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This thesis explores the dynamics of class segregation as well as questions of agency and autonomy under the Portuguese Estado Novo regime through the analytical prism of adult gaming. Taking ongoing debates about the exceptional longevity of Salazar's dictatorial government as a starting point, the argument presented in this dissertation seeks to expose quotidian mechanisms of repression and moral policing not only 'from above,' but also highlights the importance of games and playful practices as powerful sites of interaction between citizens, where moral values, social status, and concerns about idleness were constantly contested. Traditionally, historiographical debates on lived experiences of dictatorial rule in Portugal and the ideological framework of the Estado Novo highlight the regime's staunch moralism. Yet, a close examination of widespread and morally tainted practices like gambling, lottery play, and billiards shows that the regime's ideals of what constituted acceptable behaviour were not uniformly applied. Instead, the government adopted a pragmatic, class-specific approach, where government responses to games were tailored to the social status of those who played them as well as the spaces they took place in. This class-based discrimination was mirrored in the legal framework that sustained Portugal's remarkably lenient licensing system for casinos (even compared to Western democracies until the late 1960s), leaving working-class gamblers with no other legal alternative than the national lottery, which was heavily gendered, tapped into pervasive religious and charitable connotations, and complemented the regime's mixed moral messaging. In the case of billiards, some local authorities sought to discredit these games 'from below,' linking them to classist discourses about bars and taverns as 'distasteful' spaces that were incompatible with Salazar's image of the model citizen. Together, these three case studies situate the Portuguese Estado Novo within broader debates about leisure and resistance against the enforcement of moral standards under dictatorial rule.

The Arab Spring is a series of revolutions in the Arab world. Most literature addresses the Arab Spring as a result of socio-economic ails, its spread through social media, the role of youth during the Arab Spring and the relationship between the Arab Spring and democratic transition. No current literature addresses non-democratic legitimacy within the context of the Arab Spring through qualitative discourse analysis. Qualitative discourse analysis of select speeches given by Arab leaderships during the Arab Spring examines how non-democratic political factors are emphasized to validate the rule of kings and republicans, including religion, welfare and security. Discourse analysis of select speeches is deepened by analyzing the role of constitutional legitimacy as a form of non-democratic legitimacy during the Arab Spring. As recent literature discusses the prospect of democratic transition post-Arab Spring, this investigation contrasts this trend to contribute original knowledge by exploring how select speeches draw on non-democratic political factors of related constitutions to also examine how non-democratic legitimacy is formalized. This project contributes original knowledge on the strength of non-democratic legitimacy during the Arab Spring and is suitable for International Relations scholars, investors interested in the Arab world and policy makers who wish to understand how regimes cansurvive unrest. Findings show that while the hypothesis assumes monarchs will draw on religion as a non-democratic factor of political legitimacy and that republicans will emphasize the material ruling bargain, kingdoms with oil are more likely to draw on material benefits to justify their rule than republicans, who themselves engage in attempts to balance the politicization of the ruling bargain with non-democratic justification, including sparse religious references. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, an oil-dry monarchy represents the strongest hypothesis confirmation of monarchs drawing on religion and traditionalism rather than a material ruling bargain. Across all case studies, the ability of Arab leaders to draw on constitutional elements to justify non-democratic rule in public discourse is limited, with Jordan again an exception, as Abdullah II enjoys political immunity as King under Jordan's Constitution.

This thesis stakes out to reframe the debates surrounding a widely criticised chapter in the cultural history of modern Greece: the receptions of the classical past under the Dictatorship of 21 April (also known as 'the dictatorship of the Colonels') during the period 1967 to 1973. Informed by the hermeneutics of classical reception studies, I aim to provide a new perspective on the dictatorship, one that focuses on the contemporaneity of its discursive and visual renderings of antiquity, but which departs from a conceptual framework that is dictated by the master narrative of the Cold War (by the polarisations between Right and Left). The project converges on the ideological discourses, educational policies and the mass spectacles of the Colonels, each of which has been designated as fraught with 'ancestoritis' or 'pseudoclassicism' in the literature. In breaking away from value judgments and notions of misappropriation, it is my intention that the project functions as an exercise in a critical levelling with the dictatorship's multifold classicisms. Concomitantly, I propose that in order to better understand the politics of reception of the Aprilians, which have often seemed impenetrable, it is necessary to branch out into more cross-disciplinary methods of enquiry than those that have been employed in the past. My own approach borrows analytical tools from theories of counter-intelligence, cultural studies, political theory, educational sociology and performance studies. With this exploratory patchwork, the present study hopes to contribute toward opening up a field on which it is possible to examine the dictatorship on its own terms, while taking into account the composite articulations of antiquity with power, upward social mobility, economic development, and entertainment and leisure culture in 1960s Greece.

The transitions to democracy in Argentina and Chile have been critiqued by numerous artists and analysts alike, both because of the social and economic continuity from dictatorship to democracy, and because of the democratic states’ occlusion of the violence of the preceding dictatorships. Yet while this compromised democracy has been subject to numerous artistic critiques, this does not necessitate an aesthetic abandonment of democracy as an ideal, but rather a challenge to its consensual nature. This study identifies a specific set of texts – by the art collective CADA, by writers Pedro Lemebel and Néstor Perlongher, and by poets Juan Gelman and Raúl Zurita – and locates within them a desire to radicalise the democratisation processes that were only superficially carried out in the 1990s. And as this work describes, this is a uniquely aesthetic project. In its association of the aesthetic and the political domains, this work draws substantially on the theoretical work of Jacques Rancière. Yet the juxtapositions of the artworks with the theoretical perspective is aimed not only at elucidating the particular nature of the relationship between aesthetics and politics to be found in these works, but also at productively complicating or expanding upon certain aspects of Rancière’s theoretical framework. The artists and authors discussed here call for a new understanding of the aesthetic as an intrinsically political category, seeking at once to revolutionise both politics and aesthetics. The texts analysed as part of this work all appear at a time when the political aesthetic functions primarily according to a revelatory paradigm, as exemplified by the testimonial genre. At the same time, the category of the aesthetic is treated with scepticism in the light of the apparent ability of the marketplace to assimilate even the most radically oppositional text into its hegemonic narrative. The notions of both political and aesthetic dissensus, therefore, find themselves under threat at this particular historico-political juncture. In contrast, the texts I examine in this work undertake an aesthetic investment in alternative significatory sensibilities in order to counter political consensus. In other words, they locate the political in a different aesthetic sensorium: that of the human body, of emotions, and of the affective connections between subjects. In so doing, they move beyond the denunciatory text as the political aesthetic par excellence, pointing instead to aesthetic distributions that remain excessive, or that overspill any effort to order the sensus communis.

