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Title: "Only the fourth chief" : conflict, land, and chiefly authority in 20th century KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa
Creator: Kelly, Jill Elizabeth
Date: 2012
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation examines the local nature of South Africa’s transition–era political violence (known in isiZulu as uDlame). While common explanations for the conflict focus on the struggle for political legitimacy between the rural and traditionalist Zulu ethnic nationalist movement Inkatha and the young and urban African National Congress (ANC), I argue that for the individuals and communities involved, politics were local. For the peri–urban Nyavu and...
Show moreThis dissertation examines the local nature of South Africa’s transition–era political violence (known in isiZulu as uDlame). While common explanations for the conflict focus on the struggle for political legitimacy between the rural and traditionalist Zulu ethnic nationalist movement Inkatha and the young and urban African National Congress (ANC), I argue that for the individuals and communities involved, politics were local. For the peri–urban Nyavu and Maphumulo chiefdoms in the Table Mountain region outside of Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu–Natal, these larger struggles were embedded in a century–old debate over land and what it meant for a chief to be legitimate. Drawing on a rich combination of written and oral sources, the dissertation examines the role of colonial and apartheid governments in the appointment and succession of Zulu chiefs, the engendering of debates over legitimacy and chiefly authority, boundary conflicts, “faction fights,” and competing claims on land. In the Table Mountain region, the Nyavu, whose chiefdom predated the rise of the Zulu state under Shaka, made land claims based on their hereditary status against the chiefdoms established in the area by the British such as the Qamu, Gcumisa, and Maphumulo (chapter one). The construction of a dam during the segregation era and the establishment of Tribal Authorities and bantustans under apartheid exacerbated these contests over access to land and political legitimacy (chapter two). The rise of the ethnic nationalist movement Inkatha in the KwaZulu bantustan, forced relocations, and an increasing population meant many parties competed over scarce land in the Table Mountain region (chapter three). As political violence erupted across KwaZulu–Natal and in the Gauteng townships during the late 1980s, the Table Mountain region initially remained a haven of peace under the “peace chief” Mhlabunzima Maphumulo of the Maphumulo chiefdom. In offering himself as peacemaker and protector, Chief Mhlabunzima attracted new Maphumulo members onto the contested land, sparking the deadly transition–era violence with the neighboring Nyavu (chapter four). Maphumulo’s actions also caused a rift within his chiefdom (chapter five). Local actors used both the national and local contest between Inkatha and the ANC as an opportunity to decide the land dispute through violence. The final chapter (six) turns away from the male-dominated experience of the violence to analyze how women's discussions about it reveal both their claims on ethnicity and uses of Zulu culture as a coping mechanism.The historiographical significance of these findings is threefold. First, my dissertation builds on earlier concerns of African historians about the importance of land for chiefly legitimacy, but goes beyond them by examining other claims to authority, such as hereditary descent, resource allocation, and security and protection during conflict. Second, after the advent of democracy, historical research and public history in South Africa has emphasized commemorative liberation history that tends to overlook the relatively recent painful, divisive years of warfare that almost scuttled the 1994 elections. Third, my study has relevancy in contemporary South African and African human rights debates over state/peasant relations and the role of chiefs and land reform in postcolonial African politics and democracy.
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Title: "Open" sulfur heterocyclic analogs of the phenothiazines and related phenylthienyl systems
Creator: Okafor, Charles Okolo
Date: 1965
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Our Utah girls" : girls and young women in the transitional Mormon Church
Creator: Rose, Natalie Kaye
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: How the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) transitioned from practicing the most unconventional marriage system in the nation to representing a model of family stability has surfaced as one of the most riveting and perplexing questions in the field of American religious history. A common explanation for this remarkable transition centers upon the assumption that church members were eager to be welcomed into and prove their allegiance to the United States after contending with...
