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<p>The Bhagavadgītā, the most popular religious text of Hinduism, has become the social and political gospel of India in the Twentieth Century. What is attempted in this study is an examination of the Hindu religious consciousness as reflected in the various recent interpretations of this religious text. In this, we have examined the writings of Twentieth Century national and religious leaders of India and their reinterpretations of the age-old Hindu concepts of dharma, karma and mukti. The main line pursued is to discern the attempt by the moderns to integrate dharma and mukti and to render the message of the Gītā relevant to the problems of contemporary India. We examine this attempt by these national leaders against the background of recent ideologies such as nationalism, socialism and secularism that have made deep inroads into the sub-continent. The "counter-ideologies" (à la Harry M. Johnson) that sprang up from the new interpretations of the Gītā by national leaders such as B.G. Tilak, M.K. Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo and others are examined in depth. The modern commentators also attempt to relate the teachings of the Gītā to the needs of a modern secular society, and in particular to the problems of religious pluralism which confront modern India. These commentators however, did not limit the relevance of this text to India, but have been eager to point out its relevance for a wider humanity.</p> <p>This study aims to be both descriptive and critical. I have sought to describe what modern Indian thinkers selected as essential to the tradition and have also sought to understand their determination to come to terms with not only spiritual but also national and social issues. It is clear that they understood that reconstruction work in India could not be envisaged without giving it a basis in religious tradition which in their mind was most succinctly represented by the Bhagavadgītā. The writer after critical study, has come to the conclusion that these commmentaries taken together have successfully pointed out the significance of the Bhagavadgītā as a text that can accommodate varieties, and as a text which, without losing the clarity and rigour of its central spiritual perception, can provide legitimation, for the social and political forces that underlie a secular state.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation examines the differing responses to modernity in the visual culture of Madrid from 1926-1936. I trace the debates generated by the anticipation, apprehension, or expectations to the ongoing processes of modernization. My work is guided by the understanding that the metropolis is both a physical and psychological space, and that the resulting visual culture is imbued with those experiences of Madrid. Thus, the questions and concerns of the period are instilled in the visual arts, regardless if the city is explicitly represented in them or not. Although Madrid was not a model of industrialization, the city’s inhabitants acknowledged and reacted to the attempts to modernize the city as well as the ongoing political and social transformations. My study examines diverse media alongside the popular press of the period. By examining individual works of art alongside periodicals, my dissertation reveals the relationship between the thriving popular culture, the elite culture, and an emergent mass culture. In the first chapter, I introduce how these different kinds of culture have been defined, as well as Madrid’s current place within art historical scholarship. In the second chapter, I look at how the construction of the Gran Vía avenue was presented in the press to investigate the social effects of the reorganization of Madrid’s center. The third chapter analyzes the development of the public persona of writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna and how he used his image as an advertisement for modernity. In the fourth chapter, I examine the film Esencia de verbena, directed by Ernesto Giménez Caballero. The film pictured Madrid’s traditions but also invoked Surrealist aesthetics. By bringing together ideas of international modernity and local folklore Giménez Caballero showed how popular culture was a useful resource for the local avant-garde. In the final chapter, I focus on the sculpture of artist Alberto Sánchez to demonstrate how his seemingly depoliticized artworks actually engaged in a critical discourse about the economic and social conditions resulting from modernization. This dissertation challenge the current understanding of the distinctions between the popular, elite, and mass cultures in Spain. Such categories cannot fully express the complexity of the visual culture of Madrid in the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, I argue that Madrid’s inhabitants negotiated and mediated modernity by blurring the boundaries and exploring the interconnections between these different cultures. / Art History

