Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This thesis traces the making of a social world of the musicking Cape through sound, which it calls sonic anticipation. Sonic anticipation is threaded through a Cape-based musicking milieu called goema in the Nineteenth century, and through the regional jazzing culture that emerged in Cape Town in the latter part of the Twentieth century. A key concern is to read the sonic archive of Cape music without folding into a representational discourse of (apartheid) group identity or of a Cape exceptionalism. First, the thesis explores goema's emergence as folk music. In a central example, sonic anticipation is discernible in the intensities of a song called Daar Kom die Alibama [translated as ‘There Comes the Alibama’]. This song enabled goema to secure a status as racialised folk memory. Later in the Twentieth century, the song set the scene for a rearticulation that laid claim to the city as a response to the 'anxious urbanity' of race formation. This shift from the Nineteenth to Twentieth century musicking tradition is at the heart of what we have come to know as Cape jazz. In its genealogical construction of Cape jazz, the thesis traces a prefigurative aesthetics and politics that proposes new ways of thinking about the political significance of jazz. It traces the pedagogic strategies that musicians – Tem Hawker, Winston Mankunku, Robbie Jansen and Alex van Heerden - used in pursuing ‘ethical individuation’ with this racialised folk memory. By the early 1960s, jazz had become a method ‘archive’ or formative canon for these musicians. The thesis outlines how musicians used ‘nomadic’ pedagogies; following the energies that moved through the city, inside the technological, and discursive formations by which the social world was made. This thesis on goema’s refrain and the musicking Cape offers a way to consider a ‘difference that is not apartheid’s difference’.

Thesis advisor: Cynthia Lyerly / My dissertation examines the social, cultural, and political lives of women in the early Republic through an analysis of the first women's literary circle formed in the United States after the Revolution, the Boston Gleaning Circle. The Gleaners, as the women referred to themselves, instead of engaging primarily in charitable and religious work, which was the focus of other women's groups, concentrated on their own intellectual improvement. The early Republican era witnessed the first sustained interest in women's education in North America and the Gleaners saw women as uniquely blessed by the Revolution and therefore duty-bound to improve their minds and influence their society. My study builds on, and challenges, the historiography of women in the early Republic by looking at writings from a group of unmarried women whose lives did not fit the ideal of "republican motherhood," but who still considered themselves patriotic Americans. The Gleaners believed that the legacy of the American Revolution left them, as young women, a crucial role in American public life. Five of the Gleaners had a father who was a Son of Liberty and participated in the Boston Tea Party. Their inherited legacy of patriotism and politics permeated the lives of these young women. Many historians argue that the Revolution brought few gains for women, but the Gleaners demonstrate that for these young Bostonians, the ideas of the Revolution impacted them. Making intellectual contributions was not easy, however, and the young women were constantly anxious about their Circle's place in society. By the 1820s, the opportunities that the Revolution brought women had been closed. Prescriptive literature now touted a cult of True Womanhood told women that they were to be selfless, pious, and submissive. These ideas influenced the Gleaners and by the 1820s they no longer met for their literary pursuits, but for charitable purposes. No place in society remained for women in a self-improvement society. Instead, women had to work to improve others, demonstrating the limited opportunities for women in the antebellum period. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

