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Historicizing Identities analyzes the intersections of Jewish, French and immigrant identity in novels and films that depict Jewish migration from Eastern Europe and North Africa in the twentieth century. Through a combination of literary and historical analysis, it traces changing notions of identity during and after the collapse of the French empire between the 1940s and 1960s, and explores how Jewish writers’ and filmmakers’ perspectives vary depending on their relationships to the history of colonialism and the Holocaust. The works discussed in the dissertation consider the history of Jewish immigration through the lens of personal family stories. This approach reflects the extent to which marriage and children are at the center of logics of assimilation in France as well as traditional understandings of Jewish survival. Additionally, turning to their own families’ pasts allows these artists to insist on the particularities of their experience and to resist reductive understandings of Jewish history. In turn, close analysis of their work allows us to better understand Jewish, French and immigrant identity as historical constructions.

“The Economic Nahda” is social history of the economic ideas articulated by Arab intellectuals in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. The Nahda—the Arab cultural and intellectual “renaissance” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—took place during a time of immense socioeconomic transformation in the late Ottoman Empire. During this time, the region saw increased trade with the global market, the spread of capitalist social relations, and a rising Ottoman public debt to European financiers. This dissertation focuses on how figures associated with the Arab Nahda conceptualized the tumultuous changes of this period. It begins by revisiting some of the classic publications of the Nahda and surveying the first engagements with the ideas of political economy. It then moves on to examine the economic ideas that were circulating during different historical junctures in late Ottoman Syria, starting from the establishment of the province of Syria in 1865, and ending with the new era of mass politics after the 1908 Ottoman constitutionalist revolution. It argues that throughout this period, intellectuals and political elites increasingly conceptualized political reform and economic transformation within the framework of the new “science” of political economy. Ultimately, the dissertation traces how these new economic ideas were elaborated and mobilized in response to developments such as peasant revolt, Ottoman state reform, increasing public debt, and ascendant European imperialism.

This dissertation approaches key questions in the study of colonial urban modernity through methods in the history of medicine and sciences. Through a comparative focus on the colonial cities of Bombay and Calcutta, I explore the new found interests of colonial urban planners, public health experts, and Indian social elites in the “unclaimed bodies” of the poor, which were considered both diseased and disposable, and attendant concerns with the scientific management of subaltern death. By exploring the converging logics yet the divergent outcomes of colonial state and native elite efforts to manage the death of the urban poor and indigent as an urban problem that required scientific solutions such as the gas crematorium or relegating mass burials for unclaimed bodies to the suburbs, this study in comparative urbanism demonstrates how the imperatives of colonial public health and political economy followed by a heightened period of native critique between the two world wars reconfigured global ideas of health and technologies. From the mid-nineteenth century, epidemics and famines had provided the occasion for British and Indian social elites to reconstitute social power and remake boundaries of caste and community in the context of urban migration and industrial labor. While famines happened in Western India, an emergent preoccupation with tropical diseases in Eastern India had reconfigured the meaning and the social experience of death for the urban poor. Working class bodies thus became the locus of the entangled knowledge-making of health, technology, and religion in regionally specific ways. In particular, modern technologies such as the gas and electric crematorium enabled the spatial reorganization of labor, caste, and community in the service of a colonial political economy: modern technologies for the efficient and hygienic disposal of the dead bodies of the indigent and impoverished were thus also solutions for managing the lives of the working castes and classes. The scientific management of subaltern death was not just the preoccupation of anatomists, doctors, and public health engineers but as well, of the British Parliament, international health organizations, Indian and British members of municipalities, missionaries, religious charity leaders, communal organizations, anti-caste leaders, and subaltern mortuary workers. Simultaneously, anti-colonial and subaltern politics transformed the effects of scientific knowledge and infrastructure in both Bombay and Calcutta, albeit differently in response to framing antagonisms of caste, capital, and community. Thus, despite the normalizing and homogenizing impetus of colonialism, health policies and attendant technologies reacted to and reflected the impact of local configurations of power and urban space. Putting the history and anthropology of death into conversation with the global history of medicine, science, and technology in the context of colonial and postcolonial South Asia allows us to understand how global technologies under imperialism engaged with local social meanings to bring about epistemic shifts in perceptions and practices of the body, while also altering spatial and social relations. The subcontinental history of the crematorium thus reflects the ongoing impact of discourses and infrastructures of public health and hygiene in redefining bodies marked by social distinctions of caste, class and religion in the colonial metropole through acts of spatial politics. The introduction of the crematorium in colonial India reproduced extant practices of social hierarchy and spatial segregation but it also became an enabling infrastructure through which anti-caste activists, Marxists and Socialists imagined scientific modernity and a future without segregation.

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This dissertation examines US media representations of Dominicans during the American occupation of the Dominican Republic between 1916 and 1924. It argues that American media images of the Dominican Republic changed to accommodate US government policy. For example, when there was interest in annexing the country in the mid-1800s, those who were in favor of annexation depicted Dominicans as white in order to demonstrate that they could be integrated into the United States. In the early 1900s, however, when the United States wanted to prevent foreign powers from intervening in the Dominican Republic, US media representations of Dominicans were overwhelmingly black to show the need for American oversight of financial matters. Whether depicted as black or white, this dissertation argues that the primary lens the US media employed to represent Dominicans was that of underdevelopment. Subsumed within this imperial narrative of underdevelopment were malleable depictions of race and, by 1916, a new element of humanitarianism that operated under the assumption that the Dominican Republic was underdeveloped and thus in need of American guidance. Lastly, this dissertation examines the shift in the US media in 1920 as American sources began to critique the occupation. / History

Thesis advisor: Elizabeth Shlala / Everyone looks at the transition out of the imperial age in the 1800s as a massive leap of progress for humanity. While the end of the Age of Imperialism definitely came with many advancements, the nationalist age that followed was not as harmonious or just as it sometimes portrayed. Especially in nations that did not have full control of their rapid transitions (ie. Germany and Turkey), this evolution into an 'Age of Nationalism' was anything but peaceful. But why is it that nationalism can be so easily radicalized into violence? Why was the Wars and interwar period for Germany and Turkey so rife with instability, violence, persecution, and bigotry? Examining the patterns of homogenization, insulation, and stratification necessary to the birth of a nation out of an empire, this thesis seeks to understand just why and how radicalized nationalism can (and has) led to genocide. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Morrissey School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: International Studies. / Discipline: Departmental Honors.