Graduate Theses & Dissertations

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Controlling the Feminine Body in Public
Within this project, I have identified a new pattern of instruction, surrounding women’s bodies and their movement within the public space, present within didactic literature produced during the reign of Charles VI of France (1368-1422). This pattern, present in the texts Le livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry pour l’instruction de ses filles, Le Menagier de Paris, Le livre des trois vertus and Mirroir des dames, sought to shame control women’s physical presentation in public through use of imagery, stories and fear of pride. Using modern gendered body theory presented by Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler to examine the rise of this pattern, this project then concludes it represents an attempt of the social authority to present a passive feminine body in the public space in order to display male power during a time of social instability. Author Keywords: body history, didactic literature, medieval education, medieval France, women, women's bodies
Civil Aviation and Scheduled Air Services in Colonial Botswana, 1935-1966
This thesis provides an in-depth and chronological study of the development of civil aviation in the Bechuanaland Protectorate (today’s Botswana), and the role played by the British Government in the development of this form of transport. The thesis argues that Her Majesty’s Government’s neglect and very little interest in its protectorate’s civil aviation represented a form of underdevelopment. The study also reveals the constant contradiction between the neglect of the imperial government and the constant lobbying on the part of colonial administration in the Protectorate for the establishment of an air service. To the colonial administrators, civil aviation represented a symbol of modernity and progress as well as more practical advantages such as mobility. The thesis finally concludes that the Bechuanaland Protectorate’s first airline was established due to growing nationalism both locally and on the continent, at large. The British Government facilitated the establishment of the airline as an attempt to appear benevolent to the protectorate on the eve of independence. Author Keywords:
Nymphs, Satyrs and Impotent Old Men
British pornographic texts arguing the texts were part of a wider cultural discourse on luxury, criticising the upper echelons of society for their decadent and vice-ridden lifestyles. Pornographic texts consistently portray the elites of Britain as partaking in sexual deviances including lesbianism, sex with dolls, dildos and household objects. The portrayals could be dismissed as tales fabricated for the titillation of the reading audience except that medical texts of the period diagnose the diseases of nymphomania and satyriasis, the rough equivalent of modern sexual addiction, as primarily affecting those of the upper class. Lifestyle was the key to diagnosis; luxurious living was thought to weaken the elite body rendering it vulnerable to excess sexual passions. Therefore, the hyper-sexual elite in pornographic texts reflected the contemporary cultural understandings of lifestyle and physiology. Author Keywords: Britain, culture, eighteenth century, nymphomania, pornography, sexuality
Politics of Memory
In dialogue with the critical scholarship on war and remembrance, my research deals with the construction, contestation and negotiation of collective memory in contemporary Vietnam with a focus on commemorations devoted to dead soldiers. Utilizing the methodologies of cultural studies and ethnography, this research seeks to comprehend the politics of memory which characterize collective memory as a social phenomenon whose meanings, interpretations and forms are variedly constructed from a certain social group to the next. Empirically, in this research, constitutive elements of Vietnamese postwar memoryscapes including the hero-centered discourse sanctioned by the Communist Party and the Socialist state, the family remembrance rooted in religious and kinship mandates and the newly emerged online ecology of memory are examined in their own nature as well as in their complicated intertwinements and constant interactions with each other. Case studies and specific methods of individual interview, participant observation and cultural analysis enable the author to approach and identify a wide range of forms and intersections between official and vernacular practices, between oral and living history and institutionalized and cultural presentations of memory. While considering these issues specifically in the Vietnamese context, my dissertation contributes to the increasing theoretical debates in the field of memory studies by exploring the relation of power and the symbolic struggle within and between different social agents involved. As it emphasizes the dynamic and power of memory, this research furthermore situates the phenomenon of collective memory in its dialogues with a broader cultural political environment of postwar society, which is characterized as a hybrid condition embracing processes of nationalism, modernization and post-socialist transformation. Significantly, during these dialogues, as demonstrated in this research, memory works embrace presentism and future-oriented functions which require any social group who is involved to negotiate and renegotiate its position, and to structure and restructure its power. Last but not least it must construct and reconstruct its own versions of the past. Author Keywords: collective memory, Dead soldiers, postwar society, Socialist Vietnam, the politics of memory, war remembrance
