This document contains a meta-commentary on the article that I co-authored with Dr. Corry Cropper entitled Breaking the Duel's Rules: Brantôme, Mérimée, and Melville, that will be published in the next issue of Essays in French Literature and Culture, and an annotated bibliography of primary and secondary sources featuring summaries and important quotes dealing with duels, honor, honor codes, cheating, historical causality, chance, and sexuality. Also, several examples of film noir are cited with brief summaries and key events noted. The article we wrote studies two instances of cheating in duels: one found in Brantôme's Discours sur les duels and the other in Prosper Mérimée's Chronique du règne de Charles IX, and the traditional, as well as anti-causal, repercussions they had. Melville's Le Deuxième souffle is also analyzed with regards to the Gaullist Gu Minda and the end of the aristocratic codes of honor that those of his generation dearly respected but that were overcome by the commercial world of republican law and order.

This PhD Dissertation was completed through 2011 to 2016 and was nominated for a CAGS-UMI Distinguished Dissertation Award. / My dissertation explores transnational adoptions of black African children by white Western parents as a site through which to think about global affective relationality and transnational histories within intimate proximities. The image of an interracial, transnational family can seem to be a fulfillment of the potential for transcendent love symbolized by humanitarian fundraisers such as Live Aid— a love that collapses borders and brings together races in multicultural bliss. Furthermore, adoptions of African children can potentially challenge discursive systems of categorization that frame the black body as existing outside the body politic. At the same time, however, we cannot understand transnational adoption without taking into account the histories of power that make possible and potentially limit the contours of these affective orientations. Indeed, representations of a transnational family consisting particularly of black African children and white Western parents not only invoke the logic of white moral motherhood within the context of contemporary globalization; they also point to European philosophical traditions that presuppose the colonizer’s right to the black body. In this project, thus, I ask: what are the sociopolitical and cultural motivations behind the desire to express humanitarian love towards African children through the act of adoption? How might these motivations create avenues for exclusion and exploitation even as they create new geographies of belonging? To answer these questions, this project brings the affective domain of contemporary transnational adoption between African children and white American parents into conversation with histories of colonial transnational intimacies and the precarious lived experiences of classed and racialized individuals in the African postcolony. In challenging popular celebratory fictions of the transnational family, it critically examines not only the utopian aspirations and social costs of transnational adoption as a humanitarian project, but also the very affect produced and channeled through adoption as a humanitarian act. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / My dissertation takes a multidisciplinary approach to analyze transnational adoptions of black African children by white Western parents. It offers answers to the following questions: 1. How do the ghosts of colonialism, along with the violent realities of globalization, expose the inequities hidden within idealized humanitarian narratives of rescue underlying global adoptions while at the same time revealing their transformative potential? 2. How can we account for the experiences and psychic struggles of the African adoptee, and what do their contradictions of idealized Western narratives tell us about the fantasies and anxieties of their Western parents? Ultimately, I argue that while the transnational family suggests transformative transnational connections, Western humanitarian frameworks have also sought to manage the messiness of these connections, to fix white and black bodies into old colonial roles, and to exclude certain bodies, namely those of the African birth mothers, out of the affective realm of transnational adoption. At the same time, these attempts at management, I argue, only speak to the productive potential of these messy relations to transform and exceed colonial limitations.

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Historically Black colleges and universities served as primary sites of modernist artmaking. In 1920, however, no HBCU offered an art major or employed full-time fine arts faculty. This dissertation examines that swift transformation, demonstrating it not as a simple evolution, but rather as a contested site of Black thought and protest. I show this not through an institutional history or "timeline" of Black college art departments, but rather in a sustained attention towards Black colleges as nodes within a larger network of publics constituting Black modernism as sites for subjectivity. In doing so, this dissertation examines the conjuncture between two coincident forms: that of modernist art and of the same era's radical modes of racial exclusion. I ask what is at stake in art as lived experience, at a moment in which modernist aesthetics made claims as a means of producing novel ways of inhabiting being human while simultaneous modes of racial formation devalued Blackness within that conceptual category as life. Through this, I track aesthetic production as a relation and set of experiences occurring through specific sites and publics as an asymmetric arena for contestation, with an emphasis on historically Black colleges and universities. My first chapter, "Organize, Strike, Paint: Making Modern Art at Historically Black Colleges," charts that shift in a set of breaks in art-making at HBCUs, arguing for a student-driven movement away from industrial education towards a modernist visual arts, one embedded within a larger constellation of sites. My second chapter, "Aaron Douglas and a Liberatory History of the Senses," looks closely at Fisk University through the work of painter Aaron Douglas in a set of site-specific murals he made which visualize a long narrative of Black history, art, and labor. I argue that Douglas interrogated in those paintings central questions of visual modernism, placing the radical exclusion of Black subjects in slavery and its afterlives in the Jim Crow era as central to an understanding of modern vision and subjectivity. Through such works, HBCUs stand as necessary sites for theorizing a history of vision and its relation to the "human," as a rejoinder to histories of visual modernism that do not meaningfully account for racialization. In my final chapter, "Black Study in the White Cube: Racialized Subjectivities and the Museum of Modern Art, ca. 1935," I demonstrate the circulation and exclusions that structured Black audiences and art viewing. I do so through an examination of the Museum of Modern Art’s African Negro Art exhibition, which Black artists engaged with as visitors at MoMA, through mediated forms in print and photography, as well as in circulating satellite shows presented at HBCUs. In doing so, I attend to both the modes of viewership at the museum proper as well as the ways it interacted within a broader network of Black publics. Similarly, I examine the specific content of that MoMA exhibit in its primitivist imagination of an African past, one which might be used as a ground for "modern" white subjects. I track how Black artists confronted that continued legacy of anti-Blackness and addressed the immense dislocations inherent in it. Throughout, I provided sustained attention to artists including Hale Woodruff, Loïs Mailou Jones, Aaron Douglas, John Biggers, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, Amaza Lee Meredith, William H. Johnson, Augusta Savage, and Elizabeth Catlett.

