<p>This dissertation is a social history of the city of Detroit in the 1970s. Using archives official and unofficial - oral histories and archived document collections, self-published memoirs and legal documents, personal papers and the newspapers of the radical press - it portrays a city in flux. It was in the 1970s that the urban crisis in the cities of the United States crested. Detroit, as had been the case throughout the twentieth century, was at the forefront of these changes. This dissertation demonstrates the local social, political, and economic circumstances that contributed to the dramatic increase in prison populations since the 1970s with a focus on the halls of government, the courtroom, and city streets. In the streets, unemployed African American youth organized themselves to counteract the contracted social distribution allocated to them under rapidly changing economic circumstances. They organized themselves for creative expression, protection and solidarity in a hostile city, and to pursue economic endeavors in the informal economy. They sometimes committed crimes. In the courts, Wayne County Juvenile Court Judge James Lincoln, a liberal Democrat long allied with New Deal political alliances, became disenchanted with rehabilitative solutions to juvenile delinquency and embraced more punitive measures, namely incarceration. In city hall, Coleman Young, the city's first African American mayor, confronted this crisis with a form of policing that concentrated predominately on the city's unemployed African American youth, and the result was the criminalization of poverty and race we have come to understand as mass incarceration.</p> / Dissertation

My MFA portfolio consists of two scripts for performance and a research essay exploring the methods and process of writing these. Songs My Mother Taught Me is a one-woman cabaret piece; set in 1972, it explores hippie culture in New Zealand and a young women‟s search for independence. This portfolio contains two versions of this script. Both versions of this piece have been performed. In Defence of Love is a play for three actors, each of whom plays one aspect of an abused woman trying to find her way out of a destructive relationship.

This thesis examines Jane Fonda’s antiwar activism during the Vietnam War, focusing on the period from late 1969 through 1973. Her early activism was characterized by frequent protests against the war, speeches at antiwar rallies and college campuses, and involvement with the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In 1971 Fonda organized an antiwar troupe, FTA, which performed antiwar songs and sketches to active-duty servicemen in America and Southeast Asia. Fonda’s notorious trip to North Vietnam is examined in detail, as are her comments in 1973 regarding American POWs. Negative reaction to Fonda’s activism is examined, and the myth of “Hanoi Jane” is traced from its wartime origins through its postwar evolution. The John Kerry-Jane Fonda photograph incident of 2004 is reviewed, and treated as a symptom of decades-long anti-Hanoi Jane ideas, rather than an isolated incident. Fonda’s gender, the media’s treatment of her at various stages, and her own missteps all receive consideration in determining where Jane Fonda ends and the myth of Hanoi Jane begins.

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This thesis examines the first seventeen years of the history of the Museum of Modern Art Oxford (MOMA), from its founding in 1965 until c. 1982. It is concerned with the changing relationships between the museum and its audience, focusing on those aspects of the museum's programming that shed light on its role as a public mediator of recent art. This provides a means to consider the underlying values and commitments that informed MOMA's emergence as a leading contemporary art institution. Chapter one examines the museum's relationship to utopian countercultures through the metaphor of the museum as 'garden'; chapter two considers the erstwhile 'permanent' collection and its connection to corporate patronage; chapter three investigates the parallel forces of institutional critique and institutionalization; and chapter four addresses didactic strains in the museum's representation of an emergent multiculturalism. Although dedicated to the history of a single regional gallery, the thematic structure of the thesis provides entry points into historical and theoretical issues of broader relevance. It is based on primary research in the previously neglected archive of what is now known as Modern Art Oxford, supplemented by interviews with artists and former staff members, and by close attention to British art periodicals and exhibition catalogues of the period. It is also informed by critical writings on museums and displays, and by artistic, social and museological histories, allowing the museum's activities to be situated within the cultural politics of these turbulent decades. The thesis suggests that institutional identity - as exemplified by the history of MOMA from 1965-1982 - is porous and discontinuous: the development of the museum over this period is animated by multiple and often contradictory ideals, continuously shaped by pragmatic considerations, and subject to a rich variety of subjective responses.

In recent years, there has been a noticeable rise in the use of walking in artistic practice. Artists explore, map, narrate, draw, follow and procrastinate through the use of pedestrianism. This rise in an artistic output that uses the walking body has coincided with a burgeoning literature in this field; a literature that, I argue, has yet to find its feet, frequently repeating, and so depoliticising, the dominant narrative that casts walking as a strategy of resistance to the high-speed technological demands of late capitalism. Beyond its role as emancipatory gesture, I show, walking is enmeshed in histories of gender, labour, punishment, power and protest; something that a focus on the art of the 1960s and ‘70s can help to uncover. Accordingly, this thesis seeks to place the recent rise of ‘walking art’ in a specific historical context, positing that the uses of walking by artists today find the key to their legitimation in moving image and performance work of the 1960s and ‘70s. Through chapters on the work of the Judson Dance Theater (1962-7) and Trisha Brown (early 1970s), Bruce Nauman’s studio films and videos (1967-9) and Agnes Martin’s only film Gabriel (1976), I argue that these artists used walking not only to deconstruct the mediums out of which they worked (dance, sculpture, painting), but also to negotiate the wider socio-political issues of the era, from protest marching and the moon landings to much more clandestine concerns such as surveillance and controlled viewership. These chapters reveal a walking body as supported by technology, subject to self-discipline, and negotiating a new relationship with the natural world. A final chapter on Janet Cardiff’s audio walks, which she first developed in the late 1990s, makes explicit a feminist problematic, as I ask where the female body resides in a long history of male walkers, and explore the broader question of how we write the history of ‘walking art’. Via Cardiff, I reflect on the place of the 1960s and ‘70s in our historical imagination today, arguing for a more uneasy reading of the art of these decades than we have previously been used to.

