This study analyzes the rhetoric of William "Parson" Brownlow during the Civil War era. Within the pages of the Whig, Brownlow's famous newspaper, he created a fixed image of African Americans. Brownlow argued that when removed from slavery, people of African descent naturally became barbaric, and thus slavery was needed to ensure the safety of the white population. Despite this consistency in racial thought, Brownlow, through the course of the 1850s shifted from defending slavery as a necessary evil to promoting slavery as an unqualified blessing in the years before the Civil War. Furthermore, during Brownlow's governorship of Tennessee during Reconstruction, Brownlow argued that slavery was economically deleterious to poor white farmers. These findings have important implications for the history of Appalachia. Most specifically, Brownlow's racist rhetoric suggests that race perceptions in East Tennessee were not significantly separable from the race sentiments of the larger South.

This study examines recurring motifs and personas in hip-hop. Interviews with influential hip-hop scholars, writers and music industry personnel were conducted and analyzed using qualitative methods. Interview subjects were selected based on their insider knowledge as music critics, hip-hop scholars, ethnomusicologists, publicists, and music industry positions. The vast majority of constructed imagery in hip-hop is based on a single persona, the gangsta. This qualitative analysis reveals why gangsta personas and motifs have become the de facto imagery of hip-hop. Gangsta imagery is repeatedly presented because it sells, it is the most readily-available role, and because of music industry pressures. This study is significant because gangsta imagery impacts African American social knowledge and the generalized perception of blackness. Gangsta imagery has also served to alienate black culture and has caused rifts in the African American community.

My research examines the enslaved black woman's reclamation of self through the use of voice and resistance from enslavement into freedom. I argue that the enslaved black woman's voice was one that grew stronger and louder, in an effort to have her story heard, through her attempts of reclamation of self and transition from slave to a free woman. I begin with an introduction to the purpose of my research. Chapter one describes my approach to my research. Chapter two describes the conditions of slavery for black women. Chapter three describes enslaved black women's mechanisms of resistance. Chapter four examinations the reclamation of self in slavemade quilts and the controversial Underground Railroad Quilt Code. Chapter five examines the reclamation of voice in Harriet Jacobs' narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written under a pseudonym, Linda Brent, after she escaped from slavery. Chapter six examines the reclamation of womanhood is Dr. Anna Julia Cooper's text, A Voice from the South. My conclusion describes how these historical events are still relevant to present-day society.

The scholarly consensus is that the early essays “Il mare dell’oggettività” and “La sfida al labirinto” are two of the most important Italo Calvino wrote on his literary poetics, influencing the metaphors and problematics of his entire corpus: the sea of objectivity, the labyrinth, chaotic flux, a rational cogito subjectivity, binary oppositions etc. The essays were made available to a general public in the collection Una pietra sopra in 1980, part of a selection of texts handpicked by Calvino himself. Curiously, the 1986 English translation titled The Uses of Literature does not contain these important and influential essays, making them unavailable to an Anglophone audience. These essays are here now translated, accompanied by a critical commentary by the translator about their relevance and importance to Calvino’s corpus. The problematics discussed in these essays would re-emerge, with remarkable consistency, in the metaphorical imagery Calvino deployed throughout his career. Nevertheless, Calvino evolves the problematics significantly throughout his career, almost inverting his original stance. Rather than this being an inversion, however, the translator argues that Calvino’s evolution represents a dialectical movement propelled by contradiction, and that therein lies the actual poetics or the stylized mode of thought that these essays inaugurated. Viewing the essays in this light renders them, and Calvino’s entire corpus, ripe for dialogic encounter and collision with otherwise parallel philosophical traditions and schools of thought.

The hypothesis of this study is that there is a relationship between race attitudes and "denominocentrism, " and with certain social categories, e.g., age, social class, income, education, etc., in the Church of the Brethren in the Pacific Coast Region. If a relationship can be identified and analyzed, the results will be of value as tools in helping to understand, predict, and change human behavior. It might be further suggested that if there is a strong relationship between attitudes and certain social categories in the church, attitudes of the Brethren on these issues, and perhaps on many more, are, to a large extent, conditioned by, if not the direct outgrowth of, certain socio-economic factors.

