▼ During the late Middle Ages, a remarkable phenomenon occurred in Italy: the growth of many small, self-governing city-states, which included Siena. At this time the Sienese commune was administered by a succession of elected ruling councils: the Ventiquattro, the Trentasei, and the Nove. Despite being mired in social and political turmoil, these regimes sponsored great works of art. This dissertation argues that the arts were a fundamental component of these administrations' ability to rule because of the way that cultural production helped to create and spread new conceptions of social class. This project examines two areas of the arts either commissioned, or created, by the Trentasei, Ventiquatttro, and the Nove: a set of eighteen painted book covers from the government financial offices of the Biccherna and Gabella, and the Palazzo Pubblico complex (which includes the town's main square). Through the methods of iconology and social closure it demonstrates how each of these arts, over time, acted as fulcrums through which members of Siena's various social groupings attempted to monopolize certain cultural advantages by usurping privileges held by others and/or by excluding (or attempting to exclude) outside groups. Such cultural advantages included: displaying coats of arms and last names, possessing a palace and tower, and accessing the space of the city's piazza. The structural relationships that were made as groups sought to usurp/exclude others from participation in these arts created the city's social classes. This dissertation provides an interdisciplinary bridge between socio-political and art historical analyses on late medieval Siena. It fills an important gap between the detailed social histories of the city, whose methodologies have not allowed the detailed examination of the evidence provided by the arts, and traditional art historical approaches, for which Sienese society tends to be a backdrop to other concerns, such as patronage, technique, and iconography. Advisors/Committee Members: Buchanan, Charles.

▼ The role of women in Bali must be understood in relationship to tradition, because “tradition” is an important concept for analyzing Balinese culture, social hierarchy, religious expression, and politics. Wayang kulit, or shadow puppetry, is considered an important Balinese tradition because it connects a mythic past to a political present through public, and often religiously significant ritual performance. The dalang, or puppeteer, is the central figure in this performance genre and is revered in Balinese society as a teacher and priest. Until recently, the dalang has always been male, but now women are studying and performing as dalangs. In order to determine what women in these “non-traditional” roles means for gender hierarchy and the status of these arts as “traditional,” I argue that “tradition” must be understood in relation to three different, yet overlapping, fields: the construction of Bali as a “traditional” society, the role of women in Bali as being governed by “tradition,” and the performing arts as both “traditional” and as a conduit for “tradition.” This dissertation is divided into three sections, beginning in chapters two and three, with a general focus on the “tradition” of wayang kulit through an analysis of the objects and practices of performance. Next, in chapters four and five, I shift my focus to the body as the site of the display of political and social power, and write about women dalangs and some of the major female characters in wayang kulit. In Bali there is both the sekala, visible, and niskala, invisible, worlds of existence—and I also look at this invisible or spiritual side. The final section, chapters six and seven, focuses on my experience becoming a dalang in order to probe this invisible, or niskala domain of wayang kulit. I describe, through reflexive ethnography, the training process and ritual initiation I underwent before my first performance. In this dissertation, working from the general to the specific, I interrogate how “tradition” is constructed in Bali through an examination of wayang kulit, or shadow puppetry, in order to examine how women’s involvement in these performing arts might provide women an opportunity for greater agency within Balinese society. Advisors/Committee Members: Condee, William.

▼ Drawing from a number of artistic media, this dissertation is an interdisciplinary approach for understanding how artworks created under the patronage of Albrecht V were used to shape Catholic identity in Bavaria during the establishment of confessional boundaries in late sixteenth-century Europe. This study presents a methodological framework for understanding early modern patronage in which the arts are necessarily viewed as interconnected, and patronage is understood as a complex and often contradictory process that involved all elements of society. First, this study examines the legacy of arts patronage that Albrecht V inherited from his Wittelsbach predecessors and developed during his reign, from 1550-1579. Albrecht V’s patronage is then divided into three areas: northern princely humanism, traditional religion and sociological propaganda. The final chapter follows the influence of Albrecht V’s patronage through the Thirty Years’ War, during the reign of his grandson, Maximilian I. During the early years of Albrecht V’s reign, his patronage reflected his values as a noble who pursued a particularly northern, humanist agenda. During his reign, a resurgence of traditional religious experience occurred in Bavaria that the Jesuits, supported by Albrecht V, used to rouse support for Catholicism. This movement affected Albrecht V’s identity, and his patronage and the legacy of his patronage reflected and supported the entrenchment of traditional Bavarian Catholicism. Jacque Ellul termed the establishment of such structures sociological propaganda. That Bavaria remained staunchly Catholic during the Protestant Reformation is often attributed to the absolutist policies and social discipline of Albrecht V – a process known as confessionalization. However true the confessionalization thesis is, any approach for analyzing Bavarian artworks of the period must also include the possibility that the lower classes were as influential in shaping the patronage and religious identity of Albrecht V as the Wittelsbach court was in shaping the religious identity of Bavaria. Advisors/Committee Members: Dora, Wilson.