This dissertation examines lesbian and queer desire in texts in Catalan and Spanish written in Barcelona, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires from the 1960s to the present. In the texts, desire includes but is not limited to the erotic; it encompasses issues of queer textuality, relationality, and literary transmission. I focus on the works of three authors who have spent the majority of their lives in Barcelona. However, the city appears almost incidentally in their works; the genealogies that the authors trace are transnational. The texts combine literal movement (through exile or diaspora) and a metaphorical sense of being “out of place” that prompts writers to take refuge in writing. I demonstrate that despite depicting affinities beyond the family and nation, the works reveal the persistence of familial and national ties, albeit in spectral or queer ways. Rather than tracing continuous lines of descent that emphasise origins, the works are principally concerned with futurity and fragmentation, as in Michel Foucault’s reading of genealogy. Chapter One on Maria-Mercè Marçal’s La passió segons Renée Vivien (1994) traces a literary genealogy from Sappho to Renée Vivien in fin de siècle Paris to Marçal. The novel represents a merging of literary desire and erotic desire; Marçal’s search for symbolic mothers turns out to be a search for symbolic lovers that is oriented towards the present and future. In Chapter Two, I posit that in Cristina Peri Rossi’s La nave de los locos (1984) “happiness” consists of being open to chance and unpredictability unlike in conventional “happy” scripts in which a valuable life is believed to consist of (heterosexual) marriage, children, and property ownership. In Part II I argue that through fragmentation, allegory, and ambiguity, Peri Rossi’s El libro de mis primos (1969) contests authoritarian discourse without itself becoming a site of hegemonic meaning. In inviting the reader’s collaboration, it ensures authorial legacy. Part I of Chapter Three is an analysis of the temporality of obsession in Flavia Company’s Querida Nélida (1988). I propose that obsession and melancholia may point to a utopian future rather than signalling an entrapment in the past. My study of Melalcor (2000) in Part II suggests that queer forms of relationality that are not centred on procreation and monogamy offer ethical models of sociality. Part III focusses on Company’s return to biological family in Volver antes que ir (2012) and Por mis muertos (2014). The resurgence in these texts of family members who have died signals that just as the queer haunts the family, the family haunts the queer.

The body of writing collectively referred to as third generation or contemporary Nigerian literature emerged on the international literary scene from about the year 2000. This writing is marked by attempts to negotiate contemporary identities, and it engages with various developments in the Nigerian nation: Nigeria’s past and current political and socio-economic state, different kinds of cultural hybridization as well as the writers increasing transnational awareness. This study argues that contemporary Nigerian fiction obsessively returns to the period from 1985-1998 as a historical site for narrating the individual and collective Nigerian experience of the trauma of military dictatorship, which has shaped the contemporary reality of the nation. The study builds on existing critical work on contemporary Nigerian fiction, in order to highlight patterns and ideas that have hitherto been neglected in scholarly work in this field. The study seeks to address this gap in the existing critical literature by examining third-generation Nigerian writing’s representation of this era in a select corpus of work spanning from 2000-06: Okey Ndibe’s Arrows of Rain (2000), Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel (2002), Sefi Atta’s Everything Good will Come (2005), and Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2006). The four novels chosen were written in response to military rule and dictatorship in the 80s and 90s, and they all feature representations of state violence. This study finds that, despite variations in the novels aesthetic modes, violence, control, silencing, dictatorship, alienation, the trauma of everyday life and resistance recur in realist modes. Above all, the study argues that contemporary Nigerian fiction’s insistent representation of the violent past of military rule in Nigeria is a means of navigating the complex psychological and political processes involved in dealing with post-colonial trauma by employing writing as a form of resistance.

Could it be rational to believe contrary to the evidence if the belief brings a substantial amount of practical benefits? In my thesis, I investigate this question through the lens of social choice theory. Specifically, I argue that it is never rational to believe contrary to the evidence by utilizing Arrow’s impossibility theorem. To this end, I introduce an analogy between a belief system and a social group, discuss certain conditions that hold in a rational agent’s belief system, and compare and analyze the performances of different belief systems. The goal is to shed light on the role of evidence in a rational agent’s belief system while exploring the application of theoretical results in social choice theory to the ethics of belief.

In this thesis, I analyze three novels from different authors and countries. The common ground between them is that they are all non-Portuguese writers (hence, strangers) who set their fictional plots during the period of the Portuguese dictatorship. This right-wing extremism was Europe's most long-lasting dictatorship and extended to the country's overseas colonies. In this context, foreign writers are important since the view of a stranger, free from local constraints and mores, can offer distinct and relevant insights. This notion of the Stranger is not only authorial but also reveals itself in the novels' characters, which are active and reflexive agents interpreting a foreign culture while strangers to the society they come into. As such, they bring questioning and innovation into that same structure. My research uses novels as lenses for cross-cultural sociological analysis to explore society's historical, cross-cultural and memorialist tensions, as well as unsolved traumas concerning identity and (not) belonging. [...]

The dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) has left a prominent and polarizing mark on the national memory of Chile. Thirty-three years after the return to democracy, the nation has diverging ideas on how to remember this period. In 2023, as I am writing this thesis, an entire generation has grown up in democratic Chile and personal memories of the military government and the violent coup d’état have begun to fade. In this context, the system of national education becomes a key resource for younger generations to develop and understanding of the history that shapes their present-day lives. After Pinochet was removed from power via plebiscite in 1990 and the first civilian-President inherited the administration, the nation underwent a series of changes. Many of these changes focused on the denouncing of human rights violations which took place during the dictatorship and forging a way forward. There was a notable rise in activism and public interest in this period. Chileans were demanding both truth and justice for the abuses committed by the state during the dictatorship. In this atmosphere of activism and openness, a distinct memory movement is born in Chile, echoing similar conversations taking place across Latin America and in other “transitional” states. The memory movement in Chile specifically fights against the objective of oblivion surrounding the Pinochet years. Many of those fighting for the memory are those who will never be able to forget the traumatic cost of dictatorship; they are the family members and loved ones of those who were tortured, disappeared, or exiled during the dictatorship. These familiares-activistas were also incredibly influential in defeating Pinochet in the 1989 plebiscite. After decades of governments from the left (center) political coalition, La Concertación, the Chilean right gained political ground for the first time since the dictatorship with the presidential election of Sebastián Piñera in 2010 and again in 2018. Under the Piñera administration, I argue, the politics of memory shifted. From the memory narratives established by activists and the governments of Concertación leaders, Piñera’s ministers worked to promote a vague narrative of the dictatorship years. Such a narrative distances specific actors and removes some culpability of the military and right-wing politicians. Thirty some years after the return to democracy and after years of the state promoting ideals of compromiso y conviviencia, present-day memory politics in Chile highlight the continuing and deepening polarization of the country. This thesis will argue that the Chilean state uses the public education system to continually readjust the portrayal of the memory of the Pinochet dictatorship to match or combat political trends. During the alternating presidencies of Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010, 2014-2018) and Sebastián Piñera (2010-2014, 2018-2022), each administration used K-12 education to promote and promulgate a specific vision of the dictatorship that corresponded with their parties’ political and memorial goals.

This dissertation intervenes in debates about grassroots feminism and Brazilian re- democratization in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, contending that poor women of color, mobilizing around their rights as workers and citizens, actively participated in the political opening that ushered in a new democratic age after the country’s Cold War-era military dictatorship (1964–85). This project, which draws on extensive archival research in addition to oral histories and cultural production, examines social movements formed by Brazilian sex workers and domestic laborers in the late twentieth century, following their trajectories from their origins on the Catholic Left through their consolidation as organized civil society entities wielding incisive critiques not only of Brazilian authoritarianism but also of their country’s entrenched racism, classism, and misogyny. My narrative begins in the early 1960s, just before the 1964 coup that inaugurated a twenty- one-year military dictatorship, follows the arc of re-democratization through the drafting of a new constitution in the late 1980s, and culminates in the election of labor activist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the presidency in 2002. While scholars tend to locate Brazil’s democratic transition between 1979 and 1985, my extended periodization has allowed me to examine social-movement dynamics in different political contexts, not just in moments of grassroots agitation and confrontation, but also in periods of repression, stagnation, and democratic consolidation. It has also prompted me to think more expansively about democracy, which in post–Cold War Latin America has rarely been accompanied by the robust commitments to economic and social justice demanded by mobilized sex workers and domestic laborers in transition-era Brazil. In the chapters that follow, I argue first that the progressive wing of the Catholic Church was instrumental in giving rise to these two social movements while Brazil was still under authoritarian rule. Subsequently, I discuss their institutionalization and alliance-building in the crucible of the democratic transition, specifically the Constituent Assembly of 1987–88, the expansion of the newly christened public health system, and the first post-dictatorship presidential election in 1989. The last portion of this dissertation casts the 1990s as a period of neoliberal consolidation, yet one that was constantly contested by radical visions of anti-capitalism, sexual heterodoxy, and anti-work politics at the grassroots. Finally, I compare the two movements’ discursive constructions of gendered labor and productive citizenship in their interactions with the state and other civil society actors as Brazil underwent massive changes in the political sphere.

This article argues that through the reinterpretation of the old theory of pouvoir constituant proposed by Sieyès, Carl Schmitt shows the impossibility of political modernity being anything other than authoritarian populism, whether by means of democratic or autocratic procedures. It is not that Schmitt's theory is authoritarian populism, but that modern politics, born out of the French Revolution, cannot be anything else. Schmitt's analyses of the idea of the people in political modernity in Dictatorship (1921), The Crises of Parliamentary Democracy (1923), Volksentscheid und Volksbegehren (1927), Constitutional Theory (1928), and State, Movement, People (1933) provide a fine analysis of the populist character of modernity. Something that those alive in the twenty-first century have been able to experience was theorized by Schmitt in an oracular way. Because of his keen insight he is still worth reading.