Show moreHow the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) transitioned from practicing the most unconventional marriage system in the nation to representing a model of family stability has surfaced as one of the most riveting and perplexing questions in the field of American religious history. A common explanation for this remarkable transition centers upon the assumption that church members were eager to be welcomed into and prove their allegiance to the United States after contending with intense persecution and ostracism. However, this dissertation complicates this narrative and explores how acclimation into the mainstream United States was not a swift process for the church’s youngest female members. My dissertation examines how the church’s young women contended with and pushed back against the leadership’s expectations during this transition. The LDS church leadership and influential membership exercised their expectations and anxieties for the future of Mormonism through attitudes and actions directed toward adolescent female church members. Mormon girls embodied multiple possibilities for the future of the religion in the minds of the church leaders and the wider community. In the most literal sense, they represented the continuation of the religion through their desire to marry and have children. The leadership envisioned that adolescent Mormon women held the ability to push the religion into the twentieth century while still maintaining sacred religious traditions. Young women could impede the leadership’s desires by choosing intermarriage, not marrying at all, and failing to want children. To counteract these possibilities, the leadership looked to methods such as the organization of youth groups and the development of prescriptive literature to outline their expectations of how girls should act as proper Mormon women. An exploration of young women’s diaries, letters, school notebooks, memoir, and other life-writings illuminates how young women used a variety of methods and spaces to assert their agency within Mormonism. While some young women developed autonomy within church structures like the auxiliary female groups, others depended on secular higher education and professional opportunities to embrace their agency outside of the church. Their acts of agency were not necessarily directed against the church, but a way for young women to grapple with changes in their church, families, and personal lives.
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Title: "Our word is our bond" : T.S. Eliot, Geoffrey Hill, and the (post)modernist problematics of language
Creator: Kim, Yangsoon
Date: 1998
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Passport" to improved retention
Creator: Thayer, Mary Ann
Date: 1998
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Pictures...of a good subject" : friendship, the commonwealth, and the care of the self in early modern literature and culture
Creator: Kranzman, Andrew Scott
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation argues that emphases on self-knowledge and duty within friendship discourse of the early modern period repudiates a common assumption that friendship is primarily a private, selfless, apolitical affair separate from public life. This discourse largelyhighlights fashioning the self as an ethical and political subject while the friend per se remains of secondary concern. As the Early Modern Research Group observes, “the commonwealth...act[s] as a language to articulate...
Show moreThis dissertation argues that emphases on self-knowledge and duty within friendship discourse of the early modern period repudiates a common assumption that friendship is primarily a private, selfless, apolitical affair separate from public life. This discourse largelyhighlights fashioning the self as an ethical and political subject while the friend per se remains of secondary concern. As the Early Modern Research Group observes, “the commonwealth...act[s] as a language to articulate personal and public vices and virtues” (Early Modern Research Group 670). An emphasis on obligation and reciprocity for the common good or bonum commune, the importance of social hierarchy, obedience, and subordination, as well as a belief in moral discipline as the anodyne to social ills prove to be recurring components of this “language.”Some major concerns within friendship discourse and practice include: the realization of membership in a larger community; the importance of measure and mean to both individual and community well-being; the obligation to admonish community members who fail to upholdduties and shared moral standards; and the necessity of social concord across various classes. Moreover, period conceptions of friendship demonstrate that the formation of “good” and “dutiful” does not proceed without cognitive, moral, and emotional struggles, particularly, asregards indifference, selfishness, flattery, and resentment.Each chapter explores a specific facet of early modern friendship discourse and practice and places it in conversation with the “language” of the commonwealth: self-knowledge, the care of the self, frank speech, and gender. My first chapter argues that Tudor friendship pamphletsand Tottel’s Songs and Sonnets exploit the sentiment that self-knowledge fosters concord, where one learns to fashion the self into a dutiful subject to God and man. As I delineate in this chapter,discussions of self-knowledge frequently focus on the possibility of sedition arising from a lack of knowledge about one’s duty and obedience to the commonwealth. The second chapterexamines the disciplinary function of self-knowledge and duty within friendship discourse and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Concerns surrounding self-love and temperance in friendship focus on the potential for disaster when one does not know the extent of their duties to thecommonwealth. As I demonstrate in my third chapter, which focuses on Plutarch and King Lear, the sense of duty to authority that guides self-fashioning in friendship and buttresses self-knowledgealso highlights the necessity of fashioned speech, particularly the tactful articulation of one’s conscience in order to preserve ethical bonds and duties within the community. However, as regards the practice of tactful antagonism, that is, “parrhēsia” or frank speech, concerns surface because it potentially disrupts social hierarchies and so closely resembles the very thing it supposedly combats: flattery. In my final chapter, I examine themes discussed in earlier chapters (i.e., self-knowledge, temperance, and admonishment) through the lens of gender and class. Amelia Lanyer’s poems, and early modern culture and literature in general, depict caritas, or friendship between the self and others mediated by Christ, as one way to cultivate private virtue and public concord that surpasses social divisions. As I argue, divisions andfaultlines that are mostly class-based, along with visions of a lack of social mobility, pressure the utopian idea of friendship among women put forth by Lanyer as well as general discussions of social concord among all classes in the commonwealth.
