History Theses and Dissertations
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Item MODERNIZATION AND VISUAL ECONOMY: FILM, PHOTOJOURNALISM, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN BRAZIL AND ARGENTINA, 1955-1980(2010) Halperin, Paula; Weinstein, Barbara; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the relationship among visual culture, nationalism, and modernization in Argentina and Brazil in a period of extreme political instability, marked by an alternation of weak civilian governments and dictatorships. I argue that motion pictures and photojournalism were constitutive elements of a modern public sphere that did not conform to the classic formulation advanced by Jürgen Habermas. Rather than treating the public sphere as progressively degraded by the mass media and cultural industries, I trace how, in postwar Argentina and Brazil, the increased production and circulation of mass media images contributed to active public debate and civic participation. With the progressive internationalization of entertainment markets that began in the 1950s in the modern cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires there was a dramatic growth in the number of film spectators and production, movie theaters and critics, popular magazines and academic journals that focused on film. Through close analysis of images distributed widely in international media circuits I reconstruct and analyze Brazilian and Argentine postwar visual economies from a transnational perspective to understand the constitution of the public sphere and how modernization, Latin American identity, nationhood, and socio-cultural change and conflict were represented and debated in those media. Cinema and the visual after World War II became a worldwide locus of production and circulation of discourses about history, national identity, and social mores, and a space of contention and discussion of modernization. Developments such as the Bandung Conference in 1955, the decolonization of Africa, the Cuban Revolution, together with the uneven impact of modernization, created a "Third Worldism" and "Latin Americanism" that transformed public debate and the cultural field. By researching "peripheral" nations, I add to our understanding of the process of the transnationalization of the cultural field and the emergence of a global mass culture in the 1960s and 1970s.Item Slave Legacies, Ambivalent Modernity: Street Commerce and the Transition to Free Labor in Rio de Janeiro, 1850-1925(2010) Acerbi, Patricia; Weinstein, Barbara; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Slave Legacies, Ambivalent Modernity: Street Commerce and the Transition to Free Labor in Rio de Janeiro, 1850-1925" is a history of street vending during the transition from enslaved to free labor in the capital of the most enduring slave society of the Americas. Street vending - long the province of African slaves and free blacks - became in these years a site of expanded (European) immigrant participation and shifting state disciplinary policies. My dissertation contends that during the gradual transition to free labor, urban policing and the judicial system in the city of Rio came to target "criminality" rather than illicit or improper vending practices. Disciplinary measures established by criminal law focused on correcting individuals who were peddlers and not inadequately regulated street commercial activity. Thus, the language of citizenship appeared in court cases to both establish and resist negative characterizations of street vendors while a gradual marginalization of street commerce occurred within the framework of citizenship building. The practice of street commerce during this transitional era reveals a historical process that produced and transformed notions of legitimate work and public order as well as the racial segmentation of the labor force. Street vending, I argue, became a strategy of subsistence among the post-abolition urban poor, who came to their own understandings of freedom, free labor, and citizenship. Elite and popular attitudes toward street vending reflected the post-abolition political economy of exclusion and inclusion, which peddlers did not experience as mutually exclusive but rather as a dialectic of an ambivalent modernity.Item The Cartooned Revolution: Images and the Revolutionary Citizen in Cuba, 1959-1963(2009) Someillan, Yamile Regalado; Williams, Daryle; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Document: THE CARTOONED REVOLUTION: IMAGES AND THE REVOLUTIONARY CITIZEN IN CUBA, 1959-1963 Yamile Regalado Someillan, Ph.D., 2009 Directed By: Associate Professor, Daryle Williams, Department of History "The Cartooned Revolution: Imagery and Political Culture in Cuba, 1959-1963" traces the relationship between cartooning and citizenship in the early phases of the Cuban Revolution. Through a broad analysis of cartoons and advertisements produced in the Havana press between January 1959 and December 1963, this study analyzes the interplay of state-regulated visual communication that fueled cultural transformation and defined a new revolutionary citizenry. A close reading of an "imagined narrative," drawn by the new revolutionary press and consumed by