In this dissertation, I examine how laughter functioned as a feature of and response to theatrical performance in mid-twentieth-century Portugal and Brazil, especially during periods of dictatorial rule. Underlying my approach is the idea that repressive regimes—such as the Estado Novo in Portugal and the 1964-1985 military dictatorship in Brazil—perpetrate violence beyond the damage they inflict on the body: they also attack subjectivity, creativity, the senses, and modes of expression. In the face of this violence, Brazilian and Portuguese theater practitioners actively sought to elicit laughter from their audiences. My main argument is that one cannot understand the development of modern Portuguese and Brazilian theater in the twentieth century without understanding their turn to popular musical theater (particularly revue) in relation to laughter and mechanisms of state repression. As a corollary of this argument, I push against the common binary distinction between “serious” and “light” theater in Lusophone theater studies. I argue that the theoretical and aesthetic connections between popular revue and revolutionary drama in Portugal and Brazil are analogous to those between German cabaret/revue and Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater. In the end, the plays I analyze develop local epic theatricalities that break down distinctions between “popular” and “serious” theater. I employ interdisciplinary research methods throughout this dissertation. Beyond close readings of primary sources and the development of a theoretical framework through which to present those readings, I also analyze historical texts in order to situate the works and authors under review. In Chapter 1, I argue that Teatro de Revista à Portuguesa and its complex relation with laughter are central to any adequate understanding of modern Portuguese theater. Throughout the twentieth century, revue provided an embodied experience that challenged decorum. For this and other reasons, Portugal’s dictatorship sought to censor it. In Chapter 2, I analyze Bernardo Santareno’s O Judeu (1966), arguing that Santareno employs laughter as a rhetorical and dialectic tool to promote critical thinking, even in contexts where seriousness and violence prevail. In Chapter 3, I focus on Brazilian revolutionary theater pre-1964, with a special emphasis on Augusto Boal’s Revolução na América do Sul (1960) and Oduvaldo Vianna Filho’s A Mais Valia Vai Acabar, Seu Edgar (1960-61). I contend that both playwrights developed (Marxist) Brazilian epic theatricalities (largely through elements of revue that provoke laughter and produce a distancing effect) while maintaining a recognizably nationalist framework. In Chapter 4, I examine leftist theatrical practices in the wake of Brazil’s 1964 military coup, looking in particular at Vianna Filho and Ferreira Gullar’s Se Correr o Bicho Pega, Se Ficar o Bicho Come (1966). Despite state censorship, this play continued the Brazilian turn to a localized form of epic theater that questioned sociopolitics through laughter; central to its power is the introduction of cordel devices. Through an analysis of laughter in mid-century theatrical texts and productions, I argue that modern Portuguese and Brazilian theater developed through the strategic incorporation of multiple genres and devices on either side of the supposed divide between “serious” and “popular” theater. In many cases, laughter served as a powerful and enduring tool to challenge state repression.

In post-dictatorial societies, there is a need to re-imagine the nation and constitute a new experience of citizenship. The traumatic recent past and social conflicts that arise from dictatorial rule may be strategically neutralized to construct a democratic collective identity, which entails a lack of political representation and promotes an idea of democracy based on fear of conflict. Nation-building is an ongoing and dynamic process, but what are the political conditions necessary to inscribe a legacy that resists being identified with the nation?My dissertation examines the political and social dynamics of nation-building in 21stSpain. Entitled Facies Hippocratica: Transitional Justice, Amnesty, and Denial in Contemporary Spain, my project posits that the contemporary Spanish legal system as a cultural expression of the State perpetuates a politics of oblivion that results in the narrowing and depression of the channels of political representation. My dissertation is broken up into three chapters, each of them consists of two distinct sections. The first shows how the legal system and its conception of citizenry clashes with democratic principles of truth, recognition and justice. Then, in the second section, my work analyzes contemporary grassroots practices of citizenship that resist the hegemonic national narrative: literature, documentary, graffiti, memorials, theatre, and tours to historic sites. I follow an interdisciplinary approach that combines cultural studies, legal studies, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, and critical pedagogies.These practices of citizenship point at political subjectivities that have been excluded from historical narrations. This way of understanding politics accounts for political expectations of subjects in transformation, for their production of language and especially for the way in which emerging political subjects think of themselves in the process of representing a change in temporality. The practices of resistance I analyze appeal to the invention of new democratic ways of life, to a citizenry that exists beyond prevailing institutions. Amidst the current crisis of political and democratic institutions globally that contributes to the global deterioration of democratic regimes in the 21st century, these issues concerning citizenship, community, and culture across multiple fields are urgent.

This thesis explores the relationship between President Jimmy Carter’s administration (1977-1981) and Brazil’s military regime, which was led by two generals, President Ernesto Geisel (1974-1979) and President João Figueiredo (1979-1985). Illuminating the risks that Washington takes as it implements foreign policies without considering the political landscape abroad, this work argues that Carter’s foreign policy failed in the relationship with Brazil. It undermined the diplomatic dialogue and negotiation with the largest economy in Latin America, irritated Brazilians from all parts of the political spectrum, and failed to achieve improvements in human rights.

Melodrama Undercover rethinks the affective work genre cinema performed in post-dictatorship Argentina. Dominant scholarship has tended to dismiss the political and cultural significance of popular films produced after the 1976–1983 military rule. It claims this cinema largely stops reckoning with the dictatorship in the 1990s, given the proliferation of genre films that do not represent state violence and genocide directly. I reconsider mainstream cinema’s role in mediating the past to show how it confronts and represents historical trauma allegorically to negotiate questions concerning justice, memory, and national identity. These films engage processes of displacement and resignification to imagine a different relationship to the country’s past as they restage social and subject-state relations under authoritarianism. In their use of allegorical images, plots, and resolutions, diverse popular genres allow audiences to work through the past in a collective experience of spectatorship that addresses the wounds of historical trauma and, in the process, imagine a (bearable) future that holds the possibility for change. Organized through the conventions of the melodramatic mode, prominent Argentinean genres (such as the tango musical, the policial/crime thriller, and the science fiction film) have historically acted as beacons of memory and justice during moments when both were imperiled. Using a contextual approach, Melodrama Undercover engages archival research, close reading, and film theory to reconceptualize melodrama as a site of collective resistance. In the Argentinean films under consideration, melodrama has offered audiences fantasies that dramatize the restoration of the social and familial relations severed by authoritarianism. I use the concept of the “melodrama of community” to show how Argentinean genres eschew reactionary escapism by looking forward as they look back: they investigate and narrativize the past in order to envision—or warn about—the future. In this way, genre cinema functions as a palliative for the violent losses the military inflicted on marginalized Argentineans while modeling new social formations and resilient communities able to rebuild a shattered nation.

