Le charbon était connu au Vietnam depuis longtemps, mais c’est pendant la période coloniale qu’il fit l’objet d’une exploitation systématique. Les Français s’intéressèrent à ces ressources minières du Vietnam dès avant la conquête coloniale. Après l’établissement du protectorat français au Tonkin et en Annam en 1883-1884, l’exploitation des mines de charbon connut un essor rapide sous l’effet de l’afflux de capitaux et l’introduction de techniques de France et devint l’une des principales activités industrielles du Tonkin. Les autorités coloniales soutinrent fortement la « mise en valeur » de la colonie par le capitalisme français. Néanmoins, il n’était pas toujours facile même pour les plus grandes compagnies françaises d’organiser une nouvelle activité de production dans un pays peu industrialisé Alors que les charbonnages de Hòn Gai parvinrent à surmonter des difficultés d’ordre financier, commercial et industriel et réaliser des profits considérables, la plupart des autres entreprises minières ne rémunèrent jamais suffisamment les capitaux engagés, et même certaines d’entre elles se terminèrent par des échecs complets. En particulier, les compagnies minières rencontrèrent une grande difficulté à recruter des ouvriers et les retenir dans les mines, dont les conditions de travail furent particulièrement dures. La forte mobilité caractérisait la main-d’œuvre des mines et retarda ainsi la formation d’une conscience de classe parmi les ouvriers des mines. La grève générale des ouvriers de Hòn Gai en novembre 1936 témoigne pourtant la naissance d’une nouvelle classe sociale, que les militants communistes vietnamiens visèrent à transformer en avant-garde révolutionnaire contre le colonialisme et le capitalisme. / Coal was known in Vietnam from early on, but it was during the colonial period that it was subjected to systematic exploitation. The French were interested in these mineral resources of Vietnam before the colonial conquest. After the establishment of French protectorate in Tonkin and in Annam in 1883-1884, coal mining grew quickly as a result of influx of capital and introduction of technics from France and became one of principal industrial activities in Tonkin. The colonial authorities strongly supported the “mise en valeur” of colony by French capitalism. Nevertheless, it was not easy even for the biggest French companies to organise a new production activity in a country hardly industrialised. Whereas Hòn Gai colliery succeeded in overcoming financial, commercial and industrial difficulties and to make sizeable profits, most other mining enterprises did never provide enough returns to capital employed and even some of them ended in total failure. In particular, mining companies had great difficulty in recruiting workers and retaining them to mines, working conditions of which were particularly harsh. High mobility characterised workforce of mines and delayed thus formation of class consciousness among mine workers. The general strike of Hòn Gai workers in november 1936 witnessed however emergence of a new social class, whom Vietnamese communist activists sought to make revolutionary vanguard against colonialism and capitalism

Since 2000, there has been an explosion of "reality," or unscripted, television shows in a variety of formats. The series in which new societies are created in isolation appeared almost immediately to be influenced by certain identity constructs, particularly gender and sexual orientation. Audiences came to these shows with definite expectations already in place. I intend in this study to determine why this is so and what those expectations are. Survivor, the germinal presentation of this genre, has as its motto "Outwit, Outplay, Outlast." However, as the show has developed through many iterations, the ability to literally survive in a hostile environment has been eclipsed by what is now called "the social game" by contestant, viewers, producers and observers of the phenomenon. Because of cultural stereotypes about gender, amateur review writers, along with regular viewers who frequent internet communications spaces, began to remark on how women win (when they do) compared to how men win, and to comment upon the various player behaviors and strategies in terms of sexual orientation, race, age and other constructs. Because I was hooked in the first Survivor series, and subsequently became interested in Big Brother as well, I searched for information online and discovered the explosion of discussions. Despite all the other aspects of, and activities in, these games, the large majority of the texts seemed to center upon identity constructs. Although there is a great deal of strategy to observe and discuss, even that was frequently couched in what a viewer could expect of a person of given gender or sexual orientation. It wasn't long before I began to perceive both the programs and the writing generated by them as texts that could be analyzed in terms of rhetorical appeals. Certain texts which might be expected to demonstrate credibility were ignored in favor of emotional reinforcement. Viewers and reviewers seemed most pleased with, and attributed the most credibility to, those speech acts and behaviors which resonated with their values and beliefs systems, regardless of their effectiveness I found this trend interesting enough, and distressing enough, to examine in depth to learn how people read the texts of strategy-genre reality television. In general, there is a complete lack of critical viewing and no application of logic except by academics and journalists. Average viewers reject whatever does not match their belief system, even if that behavior wins the game. Feelings have eclipsed all else as the standard of credibility and value. I conclude that credibility may only be derived from a text when feelings match viewer values. Of paramount importance in matching these values are the behaviors of the players, in that they must meet expectations in stereotype and tradition, and of course, the gender and sexual orientation of the winner.

