This thesis explores the ways in which modern history-writing practices reiterate race-based categories of citizenship. To investigate these practices across time, I have examined discourses produced by the United Farm Women of Alberta (UFWA) in 1925, and discourses produced by the contemporary magazine American Renaissance (AR). The UFWA were concerned with the promotion and definition of citizenship, and in so doing laid race as a foundation of Canadian identity. AR is a magazine that concerns itself with white nationalism in the contemporary United States. Drawing upon Avery Gordon and Wendy Brown’s theories of history and haunting, I have situated these discourses in imaginative relation to one another, illuminating the “past” in the present. I have also critically examined how I am complicit in reproducing the historical practices under study; as an architecture of history, haunting helps to imagine alternatives for the study of history and social life, particularly our own. / vii, 160 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm

This thesis explores the ways in which the local socio-political and historical context shapes immigrants lives with particular attention to the role of the state, local culture and region in their new racialisation.

This dissertation offers a history of the perilous American present. Through a series of timely case studies I investigate the constitutive force and present-day regeneration of political and racial violence in the United States. Drawing on a range of contemporary critical thought, "Afterlives of Violence" constellates scenes from recent works of memoir, fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and film, my principal interest in each case being to excavate the temporalities, the effects, and the disavowals of American carnage—understood less as a damaging deviation from a “great” past than as precisely that past’s unceasing, pernicious fallout. Where often violence continues to be conceived of as an event, my research and readings draw on examples from twenty-first-century American literature, politics, law, and culture to present it instead as a haunting structure that is enduring at least in part because of the very illegibility and deliberate obscuring of its aftermaths under certain idioms of thought and norms of representation. Bookended by discussions of a white supremacist’s massacre at a Charleston church (in July 2015) and of the national memorial to racial terror lynching established in Montgomery (in April 2018), the dissertation offers a series of figures for thinking through history’s afterlives—both in the grim renewal of its violences in the U.S. today and in the imaginative arts of refusal which its inheritance inspires. In the first two chapters of the dissertation, I critically explore the ways that recent African American and Native American literature maps, respectively, the residual afterlives of slavery and ongoing menace of antiblack animus, and, the blind spots in settler colonial law that simultaneously conceal and extend the violence of occupation, in particular exposing the lives of Native women to harm across time. Through extended readings of texts including Saidiya Hartman’s "Lose Your Mother," Dionne Brand’s "A Map to the Door of No Return," Louise Erdrich’s "The Round House," and Layli Long Soldier’s "WHEREAS," I demonstrate how the wounding attachments of history and the longing for a different future they prompt are, in turn, exacerbated and thwarted by injurious mnemonic and political legacies that the authors present as essentially unfinished with their lives. I also show how these texts perform a fundamental critique of liberal gestures of redress and apology, as well as concomitant invocations of closure associated with the politics of recognition. Here, the present is celebrated for its being newly distanced from a past we have come to identify as imprudent, with the meaning or substance of race additionally believed to have been at long last left behind. Quite to the contrary, the texts I analyze have us understand that these efforts too often only seek to acknowledge the traumatic specters of history in order to more quickly forget the tenacious continuing hold of their traces on modern American life. In the work of Hartman and Brand, for instance, the physical and metaphorical abyss which is the Door of No Return ensures that the losses of history remain irreparable, while Erdrich and Long Soldier each demonstrate how the precedents and aporias of settler law guarantee that they survive. Where the opening chapters are in some fashion concerned with the aftereffects of a violence often interpreted as historical, the later chapters of the dissertation shift to examine two emergent technologies of state violence: the drone and the border wall. Beyond the immediately notable racial dimension that ties them to the preceding case studies, these forms of violence also have their own genealogies, too, which I read back into them. Further, I propose that their ominous afterlives are prospectively prefigured in our own destitute times, even as I also insist the future necessarily remains undecided. Concentrating, in the first case, on the visual and temporal regimes of extraterritorial drone killing—which I argue can be revealingly likened to the death penalty in the conception of “future dangerousness” each shares—and, in the second, on the brutalist aesthetics and political rhetoric of walling plans for the U.S.-Mexico border—which in specific ways derealize the lives that this architecture is intended to target—these chapters use primary legal documents to draw out the logic and justification of preemptive and protective violence. I pay particular attention to how these respective forms of harm are frequently legitimated on the basis of their being humanitarian in character. In an extended analysis of a trio of Hollywood “drone films” I show how they troublingly come to adopt this same frame, staging targeted execution as a regrettable necessity and lesser evil, while in readings of executive orders and government reports pertaining to the southern border I unweave the misleading mobilization of human rights discourse to justify wall construction. With the assistance of decidedly more critical texts, including Solmaz Sharif’s "LOOK" and, in the context of the militarized borderlands, Sara Uribe’s "Antígona González" and Valeria Luiselli’s "Tell Me How It Ends," I provide a distinct rejoinder to this mode of thinking. I highlight the authors’ formal efforts to bring back into view, first, the ways of seeing and types of narrating that make possible the conversion of calculated erasure and cruel destitution into ethical action, and, just as importantly, the bodies affected and existences wrought in the wake of political violence. Beside its sustained insistence on the need to truly reckon with the fact that everything which has happened will never not have happened, ultimately at stake in the symphony of reflections offered by "Afterlives of Violence" are questions of how we recognize, think, describe, and, perhaps finally, refuse or resist violence. Inspired in large part by the multitemporal geographies of loss and hope, of suffering and flourishing, traced in the work of American studies and feminist scholars including Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Colin Dayan, Avery Gordon, Patricia Williams, and Judith Butler, I wager to break the hold of the past—or to derail the perils of the present—in the service of a more just future, at minimum their multifarious and continuing afterimages of violence must first be properly pictured. Insofar as law, photography, and history must be understood as other names for the transmission of the past, I have found them useful instruments to think with in this endeavor, while literature, broadly conceived, I have interpreted as a site for the performance of thought’s suspension, its undoing, its reinauguration.