This dissertation studies the history of the German Red Cross of the German Democratic Republic and the German Red Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany. The dissertation begins with Germany’s defeat and capitulation in the Second World War into the occupation period, situating the pre-1945 German Red Cross in the chaos of the war’s end and its dissolution and ban by the Allied Powers. It investigates the aid work of new regional Red Cross societies in the Western occupation zones and the political debate about the Red Cross’s place in a socialist East Germany. The dissertation also analyzes the new national Red Crosses’ formation in 1952 and their domestic activities. These are two parallel histories of states with many similarities, while existing separately from one another and with differing ideological visions for the future. The German Red Crosses remained linked by their pasts and the circumstances of the present. This reality is reflected in their efforts to join the International Red Cross from 1952 to 1956, and in their collaboration to reunify families separated by the inter-German border. The dissertation argues that the histories of the German Red Crosses and humanitarianism contributes to our understanding of the fundamental predicaments faced by divided Germany in the early-Cold War. The Red Crosses shaped the responses to the challenges facing the region, whether they be the immediate suffering and long-lasting aftereffects wrought by total war, new anxieties about a nuclear future, or the need for modern disaster response and public health infrastructures. And humanitarianism was never purely altruistic. It was a useful political tool for East and West Germany and their peoples, who sought stability and peace and the successful completion of their ideological projects: creating socialism in the East and a liberal capitalist order in the West. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / On September 19, 1945, the Soviet Military Administration in Germany disbanded the German Red Cross and labelled it a Nazi organization, and the American, British, and French occupation governments followed suit. By 1952, two new national Red Cross organizations formed in divided Germany, the German Red Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Red Cross of the German Democratic Republic. This dissertation explores the history of the German Red Cross in West and East Germany from 1945 to 1965 and asks fundamental questions about the role of humanitarianism in Germany’s postwar recovery and reconstruction, in the daily life of two distinct but connected societies, and in the international relations of the Cold War. The dissertation argues that humanitarianism and humanitarian organizations are not immune to politics; indeed, humanitarianism was a useful tool for those on both sides of the ideological divide. It helped legitimize and sustain communism in East Germany, and it did the same for liberal capitalism in West Germany. In the first postwar decades, the German Red Crosses faced head on the manifest problems of East and West Germany, as both societies recovered from the influence of Nazism, the perpetration of genocide, and the destruction of war and set out to find security and peace under the weight of the Cold War. The two organizations were uniquely positioned to face those problems as their leaders were well connected and their aid workers were both humanitarian subject and humanitarian.

This study traces the current status of Spanish ethics as seen through the optics of historical memory. Starting from the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the thesis relates contemporary themes to their proposed origin throughout three additional distinctive eras of the 20th and 21st century in Spain: 1982-1996 (Socialist Spain), 1997-2010 (Post-modern Spain), and 2011-present (current Spain). Spanish narratives ranging from Los Abel by Matute, La magnitud de la tragedia by Monzó, "Fidelidad" of Ha dejado de llover by Barba and Las fosas de Franco by Silva are contextualized through their ethical architecture, in accordance with their socio-political context, and relationship to past historical traumas. This work proposes that the themes of anticlericalism, the pursuit of social equality, anti bureaucracy, and political distrust are trends culminating from Kohlberg's third level of morality. The thesis aims to be an exposition and legitimization of different ethical schemas that might otherwise be polarized as wrong and inferior by others.

The Composers' Collective, founded by leftist composers in 1932 New York City, sought to create proletarian music that avoided the "bourgeois" traditions of the past and functioned as a vehicle to engage Americans in political dialogue. The Collective aimed to understand how the modern composer became isolated from his public, and discussions on the relationship between music and society pervade the radical writings of Marc Blitzstein, Charles Seeger, and Elie Siegmeister, three of the organization's most vocal members. This new proletarian music juxtaposed revolutionary text with avant-garde musical idioms that were incorporated in increasingly greater quantities; thus, composers progressively acclimated the listener to the dissonance of modern music, a distinctive sound that the Collective hoped would become associated with revolutionary ideals. The mass songs of the two Workers' Song Books published by the Collective, illustrate the transitional phase of the musical implementation of their ideology. In contrast, a case study of the song "Chinaman! Laundryman!" by Ruth Crawford Seeger, a fringe member of the Collective, suggests that this song belongs within the final stage of proletarian music, where the text and highly modernist music seamlessly interact to create what Charles Seeger called an "art-product of the highest type."

