http://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778 2013-05-19T15:36:27Z http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13869 Title: A Dialogue on Human Rights: America's Policy Makers and the Soviet Dissident Movements, 1956-1976 Authors: Finch, Robert James Abstract: Through the 1950s and 1960s, American news correspondents working in Moscow had come to befriend many of the Soviet dissidents. This friendship was realized in the American press, where there was an explosion of news coverage on the dissidents. Through this news coverage, American interest groups and politicians became interested in the plight of the Soviet dissidents and began to demand that their government make human rights an essential part of its foreign policy. American politicians challenged the Nixon administration's policy of détente by seeking to link trade with the Soviet Union to its human rights practices. By 1976, the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group and the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe were established to monitor the Soviet government's compliance with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act. This represented the first time Soviet dissidents and American politicians directly communicated on issues related to human rights. 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13645 Title: Alegria: The Rise of Brazil's "Carnival of Popular Participation," Salvador da Bahia, 1950-2000s Authors: Metz, Jerry Dennis Abstract: In the second half of the twentieth century, the annual carnival in the economically depressed northeastern city of Salvador da Bahia underwent a series of transformations that brought it from relative anonymity in Brazil--where festivities in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Recife had long been given pride of place--to the status of (inter)national showpiece in terms of cultural and entrepreneurial innovation and touristic appeal. It became a dominant factor in year-round local music production. In an era of political constraint, it appeared to embody the collective performance of multiple democracies including race and free-market consumerism. New forms of popular participation were linked to innovations in carnival that, in other national carnival sites, would have been precluded by regulation and tradition. This dissertation draws from debates and analysis in Brazil's intellectual, policy, and media spheres regarding carnival, folklore, tourism, Bahian culture, mass culture, and national identity to argue that 1) the traits of creative spontaneity and popular participation in Salvador's carnival gained prominence as both national ambivalence over "folklore" increased, and dictatorial regimes constrained political democracy; 2) the state, rather than discursively and economically controlling Salvador's carnival, has more often reacted to artistic production and market forces, its hegemony configured through strategies of support and appropriation linked to tourism and an internally amplified social ethic of <italic>alegria</italic>; and 3) media and cultural commentators have made Salvador's modern carnival a new locus for longstanding national conversations over Brazilian identity, regionalism, race, and cultural imperialism, casting its innovation as simultaneously a promising engine of renovation and a threat to both local and national traditions. Salvador carnival's progressive implications of participation and inclusion have been blunted by a process of political redemocratization that was associated with neoliberal policies at the national and local levels; its internal contradictions and commercialism have challenged both its national and local symbolic power. 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13643 Title: "Founding a Heavenly Empire": Protestant Missionaries and German Colonialism, 1860-1919 Authors: Best, Jeremy Abstract: This dissertation investigates the relationship between German Protestant missionaries and secular leaders of colonial politics and culture in the German colonial empire during the nineteenth century. In particular, it examines how missionaries defined their collective identity as an international one against pressures that encouraged mission societies to adopt and promote policies that favored the German colonial state and German colonial economic actors. Protestant missionaries in Germany created an alternative ideology to govern Germans' and Germany's relationships with the wider world. The dissertation examines the formation of an internationalist missionary methodology and ideology by German missionary intellectuals from 1870 and the shift to traditional Protestant nationalism during World War I. It then examines the application by missionaries of this ideology to the major issues of Protestant mission work in German East Africa: territorial rivalries with German Catholic mission orders, mission school policy, fundraising in the German metropole, and international missionary cooperation. In so doing, it revises conventional interpretations about the relationship between Protestantism and nationalism in Germany during this period. 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1903/13633 Title: Indigenismo and its Discontents: Bilingual Teachers and the Democratic Opening in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico, 1954-1982 Authors: Dillingham, Alan Shane Abstract: This dissertation examines the relationship between indigenous peoples and modernizing schemes in Mexico during the second half of the twentieth century. As such, it explores the relationship between indigeneity, educational and development policies, and Cold War politics. The study is grounded in a particular indigenous highland region of southern Mexico, the Mixteca Alta, while at the same time investigating indigenous-state relations as they were articulated on national and international levels. I examine policy debates, institutional reforms and labor struggles within indigenista agencies between 1954 and 1982. I ask how ideas about the value of indigenous language and culture shaped projects of incorporation and the struggles of meaning inherent in those processes. In other words, this dissertation is an investigation of the micropolitics of indigenous education and development efforts in the second half of the twentieth century. I argue that in the late 1970s a confluence of factors-including postwar development projects engaging indigenous brokers, transnational discourses of anti-colonialism, and grassroots struggle with an authoritarian regime-crystallized to shift official policy to the recognition and celebration of indigenous linguistic diversity. The dissertation deepens our understanding of post-1940 Mexican political culture and the transformations it underwent. Specifically, it plots a new periodization for regions, such as the Mixteca Alta, which did not experience significant agrarian reform during the 1930s, by demonstrating how federal agencies (other than the military) only began to exert influence in the early 1950s. The period of liberalizing reforms known as the apertura democrática, or democratic opening, is frequently described as an effort to coopt government opponents. I argue against this cooptation narrative by demonstrating how President Luis Echeverría (1970-1976) employed tried and true tactics of negotiation with mobilized sectors to both concede to and control emerging aspirations. It is in this regard that the Mexican regime, earlier than most of its Latin American counterparts, employed the rhetoric of indigenous cultural and linguistic rights to reformulate its corporatist rule. 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z