La culture et les méthodes chinoises restent encore aujourd’hui bien méconnues pour le monde non asiatique. Or, le système bancaire chinois est un mélange de culture et de traditions millénaires et de méthodes et concepts modernes, importés de l’étranger. Cet amalgame particulier est donc difficile à caractériser. L’objectif présent est de déterminer si le système bancaire chinois actuel, cœur du système financier du pays, peut être considéré comme le socle d’un modèle de capitalisme -selon la définition de la théorie de la régulation- aujourd’hui, ou s’il le sera demain à travers une analyse de son histoire, de sa structure et de l’évolution des réformes, jusqu’à l’implémentation de Bâle III et les réformes de Wenzhou. De nombreux experts s’accordent à penser que le système bancaire nécessite des réformes profondes, dont notamment le retrait de l’Etat et une plus grande ouverture. Ce type de réforme bouleverserait cependant les rapports institutionnels. L’Etat devrait laisser une place beaucoup plus importante au marché et le socle que constitue le système bancaire actuel serait alors méconnaissable. Si les dernières réformes chinoises montrent une réelle volonté politique de libéralisation du secteur financier chinois, celles-ci soulignent également les obstacles auxquels sont confrontés les acteurs du système. Les méthodes d’implémentation suggèrent non pas la caractéristique d’un modèle ou d’une culture mais bien une volonté, de permettre à l’Etat de rester l’institution dominante. / The Chinese culture and methods are still unknown for the non-Asian world. Besides, the Chinese banking system is a merge of culture and ancient traditions and modern methods and concepts imported from abroad. This particular mix is difficult to characterize. The objective of this thesis is to ascertain if the current Chinese banking system, heart of the country's financial system, can be considered as the core of a model of capitalism as defined by the Regulation Theory - today or tomorrow- through an analysis of its history, structure and evolution up to the implementation of Basel III and Wenzhou’s reforms. Many experts agree that the banking system requires deep reforms, including the withdrawal of state control and a greater openness. However, this type of reform would transform deeply the institutional relationships. If the government allows a much more powerful market institution then the core of the current banking system would be changed beyond recognition. Recent Chinese reforms show a real political will to liberalize the Chinese financial sector, but they also highlight the obstacles faced by actors of the system. Besides, the implementation methods don’t suggest characteristics of a model or culture but a strong willingness of the state to remain the dominant institution.

acase@tulane.edu

I offer an interpretation of John Dewey and Reinhold Niebuhr that highlights the role of virtue in the visions of democracy that both writers articulated. Based on this interpretation, I argue that Dewey and Niebuhr both implied that virtue is necessary for democracy to thrive, despite the fact that they spent much of their careers in intellectual conflict with each other. Specifically, I claim that they were both committed to the value of humility and mutuality for democratic society. Humility and mutuality are virtues with profound importance for democracy that logically flow from Dewey's framework of American pragmatism and Niebuhr's Augustinian Christian theology. I argue that their ironic and unnoticed commitment to humility and mutuality as democratic virtues helps us to understand their shared critique of capitalism. For Niebuhr and Dewey, the democratic self stands in contrast with the capitalist self: the moral agent required and rewarded by capitalism is one who is severely deficient in humility and mutuality. I contend that the conception of democratic virtue that Dewey and Niebuhr shared, which informed their common critique of capitalism, led them to revise socially-inherited notions of property ownership, enact political solidarity with the working class, and support the struggles of labor unions. This virtue-ethical interpretation demonstrates that two writers with deeply conflicting worldviews can both hold that democracy and capitalism are irreconcilable at the level of the moral agent.

