published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 47-50).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Comparative Literature Dept., 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2003. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xi, 176 p.; also includes graphics (some col.) Includes bibliographical references (p. 153-166). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

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In this narrative, the author reflects on the personal and ethical dilemmas she faces currently in the beginning stages of conducting dissertation research fieldwork, an aspect often glossed over by retrospective accounts. She is conducting ethnography of Nicaraguan labor migrant women working in Costa Rica's coffee agro-industry, with an emphasis on reproductive health and motherhood. In addition to her social position as a Western, advanced graduate student-researcher, Goldade is also a wife and mother, arriving in the field with her baby daughter just under 4 months of age. She grapples with the challenges of negotiating the moral politics of motherhood and ethnography, seeking collaboration among host country nationals and recruiting study participants, as well as the balancing act of working motherhood.

My dissertation is titled "Ethnogenesis, Identity, and the Dominican Republic, 1844-Present." The topic is important because of the centuries-long influences of colonialism where peoples' cultural and political identities are emerging through neo-colonial ideologies. The processes of ethnogenesis are embedded in colonialism-enslavement, ethnocide, genocide, and demographic collapse, to name a few. The expansive nature of imperialism has affected the cultural production of identity, to the extent that ethnogenesis can no longer be understood in isolation within particular societies because it operates in sophisticated networks where multilingual and multicultural factions create and re-create distinct identities through a sense of both history and hybridity.The research that I carried out in this study answered crucial questions relevant to a range of issues in the process of identity formation for a cohort of the African Diaspora in the West Indies. Rather than portraying changes as inevitable movements from colonialism to postcolonialism, I placed identity within a much broader scope of understanding in terms of the impact of historical evidence and material culture in the process of ethnogenesis. Probably the most important aspect of my research for academic circles is that it exemplified an example of identity not commonly associated with people of African descent in the Americas.There are significant numbers of Dominican immigrants living in and coming to the United States. These immigrants are socially located within a parameter of classification unlike anything they encountered in the Dominican Republic. My findings demonstrated that dark-skinned individuals do not self-identify as Black in the Dominican Republic yet when placed in the U.S. Diaspora there is many times no other choice than to be labeled Black along with many of its social implications. My findings also showed that although Dominicans have removed themselves from Blackness, they have not collectively detached themselves from distinct influences of their African heritage.To understand the Dominican Republic from the year 1844 to the present, it is necessary to unfold the intricate conditions present within the parameters of independence and dependence, diversity and sameness, and colonial and neo-colonial ideologies, which simultaneously divide and unite the "Self" and "Other."

