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In 2010, for the first time since 1895, the Argentine census asked those living within its national territory if they were of African descent. While the inclusion of this question followed broader regional shifts to integrate questions on race and ethnicity into national censuses, this historic disjuncture is most astounding in Argentina. No country in Latin America has more successfully constructed itself as a nation donde no hay negros, where there are no blacks, than Argentina. Through a frame analysis of digital texts produced in Argentina between 2010 and 2012 regarding the new census question, this Master's thesis uncovers how government, media and Afro organizational actors understood the meaning of Afrodescendant and the purposes of the census question. As such, this research seeks to expand research on the African diaspora in the Americas by analyzing how racial politics of identification work in a nation-state of hegemonic whiteness. / text

Historians and Mormon scholars have largely ignored the African American experience in Utah during the latter half of the twentieth century. A close examination of Utah politics during the years 1960 to 1978 shows the profound influence of Mormonism and Latter-day Saint institutions in seemingly secular spaces, such as college campuses and state government. This work demonstrates how LDS theology and culture informed the sociopolitical landscape and contributed to white conservative resistance to racial equality readily found in Utah. Racial discrimination was not unique to Utah, but it did have its own particular flavor because of the predominance of Latter-day Saints in the state. This thesis explores the scholarship written about African Americans in Utah and elucidates the ways in which LDS theology and Church leadership extensively affected African American life in the Beehive State.

This report examines diasporic dialogues in Black concert dance focusing on dialogues between Brazil and the United States and analyzes how racial politics and cultural exchanges contributed to shape a Black aesthetic in Brazil. Since the beginning of the 20th century, both the presence/passage of US Black dancers/choreographers in Brazil and the presence/passage of Brazilian Black dancers/choreographers in the United States enabled the formation of socio-political networks among artists and cultural cross-fertilization between these countries. Katherine Dunham’s visit in Brazil and Mercedes Batista’s visit in the United States during the 1950s were formative of a Brazilian black concert dance and had left a lasting imprint in black modern dance in the U.S. as well. This report attempts a close reading of the dialogues between Dunham and Batista that shaped the dance techniques and repertoire that make up black modern and postmodern dance in the African diaspora. / text

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The National Labor Relations Act stands as one of the most influential pieces of labor legislation in the history of the United States. The Act defines the rights and responsibilities of both employers and employees. Furthermore, the National Labor Relations Act makes the State into the chief judicial body regarding labor disputes through the National Labor Relations Board. Chiefly concerned with the circumstances that led to the passage and affected the shaping of the Act, factors such as Communist organizing, racial politics of the Deep South, and internal division within the labor movement in the 1920s are examined. Specific case studies include the Auto-Lite Strike in Toledo, Ohio (1934), the Minneapolis Teamster Strike (1934), and the West Coast Longshoremen Strike (1934).

My dissertation is a foray into blues music's intricate web of racial taxonomies, an aspect that has been neglected by most existing studies of the genre. In particular, I am interested in significant changes that took place in the 1960s under which blues was reconfigured from "black" to "white" in its production and reception while simultaneously retaining a notion of authenticity that remained deeply connected with constructions of "blackness." In the larger context of the Civil Rights Movement and the burgeoning counterculture, audiences for blues music became increasingly "white" and European. In their romantic embrace of a poverty of choice, "white" audiences and performers engaged in discourses of authenticity and in the commodification, racialization and gendering of sounds and images as well as in the confluence of blues music's class origins. I argue that as "white" people started to listen to "black" blues, essentialist notions about "race" remained unchallenged and were even solidified in the process. By the end of the 1960s, moments of cross-racial communication and a more flexible approach to racialized sounds had been thwarted by nostalgia for and a reification of essentialist categories. This marked the emergence of a conservative blues culture that has continued into the present. Individual chapters focus on key figures, events and institutions that exemplify blues music's racial politics and transnational movements of the 1960s.

