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<p>My dissertation explores the counter-histories of trans-Atlantic modernity that surface in contemporary apocalyptic visuality. Framing twenty-first-century apocalypse films and televisual narratives as “new world” fantasies, I argue that British and American visions of The End re-stage the exploitative “contracts” that underwrite capitalist modernity. While contemporary visions of apocalypse predominantly valorize a survivalist ethos premised on claiming territory, annihilating threatening others, and securing reproductive labour, they can also be read for the ethical, affective, and political alternatives that they inadvertently expose. With this in mind, I bring together the fields of transatlantic studies and biopolitical theory in order to accomplish two complementary objectives. The first aim is to critique the gendered, racial, and generational politics of survivalist fantasies, which I read as conducting a neoliberal pedagogy that reanimates histories of racial terror and sexual exploitation. The second is to develop a biopolitical analysis premised on Hannah Arendt’s principle of natality in order to foreground the reproductive and youthful bodies that have been too long marginalized in theories of biopower. Though they are typically relegated to the background of apocalyptic visual culture, women and children figure the unrealized possibilities that haunt survivalist fantasies—possibilities that, I argue, are embedded in the ruined landscapes that they negotiate. Apocalyptic visions of crumbling metropolises, wasted landscapes, and abandoned border sites invite genealogical excavations of the lingering counter-histories embedded in their ruins. Such critical excavations reveal the “now” as a space-time of contestation in which suppressed pasts open onto a multiplicity of possible futures.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation investigates aesthetics of African design and decoration in the work of major contemporary artists of African descent who address heritage, history, and life experience. My project focuses on the work of three representative contemporary artists, African American artists Kehinde Wiley and Nick Cave, and Ghanaian artist El Anatsui. Their work represents practices and tendencies among a much broader group of painters and sculptors who employ elaborate textures and designs to express drama and emotion throughout the Black Atlantic world. I argue that extensive patterning, embellishment, and ornamentation are employed by many contemporary artists of African descent as a strategy for reinterpreting the art historical canon and addressing critical social issues, such as war, devastation of the earth's environment, and lack of essential resources for survival in many parts of the world. Many artworks also present historical revisions that reflect the experience of Black peoples who were brought to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade, lived under colonial rule, or witnessed aspects of post-colonial struggle. The disorderliness of intersecting designs could also symbolize gaps in memory and traumas that will not heal. They reflect the manner in which Black Atlantic peoples have pieced together ancestral histories from a patchwork of sources. Polyrhythmic decoration enables their work to act as vessels of experience, allowing viewers to bring together multiple histories and social references. / Art History

An important anomaly in transatlantic criticism is the contrast between transatlantic theory and the applied criticism of literature through a transatlantic lens. While most transatlantic scholars assert the value of individual strands of thought throughout the globe and stress the importance of overcoming national hegemonic barriers in literature, applied criticism generally favors an older model that privileges British literary thought in the nineteenth century. I claim that both British and American writers can influence each other, and that mutations in thought can travel both ways across the Atlantic. To argue this claim, I begin by analyzing the influence of Blackwood's Magazine on the literary aesthetic of Edgar Allan Poe. While Poe's early works read very similar to Blackwood's articles, he positioned himself against Blackwood's in the middle of his career and developed a different, although derivative, approach to psychological fiction. I next follow this psychological strain back across the Atlantic, where Oscar Wilde melded aspects of Poe's fiction to his own unique form of satire and social critique.

This thesis investigates Emily Dickinson's spatial imagination. It examines how her poetic landscape responds to the conditions of modernity in an age of modernization, expansionism, colonialism and science. In particular, I look at how the social and cultural representations of nature and heaven are revised and appropriated in her poems to challenge the hierarchical structure of visual dominance embedded in the public discourses of her time. Although she seldom travelled, her writing oscillates between experiential empiricism, sensationalistic reportage, and ecological imagination to account for the social and geographical transition of a rapidly industrialized and commercialized society. The notion of transcendence, progress and ascension in Enlightenment and Transcendentalist writings, based upon technological advancement and geographical expansion, characterized the social and cultural imagination of her time. Alternatively, an increasingly cosmopolitan New England registers a poetic contact zones as well as a Bakhtinian carnivalesque space, in which colonial relations can be subverted, western constructions of orientalism challenged, and capitalist modernity inflected. Dickinson voiced in her poems her critical reception of such a phantasmagoric site of a modern world. I explore how her cartographic projection registers the conflicting nature of modernity, while resists the process of empowerment pursued by her contemporary writers, presenting a more dynamic poetic vision of the world. In the first chapter, I explore her use of empirical mapping as a poetic approach to challenge the Enlightenment notion of progress and modernity. I look at her poems of social transitions, especially her poems of the Bible, the train, the pastoral, and the graveyard, to show how she addresses the issue of modernization. Her visit to Mount Auburn and the rural landscape movement are explored to show her complex poetic response toward modernity. In the second chapter, I focus on her poems of emigration and exploration to see how she appropriates frontier metaphors and exploratory narratives that dominated the discourses of national and cultural projects of her time. The colonial expeditions and national expansionism of her time are examined to show her revision and deconstruction of quest narratives. In the third chapter, I examine her commercial metaphors in relation to cosmopolitanism. I discuss her metaphors of tourism to see how her poems are based upon the notion of consumption as a poetic mode that is closely related to the violence of global displacement and imperial contestation. Her tourist experiences and reading of travel writings will be examined to show her critical response towards the dominant visual representations of her time. In the last chapter, I explore her poems of visitation and reception to show her elastic spatial imagination through her notion of neighbouring and compound vision. In particular, I discuss her poetic reception and appropriation of the theories of Edward Hitchcock and Thomas De Quincey. I conclude suggesting that her spatial imagination reveals her poetic attempt to account for the conditions of modernity.

