You Don't Have to be Good, is a nonfiction collection of prose, poetry and graphic memoir set in New Orleans, central Florida, and points in between. In this coming-of-age memoir, I recall the abrupt end of my dad's life, the 24 years of my life in which he was alive, and the years after his death—remembering him while living without him in his hometown of New Orleans. Along the way there are meditations on language, race, gender, dreams, addiction, and ecology. My family and I encounter Hurricane Katrina and Mardi Gras, and at least one shuttle launch. These are the stories I find myself telling at parties, and also those I've never voiced until now.

The problem presented in a Program of Improvement for Union County Schools deals primarily with future school buildings. The problem is threefold: The location of future school buildings must be determined in the light of population trends and economic developments. The size of the buildings must be determined. A plan to finance the program must be developed.

This thesis explains recent accounts of discrimination and cutbacks in reproductive health spaces in Tunisia. Complicating dominant analyses, which attribute these events to the post-revolution political atmosphere which has allowed the proliferation of islamic extremism, I interpret these instances as a manifestation of a deeply rooted stigma against sexually active single women. I trace this stigma’s inception to the contradictory way that Habib Bourguiba conceptualized modernity after independence, and the responsibility he assigned to Tunisian women to embody that modernity. This responsibility remains salient today, and is putting Tunisian women in an increasingly untenable and vulnerable position. After independence, Bourguiba instated a series of policies and programs aimed at demonstrating the modernity of Tunisia. The success of Tunisia’s modernization was determined, and continues to be determined by the woman’s social transformation and embodiment of modernist values. Bourguiba’s modernist platform was constituted not only by typically ‘Western’ values, such as economic prosperity, family planning, education, and gender equality, but was also deeply informed by the islamic and cultural values that hold the woman’s primordial role to be mother and wife, and expect her to abstain from sex until marriage. The modern Tunisia woman thus became expected to both obtain higher levels of education and actively participate in the public sphere, and also uphold virtues around premarital virginity, marriage, and motherhood. Her fulfillment of these tasks marked the independent nation’s progress and modernity. Today, as more and more Tunisian women are increasingly empowered to fulfill one facet of their obligation and attend university, participate in the labor market, and make use of the growing contraceptive technologies available to them, they become more likely to postpone marriage and engage in premarital sexual relations. These latter behaviors transgress the second facet of the woman’s obligation, and threaten the very integrity of the modern nation. Women are thus becoming more and more subjected to societal punishment — stigma — which manifests in many forms, including discrimination in reproductive health care spaces.

This dissertation studies the emergence of literary history and criticism in the Americas during the eighteenth century. It focuses upon the study of 1.) Natural history as a matrix of literary history and criticism; 2.) The geopolitical functions of literary history and criticism in the periodical press; and 3.) The recovery of manuscripts as a residual product of modernity. Texts associated with a hegemonic Enlightenment, such as “Disertación sobre el derecho público universal” by Francisco Javier de Uriortúa, are analyzed. Next, we study modern historical-critical thought as emphasized in the periodical press of Bogotá and Quito. Finally, the circulation of manuscripts is studied as an indicator of the participation of Spanish American authors in discussions about the Enlightenment. For the latter, the dissertation analyzes the development of theories of good taste in El Nuevo Luciano de Quito by Eugenio Espejo and in the Plan elementál del buen gusto en todo genéro de materias by Manuel del Socorro Rodríguez de la Victoria. The study challenges the epistemological conflict provoked by the handwritten condition of a considerable portion of scholarship from the eighteenth century, in which the projects of an American modernity become subjugated by the power of European print.

In 1967 Sallye Brooks Mathis and Mary Littlejohn Singleton were elected the first blacks in sixty years, and the first women ever, to the city council of Jacksonville, Florida. These two women had been raised in Jacksonville in a black community which, in spite of racial discrimination and segregation since the Civil War, had demonstrated positive leadership and cooperative action as it developed its own organizations and maintained a thriving civic life. Jacksonville blacks participated in politics when allowed to do so and initiated several economic boycotts and court suits to resist racial segregation. Black women played an important part in these activities--occasionally in visible leadership roles. As adults, Sallye Mathis and Mary Singleton· participated as educators, family members and leaders in various community efforts. Both had developed wide contacts and were respected among many blacks and whites. Mary Singleton had learned about politics as the wife of a respected black politician, and Sallye Mathis became a leader in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s in Jacksonville. In 1967, a governmental reform movement in Duval County, a softening of negative racial attitudes, and perhaps their being female aided their victories. While Sallye Mathis remained on the Jacksonville City Council for fifteen years until her death in 1982, Mary Singleton served in the Florida House of Representatives from 1972 to 1976--the third black in the twentieth century and the first woman from Northeast Florida. From 1976 to 1978 she was appointed director of the Florida Division of Elections and in 1978 she campaigned unsuccessfully for Lt. Governor of Florida. As government officials, Sallye Mathis and Mary Singleton emphasized the needs of low-income people and were advocates for black interests when they felt it was necessary. They were active as volunteers in numerous other community organizations and projects to further their goals. PALMM

Contrary to nationalist teleologies, the enslavement of Native Americans was not a small and isolated practice in the territories that now comprise the United States. This thesis is a case study of its history in Louisiana from European contact through the Early American Period, utilizing French Superior Council and Spanish judicial records, Louisiana Supreme Court case files, statistical analysis of slave records, and the synthesis and reinterpretation of existing scholarship. This paper primarily argues that it was through anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity and with the utilization of socially constructed racial designations that “Indianness” was controlled and exploited, and that Native Americans and their mixed-race Black-Native descendants continued to be enslaved alongside the larger population Africans and African Americans in Louisiana. Lacking a decolonized lens and historiography inclusive of the enslavement of Indigenous peoples, the American story ignores the full impact of white settler colonialism and historical trauma.

