The emergence and spread of electricity profoundly shaped the “long New South.” This dissertation traces the electrification of the US South from the 1880s to the 1970s. Focusing primarily on the Atlanta-based Georgia Power Company, it emphasizes that electricity’s rise was not simply the result of technological innovation. It was a multifaceted process that deeply influenced, and was influenced by, environmental alterations, political machinations, business practices, and social and cultural matters. Although it hewed to national and global patterns in many respects, southern electrification charted a distinctive and instructive path. Its story speaks to the ways the South’s experiences with electrification shaped larger American models of energy transitions and economic development, but also the ways it wrought dramatic changes in the fabric of everyday life.

This essay examines the uses of the grotesque in Alice Walker’s novel The Third Life of Grange Copeland. Published in 1970 the novel has been subject to various readings by diverse scholars. However, previous research has failed to take into account the displays of the grotesque in the novel. This essay argues that not only does Walker use the grotesque prominently throughout the novel, but also that Walker constructs an intricate critique of U.S. society through her depictions of the grotesque. Resting largely on the theoretical perspective of Mikhail Bakhtin this essay examines the following grotesque images: the female spectacle, the female adolescent, the hysteric, pregnant death, monstrosity, and whiteness. By exposing Walker’s uses of the grotesque, this essay offers an analysis that exposes the relationship between Walker’s grotesque images and her womanist objective. The aim of The Third Life of Grange Copeland is to critique the oppressive regimes of patriarchy and U.S. white supremacist culture and society. It is argued here, then, that the grotesque is strategically used in different manners when addressing womanist and racial issues. Walker uses the grotesque in order to alter confining gender binaries and expose and criticize the destructive aspects of patriarchal and white supremacist ideologies. Through her narrative and the diverse characters of The Third Life, Walker exposes the repercussions of oppressive white supremacist and patriarchal orders.

This dissertation consists of three essays investigating the historical roots of economic development and inequality in the US South. The first essay examines the impact of slavery on long-run development. Using county-level data from the US South, I show that slavery has impeded long-run development through the human capital channel. The mechanism involves labor market institutions and their impact on demand for human capital. I find that the history of slavery hindered integration of black workers into the labor market. Moreover, border-county analyses show that selective application of laws and regulations was a primary tool for impeding labor market integration. Through estimating the relative return to education for each county, I further argue that blacks in a region with a greater legacy of slavery had fewer incentives to invest in human capital. The second essay studies the long run effects of cotton agriculture focusing on a novel aspect of structural change. I show that cotton specialization in the late 19th century had long-run negative impact on local development, and the negative relationship became only evident in the second half of the 20th century. I argue that the change was caused by the mechanization of cotton production. After cotton mechanization, cotton labor with low human capital was relocated to local manufacturing. In response to the inflow of cotton labor, there was a decline in labor productivity in manufacturing which persisted through directed technical change. Using census data, I show that initial cotton specialization reduces demand for skills in manufacturing even to this day. The third essay addresses the legacy of cotton agriculture on economic inequality. Using the Gini index of household income, I show that initial cotton specialization increased long-run economic inequality at the county level. Moreover, evidence from the census data indicates that cotton specialization increased wage inequality exclusively in the local service sector, without any effects on the other non-agricultural sectors. As an explanation, I argue that wage inequality in the service sector increased due to expansion of employment in low-wage occupations followed by a decrease in their wage level.