Este texto se articula en torno a la correspondencia oficial mantenida entre el Departamento de Estado y la embajada de los EE. UU. en Madrid durante la segunda mitad de los años cuarenta preservada en los National Archives Records Administra- tion (NARA). Hemos centrado nuestra atención en este rico y abundante material con el propósito de poner de relieve la extraordinaria insistencia con que en dichos informes se reiteraba la idea de que la mejor fórmula, si acaso no la única, de generar condiciones favorables al desarrollo de una apertura política en España con la que procurar un tránsito de la dictadura a la democracia consistía en abstenerse de promover iniciativas amenazantes y punitivas contra el orden vigente en el país. Con diverso énfasis, y por encima de sus respectivas diferencias de carácter (eventualmente también de trayectoria), tanto Cartlon J. H. Hayes como Norman Armour, o bien William W. Butterworth, Philip W. Bonsal y Paul T. Culbertson se apoyaron en esos argumentos para manifestarse partidarios de aplicar a España una política flexible, realista y prudente. La única capaz —pensaban— de generar las condiciones que el país requería para ir dejando atrás sus muchas contradicciones actuales e históricas, y para emprender un tránsito hacia fórmulas de convivencia democrática.

Dictatorships today are as violent as they were during the Cold War. This has surprised international observers, who a few years ago thought globalization would help protect human rights in these countries. Despite international efforts to hold abusive dictators accountable, human rights appear to have gotten worse in many dictatorships. To explain this puzzle, I first note how globalization threatens the political and economic interests of elites in dictatorships. In turn, elites demand compensation from the dictator. Where elites can credibly threaten the dictator with removal, the dictator is likely to increase repression to placate allies and avoid a coup. This compensation dynamic between autocrats and their ruling coalition explains why some dictatorships respond with increased violence to globalization while others do not. It also helps explain how different elements of globalization interact with each other in the domestic politics of autocracies to improve or weaken human rights.

My research attempts to build an archive of the violence that mothers and daughters faced under the Argentine "Dirty War" dictatorship of 1976-1983 with specific attention to pregnant women who visibly straddle the identity of mother and daughter. By looking to state-sanctioned resources and fictional narratives, including novels and film, I hope to better understand a lived experience of pregnant prisoners that has been historically erased, and understand how this intergenerational trauma instilled a legacy of terror through the exploitation of feminized bodies. My thesis proposes that subversive, pregnant women posed the historically rich threat of being “brujas” (witches) against the masculine military state, and that this subversion appears in popular, fictional narratives (novels and movies) through the character arc of the narrative’s mother and daughter characters. While initially I centered my research only on the pregnant disappeared women, their visible absence from film and fiction challenged me to expand the scope of my study to examine biological, adoptive, clandestine and figurative representations of motherhood in the years following the dictatorship, through the twenty-first century. Thus, fiction plays a key role in building an archive that considers how the enduring, intergenerational terror of the military dictatorship operates through these women.

The following research focuses on lesbian intimacy in Argentina between 1966–1988, with particular focus on the dictatorship of 1976–1983. I argue that queer women during this era used constructions of lesbian eroticism, pleasure, and friendship as ways to counter authoritarianism by claiming that the equality and equity experienced in intimate moments was evidence of lesbian moral authority and democracy. Moments of intimacy serve as access points to understanding lesbian contestations to Argentina’s gender hierarchy, the military’s authoritarianism, and Argentina’s definition of democracy. Looking at lesbianism through multiple lenses of intimacy has revealed a fragmented, isolated community that, over the course of two decades, worked to claim their collective existence, making lesbianism possible and visible.Lesbian intimacy in Argentina occurred in multiple spaces, both private and public. By the end of the 1960s when the first gay liberation group in Argentina, Nuestro Mundo, was founded, lesbians in Buenos Aires remained atomized and isolated, lacking the kind of public social organization that other groups had. At the same time, Argentine society was tumultuous, see-sawing between democracy and dictatorship. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, the government, whether democratic or authoritarian, was particularly ruthless toward leftist groups throughout the nation. This is especially true for the regime that took power between 1976 and 1983. It was responsible for completely disrupting the public and private lives of its citizens through a program of censorship, terror, violence, kidnapping, and torture, ultimately disappearing and murdering 30,000 Argentinians. As a result, moments of intimacy—including conversations between friends and lovers, as well as consuming cultural productions like political writings, poems, drawings, literature, and songs—provided lesbians with the experiences and discourse to situate themselves as sexual minorities and citizens in Argentina.My research contributes to the growing scholarship that utilizes a methodology of intimacy. Lauren Berlant’s concept of the intimate public—composed of strangers who share common historical experiences based on seemingly fixed identities, such as race, gender, or sexuality—challenges us rethink how collective political and social consciousness can be generated during moments of privacy and intimacy. Analyzing lesbian history in Argentina through the lens of intimacy is an apt way to approach this historical moment, because lesbians were working to construct a collective identity that bypassed the categories of nation and family. As a result, my findings about lesbian intimacy change what we know about Argentinian lesbian history. While the existing historiography focuses on lesbian participation in the feminist and gay liberation movements, focusing on intimacy expands the ways that we view lesbians as political actors. Given their lack of self-representation within the activist community, moments of intimacy illustrate how lesbians understood themselves as political actors.

In this paper I examine an Argentine special-interest magazine dedicated to imported, localized Japanese anime that appeared on broadcast television in Latin America at the turn of the century. In doing so, I focus primarily on the authorial role of its editor, Leandro Oberto, and his role as gatekeeper of an emergent subculture in post-dictatorial Argentina. The entrepreneurial, political, and personal agendas of Oberto at this time are demonstrated by samples of his own articles and letters from the editor, as well as accompanying interviews from Argentine news outlets. Selected letters to the editor are also featured in order to reveal Oberto’s engagement with his readership. In order to explore and explain these complex, mediated interactions and the subculture in which they take place, I utilize established concepts of transculturation as coined by Fernando Ortiz. Emphasizing the transactional component of transculturation in a global marketplace, I draw upon newer methodologies put forth by Elizabeth Kath so as to better account for the profit-driven exchange of culture and ideas that occur through media such as television and the internet rather than face-to-face interactions. In doing so, I demonstrate a previously unused application of transculturation which may also be modeled in comparable circumstances involving other media within different localities. I also provide a complement to the overall history of Argentine cinema as adeptly described by Tamara Falicov, whose work denoting the cultural divide between the middle class and working class as evidenced by viewing habits proved insightful.