▼ This dissertation explores the nature of American musical identity in the score from the 1936 documentary film The Plow That Broke the Plains, directed by Pare Lorentz, scored by Virgil Thomson, and created under the auspices of the New Deal‘s Resettlement Administration. While the score offers a study in modernist music and compositional musical Americanism, other approaches may be more suited to positioning this New Deal cultural artifact within its historical context, thus revealing its cultural sources and social intentions. In the spirit of contemporary musicology, this project proposes a new category through which to undertake such studies: functional Americanism. Functional Americanism evaluates American identity in music through the function or utility of music operating in an American setting or for an American purpose. Using this approach to engage with The Plow, this study draws from social history, cultural studies, and musicology in order to understand The Plow within its historical moment as an articulator of American identity. Advisors/Committee Members: Wilson, Dora.

▼ This dissertation rethinks the legacy of the anti-apartheid leader Steve Biko (1946-1977) in terms of his influence upon post-apartheid South African poetry. Comparing Biko's own writings on Black Consciousness and the poetry of contemporary South African poets, I show that Biko's ideas have come to underpin a field of post-apartheid poetry that I call "Biko poems." Two questions guide this investigation. First, what is it about Biko's legacy that avails itself so potently to poetic elaboration? That is, what does Biko's articulation of Black Consciousness offer that allows it to be so vigorously engaged within poetry? I address this question in Chapter One, positing that Biko's early essays, published under the reoccurring title "I Write What I Like," and under the pen name "Frank Talk," model a form of performative writing crucial to his subsequent poetic legacy. In particular, I discuss the manners in which these essays construct Black Consciousness as the struggle to generate black political presence, and black writing as a crucial aspect of this struggle. I thus assert that Biko's essays fuse the struggle within Black Consciousness for black political presence with the struggle within performative writing to "make absence presence," as Della Pollock has defined performative writing. Biko's essays can accordingly be understood to open his legacy up to subsequent poetic elaboration, as they forward black writing as a key manner in which the struggle for black political presence can be enacted. The subsequent chapters of this dissertation are motivated by a second question: if Biko's legacy allows for a potent understanding of black writing as crucial to the struggle to generate black political presence, what work does this understanding do in the present? I address this second question by examining the different manifestations of Biko's performative articulation of Black Consciousness in the work of contemporary poets. In Chapter Two I examine the struggle within the work of Mphutlane wa Bofelo to redeem the performativity of Biko's legacy against Biko's appropriation as a symbol of elite privilege in the post-apartheid era. In Chapter Three, I examine the effort within the work of Bofelo and Kgafela oa Magogodi to leverage Biko's performativity to sanction contemporary black performance poetry. In Chapter Four, I explore Vonani Bila's use of Biko's performativity to underwrite his development of a rural poetics. Finally, in Chapter Five, I discuss how this performative mandate to arise through self-determined struggle comes into tension with Biko's own haunting presence in the works of Bofelo, Magogodi, Bila, Bandile Gumbi and Lesego Rampolokeng. That is, I show that these "Biko poems" are propelled by their irresolvable effort to both employ Biko's performative precedent and escape it. Collectively, then, I argue in this dissertation that Biko's performative articulation of blackness and black writing continues to animate contemporary South African poetry, as poets both leverage and struggle with Biko's haunting specter in their efforts to performatively emerge in the present. Advisors/Committee Members: Peterson, Marina.

▼ Appalachians are typically represented in visual culture as homogenized: white and poor. For the rest of the country tuned into to American visual culture, Appalachia is nothing more than America’s backwoods country, crawling with hillbillies, peopled by incestuous families, and stocked with slovenly welfare abusers. In the spirit of recent Appalachian scholarship’s reclamation of Appalachian heterogeneity via challenges to what scholars have referred to as the “Appalachian Myth,” this study examines the rhetoric of Appalachian stereotypes in visual culture, observes scenarios in which they construct external and internal “others,” and theorizes the ways in which images promote prejudice, classism, and gender disparities and deny the existence of richly diverse cultural traditions within the region. The visual ephemera covered in this project are not studied or organized as artifacts in an historical taxonomy. Instead, they are understood as subjects within a visual grammatical system. This system establishes boundaries between Appalachia and America. Thus, the subjects and materials studied – Jesco White: The Dancing Outlaw, media coverage of the 2006 Sago mine disaster, Jessica Lynch and Lynddie England, Hillbilly Days, Redneck Games, and The Descent – care treated as iconic phrases within a larger visual etymology or taxonomy of identity. By treating images as grammatical rhetorics and situating them within the context of contemporary feminist and visual studies theories, this dissertation offers a new theoretical framework to study the construction of identity through the deployment and rhetoric of imagery. Advisors/Committee Members: Condee, William.

