Mixed Race Antecedents: Black Hybridity in Cultural Production, 1960-1989 looks at how cultural producers of African descent in the U.S. from the 1960s through the 1980s conceptualized racial and cultural hybridity. I analyze writers and artists who were grappling with how to think about their multiple heritages while simultaneously considering the political implications of their racial hybridity. Before the Census Movement of the 1990s narrowed the discussion of racial hybridity to boxes on government forms, these playwrights, authors, and visual artists were thinking about hybridity in a different register. They explored connections between personal and political identities, the relationships between experiences and art, and the significance of having multiple racial/ethnic heritages when race in America was still very much operating under the auspices of the one-drop rule. Their creative explorations during this time distinguishes them as mixed race antecedents, those who were looking for the political and aesthetic uses of black hybridity during the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s and Gay Liberation, and their corollary art movements. I draw from critical race theory, performance studies, autobiography studies, and cultural studies to understand the complex relationship artists and writers had to the social movements that defined their historical moment while asserting their own conceptions of how racial hybridity functions for those of African descent in the U.S. In so doing, this project challenges the predominant narrative of critical mixed race studies by arguing that mixed race identity formations were emerging in American culture during and after the civil rights era, not just during the Census Movement. Particularly, I focus on the possibility of racial and cultural hybridity not replacing blackness, like what a post-racial world would ask us to do, but instead, prompting further exploration and expansion of blackness.

The act of wearing a mask, of concealing one’s identity, has been one of the most enticing but controversial cultural practices since the 1500s. Masking evoked an even bolder act of self-fashioning when enacted by the female sex, since the gesture came to be read as a materialization of the deceitful and duplicitous character of woman’s nature, proclaimed by the major state and religious institutions of the early modern era. The ubiquity of this cultural and religious trope, however, has overshadowed a parallel dimension of this phenomenon: women’s appropriation of masking as means to obtain cultural agency and public (in)visibility in the context of a number of sartorial, theatrical, and entertainment practices. How visual representations of female masking served both maskers and audiences to navigate the social, moral, and cultural implications of this reality constitutes the subject of the present study. This dissertation explores the gendering of the act of (un)masking and its dissemination in visual culture during the early modern period in England, looking at four different cultural and chronological settings: the Carnival, the Stuart court masque, the Restoration urban space, and the Georgian masquerade. Through the examination of women’s uses of masks and their artistic representations in these different contexts, the author argues that the iconography of the (un)masked woman not only pervaded contemporary imagery, but also acted as a primary vehicle to comment on, formulate, and negotiate models of femininity throughout the early modern period. As this was a quintessential form of self-fashioning, central to a number of pageants, entertainments, and rituals, the analysis of women’s masking and its depictions reveals the core of early modern attitudes to power, gender, and class, in both the public and private realms. In order to flesh out such ideological discourses, this study considers a wide range of visual depictions and cultural practices, including drawings, prints, paintings, ephemera, costumes, fashion accessories, cosmetic customs, and architectural settings. In methodological terms, this dissertation applies an interdisciplinary, feminist, and art-historical perspective to the study of early modern masking in England, engaging at the same time with a number of interpretative tools from the fields of the history of costume, dance, theatre, and literature.