Finding New Roads Towards Peace
This thesis provides an analysis of the Carnegie Commission’s report on the causes and consequences of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913). Shortly after the closing of hostilities, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace appointed an international Commission of Inquiry to collect evidence of atrocities from the sites of war. The thesis analyzes the arguments expressed in the Commission’s report as an example of European and American attitudes towards the Balkans. The concept of Balkanism provides a theoretical framework according to which the Commissioners’ views are contextualized within the existing stereotypes of the region. Based on the correspondence available in the archives of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the memoirs and biographies of the various members of the Commission, and the information published in periodicals, this work also examines the justifications for the appointment of the Commission, the circumstances related to the investigation of atrocities and the reaction of Balkan governments to the report. Keywords: Carnegie Report, Carnegie Commission, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Balkan Wars, Balkanism. Author Keywords: Balkanism, Balkans, Balkan Wars, Carnegie Commission, Carnegie Endowment, Carnegie Report
Underdevelopment in Eastern Bechuanaland
This thesis offers a comprehensive look at the changing roles of a colonial built railway in what is now eastern Botswana. It was built for the extraction of mineral wealth and migration of cheap African labour in Southern Africa but it later assumed a different role of shaping the modern Botswana state. The thesis deals with several other issues related to the railway in Bechuanaland including land alienation, the colonial disregard of the chiefs’ authority, racial discrimination and the economic underdevelopment of Bechuanaland. Since there were no other significant colonial developments at the time of independence, this thesis argues that the railway was the only important feature of the British colonisation of Bechuanaland. From early on, the railway attracted different cultures, identities and religions. It was also instrumental in the introduction of an indigenous capitalist class into Bechuanaland. Author Keywords: Bechuanaland, Botswana, colonisation, migration, railway, underdevelopment
Technology of Consent
The 1980s in the United States have come into focus as years of extensive ideological and socioeconomic fracture. A conservative movement arose to counter the progressive gains of previous decades, neoliberalism became the nation’s economic mantra, and détente was jettisoned in favour of military build-up. Such developments materialized out of a multitude of conflicts, a cultural crisis of ideas, perspectives, and words competing to maintain or rework the nation’s core structures. In this dissertation I argue that alongside these conflicts, a crisis over technology and its ramifications played a crucial role as well, with the American public grasping for ways to comprehend a nascent technoculture. Borrowing from Andrew Feenberg, I define three broad categories of popular conceptualization used to comprehend a decade of mass technical and social transformations: the instrumental view, construing technology as a range of efficient tools; the substantive view, insisting technology is an environment that determines its subjects; and a critical approach, which recognizes the capacity for technology to shape subjects, but also its potential to aid new social agendas. Using Feenberg’s categories as interpretive lenses, I foreground these epistemologies in three of the decade’s most popular formations of literary science fiction (sf), and describe the broader discourses they participated in: military sf is connected to military strategy and weapons development (instrumental), cyberpunk to postmodernism and posthumanism (substantive), and feminist sf to feminist theory and politics (critical). These were not just discursive trajectories, I claim, but vital contributors to the material construction of what Antonio Gramsci would call hegemonic and counterhegemonic formations. While the instrumental paradigm was part of the decade’s prevailing hegemonic make-up, substantive and critical discourses offered an alternative to the reality of cowboy militarism and unchecked technological expansion. By engaging with the decade’s texts—from There Will Be War to RoboCop to “A Cyborg Manifesto”—I hope to illuminate what I call the technology of consent, the significance of technological worldviews for modern technocultures, where such views are consented to by subaltern groups, and at the same time the existence of consent itself as a kind of complex social technology in the first place. Author Keywords: American History, Discourse, Hegemony, Science Fiction, Technoculture, Technology
Reshaping the Terms of Debate
