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This thesis examined how skin-tone, gender, and sexuality, within the entertainment industry, help shape the micro-level process by which racial identity is constructed in American culture. The thesis analyzed and critiqued existing ideologies of race across the Americas, with specific reference to Jamaica and the United States. Issues and questions of re-representation within American popular culture are central concerns: in particular, the ways that Black women's roles are defined and redefined through the positionality of female performance artists within the male-dominated music culture. The thesis argued then that skin-tone is fundamental to the understanding of blackness, as American society continues to view race through the lens of the popular entertainment industry. The study examined the positionality of the light-skinned/or biracial Black woman's identity is fixed sexually within the racialized context of American society. The thesis concluded that the glorification of the light-skinned/or biracial Black female recreates a socio-historical and cultural-political context that simultaneously devalues the darker-skinned Black woman.

This investigation focuses on representations of the physical construction and landscape of Southern slave plantations in order to explore the power relationships among inhabitants of those plantations and how those power relationships attempted to function and failed to establish a system of discipline and governance. While every plantation functioned violently in some form, many plantations appear to have attempted to instill a sense of place and permanence of status in slaves with more than just physical violence or obvious and overt forms of mental coercion and abuse. As a supplement to the strategic (and oftentimes random) physical violence inflicted on slaves in the attempts to control their behaviors, owners seem to have also attempted to discipline their slaves through strategic constructions of the plantation landscapes. While concluding that this strategy ultimately failed, this thesis examines attempts by owners to implement particular strategies in regulating and disciplining the behavior of slaves which can be compared with the strategies implemented in a panoptic system as described by Michel Foucault.

Efforts to effectively combat discrimination require an understanding of how groups in power think about those experiencing prejudice and discrimination. To study how White individuals think about the discrimination faced by different racial groups (Non-Hispanic White, Black, Asian, Middle Eastern, Native and Indigenous, Latinx and Hispanic, and Mixed-Race men and women), 304 White participants completed an edited version of the Everyday Discrimination Scale and the Hypervigilance scale for each of these 14 groups to assess participants’ perceptions that these targets experience discrimination. Further, explicit attitudes towards each group were assessed with feelings thermometers. Results of our within subjects ANOVAs found that all racial groups were perceived to experience different levels of discrimination from one another, with Black targets perceived as experiencing the most discrimination and White targets the least. When analyzing intersectionally, we found Black men were perceived as experiencing the most discrimination, followed by Black women, White men perceived as experiencing the least discrimination with White women the second lowest group. Additionally, Asian women and Hispanic Latino men were perceived as facing more than their same race counterparts. Overall, these data indicate that White individuals perceive differences in the group levels of discrimination faced by racial-gender groups, and highlights the importance of an intersectional approach when studying race and gender discrimination.

<p>From what <em>specific </em>socio-cultural “positionality” are African-Canadian Muslim females living their realities? What methods do they employ to locate, (re)claim, and/or assert selfhood from these peripheral spaces within the white nation? How does their shared socio-religio-racial and gendered marginality, potentially, act as a site for inciting a sense of camaraderie towards one another? Such queries frame the content of this thesis which commissions qualitative research methods to unearth answers that rely upon the “particular”--by intimately gazing at 13 Black Muslim women’s gendered-racialized experiences in Toronto. Dividing analysis by religious status this work examines the dynamics distinct to 1. convert and 2.“life-long” Muslim participants’ cultivation of a religious/racial identity. The anti-Black <em>and</em> anti-Islamic discrimination punctuating “multicultural” Canada later collapses investigation into a unified survey of the ways African-Canadian Muslim women in general, contend with the oppressive socio-cultural forces attempting to infringe on their humanity. Research concludes that the adverse <em>or</em> hospitable responses of surrounding communities (these are: the ethnic-majority Muslim community; the non-Muslim Black population; Eurocentric secular society at large) to these women, influences how they both place themselves in their environments <em>and </em>interact with their Black-Muslim female fellows. This thesis argues that the persistent ostrasization of African-Canadian Islamic women within the religious and secular-public spheres of society establishes a necessary, defensive solidarity amongst these individuals; specifically, their communions can erect a nurturing platform to challenge or minimize the impact of oppressive forces--particularly protecting against the mental and social violence inflicted by <em>racist-sexist Islamophobic white supremacist powers</em>.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This dissertation gives a number of answers to the following two research questions: given the storied nature of faith and displacement, what does literary studies have to offer church-based refugee activists in religious diasporas? And what might church-based activists, who are involved in daily struggles to interpret cultural, ethnic, and religious stories for the sake of cultural transformation, have to offer literary studies of displacement? The analysis of this thesis uses literary and cultural theory (diaspora studies, postcolonial theorizations of the exotic, discursive analysis, formalist textual examination, and more) to understand interethnic church-based refugee activism taking place within a specific religious diaspora, the Christian Reformed Church in Canada. The formation of diasporas and faith groups through shared allegiances to communal stories makes literary studies a fitting vantage point from which to examine a religious diaspora. Because religious diasporas have explicitly storied identities, their discourses are open to the potential of stories to effect communal change. Refugee novels and other cultural texts that are valued in diaspora and refugee studies can have a part in shaping the storied identity out of which church-based refugee activism is done, helping religious diasporas to more deeply understand the experiences specific to refugee-ed people and to more closely align their activism with the stated desires of refugee-ed people.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

