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Graduate Theses & Dissertations

: 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

: 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

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