The American plantation system, far from an idiosyncrasy of the southern United States, was a transnational formation that spread across the US South, the Caribbean, and parts of Latin America, forming a cross-border cultural sphere often called “Plantation America.” How have US and Caribbean writers understood the United States’ relationship to this broader landscape through its most alienated region, the South? And how did the South’s ties to the plantation zone impact how writers imagined the United States as an emerging global empire in the twentieth century? “Plantation America: The US South and the Caribbean in the Literary Culture of Empire, 1898-1959,” explores works by white American, African American, and Black Caribbean writers produced during a period of heightened US colonial intervention in the Americas, from the Spanish-American War of 1898, to the Cuban Revolution of 1959. It contributes to recent US-based scholarship on the plantation origins of Western modernity and draws on an older Black and Caribbean critical discourse on the plantation as a prototypically modern institution. Building on this scholarship, this project demonstrates that US expansion southward prompted writers to reckon with the South’s highly ambivalent relationship with Plantation America, and that doing so served as a fault line for deeply held anxieties over the modern United States’ indebtedness to the plantation complex and its creolized cultural legacies. Its chapters thus show how US empire provoked modern writers to respond to the plantation as a driver of racial capitalism and industrialized labor systems, a blueprint for modern empires, a key site for the emergence and repression of cross-culturality, and a root source for traumatic forms of psychic and spiritual alienation associated with modern subjecthood. Through the lens of Caribbean critical theory, including work by Édouard Glissant, Fernando Ortiz, and C. L. R. James, I examine Richard Wright’s postplantation perspective in his little studied Haitian manuscript, transculturation in Ernest Hemingway’s Key West and Cuban works, the modern plantation empire in stories of the Panama Canal Zone by the Caribbean-born writer Eric Walrond, and William Faulkner’s transnational plantation economy in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying.

Thesis advisor: Robert S. Ross / This dissertation presents a structured and focused comparison of how Chinese leaders and academics have perceived the security cooperation of states on China’s periphery. This study examines three cases: the U.S.S.R.-Vietnam Alliance (1978-1989); the U.S.-Japan Alliance (1990-2016) and the U.S.-South Korea Alliance (1990-2016). They exemplify adversarial alliances in that they represent security cooperation that threatened or potentially threaten Chinese vital interests. Similarly, they all represent adversarial alliances of an asymmetric power relationship between a larger and smaller state. I gathered this data from Chinese journal articles and books related to the three cases, interviewed Chinese academics and think tank analysts, and compared the Chinese perceptions with non-Chinese primary and secondary sources. The research explores how well four concepts describe alliance behavior in the evidence. The first three concepts relate to how China views the alliances’ intentions, capabilities, and cohesion. The fourth concept relates to China’s self-perception as a rising state relative to the adversarial alliances. Knowledge of Chinese past and present perceptions of adversarial alliances should assist academics and policy makers in understanding the implications of security cooperation of states that are in close proximity to the Chinese mainland. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

This dissertation examines student radicalism in Tennessee between Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954) and the national backlash against the Kent State University shootings in Kent, Ohio in May 1970. As the first statewide study of student activism, and one of the few examinations of southern student activism, it broadens the understanding of New Left student radicalism from its traditionally defined hotbeds in the Northeast and the West Coast. It also argues for a consideration of student radicalism that incorporates white and black accounts, assessing issues surrounding civil rights, labour, the renegotiation of student roles on campus, and Vietnam on black and formerly all-white campuses. Three main arguments drive this dissertation. First, the notion of the New Left inhabiting only a brief moment in time, rising and falling in the 1960s—years of hope, days of rage, in Todd Gitlin’s influential telling—is problematic in the context of Tennessee. The location of Highlander Folk School in Tennessee created a strong connection to Old Left labour activism for the state’s New Left. Student movements both developed more slowly in Tennessee and fractured more slowly. My second argument is that forms of radicalism in Tennessee were distinctly southern. The region’s political order was more stifling than its counterpart in the North, and could easily turn more deadly. Students radicals in the South grasped this difference. Any left in the South had to address issues of race, but, in light of the danger, had to do so gingerly. Thirdly, race mattered a great deal to southern leftists, black and white, at first bringing them together and later driving them apart. Both black and white students viewed attempts to establish personal autonomy within campus and community organising as centrally important to their activities. Black and white students understood personal autonomy in a broad sense, conceptualised of as ‘student power’: it covered immediate concerns over universities’ assumption of parental power over students, as well as apparent infringements of civil rights and civil liberties. This dissertation reconstructs this pursuit of student power, both within campuses and beyond, and details the growing rift between black and white student interests.

