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During the American Progressive Era, discourses of progress were co-constructed with racialized ideas about habitation. Communal, matriarchal, semi-nomadic, and self-built dwellings and their racialized inhabitants were positioned as antagonists to a single-family, heteropatriarchal, Anglo-American ideal. As associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Craftsman, Spanish Colonial and Mission Revival style bungalows that defined Los Angeles’ suburbs presented an illusion of self-made, simple living in connection with nature and frontier ideologies. Though purportedly democratic, the development of the suburbs involved the conversion of Indigenous lands into private property. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples, Black migrants and ethnic Mexicans were funneled into worker housing while employed in the construction and maintenance of a domestic sphere that secured social and financial capital for beneficiaries of Whiteness. The dissertation focuses on three sites where this occurred that have since been erased in the physical landscape, as much as in the public imaginary: 1) The Pacific Electric Railway Company’s labor camps, home to Mexican workers who built and maintained Henry Huntington’s exclusive Pasadena suburbs and resorts; 2) The homes built and maintained by students of the Sherman Institute, an Indian Boarding School in Riverside, California for the vocational training of Indigenous youth; 3) The bungalows of the industrial suburbs marketed to Black and unskilled employees of the Los Angeles Investment Company, a home-building enterprise that went on to build racially restricted, residential subdivisions in southwestern Los Angeles. In each case, laborers were racially targeted and housed in overcrowded, unsanitary, and flimsily built structures that materially foretold their demise and future redevelopment. This research challenges conceptions of the “slums” familiarized by neighborhood surveys, by exposing how their production was instrumental to the construction and maintenance of the suburbs. The chapters of this dissertation devote themselves to the designed details of these hidden histories, as emerging from three distinct labor camp, domestic service, and industrial suburbs. Though historically unique in their racial, material, geographic, and social composition, when considered together, the three sites demonstrate a commitment to settling labor and race through the uneven development of the domestic sphere.

This dissertation analyzes artworks by contemporary artists Otobong Nkanga, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Jade Montserrat, and jackie sumell that use the materiality of the earth—rocks, soil, clay, and vegetation—to explore the intertwining of destruction of ecosystems and violence against humans. I situate these works within the racial Capitalocene and an emerging discourse of decolonial geopoetics. To do so, I consider them in contrast to European landscape traditions of representation that went hand-in hand with capitalist and colonialist perceptions of land as an alienable resource and reinforced racial hierarchies. Chapters cover Nkanga’s investigations of the ruins of colonial mining practices in Tsumeb, Namibia; Bopape’s remembering of colonial violence and South African Pan-Africanism through soil installations; Montserrat’s material explorations of the politics of belonging and imperial amnesia in England; and sumell’s use of gardening as a tool towards prison abolition in the United States. I argue that the artworks studied act at the interface between human and environment, addressing the histories and presents of colonialism, extractivism, and incarceration, and drawing attention to the fundamental interconnectedness of humans and the complex network of liveliness that is land. Further, I read the care for and acknowledgement of interdependence with other beings—both human and not—that these artists enact as a strategy for envisioning livable futures beyond the structures of the racial Capitalocene.

This dissertation examines the Taiwanese Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) paradigm and a central facet of the current government project to ensure the long-term survival of traditional performing arts: the Important Traditional Performing Art Transmission Plan (Transmission Plan). It aims to answer the following questions: (1) How does Taiwan, despite its international isolation and lack of official cross-border networks, construct a heritage governance system to sustain traditional preforming arts? (2) How do different actors participate in and negotiate with each other in the Taiwanese ICH paradigm? (3) How do traditional performance groups from different ethno-linguistic communities, transmitting a wide variety of professional and amateur genres, mediate and negotiate issues of tradition, authenticity, belief, creativity, value, and sustainability in their transmission practices? (4) How do traditional performance artists/groups respond to the nation’s strategies of employing heritage as a resource for nation-building, cultural diplomacy and exchange? (5) How can the rather unusual case-study of Taiwan help us test assumptions developed from the experiences of nations linked into the dominant UNESCO-driven paradigm of heritage conservation, and assist us in refining contemporary thought and practice in the field of cultural sustainability? By illustrating the bureaucratization of traditional performing arts from case studies of the Indigenous groups, Han Chinese amateur music clubs, and Han Chinese professional theatrical troupes, this dissertation proposes five premises on which Taiwan’s current ICH policy and practice are based, and that together differentiate it from analogous policy and practice in other nations. First, it involves scholars to an unusual extent. Second, the self-conscious pursuit of “authenticity” is less emphasized than in many other countries. Third, Taiwan’s items of ICH are often a hybrid mixture of forms representing multicultural interactions, rather than some kind of notional “purity.” Fourth, while Taiwan’s ICH framework is based on that of UNESCO, it is bureaucratically highly Taiwanized. Fifth, Taiwan’s ICH is an essential soft power resource for a nation that exists in a uniquely challenging international context. Finally, this dissertation aims to reveal the singularity of the Taiwanese ICH paradigm and what it can contribute to global ICH discourses.