The past three decades have witnessed the extraordinary emergence of several global cultural realms for the crossborder flow and consecration of cultural goods (e.g., in the visual arts, music, or literature). Scholars have debated whether such accelerated dynamics of the globalization of culture are leading to the worldwide dominance of cultural goods from a few Western countries--and in this sense to growing cultural homogeneity--or whether they facilitate the increasing transnational dissemination and recognition of cultural creations from other non-Western contexts, such as Asia, Latin America, or Africa--and thus entail increasing cultural diversity. Focussing on the case of the contemporary visual arts and elaborating Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of cultural production further from a national to a global scale, the dissertation specifies the conditions under which artists from non-Western regions become visible and recognized in a global cultural realm. In contrast to the established theoretical models in the globalization of culture literature--the political economy model of cultural imperialism, the global flows and networks model, or the global culture strategies model--a field approach extended to the global scale has the principal advantage that it permits to differentiate between the hierarchical structures, transnational networks, and cultural rules of different subspaces in the same global cultural universe. From this perspective, the dissertation develops an alternative argument that goes beyond approaching cultural homogeneity or diversity as an either/or problem. Drawing upon a rich array of sources and combining interpretative and quantitative methodologies, I argue that there are systematic differences in the conditions of worldwide artistic recognition and diversity in globalizing cultural circuits that are based on a logic of intellectual prestige and charisma on the one hand, and those that are ruled by a commercial logic on the other. Hence, I make the case that, in order to capture the complexities of cultural diversity in a period of accelerated globalization, it is necessary to take into account and theorize more fully the institutional diversity of global cultural realms themselves. The dissertation is divided into four parts: the first part clears conceptual ground by discussing aspects of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field of cultural production that have to be modified or added when the framework is moved beyond national boundaries to a transnational or global level. The second part investigates the worldwide diffusion of contemporary art institutions across more than 140 countries, and it also examines discourses of artistic globalization and global art and additional historical sources, in order to illuminate the institutional formation of a global cultural field in the contemporary visual arts since the 1980s that is transcontinental in geographic scope and cultural orientations. The third part asks how these global transformations have affected the recognition of artists from different parts of the world. Drawing upon encompassing data of the transnational careers of leading artists in the global exhibition space and global auction market, I show that the contemporary visual arts are structured around a dual world economy of recognition, and that, correspondingly, dynamics of artistic diversity have evolved in systematically different ways with regard to global symbolic capital or global economic artistic success. Building on the insights from this broader structural account, the third part engages with an in-depth case study comparison of the biographies of outstanding artists from China and Mexico (Yue Minjun and Gabriel Orozco), who have achieved either high economic success or symbolic recognition in the global art field. They are representatives of the first artistic generation in the history of the contemporary visual arts that might be termed global. By explaining how these artists rose to worldwide leading artistic positions, the dissertation brings to light additional different historical, social and cultural preconditions for the inclusion and consecration of artists from non-Western regions at the intellectual and commercial poles of the same global cultural realm. Overall, by expanding insights of one of the classical studies in the sociology of culture, Pierre Bourdieu's The Rules of Art, the dissertation advances an understanding of the `global rules' of art, that is, the core-periphery structures, transnational networks, cultural practices as well as classificatory schemes of interpretation and valuation that are intertwined with the making of worldwide artistic reputations and careers in a global cultural realm. It thereby offers a window onto the making and dynamics of what I designate as a "dual world economy of recognition." In addition, through the substantive lens on worldwide artistic recognition and careers, the dissertation develops further a new theoretical approach to the globalization of culture that goes beyond certain polarities among established theoretical models, as between cultural homogeneity vs. diversity, structures and meaning, macro vs. micro, or structure vs. agency. By comparing transnational and global processes at both an intellectual and commercial pole of the same global cultural field, it elaborates a theoretical model that is multi-dimensional and multi-leveled. It permits to study processes associated with the globalization of culture--as, for example, cultural crossborder flows and exchange, cultural inequalities or cultural diversity--by linking different macro and micro level factors. Lastly, the dissertation also offers a step toward advancing general global field analysis as an emerging new theoretical paradigm in global and transnational sociology vis-à-vis more established broader theoretical approaches, such as world-systems analysis or world polity theory. By theorizing and substantiating the institutional core-periphery configurations of a whole global field, involving both its autonomous and heteronomous pole, it develops a template for reconstructing the institutional making of a field at a global scale both in its structural and cultural dimensions.

acase@tulane.edu / Research into the narrative and interpretation of how undocumented food vendors navigate formal systems raises questions about the relationship between labor, entrepreneurship, migration, and regulation. From taco truck owners to restaurateurs, Latinx food vendors are emblematic of the New Orleans post-Katrina recovery, initially feeding workers who were fundamental in rebuilding the devastated region. Despite the important role they continue to fill and their growing popularity among the non-Latinx community, these foodways purveyors face challenges in accessing political and cultural legitimacy. Using a multi-sited ethnographic framework this research follows workers from Honduras to New Orleans to analyze how these individuals negotiate social policies and precarious economies. Building on accompaniment methodology this study employs community-engaged research to get a more holistic analysis of these migration experiences and adds to the growing field of cultural producer-oriented scholarship. Centering on the shifts in policy and inconsistencies of legislation I argue that the regulation of food vendors maps onto the criminalization of undocumented individuals. Yet despite these vulnerabilities, these narratives demonstrate how Latinx communities are able to forge their own cultural, economic, and political spaces. / 1 / Sarah Fouts

Doctor of Philosophy / This work draws on the insights of an anthropology of transnationalism to explore an emergent field of translocal connections, practices and identifications between reformed Vietnam and the post-1975 Vietnamese diaspora in the West. In the post Cold War period, it is argued, we have witnessed a collapse of the geopolitics of exile that once divided diaspora and homeland. In this context, it is not appropriate for Vietnamese migration studies to speak of "two" discrete national and diasporic Vietnamese communities. Rather, the discipline is required to come to terms (theoretically and empirically) with a complex and contradictory field of transnational social relationships through which diaspora and homeland are co-constituted. The thesis charts this field via the study of phenomena such as: the explosion of mobility between Vietnam and diaspora· the emergence of a transnational Vietnamese language commercial music culture; the constitution of translocal Vietnamese urban spaces in the host nations; the enabling of symbolic and market citizenship in a Vietnamese "transnation"; and the flow of overseas Vietnamese "grey" and "green" matter (cultural and material capital) back into Vietnam. Exile and fleturn shows how the state in Vietnam, and elites in the diaspora, have responded to the advent of transnational flows between homeland and diasporic sites by authoring both traditional, border-enforcing and novel, borderexpanding strategies of imagining and governing the "national" community. It argues that overseas Vietnamese have made sense of their own transits to and engagements with Vietnam through a logic of' transnational exilic space" that variously resists and accommodates the claims of capital, the state and diasporic belonging.