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<p>In the century and a half since Emancipation, slavery has remained a central topic at Somerset Place, a plantation-turned-state historic site in northeastern North Carolina, and programmers and audiences have thought about and interpreted it in many different ways. When North Carolina's Department of Archives and History first adopted the former plantation into its Historic Sites System in 1967, Somerset was dedicated to memorializing the planter, Josiah Collins III; the enslaved rarely made it into the site's narrative at all, and if they did it was as objects rather than subjects. In the final decades of the twentieth century, Somerset Place began to celebrate the lives of the 850 slaves who lived and worked at the plantation during the antebellum era, framing their history as a story about kinship, triumph and reconciliation. Both versions of the story--as well as the many other stories that the site has told since the end of slavery in 1865--require careful historical analysis and critique. </p><p>This dissertation considers Somerset's history and varying interpretations since the end of Reconstruction. It examines the gradual invention of Somerset Place State Historic Site in order to explore the nature and implications of representations of slavery, and the development of Americans' historical consciousness of slavery during their nation's long transition into freedom. It employs manuscript sources; oral histories and interviews; public documents, records and reports; and material artifacts in order to trace Somerset's gradual shift from a site of agricultural production to one of cultural representation, situated within North Carolina's developing public history programming and tourism industry. This research joins a rich body of literature that addresses southern history, epistemology, memory, and politics. It is comparative: it sets two centuries side by side, excavating literal cause-and-effect--the ways in which the events of the nineteenth century led to those of the twentieth--and their figurative relationship, the dialectical play between the ante- and post-bellum worlds. By examining the ways twentieth-century Americans employed the antebellum era as an intellectual and cultural category, this dissertation sheds light on slavery's diverse legacies and the complexity of living with collective historical traumas.</p> / Dissertation

At the height of their popularity in the 1990s, there were 140 feminist bookstores in the US and Canada (Onosaka 2006). Today, in 2017, there are thirteen left. Feminist bookstores began opening in the 1970s promoting ideas about lesbian separatism, woman only spaces, and nurturing a feminist community. Although many functioned as for-profit stores, many also operated community centers and non-profit organizations. Feminist bookstores provide an excellent site for scholars view decades of social movement organizing merging theory, practice, activism, and academics. As a social movement organization, feminist bookstores as are the quintessential node of academia and activism. Of the thirteen bookstores left, only two are located in the US South: Charis Books and More is in Atlanta, GA and Iris Books is in Gainesville, FL. During my yearlong ethnography, I gathered archival data, field notes and ethnographic data, interview data, and oral histories This is the first comprehensive ethnography of feminist bookstores which looks at the ways feminist theories are used by social movement organizations to create, maintain, and alter collective identities and to reach feminist movement goals. Through my study of these two bookstore owners, workers, and boards, I illuminate the social organization of feminist social movement organizations in the South. In chapter two, I show how the bookstores see the existence of a tangible space to allow for contestation about collective identities and “home work” as a successful social movement outcome. In chapter three, I find that participants believe that southern identity, which is steeped in understands of the past, have created a need for the bookstore’s longevities and for progressive communities. In chapter four, I demonstrate that due to the unique positioning of the histories of racism and slavery in the South, these feminist organizations believe a central problem of feminism is to actively name and confront racism within both the South and feminism. In the fifth chapter, using two gender disputes a decade a part, I argue that the narrative of gender progress understood as inclusion of queer issues as well as transgender and gender variant identities touted by many scholars (Whittier 1995; Jagose 1996; Armstrong and Crage 2006) inaccurately represents the intricacies within practices of feminism. When it comes to feminist identities, politics, and civil rights discourses, our current political climate has illustrated that there is not room for linear narratives of progress—within movements or individual identities. Focusing on the combination of histories and demographics, with an emphasis on race and queerness, this project analyzes how the US South provides a complex space to understand the challenges of intersectional and white feminist communities and social movements.