Thesis advisor: Rosemarie Bodenheimer / In the aftermath of England&lsquo;s &ldquo;Railway Mania&ldquo; in the 1840s, it became commonplace to equate stock market speculation with gambling. Yet opinion had changed so dramatically by the end of the century that the <italic>Quarterly Review</italic> could confidently declare, &ldquo;Though speculation may lead to rashness and be censurable, <italic>it is not gambling</italic>.&ldquo; This project considers how and why the discourses of gambling and stock market speculation diverged over the second half of the nineteenth century, and the cultural and historical changes this shift encompasses. My inquiry begins with a brief history of the stock market and of gambling practices in nineteenth-century England, followed by a study of the representations of both spheres of activity in the periodical press from 1850 to 1900. Detailed discussions of three Victorian novels--<italic>Little Dorrit, Middlemarch</italic>, and <italic>The Way We Live Now</italic>--follow. Each of these novels figures the intersection between gambling and the stock market as the site for complex negotiations around changing perceptions of risk, value, and worth in Victorian society. In <italic>Little Dorrit</italic>, Charles Dickens explores issues of culpability and responsibility through the figure of the speculator, Merdle, and his surrogate, Arthur Clennam. By accepting the punishment that Merdle&lsquo;s suicide threatens to forestall, Arthur not only expiates the guilt he feels over his parents&lsquo; rapacious financial practices, he enables speculation to be domesticated and integrated back into the commercial realm. Whereas <italic>Little Dorrit</italic> provides some broad outlines of the &ldquo;speculation plot&ldquo; that gained currency in 1840s and 1850s, my discussion of <italic>Middlemarch</italic> takes a closer look at contemporary gambling rhetoric, particularly as it is employed by George Eliot to convey the general economic instability experienced during the nineteenth century. Finally, I consider Anthony Trollope&lsquo;s engagement with the nineteenth-century debate over limited liability in <italic>The Way We Live Now</italic>. In particular, I examine how Trollope modifies and reworks the conventional rhetoric associated with speculation, adapting it to the changing financial and cultural realities of the late nineteenth century. The resulting text reflects both the extent to which stock investment and speculation had been normalized in mainstream Victorian society and the social convulsions that this integration produced. In each case, I explore how the novel contributed to the acceptance of the stock market as a legitimate social institution in Victorian England, and the ways it betrayed continued ambivalence about both the stock market and its members. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Au milieu du XIXe siècle, en l’espace de quelques mois, l’Etat français se dote de plusieurs outils pour contrôler la mobilité de populations dites « indésirables », françaises et étrangères : l’expulsion des étrangers, la surveillance de la haute police et l’interdiction administrative de séjour dans le département de la Seine et l’agglomération lyonnaise. Cette thèse propose une comparaison de ces dispositifs répressifs sur la longue durée, durant tout le second XIXe siècle et questionne leurs modes de justification théoriques, leur application effective dans les départements et les populations touchées. Ce faisant, se dessine la dissociation progressive du traitement de la mobilité des étrangers et des nationaux à la fin du XIXe siècle. / By the middle of the nineteenth century, the French state acquire several legal tools in order to control the mobility of "unwanted" population, whether they are Frenchs or strangers. In this PhD thesis, we want to compare three of this repressives procedures during the long second nineteenth century, by examinating their public justifications, their effective enforcement in a local frame, and the populations effectively affected. Doing this, we highlight the progressive dissociation of the control of mobility of aliens and natives by the end of the nineteenth century.

The aim of this thesis is to offer a comparative analysis of the nineteenth-century translations of Don Quixote into English, which have received little critical attention to date. During this process I will focus on the issue of translating irony, in order to engage in the discussion regarding reader response to Don Quixote in England during the nineteenth century. This reader reception represents another area of research yet to be studied in any significant detail. This thesis will take the following structure: in the first chapter I will provide a background into the existing problems and working concepts as they have been researched so far. In the course of this I will look at the work of Allen (2008) in particular, as the critic who has provided the longest known, though by no means exhaustive, list of examples of irony identified in Don Quixote. This will be followed by a review of reader response along the centuries, beginning with the seventeenth and eighteenth and then an overview of the nineteenth. I will then engage in an analysis of specific examples of irony, using a representative sample taken from Allen’s selection. The conclusions this analysis will offer will shed further light on the importance of studying irony in Don Quixote, and also on how irony can be used as an explanation as to why so many translations of it were produced in such quick succession in the 1880s, after so long without any new versions. This research also considers the question of the transience of irony and the extent to which what constitutes irony changes over time, as reflected by a similar list of examples of irony compiled by Albert Calvert (1905). My analysis will also add further evidence to the two main debates surrounding critical opinion on Don Quixote in the nineteenth century; firstly, that Ormsby’s is justified in being regarded as the best translation of the three produced in that century, if not of all time, and secondly, the ongoing debate over whether or not Don Quixote was or should still have been regarded as a Romantic novel during the 1880s. By tracking trends and shifts in critical thinking down the centuries since Don Quixote first appeared at the start of the seventeenth century, my analysis will also offer some comment on the novel’s subsequent twentieth-century reception. Moreover, as the first study of all three of the nineteenth-century translations of Don Quixote into English, my conclusions make an important and original contribution to the emerging area of study into Cervantes in a transnational context.