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Title: "Power of we" : effects of motivational self-talk and synchrony on performance, efficacy beliefs, and sense of unity in dyadic exercise
Creator: Son, Veronica
Date: 2013
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation investigated the effects of `individual-focused' versus `group-focused' self-talk and synchrony on performance, self-efficacy, collective efficacy, and sense of unity in a dyadic exercise setting. Additionally, this study sought to identify whether individualist and collectivist orientations influence the way in which self-talk strategies enhance performance and one's beliefs about one's own and one's team's capabilities. Previous research found that group-focused self-talk...
Show moreThis dissertation investigated the effects of `individual-focused' versus `group-focused' self-talk and synchrony on performance, self-efficacy, collective efficacy, and sense of unity in a dyadic exercise setting. Additionally, this study sought to identify whether individualist and collectivist orientations influence the way in which self-talk strategies enhance performance and one's beliefs about one's own and one's team's capabilities. Previous research found that group-focused self-talk was effective in enhancing performance and both self- and collective efficacy (Son, Jackson, Grove, & Feltz, 2011). Synchrony research has also demonstrated its positive impact on fostering relative team outcomes (e.g., relationship quality, sense of unity, and satisfaction; Vacharkulksemsuk & Fredrickson, 2011; Wiltermuth & Heath, 2009). Participants were 346 undergraduate students who were randomly assigned to a same-gender dyad. Dyads were allocated to one of 12 conditions in a 3 (self-talk condition: I version, we version, control) x 2 (synchrony: synchronous activity, asynchronous activity) x 2 (task type: additive, coactive condition) x 2 (block) design with repeated measures on the last factor. Participants completed one block of an abdominal plank exercise alone and the second as a part of a dyad. Participants also completed questionnaires regarding their individualistic and collectivistic orientations, self-efficacy, collective efficacy, and sense of unity. Between the two blocks a self-talk intervention was implemented. Using ANCOVAs with baseline measures as a covariate, although no significant effects for individualistic or collectivistic orientations were found, participants using individual-oriented self-talk reported greater performance improvement compared to those in the control condition. Stronger sense of self-efficacy and greater enjoyment in working as a group was found in the group-focused self-talk condition compared to the control condition. Individuals in the additive condition reported greater performance improvement and higher levels of collective efficacy than did those in the coactive condition. Lastly, synchrony produced greater performance improvement and stronger sense of unity compared to the asynchrony condition. Findings of the study contribute to the self-talk and synchrony literature in team sport and exercise contexts and how these strategies can be effectively implemented to enhance performance and efficacy beliefs.