The Buenos Aires Herald has a rich history in Buenos Aires, Argentina as a long-standing English-language newspaper that actively bore witness to the repression of the 1976 to 1983 military dictatorship. In production since the 1800s and the sole English-language newspaper from 1959 until its closure in 2017, the Herald provided news, community updates, and credible journalism to the English-speaking community in Argentina and the world. The Herald is survived by its human rights legacy during the military dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1976 until 1983, Argentina was under the control of a military dictatorship, characterized by state-sponsored terrorism and the severe repression of human rights. For the eight long years of the dictatorship, the majority of the Argentinean press failed to report on the human rights abuses taking place, instead reporting the official position presented by the military or not reporting on the events at all. However, one newspaper in particular consistently reported the truth of the events taking place throughout the entirety of the dictatorship. The Buenos Aires Herald was able to document the repression and state-sponsored terrorism taking place during the dictatorship while most other papers were censored and forced into silence. As an English-language newspaper, the Herald occupied a unique space. Managed by mostly British expats in Argentina and owned by a company in the United States, the Herald had the support of the British government and certain protections and freedom that Argentinean papers lacked. Under the guidance of editor Robert Cox, this freedom was employed to cover the disappearances and killings taking place at great length, saving many lives along the way and making the repression known throughout the world. This thesis creates a space for understanding the capacity of the press to serve as a witness to repressive historical events. It introduces new primary source materials on the Argentinean dictatorship in the form of archives from the Herald and interviews conducted with individuals who wrote for and read the paper. Using these primary sources and theories on witnessing through traumatic events from authors including Dori Laub, Shoshana Felman, and Diana Taylor, I argue that the Buenos Aires Herald played a key role in bearing witness to the atrocities taking place during the dictatorship. By listening to the stories of those who disappeared and recording their names and tales in the paper, the Herald’s staff actively documented the state-sponsored terrorism taking place under the military government.

Grounded in my own observation of the recent string of Latin American shows, such as Montecristo (Argentina, 2008) and Amor e revolução (Brazil, 2011), which directly confront traumatic national pasts, this project investigates what representative 21st century Argentine and Brazilian fictional and testimonial televisual accounts (telenovelas, miniseries and testimonial interviews) communicate about the role of television in the construction and mediation of the officially sanctioned memory narratives promoted by normative transitional justice mechanisms. In this vein, this project—The Media of Memories: Argentine and Transitional Justice as Seen on TV—poses a series of interrelated questions:1) How can transitional justice processes take place on the small screen? 2) How can understanding these televisual practices advance existing theories on transitional justice as it relates to the right to memory, and the protection of memory’s productive problematics—such as the respect for silence, gaps and hauntings inherent in remembering mass atrocities? And finally, 3) What alternative spaces for advocacy, if any, are opened up by these television programs? In the end, my project contends that television programs, in the Argentine and Brazilian cases, have the potential to operate as malleable discursive spaces that question hegemonic memory regimes and complicate normative truths put in place by the State. Furthermore, the telenovelas, miniseries, and testimonial interviews analyzed throughout this project function, to varying degrees, as dynamic memory mediums that simultaneously promote memory as memory entrepreneurs, profit from memory, frame what truths should be remembered, and digitally transmit memory. Thus, I maintain that moving televised images have the potential to operate as a widely accessible form of transitional justice that not only translates judicial arguments to the mass populace, but also provides alternative spaces for the re-definition of justice and the performance of multilayered activism. Through its visual depiction and fictionalization of the limit experiences of collective traumas, television stages those realities that resist verbal narration and operates as a form of symbolic reparations that restores dignity to victims, develops a more inclusive narrative of the past, and protects the right to memory.

This dissertation examines the social consequences of the food policies adopted in Spain during the early Franco dictatorship (1939-1952), a period marked by food shortage and political terror. Many scholars assert that Spaniards became apolitical and sought survival rather than political engagement with the violent and fascist regime. To revise this, I selected one of the most marginalized groups of Spanish society—Spanish housewives—to show that far from retreating into the home or resigning themselves to the repression and coercion of the dictatorship, Spaniards sought new strategies of political engagement with the regime, even when traditional rights and oftentimes human rights had been stripped away. Shopping, cooking, and eating provided housewives an avenue to resist, acquiesce, or ignore the food policies of the dictatorship. Through food habits practiced in everyday life, I demonstrate that women challenged the regime via its food policies, elucidating a previously overlooked form of civic engagement and political activism during the hunger years.

This paper will reposition the frame through which A TV Dante has been seen. A TV Dante has been seen in relation to Ruiz’s “spectral turn” and his transmedia explorations characteristic of his 1980s films, or as representative of the nostalgic wanderings of his exile films. Rather, I read A TV Dante, not only in these terms, but as a film that is grappling with the problematics of return after the dictatorship. As such, scholars have often looked toward two films in particular in order to point to the problems and concerns that Ruiz’s films have raised in relation to return after exile: (Lettre d'un cinéaste ou Le retour d'un amateur de bibliothèques [Letter from a Library Lover or The Return of a Library Lover (1983) and Cofralandes (2002). I will argue, however, that exile and return are also key topoi for A TV Dante.

How a single party and personal dictatorship survive has been a question of much debate among scholars. Geddes (1999, 2003) creates a model to determine which survives the longest. Within her model, she finds that a single party dictatorship – one with a party apparatus – survives longer than a personal dictatorship – one where a single person has sole policymaking ability. She argues that the fundamental difference between the two is how each treats the opposition. The party apparatus allows a single party dictatorship the means to silence the opposition by coopting it into the party structure whereas a personal dictatorship must rely on the wealthy and military to keep any opposition at bay. With a single party dictatorship being able to coalesce the opposition, this dictatorship is more stable and survives longer. I agree with Geddes’ reasoning and seek to clarify how this situation works in Sub-Saharan Africa. I argue that a single party dictatorship can silence and use religious leaders in the opposition to gain support from the religious leaders’ followers. This additional support from the religious leaders and the followers makes single party dictatorships survive longer than personal dictatorships in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this research, I explain the importance of religion as a variable for dictatorship survival research in Sub-Saharan Africa. I show that religious leaders have a certain level of control over followers and if coopted by a dictatorship, religious leaders’ control garners support among followers. I further explain how religious leaders are in the opposition and therefore can only be coopted by a single party dictatorship. I conclude by showing that religious leaders increase a single party dictatorship’s survival likelihood.

