This dissertation exposes the pivotal nature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century geographic discourses and practices --both European, indigenous and mestizo--in the articulation of strategies of power, resistance, and negotiation in the kingdoms of the New World. Focusing on the Descripción de la ciudad y provincia de Tlaxcala (1580-1585) by Diego Muñoz Camargo - a manuscript that is part of the relaciones geográficas de Indias corpus and contains a voluminous alphabetic text written in Spanish and a pictographic text of 156 images - this dissertation proposes to expand our understanding of the rhetorical resources and repertoire of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers in New Spain by studying the cultural innovations produced in the exchange, appropriation, and re-articulation of diverse written and pictographic traditions coming from both sides of the Atlantic. Focusing on geographic discourses -which take the form of prose geography, cartography, map making, land and itinerary measurements, symbols, simulacra, and Mesoamerican ideo-pictographic writing of geographic meaning or value - this dissertation discusses how these innovations are an integral part in the articulation of a Tlaxcalteca discourse of conquest and privilege that seeks to conceptualize and regulate notions of territoriality, movement, and network in the recently globalized world at the end of the sixteenth century.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on August 28, 2008) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

In January 1943, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened Brazil Builds. This exhibition has been widely credited as initiating the international appraisal and celebration of Latin America's modern architecture. Responsive to the war context and to the museum's engagement with the Office of the Coordinator of Inter American Affairs directed by Nelson Rockefeller, this exhibition presented a clear overlap between politics and modern architecture culture in the Americas that aimed to create a unified and defensible Western Hemisphere. This is a story that, although consistently repeated and alluded to, has never been told because studies of Brazil Builds have emphasized a singular national frame. This dissertation studies the overall trajectory of MoMA's engagement with Latin American modern architecture and culture in the late 1930s and 1940s, and posits its endeavors as leading to the 1955 exhibition, Latin American Architecture since 1945. It argues that the promise of a better world made in 1943 with Brazil Builds was staged in 1955 as a threshold for the entire region and as demonstration of the advantages of a US-led postwar modernization. This work articulates the historical conditions that, in 1955, allowed the British Architectural Review to talk about a "Latin American manner" in architectural modernism. Architectural historians and critics outside the region noticed the contours of a Latin American modern style on the period roughly between 1939 and 1955 and deployed historiographic strategies to include the region's buildings within the history of Western architectural modernism. Rather than a study of an architectural style, this dissertation presents Latin American modernism as a historical concept born out of the tensions between similarity and difference with Western culture at the time of the hegemonic rise of the United States. The need for a regional construct named "Latin America" permeated postwar modernization before the unfolding of the bi-polar world of the Cold War. This work shows that the idea of Latin American architecture was subordinated to early postwar political and cultural anxieties in the United States and highlights MoMA as a key stage in the construction of this historical concept, beyond the specifics of any single exhibition. This study engages international modern architecture culture as refracted through the museum and the varied cast of characters and events supported by this cultural powerhouse to reveal overarching strategies that enabled the idea of Latin America. Guided by US postwar economic and political strategies, the multiple mirror images and distortions produced at MoMA made modernism in the Americas a contested ground challenged by regional Latin American powers and European cultural centers. This dissertation examines five exhibitions that involved the entire museum (Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art), the Department of Painting and Sculpture (Portinari of Brazil) and the Department of Architecture and Design (Brazil Builds, From Le Corbusier to Niemeyer: 1929-1949 and Latin American Architecture since 1945), as well as other related events that influenced architecture culture during this period. This work positions Latin American modern architecture within a Western postwar culture and delineates the forms of inclusion and exclusion--of what and who was modern--that created both physical spaces and mental maps of postwar modernity giving a transnational image of the Western World.