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Title: "Razing" adults and illegible children : narratives of (im) maturity during America's progressive era
Creator: Astle, Kirk Andrew
Date: 2005
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Readin' sistahs after school : counterstories from an all black girl book club"
Creator: Carey, Carleen
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This study uses ethnographic tools to analyze one after-school Black girl book club. It addressesthe question, “How do the students construct raced and gendered identities as they engage withtexts?” While some studies highlight the need for teachers to employ culturally relevantcurricula, more studies are required to illuminate how students themselves define which texts areculturally sustaining. Drawing on Gee’s model of discourse as type of toolkit, this studyinvestigates the stories...
Show moreThis study uses ethnographic tools to analyze one after-school Black girl book club. It addressesthe question, “How do the students construct raced and gendered identities as they engage withtexts?” While some studies highlight the need for teachers to employ culturally relevantcurricula, more studies are required to illuminate how students themselves define which texts areculturally sustaining. Drawing on Gee’s model of discourse as type of toolkit, this studyinvestigates the stories narrated by six female African American1 seventh-graders over the courseof one school year in a large Midwestern city. Using critical discourse analysis, this studyillustrates how written and oral story-telling can support students’ critical literacy development.This dissertation expands the literature on identity and literacy. It expands our knowledge aboutan oral narrative in conversational response to text, thus uncovering the potential of narrative andconversational response to text as a tool for both young adult identity development and teachereducation, especially among young women of color studying English in urban settings.
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Title: "S.W.A.G. = Style With a Goal" : exploring fashion/style as a critical literacy of Black youth in urban schools
Creator: Hayes, Sherrae M.
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This study is a multi-method, qualitative project using Youth Participatory Action Research through ethnographic design to examine the uses of fashion/style by Black youth as a form of critical literacy. Taking place in the setting of an urban, public, Midwestern middle school, the work outlines the ways these students communicated through their fashion sense and thus made sense of their identities and the identities of others as messages critically coded and decoded daily. This work examines...
Show moreThis study is a multi-method, qualitative project using Youth Participatory Action Research through ethnographic design to examine the uses of fashion/style by Black youth as a form of critical literacy. Taking place in the setting of an urban, public, Midwestern middle school, the work outlines the ways these students communicated through their fashion sense and thus made sense of their identities and the identities of others as messages critically coded and decoded daily. This work examines current texts/theories surrounding characteristics of uniform policy, critical literacy, and identity development through fashion/style. Ultimately, through this study’s action-orientation, this work highlights how students participated in student-led development of a uniform/dress code policy that incorporated their own critical fashion literacies. Critical Fashion Literacy, a particular form of critical literacy this work seeks to contribute to literacy studies at large, is centered upon the notion of how we each possibly read and write messages and meanings through fashion/style daily. Essentially, this study works to center youth voices with a potential impact on possibilities for their future as change agents in education in their own right – moving beyond fashion statements to the statements they are making through fashion.
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Title: "Scandinavian preferred" : Nordic ethnic identity, gender, and work within Chicago, 1879--1933
Creator: Jackson, Erika Kathleen
Date: 2010
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Scientists don't talk about underground rivers" : (e)merging water and development discourse in Quintana Roo, Mexico
Creator: Amato, Jessica Vernieri
Date: 2012
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The provision and maintenance of water for the growing tourist and resident populations of Quintana Roo present a formidable challenge to the Caribbean coastal town of Akumal, Mexico. Despite being given much attention at the 2006 Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico City, water contamination throughout southeastern Quintana Roo is now nearing a crisis. In Akumal, mismanaged municipal and state-level attempts to "develop" have increased the amounts of contaminated groundwater, untreated...
