Over the 20th century, Malians relied on local reproductive specialists: excisers (who oversaw initiation and circumcision ceremonies), nuptial counselors (who provided sexual education at marriage), and midwives. These older women’s work remained vital to social conceptions of proper reproduction, even as the biomedical maternal health system expanded, and Malians adjusted to new forms of religiosity and new ideas of status. Reproductive Labors: Women’s Expertise and Biomedical Authority in Mali 1935-1999 traces how, as biomedical care expanded over the 20th century, women and their families, feminist activists, medical professionals, and non-profit workers began to debate the importance of local reproductive practices. Part 1 explores the role of specialist labor in socializing sexuality and gender norms. In Chapter 1, I argue that following the end of slavery in the early 20th century, Malian families used nuptial counseling to instill concepts of honorable sexuality and demonstrate status at marriage (1935-1958). After independence, public outcry over unwed mothers revealed different visions of extra/marital sexuality and adolescence for nuptial counselors and state-affiliated women activists (1959-1986). In Part 2, I turn to reproductive health interventions. Chapter 3 reveals how the colonial maternal health system relied on external actors, from benevolent associations to Malian midwives, all of whom defined women’s bodies as childbearing bodies (1935-1958). Successive post-colonial governments sought to develop policies to ensure rural health access, toggling between training medical professionals to work in rural places and training local specialists, such as midwives, in biomedical techniques (1957-1976). The integration of midwives into biomedical clinics created substantial overlap between various therapeutic interventions, as I show in Chapter 5. Finally, Chapter 6 demonstrates how Malian participation in anti-excision activism owed as much to previous debates over marriage, unwed mothers, and rural maternity care as to transnational feminist movements and developmentalist interventions (1984-1999). Reproductive Labors is based on interdisciplinary research in Mali, Senegal, France and the US, including archival research, oral histories, and ethnographic work. In addition to working in national archives, the project engages with the floatsam of project reports now safe-guarded in people’s homes, bureaucratic documents from institutional archives like Mali’s National Health Directorate, and student theses. However, women’s specialist labor is less visible in archival material. In response to this elision of gendered knowledge, the project integrates ethnographic observation and French and Bamanakan oral history interviews with women specialists, as well as medical personnel and gender-rights activists. Reproductive Labors demonstrates how Malians were socialized into heterosexuality not simply through family or media, but through specific specialist interventions which linked heterosexuality to biological reproduction and gendered identities, deepening key themes in gender and sexuality studies. Reproductive specialists’ expertise was defined by their gender, skill, age, and social status, as most were older women of endogamous social group descent. Conversely, the activists who campaigned against them were usually highly-educated young women with close ties to international feminist institutions, although these linkages were structured by the colonial afterlives of educational and financial networks. Over the 20th century, questions about which group should have authority over young women’s reproductive experiences led to numerous debates for women and their families. Secondly, this project demonstrates that the continued value of local specialists for Malians, alongside the medical system’s reliance on external actors and instability in rural areas, created a specific form of Malian biomedicine driven as much by local therapeutic practices and social hierarchies as by international norms, enriching recent scholarship on the local specificities of biomedicine. Finally, this dissertation deepens scholarship on state-making in Africa. It demonstrates that reproductive health was not simply a subfield of the post-colonial Malian health system but that it became a key site for innovation in governance. As the first academic history of reproductive health in Mali, which has one of the world’s highest rates of maternal and child mortality, this dissertation seeks to understand the history of reproductive practices as a step towards reproductive justice.

This dissertation is a history of the Townscape movement, a town planning movement that emerged in 1940s Britain and that emphasized mixed-use planning, urban density, and vibrant street life. It follows Townscape’s key figure, the architect Gordon Cullen, through space and time: from the London offices of the Architectural Review to Delhi and Kolkata, where Cullen consulted for the Ford Foundation during the 1960s, and finally back to 1980s Glasgow and the London Docklands, where his ideas were recast in the context of urban regeneration under the Thatcher governments. Accounts of the postwar return to the city often center the American urbanist Jane Jacobs and the rise of urban design in the United States. Yet this narrative obscures a broader global story of the fall and rise of cities in the postwar period—one that brings together histories of welfare, development, and decolonization. Reaching back to the movement’s roots in the eighteenth century colonial picturesque, “Global Townscape” argues for Townscape as a post-imperial cultural project. Drawing on insights from the newly opened Gordon Cullen archives at the University of Westminster, as well as extensive work in Indian archives, it shows not only how Townscape was refined through architects’ engagement with the postcolonial world, but also how it originally emerged from the complex aesthetic and political demands of representing empire. As such, it situates the movement within a longer history of liberal political thought, its contradictions and critiques, while looking ahead to Townscape’s influence on the texture of urban neighborhoods today.