Black Capitol investigates the persistence of racial inequality in the federal legislative workforce. I frame the existence of racial inequality in Congress not as an outgrowth of certain racist members of Congress, but as a defining characteristic of the institution. I analyze how these disparities are produced by and through an institutional structure formed by race. This leads me to offer the concept of Congress as a raced political institution. I use the term raced political institution to mean institutions, organized for the purposes of government, in which race is embedded in the organizational structure, and is a determining factor of how labor and space is organized on the formal level. In addition, I use the term to informally capture how perceptions of power influence identity construction, interactions, and culture. I build on scholarship from critical race theorists, to argue that Congress is a seminal institution in the American racial state, responsible for structuring race and inequality in American society. From the perspective of Black legislative staff, who currently or previously worked in the Capitol, I assess how the congressional workforce is stratified, how physical space is segregated, and how interactions and identities are racialized. I employ a mixed methods approach, including over 70 semi-structured interviews with current and former legislative employees, archival research, and ethnographic observations of the staff organizations. This analysis contributes to a wide range of scholarly conversations about citizenship, representation, democracy, and bureaucracy. More broadly, this work raises important questions about the distribution of power in the American political system and how inequality in Congress reverberates off of Capitol Hill.

In this dissertation, I explore the relationship between race and ethnic conflict, demographic composition, and the provision of local public goods across U.S. cities. Specifically, I aim to understand how the preferences of neighboring, often conflicting, racial and ethnic groups are reflected in local political outcomes. To do this, I examine how urban segregation has evolved in recent decades, whether local public finance allocations correlate with differences in racial and ethnic composition, and how animosity between groups influences distributive bargaining decisions and municipal decentralization. Chapter 1 addresses a significant challenge in analyzing demographic composition and municipal finance: the lack of an open-source, robust dataset for evaluating changes in segregation over time. To fill this gap, I introduce the Multi-Level Segregation Database (MLSD), a comprehensive resource that spans the 48 contiguous U.S. states and covers four Census years—1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. The MLSD provides detailed entropy-based measures of total, within-place, and between-place segregation, offering a rich dataset for analysis. Specifically, the database includes 30,846 Census place observations representing 9,561 unique places in 481 Urbanized Areas (UAs) and 49,778 Census place observations representing 15,986 unique places in 363 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs). A key contribution of this chapter is the application of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) Divergence metric to quantify the distance between a place’s racial group population distribution and that of its broader region. The utility of the KL Divergence measure is demonstrated through a mathematical proof and a case study of Birmingham, AL. Using the MLSD, I conduct a descriptive analysis that reveals, contrary to previous findings, that segregation within and between places has generally declined from 1980 to 2010 in both UAs and MSAs. These findings challenge the prevailing notion that segregation patterns have predominantly shifted in recent decades from within cities to between cities. Instead, they reveal both forms of segregation have decreased over the four-decade period. This suggests a need for new theoretical approaches to understand what declining segregation truly signifies for group dynamics and political power at the local level. On one hand, lower levels of segregation might indicate improved intergroup relations and a greater willingness among groups to live in closer proximity. On the other hand, these trends could reflect ongoing processes of reshuffling and re-stratification—such as gentrification or the suburbanization of poverty—that perpetuate new forms of inequity. In Chapter 2, I reexamine the relationship between demographic composition and public expenditures using a dataset encompassing over 9,000 cities across six 5-year intervals between 1982 and 2007, resulting in more than 45,000 observations on city-level demographics and public finance outcomes. I test hypotheses suggesting that measures of demographic composition—used as proxies for race and ethnic conflict—explain differences in aggregate spending behaviors of U.S. cities. Specifically, I examine whether increasing diversity and/or segregation at the local