Estrategias museográficas actuales relacionadas con la museología crítica

Este artículo evita la mera disquisición teórica sobre museología crítica, sugiriendo en lugar de ello algunas pistas para calibrar su influencia en la praxis museal. Ante todo, se propone como emblemático de la museografía crítica el uso de interrogaciones en lugar de discursos asertivos; en segundo lugar, la sustitución de la impersonal autoridad institucional por prácticas participativas e interpretaciones compartidas, para dar idea de una variedad de opiniones, incluyendo las de gentes ajenas al museo; finalmente, es un rasgo distintivo el énfasis en la naturaleza subjetiva de los montajes museísticos, mostrando sus cambios a través de la historia, y señalando la autoría personal de las presentaciones y textos en el museo.

Diálogo con Europa, diálogo con el pasado. Antepasados y tradición entre la nobleza colonial nahua

En este trabajo presentamos un acercamiento a los modos de referirse al pasado en los testimonios dejados por los miembros de la nobleza colonial nahua. La lectura de las fuentes nos permite distinguir dos perspectivas –intelectual y pragmática– asociadas respectivamente con el proyecto de unir las tradiciones históricas indígena y europea y con la búsqueda de argumentos en la lucha por tierras y privilegios. El enfoque del artículo son los conceptos nahuas de «tradición» y «antepasados» (huehuetqueh), manifiestos en ambas perspectivas. Al analizar el vocabulario, retórica e iconografía intentamos entender el significado de estos conceptos dentro de la cultura nahua prehispánica y su modificación bajo las circunstancias coloniales, tanto como su papel en la continuación de la identidad nahua.

The Persistence of Torture: Explaining Coercive Interrogation in America’s Small Wars

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2016-08

CAST OFF: MARITIME LABOR IN AMERICA FROM 1935 TO 1955

Many studies have observed the precipitous decline in American shipping following the Second World War. Most focus on changes in maritime policy and the upsurge of flags of convenience. Yet this interpretation relegates mariners to a footnote. This thesis argues that America abandoned its seamen years before it abandoned its merchant marine, and that the labor story is an integral and largely overlooked dimension of the industry’s broader decline. It explores how the status and makeup of American seamen underwent monumental shifts from 1935 to 1955. Increased nationalization, improved conditions, and a patriotic cause boosted the standing of the industry, but federal and union intervention also changed the composition of the workforce and even eroded seamen’s status. These greater controls on mariners negatively affected the industry and this work contends that labor played a role in the transformation, and even decline, of the overall American Merchant Marine.

Symbiotic Cities: Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Mass Culture, 1910-1960

This dissertation examines how Buenos Aires emerged as a creative capital of mass culture and cultural industries in South America during a period when Argentine theater and cinema expanded rapidly, winning over a regional marketplace swelled by transatlantic immigration, urbanization and industrialization. I argue that mass culture across the River Plate developed from a singular dynamic of exchange and competition between Buenos Aires and neighboring Montevideo. The study focuses on the Argentine, Uruguayan, and international performers, playwrights, producers, cultural impresarios, critics, and consumers who collectively built regional cultural industries. The cultural industries in this region blossomed in the interwar period as the advent of new technologies like sound film created profitable opportunities for mass cultural production and new careers for countless theater professionals. Buenos Aires also became a global cultural capital in the wider Hispanic Atlantic world, as its commercial culture served a region composed largely of immigrants and their descendants. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Montevideo maintained a subordinate but symbiotic relationship with Buenos Aires. The two cities shared interlinked cultural marketplaces that attracted performers and directors from the Atlantic world to work in theatre and film productions, especially in times of political upheaval such as the Spanish Civil War and the Perón era in Argentina. As a result of this transnational process, Argentine mass culture became widely consumed throughout South America, competing successfully with Hollywood, European, and other Latin American cinemas and helping transform Buenos Aires into a cosmopolitan metropolis. By examining the relationship between regional and national frames of cultural production, my dissertation contributes to the fields of Latin American studies and urban history while seeking to de-center the United States and Europe from the central framing of transnational history.

"Let Us Sing as We Go": The Role of Music in the United States Suffrage Movement

Music played a prominent role in the United States women’s suffrage movement (1848–1920). Suffragists left behind hundreds of compositions supporting their cause and historical accounts indicate that musical performances were common at suffrage events. With only a few exceptions, scholars have disregarded the music used in this movement, and have underemphasized its significance. This study examines the use of music in the suffrage movement from three perspectives: music with lyrics, titles, and images that espouse women’s enfranchisement; music performed at national suffrage conventions held by the National American Woman Suffrage Association; and music accompanying suffrage parades. Though the music used varies in each case, it is clear that music played an important role in unifying suffragists and underscoring the ideals and goals of the movement.