This dissertation chronicles the discourse of sincerity in state published Soviet Russian literature and criticism from Stalin’s death in 1953 to 1970. It presents a means of reading sincerity as a literary device in fiction and poetry that corresponds to an understanding of sincerity as rhetoric. This view holds that sincerity is a socially determined effect of language and affect. As such, the dissertation begins by analyzing the valences of sincerity during the Thaw, exploring them in connection with writers of the Village Prose and Youth Prose movements as well as in the poetry of Evgenii Evtushenko. From this survey of different literary trends, a general framework of a shift from an essentialist to a performative conception of sincerity in Russian official literature is presented. This dissertation argues that there was a gradual process which saw authoritative discourse and a discourse of sincerity exist in tension with each other in the early Thaw before performativity seeped into sincerity rhetoric in the Youth Prose of the early ‘60s. An awareness of sincerity as rhetorical or performative language flourished in postmodernist literature and late Soviet underground art, creating a mode that was self-conscious of the impossibility of essential sincerity while still seeking a way to be sincere.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the emergence of a novel corporate form – the non-profit family philanthropic foundation – created a new instrument through which the charitable impulses of their founders could be expressed. This archival dissertation project examines the histories of these foundations through a few targeted test cases (the Henry R. Luce Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Lilly Endowment, Inc.) and the group of theologically and politically conservative businessmen who engineered them. On a fine-grained level, I aim to document the shift from the religiously influenced, often denominational, charitable institution to the highly “rationalized” modern non-profit philanthropic foundation between the years 1934 and 1959. In so doing, I aim to shed further light on the religious rationalities of some of our nation’s most powerful secular institutions.

Recent scholarly interest in Elizabeth von Arnim has related Elizabeth and Her German Garden and The Solitary Summer to the New Woman and Female Aesthete movements, concluding that von Arnim does not align herself with any movement per se. Rather, in these early works, Elizabeth advocates and adamantly defends her right to time in her garden, which becomes her sanctuary for reading and thinking. Little critical attention has been paid to von Arnim's later works; however, many of the themes established in von Arnim's early works can be traced through her later novels. In The Enchanted April Lady Caroline retreats to the garden at San Salvatore in order to escape the attention of others and discover who she really is and what she wants out of life. Because she follows the early von Arnim model by defending her garden sanctuary, she is able to find the strength to insist on being treated as a person rather than a beautiful object. Additionally, Lucy Enstwhistle's interrupted time in the garden in Vera demonstrates the importance of the role of von Arnim's garden in forming an identity and developing the ability to make decisions for oneself. Because Lucy allows Everard Wemyss to rob her of these opportunities, she loses the opportunity to create her identity. She soon becomes the second Mrs. Wemyss, realizes that she is abject, and begins taking on first wife Vera's attributes and passions to cope with Everard's constant demands. Because Lucy has forfeited the formative experiences the garden space can provide, Lucy is left to take up Vera's identity and tragic fate.

This thesis is inspired by an ending—that of a cowboy hero riding away, back turned, into the setting sun. That image, possibly the most evocative and most repeated in the Western, signifies both continuing adventure and ever westward motion as well as a restless lack of final resolution. This thesis examines the ambiguous endings and the conditions leading up to them in two film Westerns of the 1950s, George Steven's Shane (1953) and John Ford's The Searchers (1956). Fascinatingly, the tension and uncertainty conveyed throughout these films is also characteristic of life in modernity, a connection which has previously gone overlooked. In my analysis, I study the ties between the postwar film Western and the philosophy of modernity to interpret these works in a new light, illuminating their generic context and their understudied philosophic dimensions. This reading highlights these films' continued relevance, showing how they have enabled creators and audiences to reflect on experiences of modernity in the idiom of the celluloid century.

No description available.

This dissertation develops a history of experimental art emerging in India in the final decades of the twentieth century. It addresses the turn to video, performance and mixed-media installation – conceptually driven, circulation friendly, critical artistic modes – by artists who share a generational consciousness, shaped in part by their class position and metropolitan location. My arguments are constructed through a historical and formal analysis of significant transformations in the works of two Bombay-based artists, Nalini Malani (b. 1946) and Rummana Hussain (1952- 1999), between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s. This post-Emergency period is marked by the spectacle, symbolism and horror of the Babri Masjid demolition (December 1992) and numerous instances of targeted violence against minority communities (1984, 1992-93, 2002). The coinciding legislative passage of economic liberalization (1991) also had far-reaching implications, including a decline in state dominance over culture and artistic patronage. I contend that these dramatic shifts in the market, media and art institutional landscape catalyzed the development of postmodernist art practices. As artists like Malani and Hussain confronted the limitations and failings of their postcolonial, cosmopolitan imaginaries, their artistic responses were driven by the affective and reflexive tendencies of despair and melancholia, enlivening radical praxis in the face of derailments and lost causes. My work problematizes the notion of rupture that has often been deployed in discussions of these artist’s trajectories, referring to the transition from conventional formats of oil painting and sculpture towards expanded media experiments⁠. This study examines both specific shifts and underlying continuities in the formal and conceptual registers of the practices in question, while situating theoretical debates around postmodernism, feminism, periodization and artistic generation in the context of India.

This study examines the interaction of the Second World War with the selfhood of Kenneth Preston, a Keighley schoolmaster, using primarily the exceptionally rich content of Preston’s Diary, maintained 1941-1945. In tracing Preston’s home front experience, attention is given to the ways in which the war interacted with the individual’s own self and social conceptions, as well as ways in which subjective experiences and perceptions translated into objective realities, such as in Preston’s participation in the war effort. Illuminating the personal dimensions of the war experience enabled a broad range of meanings and “webs of significance” to emerge, allowing for examination of the interplay between the conflict and understandings of class, community, gender, citizenship, social mores, and aspects of social change during the conflict. Preston’s understandings of himself and of society are intriguing contributions to the discussion surrounding active wartime citizenship, and further historical awareness of the meanings and understandings held within the British population during the era of the Second World War. In particular, the prestige the war offered to modernistic notions of science and technical intelligence is shown to have held a central place in the war experience of this particular individual and in his perception of the rise of the welfare state. With its focus on selfhood, the study is distinguished from arguments grounded in analysis of cultural products from the era; it also contributes to understandings of the causes and implications of social change, as well as the war’s personal impact on the male civilian.

No description available.