The dissertation investigates a repertoire of ideas and objects produced by the Underground Scene (Escena Subterránea) that problematize notions of property within the Peruvian culture and society of the time. This is a young subcultural and countercultural social formation that bonded around rock music and created urban interventions, fiction and non-fiction literature, visual arts and music. My inquiry focuses on how this scene perceived as marginal contested well-established aesthetic practices and believes. I trace the way in which their poems, lyrics, interviews, cassette tapes, covers and prints deal with the expectations of what is appropriate and proper to, often migrant, young mestizo, working-class people within the cultural field. The conditions placed by the Peruvian Internal Conflict (1980-2000) and the migration of rural Peruvians to Lima created a social space where matters of property of land and circulation of people and goods were pivotal to the social experience. Literary and art criticism, along with the historical accounts of music, tend to explain the communal configuration of the scene and its aesthetics in relation to the violence of the armed struggle. These, I argue, also take from the coexistence with the migrants. The Underground Scene produced alongside with a massive marginality of indigenous rural migrants, appropriating their cultural and aesthetic procedures as well as their organizational forms. It worked within the war reflecting upon its various immediate consequences through a generational perspective using tactics borrowed from international subcultures such as the DIY, and others like piracy vastly and successfully used by the migrants. While this influence has been read as purely cultural, I am proposing a material approach. I claim that these conditions of production shaped up in a definitive way what is widely taken as a subculture and counterculture arranged as a mere imitation of the Anglo- Saxon, white, male punk movement. By using the tropes of voice, yell and noise rather than discourse or logos, these youth gave their criticism and affectivity a political dimension that pointed out the failure of party politics and democracy within the national structure.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Victoria University (Melbourne, Vic.), 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

This dissertation examines the history of aided self-help housing through the case study of Peru, which was the site of significant experiments in this field, and pioneering in its efforts to enact a large-scale policy of land tenure regularization in unplanned settlements. As the sheer scale of the housing deficit tested the limits of conventional modernist housing reform, aided self-help presented itself as a response to the constraints and apparent opportunities of this situation; its essential premise was to bring together the benefits of "formal" architecture (an expertise in design and construction) with those of "informal" building (substantial cost savings, because residents themselves furnished the labour). The analysis focuses on three key spheres: the circumstances which made Peru a fertile site for innovation in low-cost housing under a succession of very different political regimes; the influences on, and movements within, architectural culture which prompted architects to consider aided self-help housing as an alternative mode of practice; and the context in which international development agencies came to embrace these projects as part of their larger goals during the Cold War and beyond. Aided self-help housing in Peru took a variety of forms, ranging from highly co-ordinated projects constructed using communal labour, with on-site technical assistance from architects, to sites-and-services developments, which included the provision of basic services (water, sewerage, electricity, roadways), on the expectation that residents would eventually consolidate their neighbourhoods into more-or-less conventional urban areas. These projects generally offered a very basic core house, which residents were expected to expand and complete over time following standard plans set out by an architect. Housing on this progressive-development model (also called the "growing house") could be built incrementally as the family's needs demanded and its budget allowed. At the other end of the spectrum was the UN-sponsored Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda (PREVI), an international design competition which endeavoured to draw upon the experience of prominent avant-garde architects to devise new approaches to low-cost housing; foregrounding innovations in building technologies, construction systems, and urban design theories, this experiment ultimately brought the latent conflicts between high architecture and affordable housing into high-relief. This research reveals that although aided self-help housing promised a means of resolving a housing crisis that conventional architectural techniques had failed to meet, it quickly encountered the seeds of its own failure--at the political level, the organizational level, the implementation level, and perhaps most crucially, the funding level. Despite the promises of technical assistance to self-builders, in practice the needed resources and trained staff often failed to appear, suggesting that the rhetoric of self-help could simply become a mask to validate the state's disengagement from housing provision. While this withdrawal of the state (and as a result, of the architects it employs) from the provision of low-cost housing has seemed inevitable, the dissertation aims to reexamine the effectiveness of these experiments in aided self-help, in order to open the way to reassessing their potential and reframing their strategies for contemporary practice.