This dissertation traces a half-century of interactions between motion pictures and other visual media, using scenery as a node of meaning-making that affected key aspects of cinema as a medium: narrative, mode of documenting the natural world, propaganda tool, conduit of ‘ experience’ for American modernity. Exploring often-ignored aspects of visual culture like set design, moving panoramas and art exhibitions, it argues for the cross-disciplinary importance of landscape in debates around nationhood, empire, environmental blight and the relation between style and ideology, as they played out in the United States from the 1890s to the 1930s. As an inquiry, it takes its cue from concrete historical artifacts, artworks and their reception, bringing what is usually relegated to the backdrop (scenery) into the foreground of cultural history. An iconological approach is put forth that places the motion picture in the context of broader contemporaneous developments in American art. Depictions of the natural landscape had been the principal artistic means of crafting an identity for the “republic of nature” that the United States aspired to be long before the advent of cinema. To a major extent, cinema became the legitimate heir to photography and painting because of its attempt to realize the uneasy but productive co-existence of nature and artifice. Drawing from the methodology of visual studies and adopting a comparative, historically-grounded perspective, this cultural history focuses on the natural and urban landscape as a motif and a certain way of looking at the world that cuts across media and anchors cinema to late nineteenth and twentieth century visual culture in the U.S. It is thus an intervention in the visual rhetoric of space that looks for the afterlives of the nineteenth century popular obsession with nature, beyond the familiar trope of the Western genre in cinema. The impact that the early landscape photography of Eadweard Muybridge had for his subsequent experiments in chronophotography is examined by comparing the two phases of his career in technical and conceptual terms. The collaboration between railroad companies and movie studios for the promotion of Western scenery is as important to a history of landscape in early and silent America cinema as a consideration of the studios’ own layout ad their occasional function as amusement parks. Moving into the 1920s, “city symphonies” like Manhatta (1921) and documentaries of the American Southwest are placed against the background of Paul Strand’s photography and Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings, works that addressed the same issues and locales. F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise is examined as a complex “landscape text” with a collaborative visual authorship and Warren Newcombe’s Hollywood career as a effects technician and exhibiting painter is presented as a case were landscape catalyzed a crosspollination of cinematic and painterly aesthetics. This cultural history culminates with a survey of landscape’s status as a national theme (from a political, economic and artistic point of view) during the years of the Franklin Roosevelt administration in the 1930s, drawing from a variety of government-produced documentaries on themes like the dustbowl and New Deal agricultural revitalization efforts (as seen in Pare Lorentz’s The River, 1938). A major retrospective exhibition of American art staged in Paris in 1938 reveals the crucial importance attributed to landscape as a national motif around which various art forms, styles and periods in the cultural production of the United States were assembled and made intelligible for an international public.

This dissertation is wrapped up in a comparison of book and museum, which raises questions about the visual technology of the printed page itself: a black and white space. Articles and histories on paper production of the nineteenth century stress the necessity of bleaching wood pulp or rags in order to produce “beautiful,” “polished,” “virginal,” “clean” white paper. Bleaching paper to create a normalized, aestheticized whiteness, upon which to craft the cultural capital of the book, largely anticipates the later use of whiteness in the modern art gallery, where whiteness becomes a “neutral” or “objective” or “normal” color upon which to hang visual art or print words. In certain contexts, especially during Reconstruction and later during the Harlem Renaissance, authors saw the black and white contrast of the printed page as a symbol of racial segregation—whiteness and blackness following strictly ordered patterns. This dissertation thus investigates the shifting symbolism of black text on a white visual field between 1880 and 1940. Several of the subjects of my dissertation have been largely overlooked by critics, (Celia Thaxter, Simon Pokagon, Melvin Tolson), although previous studies have examined the way books of modernist poetry become display spaces—the white space of each page like a wall or frame which affords the lyric poem similar attention to modernist visual art, and imitating styles of display made famous by Alfred Stieglitz in his galleries. Poets thus become curators as well as authors. My dissertation expands these studies to include works written before the modernist period (Thaxter and Pokagon), and after it (William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, and Tolson), as well as analyze alternate material technologies of book production that vastly impact the visual experience of reading. Moreover, I also consider the political reasons for these material changes to the book, including racial representation, so that my work simultaneously explores both the aesthetics and politics of printed text.

