Includes vita. / Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 198 pages. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of South Florida, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: 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. / ABSTRACT: 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 portrayl 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. / ABSTRACT: 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. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 377-380). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 179-194). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.) - Carleton University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 160-162). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Political Science, June 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

This dissertation is a cultural history of deviance in the United States. I use a series of case studies to examine the way deviant figures have been represented and experienced within American culture. The dissertation covers four historical eras and examines a representative deviant figure in each of them. The first chapter deals with the figure of the witch in Puritan New England, the second examines the libertine in the early American republic, the third deals with freaks in Victorian America and the fourth studies the flapper in the roaring twenties. Each of these chapters is focused on a particular historical crisis, trial or scandal that produced a rich body of historical evidence for study and analysis: the Salem Witch Trial of 1692, the Apthorp-Morton Scandal of 1788, the sensational Beecher-Tilton Affair of 1875 and the Ruth Snyder Trial of 1927. My overarching thesis is that representations of deviants reveal a deep cultural preoccupation with failure and inadequacy, which are projected onto deviant figures. This interpretation is an attempt to move beyond viewing representations of deviance as simply being attempts to repress those who do not conform to societal norms, or to shore up fragile social identities by creating ‘others’ against whom the normal American could be negatively defined. Instead, I argue that representations of deviance were compelling to the Americans who created them primarily as powerful fantasies about failure, lack and inadequacy. On to the rich symbolic canvas of the deviant figure, Americans projected their anxieties about personal and social failure. In different ways at different times, deviants have been used to articulate the various possible ways in which a person could fail to meet their society’s ideals and expectations, and to imagine the consequences of such failures for both individual personhood and society as a whole. The deviant has therefore historically served as a kind of mirror to the culture which produced him or her: a mirror in which a culture might darkly glimpse its own values, distorted by the terrifying failure to achieve that which is most prized.

This dissertation offers an ethnography of motorcycle taxi drivers: Bangkok's most important and informal network of everyday mobility. Drawing on over eight years of experience in the region, six months of archival research, and 24 months of fieldwork, I analyze how the drivers, mostly male rural migrants, negotiate their presence in the city through spatial expertise, bodily practices, and social relations. Their physical mobility through traffic, I argue, shapes their ability to find unexplored routes in the social, economic, and political landscapes of the city and to create paths for action where other urban dwellers see a traffic jam or a political gridlock. My narrative builds up to the role of these drivers in the Red Shirt protests that culminated in May 2010 and analyzes how their practices as transportation and delivery providers shape their role in political uprisings and urban guerilla confrontations. My main finding is that when the everyday life of the city breaks down the drivers take advantage of their position in urban circuits of exchange to emerge as central political actors in contemporary Bangkok by blocking, slowing down, or filtering the circulation of people, goods, and information which they normally facilitate. Owners of the Map proposes an alternative view of contemporary urbanism in which the city is constructed day after day through the work of connection and mediation, its frictions and failures, the tactics adopted to resist them, as well as the political tensions that emerge from these struggles. / Anthropology

This dissertation explains how increased educational attainment became the most politically viable means of reducing economic inequality in the postwar United States. Using Houston as a case study, the dissertation argues that a heterogeneous group of people and organizations played a role in the creation of a society in which human capital development served the vital political function of structuring economic inequality: employers who sought to raise worker productivity at minimal direct cost to themselves and to wrest control of worker training from labor unions; ordinary Houstonians in search of economic security and opportunity, including black and Latino civil rights activists who used human capital development to dismantle the racial division of labor; and federal, state, and local government officials who used education to lower unemployment and spur economic development. / History

Ricardo Aldape Guerra was an undocumented Mexican migrant who was wrongfully convicted and given a death sentence for the murder of a white Houston police officer in 1982. In the absence of any physical evidence that implicated Aldape Guerra for the crime, Harris County prosecutors appealed to extreme anti-Mexican immigrant hostility in Houston by repeatedly emphasizing Aldape Guerra’s undocumented immigration status to the jury in order to construct him as a dangerous “illegal alien” deserving of severe punishment. This thesis situates Aldape Guerra’s encounter with the Texas legal system within related histories of social, cultural, economic, political, and legal phenomena in the United States in order to obtain a more complete understanding and to excavate critical lessons about the overall treatment of undocumented Mexican migrants in the U.S. legal system. It argues that the isolation of law from histories of racialization of Mexican migrants renders the U.S. legal system inadequate to protect undocumented Mexican migrants against racial discrimination, even in the court of law. It also argues that the U.S. legal system also cannot account for the material effects of transnational neoliberal capitalism on the cross-border movement of Mexican labor forces. This failure cultivates flawed legal reasoning in immigration jurisprudence that equates “illegality” with danger and criminality. / text

published_or_final_version / Asian Studies / Master / Master of Philosophy