The Royal Institution is generally thought of as an institution devoted solely to scientific research and the Popular exposition of science. In the mid-nineteenth century however it had a wider range of objectives and activities, and should be considered within the framework of the organisation of learning and culture as a whole of which science was still an integral part. In the 1840s it acted as an authority on practical science; it provided both specialised scientific education and what was then termed useful knowledge; it supported experimental scientific research; and it was a literary and philosophical society of an eighteenth-century type, devoted to the cultivation of humane learning in general. As the unity of learning disintegratedv the R. I. was forced to reassess its activities and decide which ought to be its most important function. Formal educative activities were reluctantly abandoned. Prom the early 1850s and more enthusiastically in the 1860s, scientific research was recognized to be its prime function, At the same time its management passed for the first time into the hands of scientific men and any possibility of support from outside interests warded off by a new insistence that research at the Institution must be purely disinterested and independent. Paradoxically however, its nonscientific activities received greater attention than ever before, which may be linked to changes in the Institutionts membership and to ideas of cultivated entertainment. These developments made the 1860s not only a "golden age" of success and popularity, but the decisive decade in fixing the activities and ethos of the Institution for the next hundred years.

This thesis analyses stunts in the public life of late nineteenth-century New York, where 'stunt' developed as a slang term. Addressing stunts as a performative and discursive practice, I investigate stunts in popular newspapers, sports, politics and protest and, to a lesser extent, theatre and film. Each chapter focuses on one form of stunt: bridge jumping, extreme walking contests, a new genre of reporting called 'stunt journalism', and cycling feats. Joseph Pulitzer's popular newspaper, the World, is the primary research archive, supported by analysis of other newspapers and periodicals, vaudeville scripts, films, manuals and works of fiction. The driving question is: how did stunts in public life enact conceptions of value? I contextualise stunts in a 'crisis of value' concerning industrialisation, secularisation, recessions, the currency crisis, increased entry of women into remunerative work, immigration, and racialised anxieties about consumption and degeneration. I examine the ways in which 'stunt' connotes devaluation, suggesting a degraded form of politics, art or sport, and examine how such cultural hierarchies intersect with gender, race and class. The critical framework draws on Theatre and Performance Studies theorisations of precarity and liveness. I argue that stunts aestheticised everyday precarity and made it visible, raising ethical questions about the value of human life and death, and the increasingly interdependent nature of urban society. Stunts took entrepreneurial idealisations of risk and autoproduction to extreme, constructing identity as commodity. By aestheticising precarity and endangering lives, stunts explored a symbolic and material connection between liveness and aliveness, which provokes questions about current conceptualisations of liveness and mediatisation. I argue that while stunts were framed as exceptional, frivolous acts, they adopted the logic of increasingly major industries, such as the popular press, advertising and financial markets. Stunts became a focal point for anxiety regarding the abstract and unstable nature of value itself.

This dissertation explores the choices involved in being a composer in Latin America during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century. My primary interest is to understand how composers adapted or not- their aesthetics, ideas and careers amid the rapid changes brought to this region between the 1790s and 1850s, a period often described as an “Age of Revolutions” and that saw the end of colonial rule and the foundation of modern independent nations. Composers in the region worked within European forms and styles, and with Europe as a cosmopolitan cultural model; but they also learned, composed and performed in a specific set of historical conditions that differed from those in contemporary Europe. In that sense, my interest is in the specific agency composers -as literate urban citizens- had in appropriating and shaping transatlantic cultural transfers during this period. My study focuses on two musicians working in the Andean region, today’s Bolivia, Peru and Chile, during this period: José Bernardo Alzedo (Lima, 1788-1878) and Pedro Ximénez Abrill Tirado (Arequipa, 1784 - Sucre, 1856). Born in late-colonial times, both composers adapted themselves and their musical styles to the new expectations created by the post-independence period. Through five chapters I explore their specific role as composers, and how their decisions and choices impacted their careers and music, both personally and in context. Some key problems discussed in the dissertation include the definitions of local, personal and national “schools” and styles of composition; the notion of the composer as a postcolonial letrado; the ways in which specific European influences (like printed scores and Italian opera) shaped local musical scenes; and the complexities of adapting colonial musical models to the new “republican” period and its changing values, perspectives and ideals.