This dissertation traces the emergence and development of the environmental-managerial project by which federal bureaucracy in the United States sought to administer the visual environment after about 1970. Although this effort relied on interdisciplinary practices and techniques, architects became principal actors in these workings of the administrative state: architects, initially, offered the projective visualization procedures through which state officials sought to account for environmental ‘degradation,’ but eventually, and perhaps more crucially, these practitioners laid out theoretical frameworks for the concept of the aesthetic which afforded a legally specified lens for assessing the value of particular environments. On one hand, the governmental strategies that transformed nuclear reactors, highways, strip mines, and other forms of environmental disturbance into phenomena that existed primarily on an optical register clearly belonged to a broader governmental strategy of pacification. On the other hand, turning to vocabularies and concepts traditionally rooted in the ineffable, subjective traditions of aesthetics and taste undermined the drive toward data management and quantified systems of accountability that otherwise characterized the operations of the administrative state. That the effort to reconcile these contradictions required recourse to a distinct array of art-historical, psychological, economic, and statistical procedures, often at odds with one another, reveals conceptual, procedural, and practical conflicts at the base of the managerial approach to the environment in the U.S., as well as the lasting infiltration of these systems into the self-redefinition of architecture as primarily a profession of image managers. Through examination of a wide range of archival sources, this dissertation attends closely to the mechanics of this historical development—the incremental processes of visualizing, psychologizing, quantifying, and projecting that constituted the chain of techniques by which the aesthetic came to be submitted to regimes of governance in the U.S., as well as their effects, intended and otherwise— which together operated to fabricate consensus around the increasingly unmanageable problem of the environment. It is this process of fabrication, the process by which the management of beauty came to constitute a powerful technique useful to “democracy,” that this dissertation traces.

This is a history of Muslim legal institutions dedicated to preserving and investing the property of orphans in Egypt and Syria in the Islamic Middle Period. These institutions coalesced into centralized treasuries under the control of the judiciary in Cairo and Damascus and accumulated enough resources to fund large-scale military campaigns. In Cairo, this institution was known as the mūda‘ al-ḥukm; in Damascus, it was called the dīwān al-aytām or makhzan al-aytām. Orphans’ property rights were the subject of legislation since the Ancient Period in the Near East and a significant topic in both the Qur’an and early Arabic poetry. Although the emergence of Islamic legal texts played a central role in the creation of legal practices for preserving and investing orphans’ property studied in this dissertation, an analysis of Arabic chronicles and prosopography indicates that the creation and perpetuation of the judicial treasuries in Cairo and Damascus was a product of the efforts of both political rulers and Muslim jurists and judges. The eventual decline in the fortunes of these institutions in the early 15th century A.D. was due to the combination of the economic woes of the Mamluk Sultanate and the adoption of alternative, diffuse methods of preserving and investing orphans’ property. These alternative methods relied less on the centralized political power of the state but, rather, on networks of trust and authoritative fixed-texts of law. The employment of decentralized legal practices was facilitated by the increasing authority of particular legal texts favored by the legal school (madhhab). A study of Shāfi‘ī legal commentaries on some of the most important texts of positive law (furū‘) shows that Muslim jurists in the Mamluk Period nevertheless continued to authorize divergent legal opinions within chapters on ḥajr, which is the chapter that that most explicitly discusses orphans and their property. Thus, gradual change and innovation was countenanced within the framework of a relatively stable set of widely-recognized rules regarding the preservation and investment of orphans’ property.

