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The intent of this thesis is to discuss the manner in which four black newspapers covered the U.S. Masters Tournament, hosted annually at the Augusta National Golf Club, Georgia, from 1994 through 2001. The four black newspapers include two from the North, the New Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, and two from the South, the Atlanta Voice and the Birmingham Times. It is my contention that U.S. Masters coverage in the aforementioned black papers is dependent upon the presence of Tiger Woods. Without Woods' participation at the Masters, coverage of the event would be diminished in the four black newspapers. The years 1994 through 2001 (excluding the Birmingham Times which was only microfilmed to 1999) have been analyzed in each of the four newspapers in order to present my case. The thesis proves that to the four black newspapers Tiger Woods is the deciding factor in its Masters coverage.

This study analyzes the rhetoric of William "Parson" Brownlow during the Civil War era. Within the pages of the Whig, Brownlow's famous newspaper, he created a fixed image of African Americans. Brownlow argued that when removed from slavery, people of African descent naturally became barbaric, and thus slavery was needed to ensure the safety of the white population. Despite this consistency in racial thought, Brownlow, through the course of the 1850s shifted from defending slavery as a necessary evil to promoting slavery as an unqualified blessing in the years before the Civil War. Furthermore, during Brownlow's governorship of Tennessee during Reconstruction, Brownlow argued that slavery was economically deleterious to poor white farmers. These findings have important implications for the history of Appalachia. Most specifically, Brownlow's racist rhetoric suggests that race perceptions in East Tennessee were not significantly separable from the race sentiments of the larger South.

This study examines recurring motifs and personas in hip-hop. Interviews with influential hip-hop scholars, writers and music industry personnel were conducted and analyzed using qualitative methods. Interview subjects were selected based on their insider knowledge as music critics, hip-hop scholars, ethnomusicologists, publicists, and music industry positions. The vast majority of constructed imagery in hip-hop is based on a single persona, the gangsta. This qualitative analysis reveals why gangsta personas and motifs have become the de facto imagery of hip-hop. Gangsta imagery is repeatedly presented because it sells, it is the most readily-available role, and because of music industry pressures. This study is significant because gangsta imagery impacts African American social knowledge and the generalized perception of blackness. Gangsta imagery has also served to alienate black culture and has caused rifts in the African American community.

My research examines the enslaved black woman's reclamation of self through the use of voice and resistance from enslavement into freedom. I argue that the enslaved black woman's voice was one that grew stronger and louder, in an effort to have her story heard, through her attempts of reclamation of self and transition from slave to a free woman. I begin with an introduction to the purpose of my research. Chapter one describes my approach to my research. Chapter two describes the conditions of slavery for black women. Chapter three describes enslaved black women's mechanisms of resistance. Chapter four examinations the reclamation of self in slavemade quilts and the controversial Underground Railroad Quilt Code. Chapter five examines the reclamation of voice in Harriet Jacobs' narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written under a pseudonym, Linda Brent, after she escaped from slavery. Chapter six examines the reclamation of womanhood is Dr. Anna Julia Cooper's text, A Voice from the South. My conclusion describes how these historical events are still relevant to present-day society.

The scholarly consensus is that the early essays “Il mare dell’oggettività” and “La sfida al labirinto” are two of the most important Italo Calvino wrote on his literary poetics, influencing the metaphors and problematics of his entire corpus: the sea of objectivity, the labyrinth, chaotic flux, a rational cogito subjectivity, binary oppositions etc. The essays were made available to a general public in the collection Una pietra sopra in 1980, part of a selection of texts handpicked by Calvino himself. Curiously, the 1986 English translation titled The Uses of Literature does not contain these important and influential essays, making them unavailable to an Anglophone audience. These essays are here now translated, accompanied by a critical commentary by the translator about their relevance and importance to Calvino’s corpus. The problematics discussed in these essays would re-emerge, with remarkable consistency, in the metaphorical imagery Calvino deployed throughout his career. Nevertheless, Calvino evolves the problematics significantly throughout his career, almost inverting his original stance. Rather than this being an inversion, however, the translator argues that Calvino’s evolution represents a dialectical movement propelled by contradiction, and that therein lies the actual poetics or the stylized mode of thought that these essays inaugurated. Viewing the essays in this light renders them, and Calvino’s entire corpus, ripe for dialogic encounter and collision with otherwise parallel philosophical traditions and schools of thought.

AbstractThis final essay in religious studies at Malmö Lärarutbildningen (Teacher’s education) is a minor field study (MFS) carried out in Ghana about Trokosi. Trokosi is a tradition, system and practice where young girls are given to village shrine priests as sexual and domestic slaves, or "wives of the gods", in compensation for offenses allegedly committed by a member of the girl's family. My main research question has been: What are the thoughts of the victims as well as the rescuers of Trokosi thoughts about the Trokosi tradition, system and practice? The thesis is based on a minor field study, observations and interviews. I observed the work at International Needs Network Ghana (INNG) and their work with Trokosi mainly focusing on the International Needs Vocational Training Centre (INVTC). At INVTC former Trokosi get the opportunity of becoming independence and self-sufficient - ke te pam tem eng. In this essay I have interviewed two opponents to Trokosi, in this essay called the rescuers, as well as one victim of Trokosi. In my interviews, the only person who criticized the theory and the religion behind Trokosi was the victim, a person who was born into this belief system. INNG’s critics are not about the theory behind Trokosi but how it is practised. Applying of feminist perspective this thesis focuses religious and cultural practices, in this case Trokosi, as a part of a larger system that is limiting women’s lives. In addition, post colonial theory may contribute to the analysis of “third world women’s own struggle and aspiration for independence. There are different views and perspectives on Trokosi and despite Ghana’s constitution and other documents that forbid this type of practice it is still vital. This indicates that there are more factors to consider. For instance overall patriarchal structures and post colonial experiences. Information and education is essential for the transformation of Trokosi in order to favour women’s right especially in the fields of human- and women’s rights.

The hypothesis of this study is that there is a relationship between race attitudes and "denominocentrism, " and with certain social categories, e.g., age, social class, income, education, etc., in the Church of the Brethren in the Pacific Coast Region. If a relationship can be identified and analyzed, the results will be of value as tools in helping to understand, predict, and change human behavior. It might be further suggested that if there is a strong relationship between attitudes and certain social categories in the church, attitudes of the Brethren on these issues, and perhaps on many more, are, to a large extent, conditioned by, if not the direct outgrowth of, certain socio-economic factors.

The Nazi violence did not have its origins only in the brutality of the First World War or radical nationalist ideologies, but also in European colonialism. Hence, the goal of this thesis is to demonstrate that colonial processes were fundamental to the origins of the Holocaust. To prove this, I applied the content analysis to detect colonial discourse (stereotype, ambivalence, and mimicry) in three legislations from different contexts, which prohibited sexual relations and marriages between races. The documents analyzed exemplified the segregationist thinking of each period of colonization. Portuguese laws from the beginning of modernity demonstrate the transition from religious to racist thought. Analyzing German Southwest Africa, there is the application of racist pseudoscience, and finally, in Nazism, a mixture of both, but also an evolution of colonial discourse. At the end, I proved the existence of colonial discourse in the Nuremberg Laws, demonstrating how earlier colonialisms influenced the Holocaust.

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