Through discursive essays and poetic narrative, Antithetical Commentaries on X, Y and the Disruption of Being explores the tenuous relationship between modes of measurement and the struggle for human relevance in the post-contemporary digital age. In the introductory essay, “Not the Feather, but the Bird”, I give an overview of the inherent problems of object-oriented ontology, and how it relates to aesthetics and social issues of our times. In the Developmental Overview, I detail how I developed my installation approach and techniques, particularly with regard to the three-way dynamic of the artist:work:viewer relationship and how it can encourage a ‘transgression’ that leads to the possibility of a transformative awareness of being. Subsequently, I present a series of ‘antithetical’ commentaries that neither explain nor expand the installation, rather, they create a non-binary duality that, through an entirely non-linear anti-narrative, work to erode the overlay of personal, civic and collective grids present in the memory space/time referenced in the video, TAG. Finally, in “Grid: Towards a Transgressive Humanism.” I propose a path by which installation art might serve to create transgressive opportunities for viewers, rather than the transcendence sought through religious rituals, which often reinforce stigmas, fears and authoritarian social dynamics, or worse, the reductive loop, of many contemporary approaches to art which proclaim their detachment in wordy displays, essentially leading to a form of aesthetic nihilism. This Transgressive Humanism is not presented as a dogma, but rather a revitalization of the work as a vessel of possibilities, an agent of creative growth for the artist and the viewer.

Adaptation Studies suffers from a deficiency in the study of black, brown, yellow, and red adaptive texts, adaptive actors, and their practices. Adaptive Acts intervenes in this Eurocentric discourse as a study of adaptation with a (queer) POC perspective. My dissertation reveals that artists of color (re)create texts via dynamic modes of adaptation such as hyper-literary allusion, the use of meta-narratives as framing devices, and on-site collaborative re-writes that speak to/from specific cultural discourses that Eurocentric models alone cannot account for. I examine multi-ethnic American adaptations to delineate the role of adaptation in the continuance of stories that contest dominant culture from marginalized perspectives. And I offer deep adaptive readings of multi-ethnic adaptations in order to answer questions such as: what happens when adaptations are created to remember, to heal, and to disrupt? How does adaptation, as a centuries-old mode of cultural production, bring to the center the voices of the doubly marginalized, particularly queers of color? The texts I examine as “adaptive acts” are radical, queer, push the boundaries of adaptation, and have not, up to this point, been given the adaptive attention I believe they merit. David Henry Hwang’s 1988 Tony award-winning play, M. Butterfly, is an adaptive critique of the textual history of Butterfly and questions the assumptions of the Orientalism that underpins the story, which causes his play to intersect with Pierre Loti’s 1887 novella, Madame Chrysanthéme, at a point of imperial queerness. Rodney Evans, whose 2004 film, Brother to Brother, is the first full-length film to tell the story of the black queer roots at the genesis of the Harlem Renaissance, uses adaptation as a story(re)telling mode that focalizes the “gay rebel of the Harlem Renaissance,” Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987), to Signify on issues of canonization, gate-keeping, mythologizing, and intracultural marginalization. My discussion of Sherman Alexie’s debut film, The Business of Fancydancing, is informed by my own work as an adaptive actor and showcases the power of adaptation in the activation of Native continuance as an inclusive adaptive practice that offers an opportunity for women and queers of color to amend the Spokane/Coeur d'Alene writer-director’s creative authority. Adaptive acts are not only documents, but they document movements, decisions, and sociocultural action. Adaptation Studies must take seriously the power and possibilities of “adaptive acts” and “adaptive actors” from the margins if the field is to expand—adapt—in response to this diversity of adaptive potential.

The South African Constitution recognizes 11 official languages and protects an individual’s right to use their mother-tongue freely. Despite this recognition, the majority of South African schools use English as the language of learning and teaching (LOLT). Learning in English is a struggle for many students who speak indigenous African languages, rather than English, as a mother-tongue, and the educational system is failing its students. This perpetuates inequality between different South African communities in a way that has roots in the divisions of South Africa’s past. An examination of the power of language and South Africa’s experience with colonialism and apartheid provides a context for these events, and helps clarify why inequality and division persist in the new “rainbow nation.” Mending these divisions and protecting human dignity will require a reevaluation of the purpose of education and the capabilities of South African citizens.

This thesis analyzes the sociolinguistic situations in postcolonial Latin America and francophone North Africa (the Maghreb) through a comparative lens. Specifically, it examines the ways in which Spain and France’s differing colonial agendas and language ideologies affected the relationships between colonizer and colonized, and, by extension, the role that Spanish and French play(ed) in these regions after decolonization. Finally, it explores how Spain and France’s contemporary discourses frame colonial participation in the two languages’ development, and the psychological effects these ideologies have had on the formerly colonized.