Show moreThe provision and maintenance of water for the growing tourist and resident populations of Quintana Roo present a formidable challenge to the Caribbean coastal town of Akumal, Mexico. Despite being given much attention at the 2006 Fourth World Water Forum in Mexico City, water contamination throughout southeastern Quintana Roo is now nearing a crisis. In Akumal, mismanaged municipal and state-level attempts to "develop" have increased the amounts of contaminated groundwater, untreated wastewater discharge, and unregulated nutrient runoff into the Caribbean Sea. These unsustainable efforts are chief contributors to the overall poor water quality, according to environmental scientists who monitor Akumal's coastal zone. Despite lacking the infrastructure to support a booming tourism industry, Akumal is poised to "develop" faster and more profoundly in the near future than it has in the past 20 years.As part of Quintana Roo state, Akumal is positioned for redevelopment as "Nuevo Akumal," part of a regional tourism development plan that will raise the number of hotel rooms and condominiums from 20,000 currently to over 250,000 by the year 2025 (Basave 2001). Within state-development planning processes, there is a strong disconnect between the economic need to refashion Akumal as a major tourism engine of Quintana Roo, and the desire to limit growth and maintain Akumal's global reputation as an "ecotourist" destination. The urgency to mediate these divergent positions has resulted in the creation of local conservation efforts in Akumal. The growing call for sustainable, controlled, and ecologically-aware development comes from local as well as transnational actors. Some of these ancillary programs supplement state efforts and stem from the actions of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Quintana Roo.For NGO stakeholders in Akumal, these actions have not resulted in greater bargaining power over the choices being made, but rather position NGOs as expert informants to the "real" decision-makers of the state. Seats at the development table are granted based on the perceived authority and expertise of scientists. This perception gains currency by packaging and repackaging NGO conservation efforts as alternative economic investments infused with the infallibility of western science.Adopting the grounded theoretical framework of political ecology, this dissertation explores how NGO claims of scientific expertise emerge and define the routes to sustainable development in Akumal. Through an in-depth examination of a local water conservation program in Akumal, NGO discourses are analyzed as structuring practices that create "authentic," and therefore valued, responses to development. As part of this analysis, this dissertation presents the results and interpretation of ethnographic field research to explore, more broadly, the cumulative role of science, expertise and authority as preconditions for creating local alternatives to state-level development. Identifying and discussing how these "givens" travel discursively through varying cultural and political venues addresses the multi-scalar power relationships that compete within Akumal's high-speed tourism development process.
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Title: "Shall ill-gotten gains be sought for Christian purposes?," Washington Gladden's "tainted money" address, Seattle, September 15, 1905
Creator: Conley, James Harvey
Date: 1969
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Some day on American soil" : the material record of New Philadelphia and the middle class on the American prairie
Creator: Valvano, Christopher Francis
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The following dissertation asks: What is the material expression for the emergent middle class on the American prairie during 19th-century? It develops a model of a prairie-middle-class based on the material and documentary datasets at New Philadelphia, Illinois. These two datasets comprise a single historic-archaeological record that was created by people living in this town during the middle decades of the 19th century. New Philadelphia was a founder town, established by “Free” Frank...
Show moreThe following dissertation asks: What is the material expression for the emergent middle class on the American prairie during 19th-century? It develops a model of a prairie-middle-class based on the material and documentary datasets at New Philadelphia, Illinois. These two datasets comprise a single historic-archaeological record that was created by people living in this town during the middle decades of the 19th century. New Philadelphia was a founder town, established by “Free” Frank McWorter, an African American, who was born into slavery but who purchased his freedom, along with 13 family members. Chapter 1 presents the research question: What is the material expression of the emergent middle on the 19th-century American prairie? Chapter 2 outlines the historical developments necessary for the emergence of the middle class on the American prairie during the 19th century. Chapter 3 presents the theoretical context for examining the historical archaeological record at New Philadelphia. Chapter 4 presents the methodology of historical materialism to explain social change through processes of change. A model for the expansion of the capitalist mode of production is stated. This model forms the basis for four hypotheses about the broad cultural experience with capitalist expansion. Each hypotheses leads to specific sub-hypotheses about the personal experiences at New Philadelphia. These sub-hypotheses are bridging arguments to connect the local manifestation to the wider process of capitalist expansion. Chapter 5 presents conclusions and suggestions for future work.