"Visualizing Race: Neoliberal Multiculturalism and the Struggle for Koreanness in Contemporary South Korean Television" investigates visual representations of multicultural subjects in both celebrity culture and the reality television genre to examine the struggle for Koreanness in contemporary Korean television. My aim is to explain the transformation from a modern monoracial Korea to a multicultural, global Korea as a national project of what I call "neoliberal multiculturalism" and to problematize the implicit tie between the two words, "neoliberal" and "multiculturalism." Using the category of mixed-race as an analytical window onto this cultural shift, I attempt to link the recent explosion of multiculturalism discourse in Korea to the much larger cultural, institutional, and ideological implications of racial globalization. To illustrate this shift, the dissertation analyzes both black and white mixed-race celebrities as well as ordinary multicultural subjects appearing on Korean reality programs. I examine historical archives, popular press sources, policy documents, and television programs in order to analyze them as an inter-textual network that is actively negotiating national identity. Utilizing the concept of neoliberal multiculturalism as an overarching framework, the dissertation explicates how concepts such as nationality, race, gender, class, and the television genre are intricately articulated; it also critically deconstructs the hegemonic notion of a multicultural, global Korea presented by the Korean media. I argue that Korean television deploys racial representations as a way to suture national anxiety over an increasing number of racial others and projects a multicultural fantasy towards Koreans. This interdisciplinary project contributes to several fields of study by explicating the changed cultural meaning of mixed-race in the age of globalization, defining the organic relation between the medium of television and racial representation, broadening our understanding of Asian multiculturalism and the racial politics in the region, and examining the particulars of ethnic nationalism appearing in the Korean media and popular culture. / text

This study examines the politics of identification in antiracist struggles and asks how people begin and sustain social movement work across lines of difference. The project follows a series of activists and public intellectuals to sites of conflict in order to explore how actors confront failures in solidarity by summoning people to understand their freedom as bound to antiracist struggles. In work by James Baldwin from the 1960s and work by three contemporary social movement organizations—Black Lives Matter, antiracist LGBTQ organization Southerners on New Ground (SONG), and immigrant justice organization #Not1More—actors construct shared forms of identification across racial lines using kinship language and references to the body. Undergirding these rhetorical and organizing strategies is a concept—boundness—with a history in black political thought; a paradigm in which people’s lives are understood to be co-constituted and their freedom bound together. The first chapter traces the concept of boundness in James Baldwin’s political thought and explores how boundness offers an alternative and embodied way to theorize racial identity, racialized violence, and interracial solidarity. Chapter II examines interviews with James Baldwin in 1963 and #BlackLivesMatter activists in 2014-2015 to explore how their overlapping interventions reorient public discussions about racial violence. Chapters III and IV examine how contemporary activists in SONG and #Not1More generate shared forms of identification across racial lines. Drawing on archival research and ethnography, this study employs a close reading approach to specific moments in political discourse and organizing to theorize how people on the ground are crafting and contesting forms of identification. Ultimately, this project offers an account of the ways in which forms of political identification are structured by ethical and emotional orientations, and contends that contestations over these structures are a primary site of politics. This dissertation includes previously published material (Chapter I). / 10000-01-01

Since the 1980s, the American federal government has devolved a wide array of crucial policy decisions - from transportation to welfare initiatives - to the state and local levels. With a decrease in federal aid and an increase in the number of tools available to lower tiers of government, scholars of American urban politics have suggested that cooperation among metropolitan jurisdictions could help address critical political and policy challenges, including inequities in municipal resources and unfettered suburban sprawl. This dissertation argues that metropolitan political segregation|that is, geographically-based political divisions - represents a serious obstacle to these partnerships and remains poorly understood. This project thus has two goals: to explain variations in metropolitan political segregation and explore their consequences for regional coalition-building. I first present a theory connecting America's unique racial geography to political segregation. I contend that racially segregated metropolitan areas with large minority population concentrations will experience more political segregation than their more homogenous peers. These political divisions will in turn hinder coalition-building surrounding critical metropolitan policies. Marshaling 1988 and 2000 precinct-level electoral data for every metropolitan area in the country, I find that racial demographics almost exclusively explain variations in political segregation, with more racially segregated, heavily black and Latino metropolitan areas exhibiting greater geographic political divisions. These rifts in turn have a potent impact on metropolitan policy outcomes. Taking advantage of an array of qualitative and quantitative data on mass transportation and affordable housing policy-making, I discover that greater political segregation constrains metropolitan coalition-building and spurs more fragmented policy outcomes. These findings have a disturbing implication: those regions with concentrated pockets of poverty - places most in need of metropolitan cooperation in the contemporary, heavily localized political climate - are the least able to forge partnerships around shared local policy goals.