The Reagan era instigated a fundamentally conservative shift in the political, economic and discursive climate of America. As Ronald Reagan is a highly divisive symbolic figure in American politics, much of the historiography of his presidency has been characterized by polarized interpretations. Over the past decade there has been a noticeable shift towards more favourable and triumphal interpretations of the Reagan era. This thesis seeks to analyze the ideological shifts that have characterized the trajectory of historical writings on the Reagan era. Through employing a careful textual analysis of key works by Michael Schaller, Gil Troy and Sean Wilentz, amongst others, this study demonstrates how historiography serves us less as an objective means of understanding the past and more so as an expanding collective historical artifact that illustrates the changing currents of intellectual and political discourse. In doing so, the notion of scholarly objectivity itself is thrown into question. Author Keywords: Cold War, Conservatism, Historiography, Neoliberalism, Reagan Doctrine, Ronald Reagan
Commonality of Enemies
Carlism and anarchism were revolutionary social movements that acquired significant popular support during the most intensive period of modernization in Spain (mid 19th to mid 20th centuries). It was noted but not well explored by contemporaries and historians that these enemies were similar in their hostility towards modernization and in their intense idealism. This thesis compares the two movements in order to determine the nature of their commonality and what this suggests about ideological enemies. A range of sources were consulted, including scholarship on modern Spain, biographical information on individuals who converted from Carlism to anarchism and contemporary print media. It was concluded that they were produced by the same destabilizing processes of disentailment and industrialization, which drew the working classes towards proposals that would have otherwise seemed implausibly utopian. The thesis further suggests that they were uniquely idealistic, in that they put moral integrity before the success of their cause. Author Keywords: anarchism, Carlism, enemy other, modernization, Modern Spain, social movements
Racism in Argentina and the Blackness Problem. The Change in Perception of Afro-Descendants in Buenos Aires and the New Dimensions of Blackness in Argentina (1880-1930)
This thesis examines racism in Argentina between 1880 and 1930. The governing elite's efforts to whiten the Argentine population at the end of the nineteenth century led to the erasure and discrimination of anyone who did not have Caucasian features: Afro-descendants, mulattos, mestizos, and creoles. However, in the 1930s, whitening policies proved to have limited success. On the one hand, Afro-descendants were praised by the middle and lower classes of Buenos Aires; on the other hand, the Great Depression's effects made it clear that the Argentine population was made up of an ethnic mixture that had much darker skin tones than the whitening elite preferred. This work will show how the impact of the 1930s global crisis, as well as the enthusiasm for Afro-descendants, reinforced the racism that still existed, and will demonstrate that blackness became more than a racial but also a class connotation. Author Keywords: Afro-descendants press, Blackness in Argentina, Buenos Aires Press, Cultural Constructions, Popular Blackness, Racial Identity
Class Struggle, The Communist Party, and the Popular Front in Canada, 1935-1939
This thesis is an attempt to provide a critical history of the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) during the Popular Front era, roughly November 1935 to September 1939. This study contains a detailed examination of the various stages of the Popular Front in Canada (the united front, the height of the Popular Front, and the Democratic front), with special attention paid to the CPC’s activities in: the youth movement, the labour movement, the unemployed movement, the peace movement, and the anti-fascist movement. From this I conclude that the implementation of the Popular Front, the transformation of the CPC from a revolutionary party to a bourgeois party, was not a smooth process, but instead was punctuated and resisted by elements within the CPC in what can be considered a process of class struggle internal to the CPC itself. Author Keywords: Canada, communism, Great Depression, labour, Popular Front, socialism
How to Forge an Empire
The goal of this thesis is to explore the production of ferrous (iron) armaments in the Middle Byzantine Empire, and more specifically the tenth century. Three cornerstones define the current research: (1) An exploration of the technology at use in the production of ferrous armaments. (2) A comprehensive look at the logistical and organizational structures which facilitated this industry. (3) A closer look at the labour investments required to manufacture armaments through an ethnographic and experimental approach. The tenth century document known as the De Cerimoniis forms a foundational pillar of the current study. The document details the quantity and types of military equipment required for a naval expedition launched by the Byzantines in A.D. 949. The information provided within has made this inquiry into logistics possible, and has allowed for the assessment of overall trends in the tenth century arms production industry. Author Keywords: armour, arms production, Byzantine military, logistics, metallurgy, weapons

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