Havana readers, I argue, casts a new light on the fundamental changes in political culture and society that took place in Cuba following January 1, 1959. My choice to analyze cartoons, advertisements as well as the institutions and personalities responsible for their production, draws upon the powerful interplay of revolutionary vision, reform, politics, and ideology within the imagined narrative. The institutional and functional conversion of these forms of revolutionary imagery into official propaganda occurred as a result of a deconstruction of the pre-revolutionary press and an institutional takeover and re-staffing of newspaper offices and printing presses; the deregulation of the cartooning profession; and the reorganization of pre-revolutionary advertising enterprises into a government-controlled, central clearinghouse. Initially, images portrayed the young Castro state as champion of reform within a longer tradition of Cuban liberalism. But in short time, the resistance of holdovers from the deposed Batista political class in combination with the souring of relations with the United States, engendered an emergent revolutionary visual culture. The early forms of its new visuality were exemplified in images cultivating the bearded rebel. As it matured, especially in visual communication associated with the Literacy Campaign of 1961 and the Socialist Emulation Campaign of 1962-63, the rebel image stood alongside a cast of stock characters representative of the new political regime. If, on the one hand, revolutionary imagery projected a dangerous political landscape filled with subversive plots and looming "enemies of the people," it also gave visual clues to the new forms of political belonging. Cartoons and advertisements communicated vital policies and campaigns in which Cubans with varying levels of commitment to the Revolution might be projected into an imagined, yet official revolutionary narrative. As Cubans increased their level of integration into revolutionary society, they began to redefine themselves into a more ideologically sophisticated citizenry both inside and outside of the image world.Item History, Identity and the Struggle for Land in Northeastern Brazil, 1955-1985(2008-12-11) Sarzynski, Sarah R; Weinstein, Barbara; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Drawing from Edward Said, Durval Muniz de Albuquerque Junior has argued that through a repetition of texts and images, Northeastern Brazil was "nordestinizado," or turned into an imagined area of misery, violence, folklore, fanaticism, and rebellion that became the Other of the modern, urban center-south of Brazil. My research builds on Albuquerque's arguments about the construction of o Nordeste in the twentieth century by situating them in the milieu of political and cultural debates that attempted to redefine Northeastern Brazil during the Cold War. Rural social movements (associated with the Catholic Church, the Communist Party, and the Ligas Camponesas), large landowners, filmmakers and intellectuals, popular poets, U.S. and Brazilian politicians and journalists, and Brazilian military officers proposed projects to change the structures that they saw as perpetuating regional inequalities. To gain support for their political projects, these social, political and cultural movements appropriated regional historical symbols and narratives, imbuing them with new meanings. In doing so, they sought to redefine regional identity, and to a certain extent, also looked to redefine national and Third World identity. During the Cold War, identity expanded to becoming a product of local, national and transnational discussions, facilitated by the expansion of film as a medium of mass culture. The debates over the meaning of regional historical symbols and regional identity in Northeastern Brazil are at once an exaggerated and exemplary microcosm of Cold War political and cultural struggles in Latin America and in the Third World. The characters in the story had counterparts in other countries, and the setting was one of the most socially unequal areas in the world espousing all of the problems and possibilities of impoverished areas during the Cold War. The struggles also occurred at a key moment in Cold War history in Latin America: the era of the Cuban Revolution. But, the Northeast was not a blank slate for Cold War policies; in fact, the region had entrenched cultural symbols and historical narratives that composed the framework for the debates over regional identity.Item A Beautiful Class, An Irresistible Democracy: The Historical Formation of the Middle Class in Bogota, 1955-1965(2008-08-04) Lopez, Abel Ricardo; Weinstein, Barbara; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"A Beautiful Class, an Irresistible Democracy" historicizes the (transnational) formation of the middle class in Bogotá, Colombia from the 1950s through the 1960s. Specifically, the dissertation asks how certain historical actors--architects, dentists, social workers, agronomists, rural specialists and accountants--not only cultivated a sense of self-understanding as middle class but also campaigned for the materialization of a democratic project of hierarchical rule as middle class. Furthermore, it