<p>The main purpose of this essay is to study ideas concerning the concept of ”art” within the discourse of the exhibition space that is part of a fanart community. In order to do so I have used a hermeneutical and to some extent structuralistic, discourse analysis. I have examined structure and rhetorics in two established and popular communities, Fanart-Central and deviantART.</p><p>My conclusions states that personal ideas regarding artistic value are undermined the joint policies, because of a collective rhetoric somewhat inherent in the community structure.</p><p>When a lot of works are being based on internal knowledge of symbolics and historical narratives, this may to some extent have consequences where unfamiliar observers might fail to notice elements of possible significance. Moreover, certain interests in keeping a united front of “quality art” may also affect a general idea immediate to what signifies fanart. By means of for example categorization, censure, and quality control, specific standards of “good art” are framed and conceded within the communities. Trying to sustain specific criteria as emblematic for the entire genre like this seems highly restraining, and also contradicts the essentially liberal principals of fan culture.</p>

The main purpose of this essay is to study ideas concerning the concept of ”art” within the discourse of the exhibition space that is part of a fanart community. In order to do so I have used a hermeneutical and to some extent structuralistic, discourse analysis. I have examined structure and rhetorics in two established and popular communities, Fanart-Central and deviantART. My conclusions states that personal ideas regarding artistic value are undermined the joint policies, because of a collective rhetoric somewhat inherent in the community structure. When a lot of works are being based on internal knowledge of symbolics and historical narratives, this may to some extent have consequences where unfamiliar observers might fail to notice elements of possible significance. Moreover, certain interests in keeping a united front of “quality art” may also affect a general idea immediate to what signifies fanart. By means of for example categorization, censure, and quality control, specific standards of “good art” are framed and conceded within the communities. Trying to sustain specific criteria as emblematic for the entire genre like this seems highly restraining, and also contradicts the essentially liberal principals of fan culture.

This thesis addresses why a comprehensive art education curriculum needs to merge with visual culture in order to better serve current elementary students today. The review of literature supports this theory and proves that the two approaches work together to make learning relevant and effective. The units of study provided make up a guideline that show teachers how to include visual culture into the current comprehensive art education structure. This allows students to bring their own ideas and experiences into the classroom, and results in making the visual arts more personal. Following this curriculum will help students own their education and ultimately gain higher level thinking and learning in the visual arts as well as other subject areas.

This research examines the ways in which the Vancouver Olympics emblem, an Inuit inuksuk, and other Aboriginal symbols have been ‘adopted’ by the organizers of the 2010 Winter Olympics, how visual and textual Aboriginal representations have been incorporated into the public education mandate of the Games, and how this relates to the Aboriginal Participation Goals of the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC). I use Freirian critical cultural pedagogy and Foucauldian theories along with a visual research method, semiotic analysis, as a way to examine the material presented on the official Vancouver 2010 Olympic website and related websites.

This paper examines Djuna Barnes's Modernist masterpiece, Nightwood, by exploring the author's particular styles of writing. As an ironist, a master of spectacle, and a visual artist, Barnes's distinct stylistic roles allow the writer to construct a strange fictional world that transcends simple categorization and demands close reading. Through textual analysis, consideration of how Barnes's characterization, and engagement with key critical interpretations lead to the conclusion that Nightwood's primary aim is to present the reader with an image of his or her own individual estrangement.

This dissertation studies the earliest years of photography’s invention. Attention to the earliest conceptions of photography reveals a more complex and contested understanding of the nature and significance of photographic representation than has previously been attributed to the Victorians of the early nineteenth century, providing not only a more comprehensive picture of the history of the new technology, but also new insights into the interactions of Victorian photography and visual culture. The earliest representations and receptions of photography are gathered from inventors’ reports, the first photographic texts produced for a specialist and general audience, and periodical articles that reveal the popular reception of photography by a non-specialist audience. The evolving representations and reception of photography are traced throughout the 1840s, as the medium grew increasingly popular, with a particular focus on photographic portraiture. Arguing that the earliest figurations of a new medium directly inform or “premediate” how the medium is negotiated as it becomes established in the culture – that is, even though the technology and use of photography changed quite rapidly, the earliest perceptions of the medium powerfully influenced how it was used, perceived, and resisted – I examine the central anxieties raised by photography that persisted throughout the 1840s and early 1850s. Using Charles Dickens’s Bleak House as a case study, I then turn to literature of the realist genre to assess how photography is imagined and contested in novelistic form. This not only provides a model with which to examine the incorporation of photographic allusions and themes into the realist novel, but also contributes new insights into the ways in which the issues of photography and other aspects of visuality intersected with the literary realist enterprise.