This dissertation examines the avant-garde as one of the last significant cultural manifestations in Latin America that attempted to offer an alternative to capitalism in the twentieth century. My study redefines the avant-garde as a global critique of modernity whose emergence can only be explained from a geopolitical perspective. During this time, the world order dictated that metropolitan areas like Western Europe be engaged in a mutual economic dependence with peripheral regions such as Latin America. Consequently, a revolutionary socialist impulse originated from within secondary economic areas in the world like Russia and Latin America. Movements such as Dada and Cubism conveyed the necessity for art to break from the autonomous status attributed to it by the bourgeoisie; but ultimately, these aesthetic projects did not address an essential component of the changing social picture, namely the articulation of collective fantasies directed at the emerging masses. The avant-garde was able to articulate these dreamworlds only after art intersected with socialism. With this convergence art claimed a different kind of autonomy, one not based on innocuous insularity but on a socially conscious critical capacity. The revolutionary discourse that resulted from the combination of political and artistic realms aimed at addressing the masses as an integral part of a new modern society. The chapters include muralism (Diego Rivera), periodicals (Amauta), and poetry (Vallejo). Building upon local and global geopolitical perspectives, these works constructed socialist dreamworlds, expressions of utopian desires to transform the world, against the backdrop of art's tendency toward new modes of production and aesthetic sensibilities in the early twentieth century. Sifting through the ruins of these cultural artifacts, I discuss topics such as the figure of the intellectual and the history of radical ideas in Latin America; Marxism; public art and state sponsorship; iconography of revolution and spectrality; and the autonomy of art at the intersection of politics and aesthetics.

This dissertation examines the nature of personal suffering and the impact of a local crisis on a group of small Quechua speaking communities in rural Bolivia. I consider the ongoing processes of both sudden social ruptures and "permanent" crisis, inherent in the unique evolution of a (post)colonial state as it coexists in association with "traditional" Andean society. Of most significant interest to me is the manner in which relatively rare, extreme, "deviant" events may illuminate, as a kind of analytical lens, larger issues of social, political and cultural forces at work. Within this context, key determining natures are those of individual affliction and a wider structural violence, both of which are identified here as integral and pervasive components within society as a whole. I explore these as reflecting the transformations of social agency and cultural identity among indigenous groups in contemporary Bolivia, which pertain to their dramatically expanding role in overall civil society and state practices--yet which, nevertheless, remain in dramatic juxtaposition to deeply entrenched systems of power and state control over both the social and the personal body. Within a theoretical context of political economy and critical medical anthropology, I look at these dual subjects--the state and the indigenous citizen--in counterpoint with competing notions of birth, death, affliction, and the role of civil society, as perceived within a climate of unexpected crisis and renewal. As its central ethnographic case study I focus on chronically elevated rates of maternal mortality in Bolivia, and in particular the local instance of an unexpected and dramatic surge in deaths. The multiple complexities of personal priorities and discourses circulating around these events had at its center a crisis at once glaringly public and intensely personal--which was used to the actual advantage of some, while to the obvious disadvantage of others: what I refer to as the "quality of its imagining." This personal tragedy of "death in birth" offers a unique perspective on the political uses and abuses of indigeneity and traditional culture, within a nation-state struggling amidst the often conflictive process of achieving the officially proposed objectives of "interculturality" and "decolonization." Concurrent cultural manifestations may resist, or, conversely, adopt, assimilate, and accommodate the official tenets and trappings of modernity, while attempting to find viable solutions to seemingly intractable societal problems. Local reactions and understandings of this ultimate failure in the "reproduction" of society result in crisis as a social phenomenon of significant proportions: the ultimate issue concerns what is at stake for those involved at differing levels, ranging from the (extended) family unit, to the greater community, and ultimately to the political power structures at work.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: A, page: 2701. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-145).

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2007. / Title from title page screen (viewed on June 3, 2008). Thesis advisor: Anita I. Drever. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.