interrogates how this complex project was critically constructed within a context of U.S. imperial expansion, the advance of international development agencies and foundations, as well as the growth of the Colombia state during the consolidation of the political coalition known as the National Front.Item "The Swinging Door": U.S. National Identity and the Making of the Mexican Guestworker, 1900 - 1935(2006-11-21) Noel, Linda Carol; Gerstle, Gary; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines U.S. national identity in the first third of the twentieth century. During this period, heated discussions ensued throughout the country regarding the extent to which the door of American society should be open to people of Mexican descent. Several major events brought this issue to the foreground: the proposed statehood of Arizona and New Mexico in the early twentieth century, the increase in Mexican immigration after World War I, and the repatriation of Mexican immigrants in the 1930s. The "Swinging Door" explores the competing perspectives regarding the inclusion or exclusion of people of Mexican descent embedded within each of these disputes. This dissertation argues that four strategies evolved for dealing with newcomers of Mexican descent: assimilation, pluralism, exclusion, and marginalization. Two strategies, assimilation and pluralism, permitted people of Mexican descent to belong to the nation so long as they either conformed to an Anglo American identity or proclaimed a Spanish American one rooted in a European heritage, whiteness, and a certain class standing. Exclusion denied entry into the U.S., or in the case of those already there, no role in society. Marginalization, which became the predominant strategy by the 1930s, allowed people of Mexican descent to remain physically within the country so long as they stayed only temporarily or agreed to accept a subordinate status as second-class Americans. The prevailing view changed depending on the economic and political power of people of Mexican descent, their desire to incorporate as Americans, and the demand for their labor or land by other Americans. One of the most significant findings of this project is that as the marginalization strategy gained adherents, the image of Mexican immigrants as temporary workers or "guestworkers" became the primary way in which Americans, Mexicans, and the immigrants themselves regarded the newcomers from Mexico. Despite the fact that this image was often false, the notion of Mexicans as only temporarily in the U.S. proved too seductive for the many divergent voices to resist as this image theoretically allowed Mexicans to enter the country and to provide their labor without threatening extant notions of American identity.Item Tunnel Vision: Urban Renewal in Rio de Janeiro, 1960-1975(2006-06-01) Kehren, Mark Edward; Weinstein, Barbara; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Following the inauguration of the newly constructed capital of Brasília in April 1960, the former federal district and Brazilian capital of Rio de Janeiro was transformed into the city-state of Guanabara. Although Rio lost its status as the political capital of Brazil after nearly 200 years, extensive urban renewal campaigns to modernize the city were employed by numerous politicians, planners, architects, artists, and ordinary residents to help restore Rio's position as Brazil's "true" capital city. This dissertation examines these urban renewal efforts in Guanabara from 1960 to 1975 - a period when Rio de Janeiro experienced its largest period of population and spatial growth. Whereas many of the urban renewal campaigns and projects for development prior to 1945 were intended to beautify, embellish, and "civilize" the city, the projects of the 1960s and 1970s were highly technical and revolved around integrating the automobile into the urban landscape. The measures of investment and resources devoted to modernizing and reforming the city during the Guanabara period were unprecedented for Rio de Janeiro, consequently resulting in significant spatial, social, cultural, and economic reorganization of the city. "Tunnel Vision: Urban Renewal in Rio de Janeiro, 1960-1975" examines specific projects of urban renewal such as tunnels (Rebouças and Santa Bárbara), expressways, parks (Aterro do Flamengo), subways, overpasses, and beaches while also exploring the technocratic approach to urban planning which was demonstrated through attitudes and principles that often marginalized "non-expert" participation in reforming the city. Using diverse primary sources such as government and urban planning documents, as well as neighborhood association materials, this dissertation also considers broader historical issues such as the politics and culture of military regimes, as well as questions related to the built environment, comparative planning cultures, space, class, race, ethnicity, and popular culture. Furthermore, this study also argues that the politics and culture of urban planning in Rio de Janeiro during the Guanabara period mirrored many of the same political, cultural, and social tensions that existed throughout Brazil and Latin America before and after the Brazilian military coup of 1964.