level is associated with lower public expenditures. To do this, I extend the MLSD to cover the intercensal years between 1980 and 2010, allowing for the pairing of robust diversity, segregation, and divergence measures with municipal financial data collected by the U.S. Census in years ending in 2 and 7. The Extended Multi-Level Segregation Database (EMLSD) enables the testing of various hypotheses using segregation metrics that are less prone to measurement error and account for changes in municipal boundaries over time. The analysis challenges the prevailing consensus that diverse or segregated communities necessarily experience lower public expenditures. Instead, the findings suggest that the relationship between demographic composition and public spending is more complex than previously understood, with no consistent evidence linking diversity or segregation to significant changes in public goods provision. This study therefore contributes to the literature by questioning long-held assumptions about the impact of demographic heterogeneity on aggregate public finance measures and by emphasizing the importance of considering alternative explanations, such as institutional design and inequitable distributions within cities, in understanding public budgeting outcomes. Finally, in Chapter 3, I develop a two-stage model of legislative bargaining that examines how conflict between groups shapes distributive outcomes and municipal decentralization. The project begins with a single-stage game that recognizes that city council are often comprised of representatives from groups with intense animosities toward each other. Despite strong partisan divisions or cleavages along racial, ethnic, or religious lines, legislatures must still make collective decisions about the distribution of resources. In this chapter, I present a Baron and Ferejohn (1989) style model that captures how animosity shapes distributive bargaining payoffs and the prospects for legislation advanced through cross-party coalitions. I consider a two-party legislature with three members, where each member experiences some level of disutility from allocations to opposing party members. In equilibrium, I find that the expected payoff for majority (minority) party members increases (decreases) as animosity between groups rises. However, only a majority party proposer accrues the increased ex-post payoffs associated with higher animosity, as the proposer can use the threat of cross-party coalition formation to extract additional surplus from co-party members. I then embed the new animosity bargaining framework in a two-stage model of municipal decentralization. The model indicates that the threat of decentralization in stage two can lead to a more equitable—though still unequal—distribution of resources across districts in stage one. When animosity between opposing groups is relatively low, the power to threaten decentralization compels players to form unanimous coalitions and allocate resources to every district, rather than excluding one legislator as seen in the single-stage model. Moreover, the option to decentralize diminishes the proposer’s ability to extract additional resources from other players, ensuring that all players receive the same payoff regardless of whether they are the proposer or a coalition member. Still, like the single-period game, the majority party players are better off than the minority player in equilibrium. Finally, at higher levels of conflict, the ability to initiate a decentralization effort does provide the minority party player with the opportunity to improve its payoffs in a decentralized setting.

My study is a theoretical intervention of the South African contemporary visual art of Mary Sibande. It focuses on the figure of Sophie representing the maid in three series; namely, Sophie-Elsie, Sophie-Merica, and Sophie-Velucia. The study applies Frantz Fanon’s thought to the understanding of the figure of Sophie while emphasising the themes of naming, the human subject, and presence-absence. The theoretical framework of this thesis is a decolonial epistemic theory, which is used as a lens to understand Fanon’s political thoughts. I argue that the themes of naming, human subject, and presenceabsence are inherent in Fanon’s thought. These thematic areas give a better understanding of the existential questions of the figure of Sophie in the antiblack Manichean world. It is important to unpack the figure of Sophie as a Manichean figure who represents the crossing of two different worlds – the white world and the black world, Africa and Europe. The study highlights the importance and relevance of reviving Fanon’s thought concerning decolonial contemporary African art and establishing other tools of interpretation necessary to understand decolonial aestheSis. The thrust of this thesis is to deploy decolonial epistemic theory as a theoretical framework to the Fanonian understanding of the figure of the three Sophies that embody the modern/colonial predicament of the figure of the maid and blackness. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / Ph. D (Art)