Scholars have paid scant attention to the mimeograph’s role in influencing social change, despite the fact that such media have long allowed counter-narratives a space for expression. This dual degree Master’s thesis explicitly addresses this gap in historical literature by using a case study to explore how mass duplication technologies have enabled flyers and leaflets to make serious interventions into dominant political narratives. Specifically, the case study examines how, during the 1960s and 1970s, Uruguayan leftist protestors used mimeograph machines to produce a large corpus of political propaganda that harshly criticized the country’s authoritarian rule. Not only did these missives sharply critique the country’s leadership, but they also diffused otherwise-censored news, organized increasing-illegal demonstrations, and promoted solidarity efforts that consolidated the Left into a cohesive political project.

In this dissertation, I show how the collective memory discourses dialogue with their contemporary political conditions. I analyze the novels written by the children of the dissapeared and political activists that were published during Néstor Kirchner, and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner governments (2003-2007, 2007-2015). I focus on this period to explore how the memory discourse established and promoted in both administrations permeates the dynamics of a local cultural field. I propose that the existence of these narratives would have not been posible without the political achivements in memory matters during the Kirchners’ regimes. The novels written by the children of the dissapeared enlighten experiences regarding the consequences of paternal political activism in the familial sphere. These representations do not coincide with the heroic depictions that the public memory discourse propose. In that sense, these narratives highlight the gaps between the collective and private life of the children of the dissapeared. This fissure allows the construction of a new kind of subjectivity that distances from the common places of the public memory discourse. The literary critic organizes these narratives under the “literatura de hijos” category. Although, the critic reads these novels as political interventions due to the legitimacy that the children of the dissapeared statements hold, the novelists are eager to consolidate in the literary field depicting personal experiencies in fiction. In the tension between the biographical fact and fiction, I study how the political capital of the children of the dissapeared structures the classification and value of their novels inside the literary debate. This relationship organizes the dinamics of a cultural production field. The public memory discourse presents trends in cultural production, since the writers answer to the state proposals even when the Kirchners’ governments claim the dictatorship victims.

Fernando Alegría's trio of Chile's dictatorship novels are blistering amalgams of literary imaginative prose, memoir and political history, unprecedented in Latin American fiction.The tragic and untimely death of Salvador Allende during a Sept. 11th, 1973 military strike intended to end his presidency weighed heavily on Alegría, stimulating my inquiry into his dictatorship novels to understand their ontological, cultural, political and theoretical significance in relation to our basic human rights.In Una especie de memoria, El paso de los gansos, and Coral de guerra, Alegría speaks for Chile's less fortunate, insisting on addressing the tortured and the aggrieved, the victims of political persecution and the "disappeared" at the hands of the dictatorship personified by General Augusto Pinochet. Inviting these Chileans to center stage, Alegría ensured the downtrodden and dismissed—those who had pinned all their hopes for a more just society on Allende—would not be relegated to invisibility merely because they had been born poor and had idealistically come to believe change could be made at the ballot box.The legal and philosophical notion of sovereignty, as well as its literary theoretical dimension needs renewal. Alegría's three novels provide a key to creating a safe resistance through a revolutionary recalibration of insilio or "internal exile" of the individual, who—under Pinochet—becomes an object of contempt, of rejection and violent reprisal. Consequently, this study includes perspectives on power, sovereignty and human rights by a number of thinkers from antiquity to the present. The meaning of "sovereignty" has evolved under their watch. Individual worth diminished when dissident colonists wrote "We the People...," thus galvanizing the power of military and civilian dictatorships, reason enough to re-articulate and renew our belief in sovereignty of the self as the fundamental basis for all social contracts. Would that governments and corporate entities be sublimated to the concept of sovereignty in its purest state; the truest expression of sovereignty burnished into the Zeitgeist as an expression of literary theory. Fernando Alegría's fictional truth has been midwifed and all ontologies, tautologies, languages and relationships can finally be unshackled. Key terms: sovereignty, rights, violence, literature.

The progressive version of public relations history present it as a by-product of pluralist political systems or a democratic dividend. It has been claimed that public relations thrives within open media systems and market economies but struggles in highly controlled governmental systems (dictatorships, juntas, and closed economies). This paper considers how political history and political systems affected the formation of public relations practices in regions of Europe that, after 1945, were under military dictatorships (Spain and Portugal), a military junta (Greece) and were contained in the Soviet bloc. Using comparative history methodology, the notion that public relations operates solely in democracies is challenged, although it is conceded that practice thrived in post-war Western Europe but struggled to develop in parts of southern and eastern Europe.

What explains the lack of democracy in the Arab Middle East, when so many other, less wealthy regions of the world have democratized over the past five decades? This thesis engages with each of the major explanations for the "Arab democracy deficit"--Islam, the "oil curse," authoritarian statecraft, and external intervention--but argues that there is a more fundamental culprit for the region's woes: the weakness of state-based nationalism. At a time when nationalism is increasingly seen as synonymous with exclusion and discrimination, such a finding may strike many observers as counterintuitive. However, this thesis theoretically and empirically demonstrates how healthy, state-based nationalism can provide the societal cohesion needed to establish liberal governance. It then offers in-depth analyses of the development of national identity and democracy in eleven separate Arab countries, arguing that the rise of regional Arab nationalism in the 1950s severely undermined the development of state-based nationalism (wataniyya), and laid the groundwork for decades of instability, civil strife, and oppression. Fortunately, the examples of Tunisia and Lebanon--and to some extent Jordan and Morocco--demonstrate that wataniyya can lead to much more democratic outcomes when properly nurtured.