Contested Play and Clean Water: McMillan Park, Race, and the Built Environment in Washington, D.C., 1900-1941

This study focuses on the intersection of the politics and culture of open public space with race relations in the United States from 1900 to 1941. The history of McMillan Park in Washington, D.C. serves as a lens to examine these themes. Ultimately, the park’s history, as documented in newspapers, interviews, reports, and photographs, reveals how white residents attempted to protect their dominance in a racial hierarchy through the control of both the physical and cultural elements of public recreation space. White use of discrimination through seemingly neutral desires to protect health, safety, and property values, establishes a congruence with their defense of residential property. Without similar access to legal methods, African Americans acted through direct action in gaps of governmental control. Their use of this space demonstrates how African-American residents of Washington and the United States contested their race, recreation, and spatial privileges in the pre-World War II era.

Blessed are the Peacemakers: Transnational Alliance, Protective Accompaniment and the Presbyterian Church of Colombia

The purpose of this thesis was to explore how Christian networks enable strategies of transnational alliance, whereby groups in different nations strive to strengthen one another’s leverage and credibility in order to resolve conflicts and elaborate new possibilities. This research does so by analyzing the case of the Presbyterian Church of Colombia (IPC). The project examines the historical development of the IPC from the initial missionary period of the 1850s until the present. Specifically, the purpose of the study was to consider how the historical struggle to articulate autonomy and equality vis-à-vis the U.S. Presbyterians (PCUSA) and paternalist models of ecclesial relations has affected recent political strategies pursued by the IPC. Despite the paternalism of the early missionary model, changing conceptions of social transformation during the 60s contributed to a shift in relations. Over time the IPC and PCUSA negotiated relationships in which groups both acknowledge a problematic history and insist upon an ethnic of partnership and respect. Today, PCUSA groups, in concert with the IPC, collaborate on a range of transnational political strategies aimed at strengthening the IPC’s leverage in local struggles for justice and peace. A review of this case suggests that long-established Christian networks may have an advantage over other civil society groups such as NGOs in facilitating strategies of transnational alliance. Although civil society organizations often have better access to important resources needed for international advocacy initiatives, Christian networks, such as the one established between the IPC and U.S. Presbyterian communities, rely on a history of negotiating power-disparity in order to elaborate relationships based on listening and partnership. Such findings prove important not only to how we conceptualize transnational alliance but also to the ways that we think about the history and future of Christian networks.

The modern state and the re-creation of the indigenous other: The case of the authentic Sami in Sweden and the white man's Indian in the United States of America

The present study comparatively examined the socio-political and economic transformation of the indigenous Sámi in Sweden and the Indian American in the United States of America occurring first as a consequence of colonization and later as a product of interaction with the modern territorial and industrial state, from approximately 1500 to 1900. ^ The first colonial encounters of the Europeans with these autochthonous populations ultimately created an imagery of the exotic Other and of the noble savage. Despite these disparaging representations, the cross-cultural settings in which these interactions took place also produced the hybrid communities and syncretic life that allowed levels of cultural accommodation, autonomous space, and indigenous agency to emerge. By the nineteenth century, however, the modern territorial and industrial state rearranges the dynamics and reaches of power across a redefined territorial sovereign space, consequently, remapping belongingness and identity. In this context, the status of indigenous peoples, as in the case of Sámi and of Indian Americans, began to change at par with industrialization and with modernity. At this point in time, indigenous populations became a hindrance to be dealt with the legal re-codification of Indigenousness into a vacuumed limbo of disenfranchisement. It is, thus, the modern territorial and industrial state that re-creates the exotic into an indigenous Other. ^ The present research showed how the initial interaction between indigenous and Europeans changed with the emergence of the modern state, demonstrating that the nineteenth century, with its fundamental impulses of industrialism and modernity, not only excluded and marginalized indigenous populations because they were considered unfit to join modern society, it also re-conceptualized indigenous identity into a constructed authenticity.^

Atlantic Threads: Singer in Spain and Mexico, 1860-1940

This dissertation examines the role of Singer in the modernization of sewing practices in Spain and Mexico from 1860 to 1940. Singer marketing was founded on gendered views of women’s work and gendered perceptions of the home. These connected with sewing practices in Spain and Mexico, where home sewing remained economically and culturally important throughout the 1940s. "Atlantic Threads" is the first study of the US-owned multinational in the Hispanic World. I demonstrate that sewing practices, and especially practices related to home sewing that have been considered part of the private sphere and therefore not an important historical matter, contributed to the building of one the first global corporation. I examine Singer corporate records and business strategies that have not been considered by other scholars such as the creation of the Embroidery Department in the late nineteen-century. Likewise, this dissertation challenges traditional narratives that have assumed that Spain and Mexico were peripheral to modernity. I look at Singer corporate records in Spain and Mexico and at regional government and cultural sources to demonstrate how Singer integrated Spain and Mexico within its business organization. Singer's marketing was focused on the consumer, which contributed to make the company part of local sewing businesses and cultures.