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Title: "Something like a blowing wind" : African conspiracy and the coordination of resistance to colonial rule in South Africa, 1876-1882
Creator: Cohen, Brett
Date: 2000
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Squatter settlements as a transitional adjustment phase in rural-urban migration : the case of Tabriz, Iran"
Creator: Aloochi, Housain Banifatemeh
Date: 1982
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Staying together" : kinship and community in Fiji
Creator: Turner, James West
Date: 1983
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Title: "Step up little homie, got something to say" : a study of hip-hop pedagogy in an out of school program
Creator: Newby, Ashley Luetisha
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Much of the existing Hip-Hop Pedagogy research focuses on the inclusion of Hip-Hop in formal classroom spaces, and the role that Hip-Hop culture plays in the lives of Black and Brown youth specifically. By investigating a Hip-Hop Academy that teaches Hip-Hop culture rather than merely using it as a bridge between academic goals and student realities, this project seeks to add to the existing literature on Hip-Hop Pedagogy in education. Through the use of observations and interviews over the...
Show moreMuch of the existing Hip-Hop Pedagogy research focuses on the inclusion of Hip-Hop in formal classroom spaces, and the role that Hip-Hop culture plays in the lives of Black and Brown youth specifically. By investigating a Hip-Hop Academy that teaches Hip-Hop culture rather than merely using it as a bridge between academic goals and student realities, this project seeks to add to the existing literature on Hip-Hop Pedagogy in education. Through the use of observations and interviews over the course of a school year, the voices of the participants at the Hip-Hop Academy are placed central and the ways that they conceptualize and navigate their Hip-Hop and Academic identities are explored. This study investigates how students who are being explicitly taught Hip-Hop see the connections between the culture and their academic lives in their own words. The research questions for this study are (1) What is the nature of a space grounded in Hip-Hop culture and constructed through critical theory? (2) What is the nature of student reflection on the world? And (3) What does student participation in spaces like the Hip-Hop Academy reveal about how students want to learn? Through the use of observations, ethnographic field notes, and individual interviews, the voices of the students at the Academy are centered in this study, and the voices of the instructors are incorporated in ways that both answer the research questions, and reveal the ways that the students view their academic and Hip-Hop identities operating in conjunction with one another. The findings reveal that not only does Hip-Hop Pedagogy resonate with student populations that are marginalized, but that it also resonates with some of the most privileged identities in ways that allows all students to recognize and use their voices to express who their multiple identities in ways that are empowering. Furthermore, the students in this study see the skills that they learn through the Hip-Hop Academy as applicable to the other areas of their lives in ways that reveal a student-identified difference between “knowledge” and “education.” The findings of this study reveal that students are not seeing their Hip-Hop goals as in opposition to their academic and career goals, rather they are using the skills that developed through Hip-Hop culture to pursue both Hip-Hop and academic goals simultaneously in ways that compliment each other. This offers implications not only for the power behind honoring student voices through Hip-Hop, but also for how our classrooms and learning spaces can be structured in ways that both make students want to be there and feel comfortable asserting their own voices.
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Title: "Stop killing my vibe" : a critical language pedagogy for speakers of African American Language
Creator: Baker-Bell, April
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Black and Brown students face an abysmal threat not only in classrooms but in the world because of how they have been trained to understand themselves in and through their language. Within communities and schools, students who communicate in African American Language (AAL) encounter negative messages that suggest that their language is deficient, inferior, wrong, and unintelligent. This study reveals the consequences AAL-speaking students faced when using their language in academic and non...
Show moreBlack and Brown students face an abysmal threat not only in classrooms but in the world because of how they have been trained to understand themselves in and through their language. Within communities and schools, students who communicate in African American Language (AAL) encounter negative messages that suggest that their language is deficient, inferior, wrong, and unintelligent. This study reveals the consequences AAL-speaking students faced when using their language in academic and non-academic contexts. It also reveals how these students responded to a critical language pedagogical innovation. In particular, I explored how AAL-speaking students in two ninth grade English Language Arts classrooms understood themselves linguistically across multiple contexts and to determine if their engagement with a Critical Language Pedagogy (CLP) could transform their unfavorable attitudes toward AAL. Based on findings from this study, I drew the following conclusions: (1) the students understood AAL to be a linguistic resource with associated consequences in their everyday lives, (2) the students resisted and held negative attitudes toward AAL before the CLP innovation, and (3) the students' responses following their engagement with the CLP suggested that the innovation impacted their attitudes in important and dramatic ways.
