Stuttgart, Univ., Diss., 2008.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1997. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [264]-299).

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2008. / Title from title page (Digital Archive@GSU, viewed June 21, 2010) Pearl McHaney, Renée Schatteman, committee chairs; Audrey Goodman, committee member. Includes bibliographical references (p. 80-81).

Since 1992, most US transnational adoptions have occurred between White American parents and female babies born in China. Many of these adopted girls grow up in the US as a racial minority, but when visiting their birth country they become the racial majority. I collected both qualitative and quantitative data from Mandarin language learners during a summer language program in China to find the similarities and differences among six adopted and 11 non-adopted American adolescents. The data reveal that adoptees are initially perceived to be insiders for racially belonging in China, but cultural and linguistic differences place them as outsiders. Most adoptees fit in-between belonging and not belonging in Chinese society by attempting to "pass" as Chinese citizens in public spaces. Their accounts emphasize how race, nationality, and adoptivity contribute to larger themes for identity development and belonging in "third spaces" across globalized contexts.

Imagine for a moment waking up one morning to find that what or with whom you had come to identify racially was built on a foundation of ambiguities, silences, deceptions and sacred secrets. This scenario offers snapshot of Effa Louisa Brooks Manley’s life on the color line. Manley, former co-owner of the Negro League Baseball franchise (1935-1948), the Newark Eagles, disrupts American notions about what it means to be Black or white. A white mother and two black stepfathers raised her with her siblings as a Negro. However, it was not until Manley was a teenager that her mother revealed to her that her biological father also racially identified as white. This study examines the way Effa Manley performed identity at the boundaries of blackness and whiteness from the turn of the 20th century through 1945. I argue that Manley was more than a white woman who simply passed for Black. She reconciled being Black and becoming white, by exploiting the American mythology of race and culturally identified as a Negro. I explore how her self-identification complicates racial and ethnic belonging, by analyzing the identity choices she made while traversing the fault lines of race in her early life as well as the way she performed identity in the interviews she gave before her death in 1981.

The literature on compressive parameter estimation has been mostly focused on the use of sparsity dictionaries that encode a discretized sampling of the parameter space; these dictionaries, however, suffer from coherence issues that must be controlled for successful estimation. To bypass such issues with discretization, we propose the use of statistical parameter estimation methods within the Approximate Message Passing (AMP) algorithm for signal recovery. Our method leverages the recently proposed use of custom denoisers in place of the usual thresholding steps (which act as denoisers for sparse signals) in AMP. We introduce the design of analog denoisers that are based on statistical parameter estimation algorithms, and we focus on two commonly used examples: frequency estimation and bearing estimation, coupled with the Root MUSIC estimation algorithm. We first analyze the performance of the proposed analog denoiser for signal recovery, and then link the performance in signal estimation to that of parameter estimation. Numerical experiments show significant improvements in estimation performance versus previously proposed approaches for compressive parameter estimation.

In this thesis, I expand considerations of diaspora as not only a migration of people and cultures but a migration of thought. Specifically, I demonstrate that literary representations of diaspora produce what I consider to be an epistemological migration, challenging the idea that race and culture are stable and impermeable and offering instead racial and cultural fluidity. I assert that this causal relationship is best exemplified by narratives of racial passing written by diasporic writers. Using Homi Bhabha’s concepts of mimicry, hybridity, and ambivalence, I analyze Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird and Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light, arguing that Boy, Snow, Bird’s narrative form is a form of mimicry that repeats European and African literary traditions and subverts Eurocentrism, while Playing in the Light is a “Third Space” in which to accept notions of the non-categorical fluidity of race. Through this analysis, I draw particular attention to Oyeyemi’s and Wicomb’s unique abilities to refract notions of race, rather than presumably reflect a system of strict categories, and, ultimately, I argue that these novels transcend the realm of literature, existing as empowering calls for society’s modifications of its racial perceptions.

Continuation marks are a programming language feature which generalize stack inspection. Despite its usefulness, this feature has not been adopted by languages which rely on stack inspection, e.g., for dynamic security checks. One reason for this neglect may be that continuation marks do not yet enjoy a transformation to the plain λ-calculus which would allow higher-order languages to provide continuation marks at little cost. We present a CPS-like transformation from the call-by-value λ-calculus augmented with continuation marks to the pure call-by-value λ-calculus. We discuss how this transformation simplifies the construction of compilers which treat continuation marks correctly. We document an iterative, feedback-based approach using Redex. We accompany the transformation with a meaning-preservation theorem.

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