“Translated Conquests” recovers the deep linkages between New World texts and territories to offer a new understanding of the relationship of literature to empire in the nineteenth-century United States. When Columbus planted a flag on a Bahamian beach, it was the notary in the background who transformed his performance of possession into legal truth; from this moment forward, Spanish empire relied on paper “instruments” to claim and administer New World territories. I reconstruct the forgotten history of how, as Spain lost its hold on these American territories in the nineteenth century, much of the material archive of its colonization project was relocated from the past seat of New World empire to the future one—the United States. While the hemispheric turn in American literary studies made it a commonplace that the nineteenth-century narrative appropriation of Spanish “discovery” and “conquest” ran parallel to the territorial appropriation of former Spanish possessions, my project reveals that these processes were materially linked through an inherited archive that authorized both truth-claims and land claims. Bringing methods drawn from book history to bear on hemispheric studies, “Translated Conquests” traces the circulation of these material texts—ranging from colonial titles and portolan charts to relaciones and manuscript histories—to demonstrate that their accumulation in the United States underwrote claims to hemispheric history and territory in the expansionist period between the Monroe Doctrine (1823) and the Gadsden Purchase (1854). By grounding hemispheric studies in material flows, my project offers a revised conceptual framework that situates nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism within the longue durée of an entangled Atlantic World. Novelists, historians, and translators including Washington Irving, Robert Montgomery Bird, William Hickling Prescott, and Buckingham Smith refashioned Spanish history as the prehistory of the United States, but their nationalist works emerged from a transnational network that included London antiquarian and bookdealer Obadiah Rich, Spanish scholar Martín Fernández de Navarrete, and Mexican historians Carlos María de Bustamante and José Fernando Ramírez. As they claimed newly-available sources, all of these authors entered into a centuries-old debate over how to write the history of the New World, questioning which genres and media counted as reliable evidence and what kinds of claims they authorized. My readings of how the archive both materially enables and is figured in these works offers a revised understanding of the relationship between claiming history and claiming territory in the nineteenth-century United States.

This dissertation examines the role of the law in the development of photography in nineteenth century America, both as a technology and as a profession. My central thesis is that the social construction of technology and the definition of the photographic profession were interrelated processes, in which legislation and litigation were key factors: I investigate this thesis through three case studies that each deal with a (legal) controversy surrounding the new medium of photography in the second half of the nineteenth century. Section 1, “Peer Production” at Mid-Century, examines the role of another relatively new medium in the nineteenth century – the periodical press – in forming, defining, and sustaining a nation-wide community of photographers, a community of practice. It argues that photography was in some ways similar to what we would today recognize as a “peer produced” technology, and that the photographic trade press, which first emerged in the early 1850s, was instrumental in fostering knowledge sharing and open innovation among photographers. It also, from time to time, served as a site for activism, as I show in a case study of the organized resistance against James A. Cutting’s “bromide patent” (1854-1868). Section 2, Spirit Photography, Boundary-Work, and the Socio-Legal Shaping of Photography, focuses on the attempts of Oscar G. Mason and other photographers to get “spirit” photographer William H. Mumler behind bars for fraud and deception in 1869. Seeking to uphold the image of photography as a scientific, mechanically objective technology, and that of the photographer as an honest, trustworthy, and honorable professional, these photographers turned the courtroom into an arena for both the social construction of technology and for policing the boundaries of the photographic profession. Section 3, “Privacy, Copyright, and Photography in the United States, is about a question that photographers, publishers, courts and legislators spent much of the nineteenth century struggling to answer: who was the rightful author, and therefore owner, of a photograph? The Section details why that question arose when it did – in the final third of the nineteenth century – as well as the different ways in which photographers, their opponents, and representatives of the law struggled to define the nature of photography along with the meaning of photographic copyright. It also deals with the emergence, around the turn of the century, of a third party claiming ownership in the photograph – the sitter – and with how the “right to privacy” was formulated in part to accommodate that party. Finally, this third Section reveals the sometimes contradictory and often quite resourceful ways in which both the advocates and adversaries of photographic copyright enlisted the right to privacy in order to back up their own property claims, even when the nascent privacy right was meant to curtail the power of both these parties.