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Title: "Taming the Intractable" : Chinese Migrants, Inter-Asian Interactions, and the Transformation of French Rule in Colonial Vietnam, 1862-1940
Creator: Le, Anh Sy Huy
Date: 2021
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation explores the migration, settlement, and evolution of the Chinese communities—a largely forgotten diaspora—and their importance in the transformation of French colonial Vietnam. Drawing on three years of transnational archival research spanning Vietnam, China and Singapore in a variety of Vietnamese, Chinese, French, and English sources, I construct the first comprehensive social and political history of Chinese commercial networks, social organizations, and cultural...
Show moreThis dissertation explores the migration, settlement, and evolution of the Chinese communities—a largely forgotten diaspora—and their importance in the transformation of French colonial Vietnam. Drawing on three years of transnational archival research spanning Vietnam, China and Singapore in a variety of Vietnamese, Chinese, French, and English sources, I construct the first comprehensive social and political history of Chinese commercial networks, social organizations, and cultural institutions; their multi-level interactions with the French colonial regime and Vietnamese; and their relations to mobile communities in maritime Southeast Asia and a China in the middle of drastic political transformations. Focusing on four crucial sites of ethnic Chinese-colonial state interactions, notably the colonial rice trade, health and cultural institutions, immigration surveillance, and crime and informal economies, my dissertation resituates the Chinese in Vietnam at the center of a prominent Nanyang diasporic network connecting East and Southeast Asia by examining Chinese transnationalism and identities as evolving and flexible articulations that responded dialogically to French colonial control, to the gravity of the Chinese Revolution and nationalist movements, and to varying modes of interactions with the wider Chinese capital and migratory connections in Hong Kong and Singapore.The dissertation is organized into four main chapters, thematically and chronologically organized to highlight the evolution of Chinese identities, mobile practices, and relationships to colonialism against dominant narratives of modern Vietnamese history that tend to privilege revolutionary times and downplay inter-ethnic elements. Chapter 1 explores Chinese rice monopoly and the political struggles between transnational rice merchants, a hyper-regulatory colonial state, and a new generation of Francophile Vietnamese politicians who advocated anti-Chinese nationalism as the answer to Chinese “domination.” Chapter 2 focuses on Chinese participation in the global opium trade, gambling cercles, and inter-Asian relationships that fostered an informal economy while challenging the foundation of colonial legal structures, leading to Vietnamese contentious attitudes towards Chinese roles in the French civilizing mission. Chapter 3 investigates the establishment, bureaucratization, and innovation of the French service of immigration control seeking to police increasingly mobile Chinese economic, social, and “illicit” networks and Chinese deployment of flexible identities to resist colonial hegemonic regulations. And chapter 4 turns to examine the local and transnational tensions of ethnic co-existence between mobile Chinese communities and the colonial state as reflected in issues of Franco-Chinese education, repatriations of Chinese remains to Hong Kong and their hometowns, and Chinese-led hospitals and their interactions with colonial medical institutions. My dissertation advances four interrelated areas of studies: Chinese migrants in Vietnam in the history of Nanyang Chinese migration wherein Vietnam’s crucial Chinese communities have remained largely marginal; the studies of the Sinosphere and Chinese identities; Sino-European relations and postcolonialism; and the history of colonial and modern Vietnam at large. By destabilizing Chinese-ness through an examination of diasporic identities under French rule and their multiple manifestations, my dissertation gives southern Vietnam and its Chinese communities their rightful places in the broader history of global empires, Chinese migration, and Greater China.
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