The Nazi violence did not have its origins only in the brutality of the First World War or radical nationalist ideologies, but also in European colonialism. Hence, the goal of this thesis is to demonstrate that colonial processes were fundamental to the origins of the Holocaust. To prove this, I applied the content analysis to detect colonial discourse (stereotype, ambivalence, and mimicry) in three legislations from different contexts, which prohibited sexual relations and marriages between races. The documents analyzed exemplified the segregationist thinking of each period of colonization. Portuguese laws from the beginning of modernity demonstrate the transition from religious to racist thought. Analyzing German Southwest Africa, there is the application of racist pseudoscience, and finally, in Nazism, a mixture of both, but also an evolution of colonial discourse. At the end, I proved the existence of colonial discourse in the Nuremberg Laws, demonstrating how earlier colonialisms influenced the Holocaust.

This study examined racial/ethnic differences in pre-clinical disease, social support, and tested whether social support was a moderator of racial/ethnic differences in subclinical atherosclerosis. Participants were NHWs, NHBs, and Latinos (n = 283) from the baseline and cross-sectional sample of the North Texas Heart Study. Results from unadjusted models showed no significant racial/ethnic differences for common or bifurcation intima-media thickness (cIMT). However, unadjusted models for cIMT showed a main effect for race/ethnicity F(2, 229) = 3.12, p = .046, partial η2 = .027, with Latinos demonstrating significantly greater internal cIMT compared to NHB but not NHWs. In minimally adjusted models, there was a main effect for race/ethnicity, F(2, 227) = 3.10, p = .047, partial η2 = .027, with significantly greater internal cIMT in Latinos compared to NHBs but not NHWs. In fully adjusted models, racial/ethnic differences in cIMT were attenuated. Contrary to study hypotheses, no racial/ethnic differences in social support were found and social support was not a moderator of racial/ethnic differences in subclinical disease. In the North Texas Heart Study, few racial/ethnic differences emerged, with fully adjusted risk factor models accounting for these differences.

No description available.

<p>Race and gender categories have rarely operated in isolation in the lives of Afro-Brazilian women, intersecting to shape their historical and social positioning, everyday experiences, and collective activism. Despite opposition from the Brazilian state and some civil society groups, the Afro-Brazilian women’s movement has increased awareness of the specificity of black women’s identities and oppressions. In recent years their activism has moved beyond Brazil’s borders through participation in United Nations (UN) Conferences. Yet, the dynamism of Afro-Brazilian women’s intersectional identities and their strategic use to gain legitimacy in these arenas has remained noticeably understudied.</p> <p>This dissertation argues that since activist groups do not participate in transnational forums detached from their specific histories and localized experiences, their actions, and strategies must be historically grounded. It draws upon the major arguments of postcolonial feminism, intersectionality, and the political process model to examine how national and transnational processes have shaped the identity articulations and mobilization strategies of Afro-Brazilian women activists. Four distinct processes operating in and outside of Brazil are identified as critical to the identity positions, strategies, and overall trajectory of the Afro-Brazilian women’s movement: colonialism, slavery, democratic transition, and preparations for and proceedings of UN Conferences. The influence of Afro-Brazilian women activists in domestic policy domains and internal movement dynamics are also explored. The result is a comprehensive analysis of the intricate workings of race and gender categories in activist spaces and the multiple historical and contextual factors which shape their configuration, intersection, and impact.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Titled as a play on Mindy Kaling’s 2011 book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), this thesis highlights the obstacles women, the genre of comedy, and dramaturgs face in order to be taken seriously in the arts. Using the work of Mindy Kaling, I explore how she uses comedy as a means of defying the expectations put upon her as an Indian American woman in order to provide context for the ways in which the marginal statuses of women of color and comedy overlap. In an effort to demonstrate the ways in which comedy can be utilized as a tool for social change and the ways in which the work of a dramaturg can support that, this thesis documents the planning and execution of three events that accompany this written document: a production of Mindy Kaling and Brenda Withers’ 2002 play, Matt & Ben; a screening of the 1997 Oscar-winning film, Good Will Hunting; and a Q+A conversation with Broadway’s most-produced female playwright, Theresa Rebeck. My work is shaped by various theoretical frameworks, including intersectional feminism, symbolic annihilation, charged humor, and gender performance theories, seeking to establish that my dramaturgical, comedic, and feminist sensibilities are all driven by the same empathetic impulse that sits at the very core of my artistry and arguing that despite a vast history of marginality, dramaturgs, comics, and women can be powerful agents of change.