This collection of work grew from a guided journey and an exploration of ideas that has not only encouraged my growth as an artist, but as a responsible citizen sharing this world with others. Over the duration of this evolution I have become increasingly attentive to what I feel is our collective manufactured existence; the things that we produce and the influence that this production has on our lives. From the built environment, material and immaterial commodities, advertising and marketing, consumption, sustainability, etc., all these continuously shifting factors act as constants in our lives and shape our psychosocial development. To better understand this, I have delved into looking at both myself and others for evidence of the various effects from living in a consumer culture. Drawing also from extensive research in the history of as well as contemporary theories on production, mass media culture, addiction, exploitation of people and resources, and the growth of technology, I look to increase not only my own awareness on these subjects, but to also educate others. My process of making work is a meditation in order to better facilitate inspection intertwined with introspection. A finished piece becomes an externalization of this effort, but not as a conclusion. The various mixed media included in All These Things is the culmination of an ongoing search that encourages conversation and further evaluation of our roles in a commodity culture. By coming at this multi-faceted topic from different directions, I am offering a radial view into the many possible considerations for what it means to be a consumer and how this affects us all.

Eugene O'Neill included within his vision of humanity a series of complex, emotionally and psychologically developed black characters. Despite critical controversy over his methods or effectiveness, from his eerily silent mulatto in "Thirst" through the grandiose incarnation of The Emperor Jones and the everyman of Joe Mott and The Iceman Cometh, O'Neill created characters of African descent that thrilled and infuriated critics and audiences alike. A closer exploration of the issues involved in his portrayal of ethnically identified characters seems necessary, an exploration that does not limit itself to an interrogation of ethnicity per se in O'Neill's plays, but one that addresses the portrayal of black characters and whether or not O'Neill privileges one "race," or socially and culturally identifiable population. O'Neill's infusion of "psychology" into his black characters may have delineated them as fate-driven primitives at the mercy of their atavistic histories, but he did the same with his Irish and other ethnic characters. In fact, many critics argue that his Irish characters are particularly subject to caricature, yet O'Neill is not generally understood to be anti-Irish. Are we then to understand O'Neill's portrayal of ethnicity in the superstition and fear of The Dreamy Kid and Brutus Jones, or in the context of the playwright's bold and dismissive retort to the Ku Klux Klan's condemnation of interracial casting in All God's Chillun Got Wings? It would be a spurious examination that intentionally disregards perceived racist phenomena in O'Neill's plays. However, his depiction of racialized behaviors (and his own possible racism) must be seen to function as an extra-discursive element that ultimately does not disrupt the development of a unified body of work. His major black characters, tragic or otherwise, are not limited by their deceptively stylized portrayals but rather reflect O'Neill's quest to understand and examine the nature of a common human experience, a view that is ultimately consistent within the entirety of his canon.