This thesis examines the ways that African Americans in the mid-twentieth century thought about and practiced masculinity. Important contemporary events such as the struggle for civil rights and the Vietnam War influenced the ways that black Americans sought not only to construct masculine identities, but to use these identities to achieve a higher social purpose. The thesis argues that while mainstream American society had specific prescriptions for how men should behave, black Americans were able to select which of these prescriptions they valued and wanted to pursue while simultaneously rejecting those that they found untenable. Masculinity in the mid-century was not based on one thing, but rather was an amalgamation of different ideals that black men (and women) sought to utilize to achieve communal goals of equality, opportunity, and family.

Este trabajo analiza la gestación, funcionamiento y recepción de la estrategia literaria de Fernando Vallejo, en especial, el malditismo y la subversión que caracterizan su controvertida poética. Para hacerlo, adopta un enfoque metodológico que tiene en cuenta tanto los aportes de la Sociología de la literatura como los de disciplinas como la Estética de la recepción y el Análisis del discurso, sin olvidarse de estudiar los códigos narrativos, afectivos y culturales que favorecen los efectos subversivos de sus textos, entre los que destaca el pacto ambiguo firmado con sus lectores por el autor colombiano, único en la narrativa actual en español. <p>Ante la ausencia de un marco teórico sobre este tipo de obras subversivas o malditas, de manera más específica se intentan desentrañar las claves principales de las poéticas del mal y de la subversión, llegando a proponer un cuadro explicativo con los rasgos que, en base al estudio pluridisciplinar de nociones como la “desviación social”, el “mal” y la “subversión”, presentan los textos literarios subversivos y malditos. En este sentido, los no hispanistas pueden leer esta tesis como un case study o materialización de dicha propuesta <p>/ <p>Ce travail analyse la gestation, le fonctionnement et la réception de la stratégie littéraire de Fernando Vallejo, et plus particulièrement la malédiction et la subversion qui caractérisent sa poétique controversée. Dans ce but, l’étude adopte un point de vue méthodologique qui tient compte tant des apports de la Sociologie de la littérature que de l’Esthétique de la réception et de l’Analyse du discours. Seront également étudiés les codes narratifs, affectifs et culturels qui favorisent les effets subversifs des textes, parmi lesquels ressort l’ambiguïté du pacte signé par l’écrivain colombien avec ses lecteurs, unique dans la littérature contemporaine de langue espagnole. <p>Devant l’absence de cadre théorique sur ce type d’œuvres subversives ou maudites, il s’agit d’identifier de manière plus spécifique les éléments clés des poétiques du mal et de la subversion, pour arriver à proposer un cadre explicatif. Celui-ci comprend les caractéristiques que présentent, sur base de l’étude pluridisciplinaire de notions telles que la “déviation sociale” et la “subversion”, les textes littéraires subversifs et maudits. En ce sens, les non hispanistes pourront lire cette thèse comme une étude de cas ou comme la matérialisation d’une telle proposition théorique. / Doctorat en Langues et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The Colored Trainmen of America (CTA) actively challenged Jim Crow policies on the job and in the public sphere between the 1930s and 1950s. In response to lingering questions concerning the relationship between early black labor activism and civil rights protest, this study goes beyond both local lure and cursory research. This study examines the Colored Trainmen's major contributions to the advancement of African Americans. It also provides context for some of the organization's shortcomings in both realms. On the job the African American railroad workers belonging to the CTA fought valiantly to receive the same opportunities for professional growth and development as whites working in the operating trades of the railroad industry. In the public sphere, these men collectively protested second-class services and accommodations both on and off the clock. Neither their agenda, the scope of their activities, nor their influence was limited to the railroad lines the members of the CTA operated within the Gulf Coast region. The CTA belonged to a progressive coalition comprised of four other powerful independent African American labor unions committed to unyielding labor activism and the toppling of Jim Crow. Together, they all worked to effectuate meaningful social change in partnership with national civil rights attorney Charles H. Houston. Houston's experience and direction, coupled with the CTA's dedicated membership and willingness to challenge authority, created considerable momentum in movements aimed at toppling racial inequality in the workplace and elsewhere. Like most of their predecessors, the CTA's struggle for advancement fits within a continuum of successive challenges to economic exploitation and racial inequality. No single person or organization can take full credit for ending segregation or achieving equality. Many who remain nameless and faceless contributed and sacrificed. This study not only chronicles the contribution of a relatively unsung African American labor organization that waged war against Jim Crow on two different fronts, it also pays homage to a few more individuals who made a difference in the lives of an entire race of people during the course of a bitterly contested, never-ending struggle for racial equality in the United States of America during the twentieth century.