No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation examines representations of Native peoples during the British Imperial Age of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It concentrates specifically on diplomatic Go-Between figures, individuals who performed a mediating role between their own indigenous communities and the colonizers. The dissertation examines images and objects within a postcolonial framework, engaging notions of hybridity and mimicry in order to interrogate more traditional readings of colonial power and representation. The images of Native peoples that appeared in ethnographic studies, paintings, and prints, as well as in objects of material culture such as games, books, and toys, reveal a dislocating indigenous agency within their colonial contexts. By offering new considerations of artistic process and the role of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British theatrical culture, the dissertation suggests that these Native figures were mediated by the tropes and conventions of contemporary theater through pose, gesture, and other dramaturgical allusions. In its exploration of the theatrical dimensions of imperial diplomacy and Go-Between representation, including evidence of performative mimicry by Go-Betweens themselves, my dissertation reveals an even more subtle interplay of identities in the context of colonial image-making than art historians have hitherto recognized. In addition to using theater history and performance theory to situate Go-Between images in relation to the contemporary English stage, the study also implicates the creative process and resulting artifacts themselves in the Go-Between status, affording the material object itself a hybridity that can become the site of ideological dislocation. / Art History

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is a hybrid organization managing the most critical Internet infrastructure - the Domain Name System. ICANN represents a new, emerging Internet self-governance model in which the private sector takes the lead and the government sector plays a more marginal role. Little is known, however, about what is actually happening in this new organization. The dissertation (a) systematically assesses ICANN's overall performance based on a set of evaluative criteria drawn from its mission statements; (b) explores possible factors and actors that influence ICANN's overall performance by tracing the governance processes in three cases based on a preliminary conceptual framework; and (c) suggests practical and theoretical implications of ICANN's governance and performance in its broader institutional context. The study finds that although differing governance processes have led to different performance outcomes (Lynn et al. 2000), "stability" has been the defining value that has shaped the overall path of ICANN's governance and performance. The study characterizes ICANN as a conservative hybrid captured, based on specific issues, by the technical and governmental communities. It also proposes the concept of "technical capture" to suggest how technical experts can have significant, but often implicit, influence over the policy development process in organizations. / Ph. D.