This thesis defends the potential of the ‘realist’ form of narrative for contesting, as well as reproducing, ideology. The common form of ‘realism’ consists of a loose ensemble of conventions. The key components are omniscient, evaluative narration; an empiricist objectivism; the construction of individuals as agents of action and bearers of natural attributes; cause and effect sequencing; conflict leading to resolution; mystery leading to disclosure; and the effacement of these techniques in the interests of illusion. In one critique of realism – ‘post-Althusserian anti-realism’ - these practices constitute ideology both in a general sense - as manipulation - and a specific sense - as transmitters of capitalist presuppositions. A 'social realism' or ‘critical realism’, which attempts to invalidate ideology by the presentation of countervailing data, is said to be undercut by its encoding within this alleged inherently ideological form. This critique of realism is based on an unsustainable, ‘formalist’, reduction of ‘content’ to ‘form’. The role of observation in knowledge production and the significance of inductively generated propositions are replaced by a sophisticated, but ultimately reductive, ‘discursive determinism’. From its conventionalist epistemological premises, post-Althusserian anti-realism ignores the capacity of empiricism to break with preconceptions. By dismissing the convention of accountability to evidence, the critique is forced back onto criteria of internal consistency - a position even more vulnerable to prejudice than empiricism. The thesis then argues that the concomitant view of the subject of narrative realism as a construct of liberal-individualism ignores how realist texts have questioned ideas of autonomy and a fixed human nature. Anti-realist methods have usefully exposed some of the means by which constructions of freedom and self-determination mask the subordination of labour in ‘free’ -market economies. However, this frequently entails undervaluing gains made under a rubric of human rights. The replacement of human subjectivity with discursive or economic determinism tends to expel dialogue, volition and human needs as factors in the ideational and practical repudiation of ideology. A narrow approach to realism is therefore inadequate for determining the relation of realism to ideology. The alternative position defended here is that realism’s relation to capitalism - like that of liberalism and empiricism - is tangential, not homologous. The variability of ‘content’ in realism makes realist techniques - as abstract form - politically neutral (but claimed by anti-realists to be intrinsically authoritarian). Realist conventions which construct a point of view are open options for making judgements that will vary in empirical rigour and opposition to different ideologies. The thesis sets the authoritarian aspects of realism’s attempted manipulation of the reader against the potential in realism for a dialogic plurality of perspectives, the possible defensibility of a point of view, the need for coherence and judgement in political dialogue and action, and the frequency of ‘content’-based reader resistance. The realist form is not an absolute of representation, but nor is it a mere reflex of capitalism. By the same token, the anti-realist concept of the anti-ideological function of ‘anti-realist’ texts imposes a reverse, homogeneous, inherently oppositional role onto politically heterogenous cultural forms. The thesis argues, furthermore, that by rejecting empiricist modes of substantiation and adopting a mechanistic view of ideology, the post-Althusserian critique of realism fails to engage adequately with the theoretical defence of capitalism. The harmony thesis of free enterprise can only be given a pejorative label ‘ideology’ on the basis of comparative and historical considerations of the performance of capitalism. In practice, the natural tendency of the market to cyclical instability with attendant unemployment, impoverishment and the compounding of class-based inequalities has only been mitigated by extensive government intervention. The thesis concludes then with a case study of Dickens’s Hard Times as an example of the above, more effective, approach to capitalist legitimation. Hard Times employs empiricist, semi-‘fictional’, ‘realist’ techniques to demonstrate the ideological nature of theories of free enterprise. The critical edge of this novel is blunted by a liberal-romanticism that is ambivalent about legal-institutional solutions to social problems. Despite this fault, Hard Times shows some of the possibilities offered by the realist form for viable social critique.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Notre Dame, 2007. / Thesis directed by George Marsden for the Department of History. "July 2007." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 420-442).

This thesis employs Karl Polanyi’s concept of the double-movement of capitalism to trace the trajectory of a social movement that arose in response to capitalist transformation in the fishery of Kanyakumari district, south India. Beginning in the 1980s, this counter-movement militantly asserted community control over marine resources, arguing that intensified production for new markets should be subordinated to the social imperatives of subsistence and equity. Two decades later, the ambition of “embedding” the market within the community had yielded instead to an adaptation to the market in the language of “professionalization,” self-help, and caste uplift. Polanyi is useful for identifying the constituency for a counter-movement against the market, but tells us little about the social or political complexities of constructing such a movement. To locate the reasons for the decline of the counter-movement in Kanyakumari, I turn therefore to an empirical observation of the civil society within which the counter-movement arose. In doing this, I argue against Partha Chatterjee’s influential view that civil society as a conceptual category does not apply to “popular politics in most of the world,” and is not useful for tracing non-European, post-colonial, and subaltern modernities. By contrast, my case shows the presence of civil society – as a sphere of autonomous and routinized association and publicity – among subaltern groups in rural India. I argue that it is precisely by locating the counter-movement of fishworkers within civil society that one can map the multiple negotiations that take place as subaltern classes are integrated into the market, and into liberal democracy, and explain the difficulties of extending and sustaining the counter-movement itself.