While there have been many studies of Henry James's ghost stories, there has been surprisingly little scholarship written on postcolonial tensions in these works. In American literature, the figure of the Native American ghost is a common expression of Western settler guilt over native erasure and land seizure. In both his American and British ghost stories, though, James focuses more on the horror within the colonizer than the terrifying, ghostly other from the edge of the empire. As such, these ghost stories serve as a more significant critique of colonialism and imperialism than Gothic texts that merely demonstrate the colonizer’s fear of the racial and ethnic other at the edges of the empire. James’s earliest ghost stories address to the legacy of American colonialism, staging narratives of indigenous erasure and land seizure by centering hauntings around property disputes. The later ghost stories—written after James had emigrated to Britain— engage in a critique of the imperial British military and colonial power structures that systematically oppress indigenous groups in the name of the empire. These ghost stories all focus on the figure of the Western settler-colonizer and his guilt in creating hauntings; James’s living characters often realize they have been complicit in the wrongdoings that result in revenge-seeking ghosts, and this realization is more terrifying than the ghosts themselves. In this way, James's ghost stories present a means of questioning the validityof colonizer identity, and thus a means of deconstructing the binary of the Western “self” and the indigenous “other.”

This thesis examined bodied activism in Chicago's Slutwalk 2012 march, a contemporary movement initiated in Toronto, Canada that publicly challenged the mainstream sentiment that women are responsible for their own rape and victimization. Adopting an intersectional approach, I used textual analysis to discuss photographs posted on the official Chicago Slutwalk website to explore the ways this form of public bodied protest discursively engages women's empowerment from movement feminism as well as third wave and postfeminisms. I additionally analyzed the overall website and its promotional materials for the Slutwalk marches as well as how Chicago's photographic representations privilege the white female body as victim, demonstrating how the reclamation "slut" privileges whiteness. The website depictions normalize how one should react to a system of violence which provides negative implications for women and men who are situated in a postfeminist rape culture. Positioning my analysis within Communication/Cultural Studies and Women's and Gender studies, I contributed to the literature about rape culture and postfeminist activism through my analysis of Slutwalk. By employing intersectionality from feminist theory and textual analysis, I demonstrated how Slutwalk's promotion of bodied activism naturalized postfeminism and excludes Black women from participating.

Abstract This thesis analyzes lynching and segregation in the American South between the years 1877 and 1951. It argues that these crimes of physical and social violence constitute genocide against black Americans, according to the definitions of genocide proposed by Raphael Lemkin and then the later legal definition adopted by the United Nations. American law and prevailing white American social beliefs sanctioned these crimes. Lynching and segregation were used as tools of persecution intended to keep black people in their designated places in a racial hierarchy in the United States at this time period. These crimes were two of many coordinated actions designed to physically and mentally harm a group of people defined and targeted on grounds of race. These actions of mentally and physically harming members of the group do constitute genocide under both Lemkin's original concept of genocide and the United Nations' legal genocide definition. Studies of the black experience, although starting to gain some research popularity, are virtually absent from genocide historiography. This thesis aims to fill part of that void and contribute to the emerging studies of one of America's "hidden genocides."* * "Hidden genocides" is a term that Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson have used to describe intentional destruction of groups in human history (genocide) that are often denied, dismissed or neglected in popular and scholarly discussions about genocide. [Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson. Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory. New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 2014).

A descriptive analytical study was done of the influence of Federal government policies on the present economic and educational status of Indian Americans. Three Perspective views underlying government actions toward Indians were identified. The policy of extermination manifested itself in open conflict and the removal of Indian tribes to reservations. This segregation intensified Indian poverty and retarded educational development. The paternalism underlying the special wardship status of Indians created a sense of powerlessness in which Indians felt alienated from the decision-making process. Assimilation policies which were in essence Anglo-conformist policies were strongly followed in many government boarding schools. Anglo-conformity techniques in many cases led to a loss of self-esteem and cultural identity, and various types of social maladjustment became evident among Indians. Historically the policies which have shaped Indian educational and economic policies have been Anglo-directed. Certain social movements which are Indian-directed have arisen as a reaction to paternalism and assimilation. Tribalism and Pan-Indianism are two examples. The social movement which has most support among Indians and non-Indians is the move toward self-determination. Through self-determination Indians are seeking to establish greater respect for their culture and to increase belief in their competence to decide and direct economic and educational policy for themselves. Self-determination is compatible with cultural pluralism. Several schools and projects which have developed as a result of the self-determination movement are described and in part evaluated. Among these are schools at Rocky Boy and Ramah, The Rough Rock Demonstration School, the Navajo Community College, and the Institute of American Indian Arts, all of which are in New Yexico. Some industries which are financed and directed by reservation money and located on the reservations have been established in conjunction with this movement. The tribes which originated in the Southwest and which maintained an agricultural existence with social and religious institutions based on agriculture appear to have been less influenced by Anglo-conformist policies. These tribes have progressed far on the road to self-determination. One example is the Zunis who are independent and relatively autonomous. Tribalism and self-determination seem to be bringing about a renaissance of Indian culture and of cultural pluralism.