In this study I examine the two major cosmetic categories - products for skin and products for hair - aimed at frican American women and advertised within the black press between 1920 and 1960. Specifically, I examine the Chicago Defender, Afro-American, Plaindealer, and Ebony. My project analyzes the images and conceptions of blackness and beauty sold to women of colour by white-owned and black-owned cosmetics companies.  I explore the larger racial and social hierarchies these advertising images and messages maintained or destabilized. A central theme of this project has been tracing the differences in advertising messages and conceptions of beauty communicated by black-owned and white-owned companies. Many of the images and much of the advertising copy produced by black-owned cosmetic companies challenged hegemonic beauty ideals that venerated white beauty and sold white idealization as a norm. The black cosmetic industry, however, was dominated by white-owned companies. The dominant position of white-owned companies was linked to the advantages associated with whiteness, which allowed these companies to advertise with greater frequency throughout the forty-year period. White-owned and black-owned companies often pursued diverging advertising strategies and messaging about black beauty. An important finding of the project is that white-owned companies were more likely to use degrading language and stereotypes to describe black beauty in their advertisements. However, a company’s racial identity did not always determine advertising strategies or messaging about black beauty. An important concept that permeated the 1920s and 1930s was the strategy of racial uplift, which was promoted by several black-owned companies. This strategy tapered out by the1940s as new technologies like photography regularly depicted black women with dignity and accuracy. The 1940s and 1950s witnessed new advertising strategies including the appeal to glamour. This period also saw the introduction of Ebony magazine, which fundamentally altered advertising messages through their appeal to middle class sensibilities. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / My project analyzes skin bleaching and hair straightening advertisements appearing in four black-owned periodicals between 1920-1960: Chicago Defender, Afro-American, Plaindealer, and Ebony. The main goal has been to document the advertising messages about blackness and beauty communicated to black women through the advertisements of black-owned and white-owned cosmetic companies. I explore the larger racial and social hierarchies these advertising images and messages maintained or destabilized. A major finding of this project has been that advertising messages usually, but not always, diverged along racial lines. White-owned companies were more likely to use denigrating language to describe black hair and skin, and more likely to measure the beauty of black women based on how closely they approximated whiteness. Black-owned companies tended to challenge this ideology. They used messages about racial uplift as part of this challenge.

Yes / Research Development Fund Publication Prize Award winner, July 2019.

The depiction of people with disabilities in American literature has varied considerably throughout the twentieth century. In the south in particular, disabled individuals have been portrayed as violent, licentious, and deceitful. This thesis examines three hallmarks of American southern literature—Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, and the short stories of Flannery O’Connor—to demonstrate the anxiety of that era surrounding disability, as well as how disability works in tandem with race and class. The fixation of these works on the sexual immorality of disabled men reflects the fascination with eugenics in the mid-twentieth century, as do their animalistic or inhuman qualities. While the societies depicted in these works value ableist belief systems, elements of these works themselves contain more progressive stances regarding disability. These works, when studied through a disability studies lens, have the potential to redefine the common perceptions of disability in southern literature.

This dissertation is a political and intellectual history of educational thought in Britain and the British empire told through the Institute of Education in London. It explores how and why children’s education became central to the late British imperial project. It argues that contemporary ideas about the social and political aims of education were deeply shaped by a growing sense of democracy’s fragility and contingency in the early twentieth century, and by reformers’ view of the British empire as democracy’s guardian on the world stage. It draws on the archives of staff, students and influential supporters of the Institute, tracing its institutional transformation from provincial Edwardian teacher-training college to an outward-looking imperial center for educational reform and research in Britain’s colonial empire and in the British Commonwealth. It argues that Britain’s leading educators tried to position themselves as experts in making citizens fit for democracy. It shows how these pedagogues pursued reforms to metropolitan and colonial education to project an outward image of the British empire as a progressive pedagogical project preparing members of political communities for self-government.

This dissertation deploys queer theory and temporality to investigate the ways in which American authors were writing about identity at the turn of the twentieth century. I provide a more expansive use of queer theory, and argue that queerness moves beyond sexual and gender identity to have intersectional implications. This is articulated in the phrase "queer textual libido" which connects queer theory with affect and temporal theories. Queerness reveals itself on both narrative and rhetorical levels, and can be used productively to show the complex navigation between individual and national identity formation.