for a procurement camp. Although this is true, additional data from the site's faunal assemblage suggests that the site was a seasonal procurement camp during the spring and summer months. Combining the ceramic and faunal data, the Little Midden site seems to reflect a large procurement site that was occupied year-after-year to exploit the marine resources, which differs from the inconsistent occupations of other procurement camps. These results demonstrate that previous classifications of site function in the Indian River Culture Area do not describe the full range of human subsistence and settlement behaviors that have been documented archaeologically.

This thesis argues that consumerism and the mass media wield an unparalleled influence over contemporary North American society, and that these forces constitute the primary means through which identity is constituted. The historical and theoretical developments that have led to the foregrounding of these forces are outlined in the introduction - developments, it is argued, that are intrinsically connected to the social upheava1 that characterized America in the late 1960's and early 1970's, while their presence in and effects on the fiction of four contemporary North American writers - Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Bret Easton Ellis and Douglas Coupland - are examined in the main body of the thesis. Chapter I focuses on Pynchon whose novels, it is argued, are the product of a uniquely post-1960's America, which mourns the sacrifice of traditional ideals to the corporate mindset which has been prevalent since ths 1980's Pynchon's dominant metaphor for the direction in which he believes American society to be moving is the thermodynamic concept of entropy, which stipulates that all prqress is towards death. His novels abound with characters who disintegrate due to the information overload fostered by their media-based world. However, he retains his faith that a return to historical values and traditions will stem and even reverse the entropic tide DeLillo, a close contemporary of Pynchon's, draws on a different aspect of the legacy of the 1960's, for his writing is overshadowed by the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy and the years of turbulence that ensued. His novels are ultimately more pessimistic because his characters do not succeed in escaping from the repressive narratives of consumerism and the mass media in order to reassert their own personalities. One reason for this failure, it is argued, is that DeLillo's characters represent a metaphorical dramatization of the dichotomy between the modernist desire for structure and the postmodernist embrace of fluidity and uncertainty. The fictional characters of the younger authors, Ellis and Coupland, inhabit this postmodern world where all experience has been rendered depthless and traditional ontological and epistemological certainties have been collapsed Ellis' characters fluctuate between the extremes of apathy and violence as they search for a way of preventing their psyches from disintegrating amidst the surrounding chaos. Neither one of these options brings - any relief. Coupland is more optimistic about the ability of his characters to survive and even prosper in the contemporary world. He arms them with the linguistic and technological skills necessary to adapt to the rapid social and technological changes. Most importantly of all, he draws on the sense of objectivity fostered by his own background as a Canadian in order to provide them with an alternative and a sense of escape from the media-saturated environment of the American West Coast. What is perhaps most remarkable about these four authors as a group is that in spite of their obvious insight into the nature of the contemporary postmodern world, they are unwilling - or perhaps even unable - to fully relinquish their hold on a number of traditional metanarratives, most notably the ideal of the stable, supportive family unit. This implies a degree of uncertainty and perhaps even of fear on their parts about fully committing to the fluidity of contemporary culture.

This thesis explores the intersections of culture, nationalism, and neoliberal globalization through examination of the construction of Mexican identity in Canada after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. I evaluate how visual art has been used by the governments of Canada and Mexico to negotiate new bilateral relationships in the face of increased North American integration under free trade. My study includes analysis of two Canada-based exhibitions, “Mexican Modern Art, 1900-1950” and “Panoramas: The North American Landscape in Art.” Framing my discussion within the larger history of North American integration, I argue that these two exhibitions are part of a larger exchange in the area of cultural diplomacy between Canada and Mexico, which was especially prominent at the turn of the millennium. These case studies provide a means to assess the manipulation of culture, the creation of a new North American identity, and the management of national/ist narratives within the larger project of neoliberal globalization. Critically situating my study within the current discourse of globalization theory, I contend that artworks in these exhibitions were positioned in a manner to positively reinforce new trade relationships under NAFTA. / Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2008-08-20 15:05:45.256

[pt] O artista norte-americano Robert Morris é conhecido sobretudo como escultor, mas sua obra abrange uma diversidade de meios, procedimentos e materiais, dentre os quais a dança. Morris esteve diretamente envolvido com grupos de dança entre o final da década de 1950 e meados da década de 1960, período em que participou do que foram talvez os dois mais importantes focos de pesquisa em dança, nos Estados Unidos, para a sua geração: as atividades que se desenvolveram em São Francisco, ao redor da professora e dançarina Ann Halprin, e as atividades que, em Nova York, resultaram da formação do grupo Judson Dance Theater. Nesse período, além de atuar como dançarino em trabalhos de outros artistas, Morris criou um pequeno mas significativo conjunto de trabalhos de dança. A tese toma esse conjunto como base para um estudo da obra do artista e procura vê- la, em grande parte, como desdobramento de experiências e questões surgidas no âmbito da dança, em diálogo com o seu concomitante envolvimento na pintura, no desenho e na escultura. Discutindo alguns dos pontos principais desse diálogo - como o reducionismo minimalista, os procedimentos de tarefa e instruções, a ênfase na temporalidade e na literalidade da ação corporal - e alguns de seus conceitos centrais - como estado de dança, forma vazia e anti-forma - , a tese se propõe a ampliar as possibilidades de análise e compreensão de um momento crucial não só para a formação e o curso subseqüente da obra de Morris, mas também para a constituição do campo ampliado da arte contemporânea. / [en] The North American artist Robert Morris is known mostly as a sculptor, but his work encloses a diversity of means, procedures and materials among which dance. Morris was directly involved with dance groups between the end of the decade of 1950 until mid 1960, period in which he participated in what were maybe the two most important focuses of research in dance, in the United States, for his generation: the activities that were developed in San Francisco related to the professor and dancer Ann Halprin, and activities in New York City resulting from the formation of the group Judson Dance Theater. In this period, aside of acting as dancer in works from other artists, Morris created a small but significant set of dance works. The thesis considers this set as the basis for the study of the artist work and strives to see it, mainly, as a deployment of the experiences and questions arisen in the scope of dance, in dialogue with his concomitant involvement in painting, drawing and sculpture. Discussing some of the main points in this dialogue - as the minimalist reductionism, the procedures of tasks and instructions, the emphasis in the temporality and in the literality of the corporal action - and some of its central concepts - such as dance state, blank form and anti form - the thesis intends to extend the possibilities of analysis and comprehension of a crucial moment not only for the formation and the subsequent course of Morris work but also for the constitution of the expanded field of contemporary art.