This dissertation situates the emergence of practices of building and making in design classrooms in the late nineteenth century expansion of the public college as an instrument of settler colonialism. In doing so, it connects both industrial design pedagogy and the new design typologies of the campus to histories of enslaved Black labor and levied Indigenous lands that have long enabled the American university system. At land grant universities, industrial institutes, and Indian boarding schools, industrialization and colonialism were concomitant; prescriptive racial identity categories were manufactured alongside standardized single-family cottages, faux Navajo rugs, and technical drawing and blueprint processes. The emphasis on self-sufficiency and manual labor by students, though differentiated throughout, aligned with narratives of respectability, free labor, and individual land tenure as political, social, and economic ideal integral to the nation in the destabilized years following the U.S. Civil War. Racialized perceptions of labor power were visually indexed through the commodity value of the designed object itself, an important difference from European theories of universal design reform that rendered the public college as an ongoing site of extraction and dispossession.Few sites are more associated with the spatialization of liberal values than the American campus, yet it is often interpreted benignly as an adhoc vernacular landscape. But the typology of the campus, as it emerged in the 1860s, was a purposefully didactic space, one designers approached using theories of environmental determinism to instill in its users both vocational skills and racial habitus. Moreover, schools for Black and Native students inflected the larger mission of the Land Grant system: just as physical university plants for the states were funded through real estate speculation on far-off dispossessed territories, the proximate built environment of the campus was often a site where federal policies were negotiated and socially tested. The dissertation tracks case study schools from their campus origins in the labor and administration practices of enslavement, the Indian removal and allotment campaigns, and the military administration of the Civil War. I underscore knowledge produced by �these curricula–from the integration of Indigenous cultural practices within homebuilding programs intended for assimilation to the development of new techniques of drawing, applied ornament, and representations of labor that responded to the implicit racial politics of architectural style and new identity-based markets for Black artisanal labor and Indian craft objects. The dissertation concludes by tracing the afterlives of this model as exported to new geographies in Liberia and the Philippines, arguing that both industrial pedagogy and the settler colonial triad were integral to the expansion of American empire. The material and visual artifacts of these schools, as well as the practices of making and knowing intimate to them, reveal the contradictions underpinning this supposed model for an equitable liberal society.

This dissertation examines the photography-centered practice of American artist Sarah Charlesworth (1947–2013). Charlesworth, like many of her mostly female peers, began appropriating mass media images in the 1970s to address issues of representation, particularly the patriarchal and political power of images in the public realm. She has become overwhelmingly associated with the postmodern “pictures” artists, often referred to as the so-called “Pictures Generation,” a term originating from art historian Douglas Crimp’s landmark 1977 exhibition Pictures at Artists Space, New York, and curator Douglas Eklund’s 2009 exhibition The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, Charlesworth’s own appropriations engaged not only in critique, but also in connection and exchange. Her exacting work is not divorced from modernism, paying specific attention to photography’s lineages and legacies—qualities often overshadowed by Charlesworth’s historicization within a Pictures context.Mine is a photo-historical account, focusing on form and materiality, and engaging with photographic, literary, and feminist theory. Important here are Charlesworth’s close connections with Roland Barthes (1915–80), especially with Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1980/81), and the two’s similar views on photography, absence, and loss. Also important are literary scholar Jane Gallop’s feminist theories of jouissance, notably her writings on Barthes’s use of the term and its relationship to female agency and creativity. Like Barthes, Charlesworth found pleasure in process and particulars, seeing photography as both problematic and a thing of beauty and relation. This dissertation finds three distinct chronological periods in Charlesworth’s work. Chapter One considers the artist’s early years (1972–80), when she employed found images from newspapers, press photos, and magazines, using subtractive strategies such as excision, omission, masking, and displacement. Chapter Two (1981–89) addresses Charlesworth’s subsequent focus on additive processes: layering, accumulation, amalgamation, and collage/montage. Chapter Three looks at Charlesworth’s shift to analog picture-taking in the 1990s, when she constructed three-dimensional scenes for the camera. Charlesworth’s practice expands on feminist and photographic histories, foregrounding material and process, absence and presence, critique and pleasure. Charlesworth’s “pictures” may indeed be better understood as “photographies,” a term she used to describe the medium’s multiple approaches and functions.

