The abundance of good reservoir and source rocks offshore Cabinda, Angola, makes the area an attractive and successful hydrocarbon province. Block 0, offshore Cabinda, lies in the Lower Congo basin along the western coast of Africa. The stratigraphy of Block 0 consists of two major oil-rich sequences: the rift sequence (primarily lacustrine) and the post-rift sequence (primarily marine). These are separated by a thick section of evaporites, and thus are referred to as the pre-salt sequence and post-salt sequence, respectively. The Chela Formation, mid-Aptian in age, was deposited before the salt. It consists of sandstones and conglomerates locally interbedded with carbonates. It is the youngest unit of the pre-salt sequence. The top of the Chela Formation is gradational into the salt, whereas the base of the Chela unconformably overlies older pre-salt units. The regional pre-Chela unconformity corresponds to the "break up unconformity" developed as a direct response of Gondwanaland rifting that resulted in the opening of the South Atlantic Ocean and culminated with the separation of the South American and African continents. In this context, the Chela Formation represents an early post-rift transgressive unit that spans the transition from continental to marine conditions. The thickness of the Chela Formation in Block O is variable. This unit thickens westward from O to 305 m. Environments of deposition within the Chela Formation range from coastal non-marine to shallow-marine environments. The Chela Formation onshore Cabinda is a fining-upward sequence with coarse sandstone and conglomerate in the base grading to finer sandstone interbedded with mudstone. Offshore, the unit is represented by a sequence of very-fine to fine-grained sandstone, grading to siltstone, and locally interbedded with dolomitic carbonates. Sediment in the Chela Formation has a continental-block provenance, evidence that Chela detritus was supplied from an external granitic source on the southern African continent. Although no commercial accumulations of hydrocarbons have been found offshore in the Chela sandstones to date, the unit represents a potential reservoir because of hydrocarbons log porosities between 15 and 30 porosity units, the presence of hydrocarbon shows onshore, and an excellent overlying seal of thick salt.

This dissertation seeks to help teachers understand the ways that affect is tied to the dominant ideology of white supremacy in contemporary U.S. society. It argues that affect the complex confluence of feeling and judgmentis bound intricately to racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, etc. In this work I attempt to deconstruct the social construction of affect that fuels dominant white ideology what some scholars call whiteness in the context of white teachers and students in the cultural studies writing classroom. With the lofty yet ultimately empowering goal of effecting anti-racist change in the classroom and in the profession, I trace affective dimensions of whiteness (such as fear, blame, defensiveness, and denial) revealed by white teachers and students. Clinging to the myths of meritocracy, individualism, and the American Dream, white teachers and students often unknowingly perpetuate dominance based on white privilege.

This dissertation examines the feminist intersections of composition studies, visual rhetoric, and comics studies in order to identify a rhetorically interdisciplinary approach to composition that moves beyond composition studies’ persistent separation of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, rhetoric and ideology, and analysis and composition. Chapter one transgresses the qualitative/quantitative divide using keyword analysis and visualization of 2,573 dissertation and thesis abstracts published between 1979 – 2012 to engage in what composition studies scholar Derek Mueller terms a “distant reading” of the extent and contexts of composition studies’ self-identified interdisciplinarity. Complementing my more traditional literature review, the results of this analysis validate the necessity of my analytical and pedagogical interventions by suggesting that composition studies has not yet addressed comics through the feminist intersections of visual rhetoric and critical pedagogy. Chapters two and three develop a rhetorical analytical approach to comics that moves beyond comics studies’ persistent separation of rhetoric and ideology by positing conflict as an identifiable form of rhetorical persuasion in the Martha Washington comics. These comics were collaboratively created by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons between 1989 – 2007. Following feminist rhetorician Susan Jarratt’s case for rhetorical conflict as a pedagogical tool and extending Chicana feminist Chela Sandoval’s conceptualization of meta-ideologizing in which oppressive ideologies are re-signified via recontextualizations that juxtapose ‘old’ and ‘new’ signs of ideological meaning, I explore the rhetorically persuasive conflict arising from visual, conceptual, and embodied juxtapositions of race, class, and gender made visible in these comics. Chapter four outlines a feminist, critical, visual rhetorical – what I call prismatic – approach to composition pedagogy that requires (1) contexts in which differences and conflicts can be identified and engaged, (2) explicable sites of intersection between ideological perspectives and rhetorical construction, and (3) models for the transition from ideological critique to (re)composition. This is not an add-pop-genre-and-stir approach to composition pedagogy; rather, it intentionally deploys comics’ inherent multimodality as a challenge to students’ often narrow definitions of rhetoric and composition.

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