Entre 1763 et 2013, le Québec est armes car il se retrouve entraîné au coeur des questions de sécurité et de défense qui agitent l’espace nord-américain. L’histoire de la Belle province est marquée par une série d’alliances militaires, de luttes violentes, de rébellions, de résistances et de transgressions. La guerre de Sept ans, la révolution américaine, la guerrefranco-britannique en 1793, la révolte des Patriotes en 1837-1838, la participation des Canadiens francophones à la guerre de Sécession, les crises de la conscription en 1918 et en 1942, l’action du FLQ, les référendums sur l’indépendance du Québec en 1980 et 1995 ou encore la participation active du Québec à la guerre contre le terrorisme à partir de 2001constituent quelques exemples de ces rapports de force au cours de la période étudiée.L’histoire du Québec en tant qu’entité spécifique démarre avec la cession par le roi de France de la partie canadienne de l’empire français au roi d’Angleterre avec le traité de Paris du 10 février 1763. Sous la houlette de l’Église catholique, les Canadiens francophones, qui vivent dans les basses terres du Saint-Laurent, organisent leur résistance face au colonialisme britannique. Ils développent au fil du temps leur propre culture stratégique fondée sur l’idée d’une nécessité de la survivance du fait francophone en Amérique du Nord. Malgré les tentatives de l’Angleterre d’assimiler la population de la colonie à la culture anglophone afin de mieux faire accepter son autorité, les francophones résistent et organisent leur défense territoriale dans les basses terres du Saint-Laurent. Cette résistance accélère l’émergence d’une relation spéciale entre le Québec et la France qui constitue son ancienne métropole coloniale. Les relations de la Belle Province avec les États d’Amérique du Nord sont conditionnées par cette culture stratégique spécifique des francophones.Au moment du 250e anniversaire du traité de Paris, en 2013, le Québec forme un complexe de sécurité et de défense ayant atteint un statut de quasi-État souverain. Il a une population homogène, un territoire et un gouvernement propre. Il possède le plus important réseau de représentations diplomatiques à l’étranger de tous les États fédérés dans le monde. Il dispose également d’une force de police, d’un service de renseignement ou encore d’une industrie de guerre. Le Québec exerce une influence internationale hors de proportion avec son poids démographique. / Between 1763 and 2013, Quebec is armed because the province is concerned by the security and defense issues in the North American area. The Quebec history is characterised by a series of military alliances, violent struggles, rebellion, resistance and transgressions. The Seven Years War, the American Revolution, the Franco-British war in 1793, the Patriotsrevolt in 1837-1838, the participation of French Canadians in the American Civil War, conscription crises in 1918 and 1942, the FLQ action, referendums on Quebec independence in 1980 and 1995 or the Quebec active participation in the war against terrorism from 2001 are some examples of these power relations for the studied period.The history of Quebec as a specific entity starts with the assignment by the King of France of the Canadian portion of the French Empire to the King of England with the Treaty of Paris of February 10th, 1763. Under the leadership of the Church Catholic, French-speaking canadians who live in the lowlands of the St. Lawrence, are organizing their resistance toBritish colonialism. Over the time, they develop their own strategic culture based on the idea of a need for the survival of the French fact in North America. Despite the attempts of England to assimilate the population of the colony to the English culture to better accept his authority, french canadians resist and organize their territorial defense in the lowlands of theSt. Lawrence. This resistance accelerates the emergence of a special relationship between Quebec and France wich is its former colonial power. The relations of the Belle Province with the North American States are structured by the specific strategic culture of french canadians.At the time of the 250th Treaty of Paris anniversary, in 2013, Quebec is a security and defense complex having reached a status of almost sovereign State. The province has a homogeneous population, a territory and a lawfull government. Quebec has the largest diplomatic representations network abroad all federal states in the world. The province alsohas its own police force, an intelligence service or a war industry. Quebec has international influence out of proportion to its demographic weight.

Drawing on methodologies from Performance Studies and Transnational American Studies, this dissertation is an historical analysis of the transatlantic relations of the American Indian radical sovereignty movement of the late Cold War. First the study recovers the transnational dimension of Native Americans as historical actors, and demonstrates that the American Indian radical sovereignty movement of the early 1970s posed a transnational challenge to the U.S. nation state. Next, arguing against the scholarly consensus, it shows that by the mid-1970s the American Indian radical sovereignty movement transformed itself into a transnational struggle with a transatlantic wing. Surveying the older transatlantic cultural representations of American Indians, this study finds that they both enabled and constrained an alliance between Native radical sovereignty activists and European solidarity groups in the 1970s and 1980s. This dissertation traces the history of American Indian access and participation in the United Nations, documents the transformation of Native concepts of Indian sovereignty, and analyzes the resulting alliances in the UN between American Indian organizations, Third World countries, national liberation movements, and Marxist régimes. Finally, this study documents how national governments such as the United States and the German Democratic Republic responded to the transatlantic sovereignty alliance from the middle of the 1970s through the end of the Cold War.

The paper describes the exchange program in between the University of Wisconsin/ Milwaukee and the University of Potsdam in the field of economics. It discusses in detail the development of the program, including the problems and challenges. Additionally a brief description of the curriculum is presented. Then the future possibilities of the Transatlantic Degree Program (TDP) are discussed and the influences and problems of the Bologna process analysed.