This dissertation examines expanded cinema as a significant site of negotiation between discourses of female identity and the identity of film in 1970s London. Focus is given to women working in and around the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC), a collective of artist-filmmakers known for their Marxist politics, their application of Greenbergian modernism to the film medium, and their collective mode of production. Sewn with thread, punched with holes, and printed at a dizzying frame rate, the abstract films of Carolee Schneemann, Lis Rhodes, and Annabel Nicolson seem paradigmatic of the LFMC’s commitment to formal experimentation. Yet unlike their peers, these women eschewed a universal subject without gender, instead engaging with contemporary critiques of patriarchal ideology’s comprehensive infiltration of culture. Chapter One considers expanded cinema’s relationship to feminist critiques of language through the work of Lis Rhodes. Here, I consider her live projector performances, which asserted a new model of language that developed in relation to Fluxus notation. Chapter Two argues that Annabel Nicolson generated a model of expanded cinema that rehabilitated forms of subjectivity denigrated by the most vocal interlocutors of the LFMC. Notions of intuition and gesture were employed as a means to interrogate the cinematic apparatus and the qualities of film she perceived as linear and phallocentric. Chapter Three turns to Carolee Schneemann’s assessment of the relationship between the body and the cinematic apparatus. Analyzing the expanded cinema work she conceived in London, this chapter hypothesizes that the union between body and film that Schneemann trialed can be traced back to ideas about the integrative power of female sexuality rooted in the revisionist psychoanalysis of Wilhelm Reich. This dissertation thus demonstrates the diverse commitments of avant-garde film informed by feminism, countering the conception of feminist art as a field structured by a constructionist-essentialist binary. It provides a new account of expanded cinema at a historical moment when the issue of identity began to push up against the aesthetic dogmas of avant-garde film.

The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) currently oversees the nation’s largest and only fully-subsidized healthcare system—a system that also happens to be one of the most successful by nearly any measure. And yet, in some ways, this system is fundamentally broken, exacerbating ongoing health crisis in the veteran community like suicide and persistent health and healthcare disparities. This dissertation examines the history of this system and how those who administer it utilize concepts of disability to determine care access, how that framing of disability has changed over time, and the potential ramifications of using disability as a precursor to care. This dissertation examines the history of the veterans’ healthcare system, how it came to rest on medical authority to make disability—and thus access—determinations to create a federally-subsidized, initially hospital-based, healthcare system. It examines the role of public, political, and patient pressures in shaping that system and their implications for access. And it demonstrates how these historical forces continue to shape and affect modern issues like health and healthcare disparities and the persistent problem of veteran suicides.While the VHA, like most modern medical organizations, is a forward-looking enterprise, this dissertation demonstrates that there is significant value in a historical perspective in examining and shaping health policy decisions in the future.

This dissertation is a historical study of global interactions between Islamic law and early media industry, exploring the broader social and political context of fatwas written about the phonograph throughout the Middle East and the Indian Ocean region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each chapter examines fatwas on the phonograph that were issued in what are now the modern states of Egypt, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. In doing so, the dissertation broadly explores how early European and American phonograph firms targeted Muslim consumers worldwide by producing recordings of Quran recitations, Islamic hymnals, and sung poetry, while Muslim jurists debated the faults and merits of this novel form of capitalist production and consumption in an equally global arena of Islamic jurisprudence. Additionally, the dissertation highlights how fatwas on the phonograph were written at a time when the practice of Islamic law was changing globally, becoming increasingly intertwined with the enlightenment philosophies and ideologies underpinning the legal mechanisms and practices of modern civil law in British and Dutch colonial contexts as well as in Ottoman imperial contexts. Such entanglements saw Islamic law become increasingly employed as a tool of social control in attempts to regulate public life and patterns of behavior derived from custom and new forms of consumption, especially social gatherings revolving around musical entertainment and spectacles of religious vocal recitation. Furthermore, while early Islamic legal debate about the phonograph became embedded within existing legal and philosophical deliberation over issues of sound, vocal recitation, divine revelation, and vernacular amusement, this dissertation suggests that the global phonograph industry ultimately helped galvanize a worldwide discursive shift in Islamic jurisprudence with the adoption of “music” or al-musiqa as a substantive legal category. This process was coeval and intertwined with the modern development of the field of ethnomusicology, which itself was born within a Dutch colonial administration that derived its legal definition of “custom” and “tradition”–including “musical tradition”–from the Islamic legal definition of “custom” or ‘adat.