Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper assesses the nature of colonial states systems in the French empire of the inter-war period period. It focuses on the role of security services - civil and military intelligence agencies - in upholding colonial control and monitoring indigenous opinion and oppositional activity in France's Muslim territories in North Africa. The key argument is that the role of such state surveillance was the critical element in state security in the absence of sufficient coercive power to maintain genuinely 'police states'. Instead, the French colonial system in North Africa was closer to the model of what I term an 'intelligence state': coercive certainly, but based on pre-emption more than mass repression.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In 1923, Delilah Beasley became a regular columnist for the Oakland Tribune and the first African American woman to write for a mainstream (White) daily. “Activities Among Negroes” showcased the inner workings of the East Bay region’s black middle class, and as result promoted interracial understanding between Blacks and Whites, as Beasley transferred the Black press’ journalistic style of advocacy to a mainstream paper. Beasley’s work often drew the attention of prominent whites to African American issues in the San Francisco Bay area and, in some cases, in the nation. This paper examines the larger community’s response to her work and the bridges it helped create between Oakland’s segregated worlds. This examination adds to present day discussions about the role of diversity in mainstream media and its effects in developing understanding between ethnic and racial communities and people of different cultural backgrounds.

Publication Type: Individual Paper
Abstract: American racial segregation was created and maintained through thousands of informal, local policies in the northern United States in the eighteenth century. Only after the Plessy decision did Jim Crow become a nationally, legally recognized standard for race relations. The struggle to overturn this systematic offense against human dignity has rightly focused on the problems in the American South. However, the consequence has been the omission of examinations about segregation in its birthplace – the North. Even the few studies that reveal the historic influence on segregation on Northern culture focus on larger cities. Some of the clearest applications of racial separation happened in the rural areas of the North. The shore communities of New Jersey provide excellent examples of northern segregation. The black laborers had to be kept away from the white population when they were not working. At beaches and in hotels, African Americans were stringently denied equality. As they did in the cities and in the rural South, the black population organized groups to challenge the legal barriers that denied their humanity. However, in these communities, the same people served as leaders of the NAACP, the UNIA, and the Urban League. Black leaders in the resort towns used the name recognition of larger civil rights groups to recruit new members, to attract famous speakers, and to gain leverage with local white politicians. These strategies (and the subsequent rhetorical explanations) add a new dimension to the discussion of race activism in the first half of the twentieth century.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: UNHCR is seen as an effective and authoritative international organization (IO) due to its ability to adapt to new problems and teach new normative understandings to states. Its success, however, is surprising for two reasons. The first of these is that when UNHCR was created in 1950, it was initially granted a strictly limited mandate and scant resources. The second is that prior to its creation, the institutional record had been decidedly mixed, most notably in the failure of IOs both inside and outside of the League of Nations to protect refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. In the post-Second World War period, while Western states recognized the need for a formal IO to protect refugees, they disagreed on the form that it should take. Why did UNHCR succeed when other IOs did not? This paper will suggest that the interwar IOs, while they introduced a number of crucial norms, were unable to get widespread state adoption due to discordance with domestic norms which reflected a widespread anti-immigration bias. After the Second World War, states more readily accepted humanitarian principles and the discordance slowly disappeared. Even so, an effective IO did not emerge until UNHCR succeeded in reframing refugee protection as a Cold War issue and by expanding it away from a Eurocentric basis to a global one. Thus this paper will argue that an IO's success as a norm entrepreneur can vary significantly. In order to be effective at reframing state identities, an IO's efforts must build on a preexisting concordance with domestic norms and culture.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Ong (1982) characterized the electronic age as moving through a secondary orality, an interactive motion in which radio, for instance, depends on writing and print for its existence. Yet few media scholars have examined secondary oral culture’s “literate orality.” This paper argues against Ong’s dependence of radio on print in favor of an interdependence between radio as sound and poetry as print. I will draw on radio poetry to illustrate how print can depend on radio and vice-versa. Specifically, I will examine how radiophonic poetry (verses equally designed for air or print) trumps radiogenic poetry (verses exclusively designed for an aural process, uniquely shaped by radio’s properties) (Coeuroy, 1930) with several non media-specific properties of acoustic writing. What I call acoustic writing as process, not product, requires an orality of verse for radio not far removed from the demands of writing sonic poetry for publication. The hybrid medium of radio poetry deserves further development to understand what occurs during the writing of a poem designed for print and air. In the spirit of crossing hybridities, radiophonic poetry from the 1920’s in Mexico and the United States will be examined as evidence akin to a musical score or film script.