With Second Wave Feminism and the Women’s Rights Movement, 1970’s Americans began to see a shift in gender norms affecting how we relate to one another, particularly within a family structure. Scholars have noted an anxiety permeating the decade over the potential negative ramifications of such a drastic cultural shift. We see these issues of gender politics played out in numerous popular films from the 1970s and into the 1980s. Kubrick’s The Shining, like many horror films of the time, preys upon the societal fear for the family, due to these shifting gender norms, by featuring a crumbling patriarch (Jack), a troubled child (Danny), and mother struggling to hold her family together (Wendy). Upon closer examination The Shining stands out for its progressive narrative which supports leaving behind outdated ideas of masculinity and femininity, in favor of embracing a more open and ambiguous definition. Kubrick uses his characters as figures, representative of broader social and cultural conflicts. His film operates at two levels, the individual (or micro level of the character’s story) and the systemic (or macro, how their story reflects large social issues). In this way he exposes the toxicity of traditional masculinity and its detrimental effects on a family. By killing Jack and allowing Wendy and Danny to escape, The Shining emphasizes the need to progress and reshape our perceptions of gender identity. In my examination of the film I combine film theory with historicism, leaning on the works of cultural history scholars as well as film scholars. My analysis of The Shining expands both our understanding of the film and of its cultural moment, unearthing issues we continue to grapple with as a society today.

Ce travail analyse les relations de l'ethnographie avec un corpus divers de la littérature mexicaine publiée au cours des années 1950, 1960 et 1970. Ces relations sont examinées par ce que nous appelons «empreinte ethnographique», une frontière sémiotique (dans la terminologie de Yuri Lotman) où les intérêts et les méthodes de l'ethnographie sont traduits en termes littéraires. Grâce à ce concept, nous analysons: Juan Pérez Jolote: biografía de un tzotzil (1948), de Ricardo Pozas; El diosero (1952), de Francisco Rojas González; Benzulul (1959), de Eraclio Zepeda; Balún Canán (1957) et Los convidados de agosto (1964), de Rosario Castellanos; La tumba (1964), de José Agustín; Gazapo (1965), de Gustavo Sainz; Los hongos alucinantes (1964), de Fernando Benítez; Los albañiles (1963), de Vicente Leñero; Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969) et La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), d’ Elena Poniatowska; Chin chin el teporocho (1971), d’Armando Ramírez; et Vida de María Sabina. La sabia de los hongos (1977), d’Álvaro Estrada. L'interconnexion est présentée par le travail littéraire axé sur la reconstruction des sujets inscrits et configurés par leur culture: si d'abord dans la littérature mexicaine l'accent était mis sur l'indigène, ultérieurement cette littérature essai d'expliquer la culture de l'habitant urbain. De cette façon, l’empreinte ethnographique dévoile comment un corpus apparemment divers est interconnecté. De même, nous proposons que cette empreinte ethnographique soit construite par ce qu'on appelle le «réalisme culturel»: un style d’écriture qui tente de rendre compte de cultures spécifiques selon le point de vue de ses acteurs. / This study analyzes ethnography’s relationship with a diverse corpus of Mexican literature published during the decades of 1950, 1960 and 1970. These relationships are analyzed through what we call “ethnographic imprint”, a semiotic frontier (in Yuri Lotman’s terminology) where ethnography’s interests and methods are translated into literary terms. Through this concept, we analyze Juan Pérez Jolote: biografía de un tzotzil (1948), by Ricardo Pozas; El diosero (1952), by Francisco Rojas González; Benzulul (1959), by Eraclio Zepeda; Balún Canán (1957) and Los convidados de agosto (1964), by Rosario Castellanos; La tumba (1964), by José Agustín; Gazapo (1965), by Gustavo Sainz; Los hongos alucinantes (1964), by Fernando Benítez; Los albañiles (1963), by Vicente Leñero; Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969) and La noche de Tlatelolco (1971), by Elena Poniatowska; Chin chin el teporocho (1971), by Armando Ramírez; and Vida de María Sabina. La sabia de los hongos (1977), by Álvaro Estrada. The interconnection appears through literary work focused on rebuilding subjects framed and shaped by their culture: if the original focus was the native, in the later period the subject explained according to its culture was the urban dweller. Thus, the ethnographic imprint reveals how an apparently diverse corpus is interconnected. Similarly, we propose that this ethnographic imprint is constructed through what we call “cultural realism”: a writing style that tries to account specific cultures (with correspondence in the extratextual world) from the actors’ point of view.

Nesta dissertação de mestrado, procuro ler a obra de Torquato Neto através das tensões poéticas e políticas que a mesma engendra. Sua obra é construída num momento importante e ao mesmo tempo problemático da história brasileira, onde, entre outros aspectos, dá-se o processo de autonomia do campo literário (e cultural) brasileiro e, no campo político e social, vive-se uma ditadura militar. Ambas as circunstâncias compõem o turbulento painel criativo torquatiano. Do construtivismo anárquico, passando pelas dicotomias em jogo (vida/arte, política/poética, expressão/construção, matéria/material) e os deslocamentos e a instabilidade enunciativa, à resistência como forma máxima de expressão. / In this dissertation, I try to read the writings of Torquato Neto through the poetic and political tensions that it engenders. His work was built during an important yet problematic moment of Brazilian history, when occurred, among other factors, the process of autonomy of Brazilian literary (and cultural) field, and in the political and social fields people were living under a military dictatorship. Both conditions are responsible for the composition of the artists turbulent and creative panel. From the anarchic constructivism, through the dichotomies at stake (life/art, politics/poetics, expression/construction, substance/materiality), displacement and enunciative instability, to the maximum resistance as a form of expression.