▼ This dissertation explores how films about Africa depict contemporary economic globalization. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which narrative styles and visual imagery are used to project themes of economic globalization and how these styles are ideologically framed to reflect the neoliberal economic policies in Africa. By concentrating upon the ways in which these films represent globalization, this project breaks from the popular tendency in discussions related to cinema and globalization in Africa to apply a political economy approach that focuses mainly on the socioeconomic and political structures of film industry in Africa. Accordingly, this dissertation generates a dialogue between the art of cinema and the critical discourse on globalization through a theoretical framework informed by African cinema, social realist cinema, and Third Cinema. This dialogue is developed as the dissertation responds to two posed basic questions: What socioeconomic realities in regard to economic globalization are presented in contemporary films about Africa? And, secondly, what cinematic modalities are used to narrativize these socioeconomic realities? The study focuses on four films: Hyenas (Djibril Diop Mambety, 1992); Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006); Darwin's Nightmare (Hubert Sauper, 2004); End of the Rainbow (Robert Nugent, 2007). It includes an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction provides a brief overview of the study and a literature review. Chapter one offers a discussion on the Hyenas focusing on the violence associated with the implementation of the neoliberal economic policies in Africa. Chapter two is an analysis of Bamako centering on the destructive nature of the economic globalization. Chapter three provides an examination of documentary film depiction of the agent of economic globalization as reflected in End of the Rainbow and Darwin's Nightmare. The conclusion finalizes the discussion with some recurring insights regarding the general representation of economic globalization in films about Africa. Advisors/Committee Members: Gillespie, Michael.

▼ Previous scholarly work on the director Terrence Malick has argued that his films “ Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World> (2005) “ are, in varying ways, philosophical. This assessment is usually made via an analysis of the films in relation to a single philosophical metatext (frequently the work of Martin Heidegger) that transcends the concrete historical situation of both the given film and the historically existing viewer. This study seeks to intervene in this critical literature by theorizing an approach for understanding Malick's films as works that do not merely illustrate already articulated philosophical themes but that rather function, in dialogue with the spectator, as an invitation to generate creative and historically situated meaning. The film medium, this study argues, is uniquely philosophical in that it exists in time (via the gradual entropy of the celluloid film print) as does the finite, historically embodied spectator. Malick's cinema, I argue, reflects poetically upon the finite nature of both the film medium and the viewing subject through films that depict subjective experience in the historical past. Rather than construct a theoretical methodology that will then be “applied” to the films, the study uses its first three chapters to construct a propadeutic (in philosophy, a preparatory framework) that in the remaining chapters inform an exploration of the philosophical thought that Malick's four films encourage. The first chapter of this study places the dissertation's framework in critical debates about the use and function of philosophy in relation to film. The second and third chapters then illustrate in greater detail the project's own approach. The second chapter uses the work of D.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell and others to suggest that in watching films we are led to reflect upon what we value as existential, becoming spectators. The third chapter builds upon the phenomenology of Vivian Sobchack in order to suggest how the temporality of film experience emerges through film space. In the final four chapters, I use the insights of the propadeutic to craft a philosophically informed critical analysis of Malick's four films. This analysis demonstrates not only the philosophical value of the director's oeuvre, but also functions as a case study demonstrating the larger value of philosophy and existential phenomenology to the critical study of Malick and film in general. Advisors/Committee Members: Marchenkov, Vladimir L.

▼ In this dissertation, I investigate the practice of sound art in the post-Tiananmen era in China. I define sound art as creative practices that use sound (including silence) as a major means of creation and expression. It is a genre that both connects and disturbs categories of visual arts and music. The driving question of this project is how the sign of freedom translated into a socio-cultural ideology, a value, and an impulse shapes and is shaped by a socio-cultural milieu that is itself changing under the influence of globalization. In other words, the project examines how freedom affects the social and the personal. At the same time, the project “unmakes” the sign to investigate the affect of freedom—the thing that slips away in the process of signification. Drawing from sound art practice, the project suggests that to be free is to be sensitive and open in everyday life, to sense beyond security, to place one’s self in crisis, and to become the body without organs (BwO). China’s sound art provides one of the best sites to examine how freedom (with its referents of neoliberalism, consumerism, and human rights, as well as 自在 [spontaneous becoming or self-existing]) is used, interpreted, felt, expressed and lived. In China’s sound art culture, there are activists who consider sound art a social tool to fight for democracy and social justice, avant-garde artists who criticize consumerism and capitalism in Chinese society, as well as musicians and artists who advocate anarchism and alternative lifestyles. There are also artists who are less interested in making claims about political or social issues, but are more concerned with the practice of self through making good sound art works. The project argues that different kinds of freedom-searching acts have different political and social significances; even making good experimental artwork is a kind of social intervention by resisting existing political or social ideologies. In the dissertation, I discuss two spatial references of freedom in Beijing, Tiananmen Square and 798 Art District in chapter one. In chapter two, I outline the field of sound art culture in China during the post-Tiananmen era. Then, in chapter three, I analyze two collective affects, anxiety and powerlessness, related to a series of freedom-searching events in the sound art culture. In chapter four, I depict and analyze the characteristics of a utopian collective that practices experimental and free improvisational music in suburban Beijing. I further examine in chapter five how Beijing-based sound art scene connects to music subcultures in other cities, while reflecting on disconnections between sound art and China’s contemporary arts. Finally, in the conclusion, I propose how sound art practice might cultivate affective listening. Advisors/Committee Members: Peterson, Marina.