Lucumí (Yoruba) Culture in Cuba: A Reevaluation (1830S -1940s)

The status, roles, and interactions of three dominant African ethnic groups and their descendants in Cuba significantly influenced the island’s cubanidad (national identity): the Lucumís (Yoruba), the Congos (Bantú speakers from Central West Africa), and the Carabalís (from the region of Calabar). These three groups, enslaved on the island, coexisted, each group confronting obstacles that threatened their way of life and cultural identities. Through covert resistance, cultural appropriation, and accommodation, all three, but especially the Lucumís, laid deep roots in the nineteenth century that came to fruition in the twentieth. During the early 1900s, Cuba confronted numerous pressures, internal and external. Under the pretense of a quest for national identity and modernity, Afro-Cubans and African cultures and religion came under political, social, and intellectual attack. Race was an undeniable element in these conflicts. While all three groups were oppressed equally, only the Lucumís fought back, contesting accusations of backwardness, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and brujería (witchcraft), exaggerated by the sensationalistic media, often with the police’s and legal system’s complicity. Unlike the covert character of earlier epochs’ responses to oppression, in the twentieth century Lucumí resistance was overt and outspoken, publically refuting the accusations levied against African religions. Although these struggles had unintended consequences for the Lucumís, they gave birth to cubanidad’s African component. With the help of Fernando Ortiz, the Lucumí were situated at the pinnacle of a hierarchical pyramid, stratifying African religious complexes based on civilizational advancement, but at a costly price. Social ascent denigrated Lucumí religion to the status of folklore, depriving it of its status as a bona fide religious complex. To the present, Lucumí religious descendants, in Cuba and, after 1959, in many other areas of the world, are still contesting this contradiction in terms: an elevated downgrade.

Iowa’s Title V Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Annual Report, 2012

Title V of the Social Security Act is the longest-standing public health legislation in American history. Enacted in 1935, Title V is a federal-state partnership that promotes and improves maternal and child health (MCH). According to each state’s unique needs, Title V supports a spectrum of services, from infrastructure building services like quality assurance and policy development, to gap-filling direct health care services. Title V resources are directed towards MCH priority populations: pregnant women, mothers, infants, women of reproductive years, children and adolescents and children and youth with special health care needs.

The Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association

Annually, the association publishes a journal, The Proceedings, which consists of papers presented at the annual meeting. The Exchange of Prisoners in the West Indies in Queen Anne’s War by Ruth Bourne – Winthrop College College Textbook Treatments of American History by Jess C. Burt, Jr. – Presbyterian College The Report of the French Minster of War to the National Legislative Assembly, January 11, 1792 by Charles N. Sisson – Coker College

The Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association

Annually, the association publishes a journal, The Proceedings, which consists of papers presented at the annual meeting. Southern Legend: Climate or Climate of Opinion by William A. Foran John Barnwell and British Western Policy by Mrs. George Fisher Teaching American History with a South Carolina Accent by Albert N. Sanders

La seguridad energética de Estados Unidos a inicios del siglo XXI: ¿securitización o politización del acceso a recursos energéticos?

Tradicionalmente, la consolidación de la seguridad energética en Estados Unidos se ha mostrado como un asunto de seguridad nacional. En especial, la escasez de recursos energéticos ha sido vista como un problema existencial que requiere de medidas de emergencia en el marco de un proceso de securitización. Sin embargo, esta investigación surgiere que el tema ha sido mayoritariamente politizado a inicios del siglo XXI. Quizá este proceso de securitización tan solo fue implícitamente planteado con ocasión de la invasión a Irak en 2003, en la medida en que dicha intervención pudo haberse inspirado por la necesidad de derrocar a un régimen que había impedido el acceso estadounidense a recursos petroleros iraquíes. En este orden de ideas, la investigación analiza las políticas de seguridad energética de los gobiernos de George W. Bush y Barack H. Obama con el propósito de entender el grado en el que estas estuvieron vinculadas a sus respectivas agendas de seguridad nacional.