Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper analyzes newspaper coverage of immigration reform in mainstream English-language newspapers prior to, and following passage of immigration reform legislation by the US House of Representatives in December, 2005. The purpose of this project is twofold: 1) To illuminate the media’s participation in the social construction of the policy “problem” and acceptable “solutions” to it; 2) To illuminate how the social construction of the policy problem and solution contributes to the social construction of a particular group of people in America, namely Latino immigrants. The analysis presented here is based upon a qualitative analysis of a large random sample of newspaper articles published in the northeast and southwest United States during August 2005, April 2006, and October 2006. The analysis reveals both consistency and significant changes in the news coverage of immigration reform between April 2005 and October 2006. I discuss two key findings at length. First, changes in coverage between August 2005 and October 2006 portray an expansion in the terms of the debate about immigration reform that has proven significant in the course of the policy’s development. Second, while many articles fail to explain the need for immigration reform, the coverage generally portrays the problem as “illegal immigrants” from south of the US-Mexican border. This portrayal contributes to the social construction of Latinos as the Other. This project therefore enhances our understanding of the social construction of immigration policy and its subjects, and the print media’s contribution to this process.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: This paper examines the motif of mobility within William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) by tracing the infrastructure of roads and railroads within the novel. Practically, in the time of Jim Crow, Americans had a reason to be concerned with transportation. By the mid-nineteenth century, the country stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific—some 3000 miles east to west. Railroads rushed to connect the burgeoning territory and, by 1900, the United States map had been totally redrawn: towns sprung up along the tracks, and cities were created at termini and major crossing points. The train gave a certain sense of liberation to citizens who could go further and faster than they had before. Similarly, between 1910 and 1920, Americans celebrated the newfound freedom given by cars: the upper-middle class increasingly took to the road to find adventure and to feel unencumbered by the dictates of the train. However, despite the appealing myth of travel infrastructure as providing physical and social mobility, roads and train tracks are always paradoxically also involved fixity—while roads connect two points (movement), they also fix those two points in space (stasis).
Looking at the way in which the allure of mobility is critical to American identity, I will trace the promise that Lena Grove offers by proceeding outside Light in August. With her socially alternative lifestyle (she is a single unmarried mother traveling with a bachelor) and her associations to blackness (e.g. she gives birth in a slave cabin), Lena finds in the road a liminal space to challenge the ideological constructions of the white patriarchal family and the racial distinctions that underpin it. In fact, Lena’s final achievement is walking right out of the novel, leaving a white furniture salesman to muse over her unusual behavior in his own marriage bed. To contrast this note of hope, Joe Christmas is bound by roads in their manifestation of stasis. No matter where Christmas goes, he always seems to be circumscribed by racial ideology. With a consciousness formed by the possibility of being black, Christmas finds no true mobility in his phenotypic whiteness. Thus, his path is, literally, between the town and the slave cabin, until he waits in the street for arrest as a black rapist.
Gail Hightower offers a useful mediating position between these two extremes. With a train ride, he travels to Jefferson, Mississippi brought by an aggrandizement of his Confederate Grandfather’s galloping down the road. This mythologizing of mobility undoes Hightower as he is increasingly linked with hints of homosexuality and interracial sex. Eventually, defeated and decaying, Hightower sits looking out his window at the road. Having recognized the failures of the myth of mobility, Hightower and Faulkner cannot fully envision a new paradigm for race relations or for sexuality—Lena has no interiority while in the novel and then must walk out of it. However, with Hightower and especially with Lena, Light in August retains hope in the possibility for American social change through roads, trains, and travel.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: When Western military forces intervene abroad they must do so having in mind the long-term strategic consequences of seemingly minor tactical errors. The British Army in the early stages of its commitment on to the streets of Northern Ireland in 1969 made such errors; it is still living with the fallout from these errors today.

Publication Type: Individual Presentation
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" and "The Piano Lesson" are quintessential dramatic representations of early African-American history and culture. We see former African slaves migrate northwards from the American south and the challenges they face as they settle down. In both plays the Christian origin of the African-American culture is revealed as we see the former African slaves with their bible and we witness the presence of a Christian church minister who attempts to cast out a menacing ghost. I propose to discuss the presence of the African origins of spirituality that Wilson deftly crafts into both plays unobtrusively. It is this hidden presence of the divine Ogun and the ancestral spirits that controls the plays and ties the African-American experience with its African origins.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The proposed paper contributes to the Atlanticization of American history by offering a new look at the First of August celebrations of African American and abolitionist communities during the antebellum period. Rooted in the older traditions of African American festivals and the European American tradition of the Fourth of July, First of August celebrations commemorated Great Britain’s abolition of West Indian slavery on August 1, 1834. Limited by their narrow focus upon the nation-state, historians of the antebellum United States have neglected the powerful influence Britain’s abolition of slavery had upon American history. Celebrations of the First of August are a critical part of this transatlantic history.
Beginning rather tepidly with gradual emancipation in the British West Indies in 1834, First of August celebrations increased in size, number, and intensity after the complete abolition of West Indian slavery in 1838. Historians beginning with Benjamin Quarles have established the importance of the First of August within African American and abolitionist history, but this paper argues that First of August celebrations should also be seen on the larger canvas of the coming of the Civil War. The development of the sectional crisis should be understood within a transatlantic frame, and the First of August celebrations were the civic rituals of American abolitionism, they were central to the movement’s main project --- the molding of an antislavery North.
First of August celebrations were celebrated throughout the North and West wherever abolitionists reached a critical mass. Fortuitously coming less than a month after July 4, August 1 provided abolitionists with the opportunity to publicly challenge the generally accepted understanding of an American “freedom” compatible with slavery and racism. While the forms of these celebrations were quite similar, the content of the First of August worked to undermine the unthinking celebration of “American Freedom” that took place every Fourth of July. First of August celebrations featured public processions, banners, picnics, a series of orators, and in the evening among the organizers, a round of toasts that always began with “the day we celebrate,” just like on the Fourth of July. But instead of glorifying Revolution era triumphs over Britain, abolitionist orators excoriated American slavery and honored British abolition; instead of toasting Washington and Jefferson, these activists raised their glasses to George Thompson and Nat Turner. Wherever the First of August was celebrated, the political community of abolitionists challenged the complacency of the broader acceptance of the status quo. Individuals such as the white reformer Charles Spear turned their back on the Fourth of July, embracing the First of August and abolitionism. And in his famous Fifth of July oration in 1852, the Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass brought the radicalism cultivated on the First of August into his withering analysis of the Fourth of July. On the eve of war a critical mass in the North was antislavery, if not abolitionist. The First of August had played an important role in this transformation.