Doctoral dissertation: Panoptical tropes and negotiations between art and politics in Charles Johnson's short fiction Abstract The dissertation traces the uneasy marriage between ideology and aesthetics in African American literature, and its reflections in Charles Johnson's short fiction. The historical introduction is an attempt to reevaluate the tradition of ideological self-policing in African American literature. Its central thesis resides in the claim that African American literature and its critical reception has still retained some of this ideological template, in a manner and degree that throws it out of sync with the mainstream trajectory of American literature. This lingering anachronism cannot be legitimately attributed to a single causative circumstance, yet one of the more obvious explanations for this residual trend is the living memory of overt discriminatory practices in many parts of the United States, which is why the centrifugal literary discourses of assimilationism and protest fiction are still very vibrant. This simple argument alone provides a sufficient basis for contextualizing and understanding the thesis that ideological writing still inadvertently manages to find its way into African American fictional pursuits. This is also underscored by the observable fact that even the...

On December 22, 1926, an opening ceremony of the so-called Gypsy school was held in Uzhhorod, the capital of the Czechoslovak administration in Carpathian Ruthenia. Czech officials who gave talks pointed out pedagogical significance of the established institution which they described as unique and exceptional "experiment". The creation of a special school for children of those inhabitants who were labelled as "Gypsies" on the territory which was annexed by Czechoslovakia only later after the First World War and which in the contemporary imagination represented specific, "backward" region of the newly established state, served to consolidate the legitimacy of the First Republic as a democratic, progressive, modern, liberal state which belonged to the developed and civilized West. More than a half year later, on July 14, 1927, representatives in the Czechoslovak Parliament in Prague passed the Act No. 117/1927 on Wandering Gypsies. The development of this law was related to an immense interest of the contemporary media in "Gypsies" which was encouraged by the arrest of approximately twenty "Gypsies" from a village located in East Slovakia. They were charged of numerous robberies and murders. In contrast to the situation shortly after the First World War when the central Czechoslovak authorities...

Maters thesis People with undetermined citizenship the case of Estonia , describes the situation of the group of people who has no citizenship. The status of those people is described by chronological analysis of Estonian law and analysis of their socioeconomic position. They came to Estonia after the Second World War from different republics of USSR. When Estonian independence was renewed they had to adapt at new living conditions. Some of them are not successful. They did not get the automatic right to get Estonian citizenship. In Estonian law the main principal is the principal of state continuity. It means that immigrants have to naturalize. They have to pass the exam of the state language and fulfill the requirements concerning the permanent residence permit. Estonian law gives people with undetermined citizenship almost the same rights as to Estonian citizens the exceptions are active and passive right to vote to Parliament and the right to be elected to local councils. From 2006 there is even the advantage for them because they can travel to Russia without visa. They are not discriminated economically the problem is mostly in the indirect impact of division of Soviet time society. People with undetermined citizenship usually cannot speak well Estonian. It makes it difficult to find a good...