This dissertation examines the struggle between Chile’s opposition press and the dictatorial regime of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (1973-1990). It argues that due to Chile’s tradition of a pluralistic press and other factors, and in bids to strengthen the regime’s legitimacy, Pinochet and his top officials periodically demonstrated considerable flexibility in terms of the opposition media’s ability to publish and distribute its products. However, the regime, when sensing that its grip on power was slipping, reverted to repressive measures in its dealings with opposition-media outlets. Meanwhile, opposition journalists challenged the very legitimacy Pinochet sought and further widened the scope of acceptable opposition under difficult circumstances. Ultimately, such resistance contributed to Pinochet’s defeat in the 1988 plebiscite, initiating the return of democracy. Historians have paid relatively little attention to the relationship between the dictatorship and the opposition press, the critical role opposition journalism played during the Pinochet years, and the importance of opposition journalists in the successful “No” campaign in the 1988 plebiscite. This dissertation makes clear that the opposition media—and opposition newsmagazines in particular—together played a vital role during the period.

During the period of military government in Argentina, Brazil (1964 –1982) and the present day communist Cuban regime, a machinery of cultural repression was established in these countries, these states had a systematic plan of cultural repression of any kind of opposition, dictatorships had an organized and sophisticated operating control over the press and all publications. The dissident writers examined in this dissertation developed strategies of resistance that depended largely on allegory to carry their messages against their respective oppressive regimes. By means of a detailed rhetorical analysis, our study examines the lookings of allegory and cultural resistance under the constraints of repression. Our corpus includes six novels written by dissident writers during the period studied in this dissertation. The fictional narratives selected in this study are divided into novels from Brazil, Argentina and Cuba. The Brazilian novels: of Jorge Amado Dona Flor e seus dois maridos (1966) and Érico Verissimo, Incidente en Antares (1971); two Argentine novels: Ricardo Piglia’s, Respiración artificial (1980) and Martin Khoan’s, Dos veces junio (2002); and by two Cubans: Jesús Díaz, Las iniciales de la tierra (1987) and Zoé Valdés, La nada cotidiana (1995). This dissertation demostrates that allegory and ghosts, as literary figures, can evolve and assume new functions of resisting oppressive governments through confronting, denouncing, identifying and conjuring national traumas as well as adapting themselves to the different political circumstances in which they are used.

Members of the post-dictatorship generation in Chile have been the first to organize large-scale political protest since Augusto Pinochet’s military authoritarian regime ended in 1990. How do these individuals interpret this recent past, and how does it influence their conceptions of politics? How is their political action shaped by discourse and vice versa? Ethnographic data collected from interviews with Chilean university students is analyzed using a practice theory approach adapted from Sherry Ortner’s concept of the loosely structured actor. This analysis reveals the family to be a primary source of information and affect guiding young adults’ interpretation of meaning, with regard to both the past and the present. I argue that there exists currently a discourse of memory according to which Chilean citizens are shaped to remember the past in certain ways and not in others, and the political action of post-dictatorship actors is shaped by this discourse but also challenges it. Further ethnographic research must attend to the family as a site of political consciousness, and to the dialectical processes by which Chile’s historical narrative and its present political climate are mutually shaped.

The first chapter of my dissertation studies the 2011 student movement in Chile, the largest protest mobilization in the country's history, in which hundreds of thousands of students skipped school to protest with the goal of reforming the educational system. Using administrative data on millions of students' daily school attendance decisions on protest and non-protest days, a large network composed by the lifetime history of classmates, and differential network exposure to the first national protest, I employ an instrumental variables approach to test how networks affect protest behavior. The main finding is that individual participation follows a threshold model of collective behavior: students were influenced by their networks to skip school on protest days only when more than 40 percent of the members of their networks also skipped school. Additional findings show that protest participation imposed significant educational costs on students and helped to shift votes towards non-traditional opposition parties. Taken together, results indicate that networks amplify the effect of protests in non-linear ways with potentially significant consequences for institutional change.The second chapter, co-authored with Jose Ignacio Cuesta and Cristi'an Larroulet, investigates the workings of educational institutions in Chile. In education, data on school quality is often gathered through standardized testing. However, the use of these tests has been controversial because of behavioral responses that could distort performance measures. We study the Chilean educational market and document that low-performing students are underrepresented in test days, generating distortions in school quality information. These distorted quality signals affect parents' school choice and induce misallocation of public programs. These results indicate that undesirable responses to test-based accountability systems may impose significant costs on educational markets.The third chapter, co-authored with Mounu Prem, studies firms during Chile's transition to democracy. Political transitions are associated with significant economic changes, but little is known about how firms fare across regimes. We study Chile's democratization and show that firms in the dictator's network make critical investments in physical capital during the political transition. These investments are made possible by government banks during the dictatorship and allow firms to improve their market position in the new regime. Our results show how market distortions can be transferred across political regimes.

During the dictatorships both the former DEOPs (Departamento de Ordem Política e Social) in São Paulo and the former ESMA (Escuela Mecánica de la Armada) in Buenos Aires functioned as clandestine detention centers. Today, the functions of both of these spaces could be broadly (and contentiously) described as memorials, museums, and spaces of public gathering. In 2009 the former DEOPs was inaugurated as the Memorial da Resistência, and in 2004 the former ESMA was inaugurated as the Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos [ex-ESMA]. I say “contentiously” because the historical dialogues that framed the creation, use, and definition of the Memorial and the ex-ESMA continue to be highly divisive issue in both countries, and the concerns regarding physical development parallel the complicated and divergent paths towards transitional justice that Brazil and Argentina have taken. In this work I assert that the spatial transitions seen in Brazil and Argentina have been directly influenced by the powerful processes of political and economic restructuring that occurred in both nations in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s as reverberations of the economic effects of the dictatorships.

In my dissertation I analyze how politics and film interact in Lusophone (i.e., Portuguese- speaking) countries in Europe (Portugal), South America (Brazil) and Africa (Mozambique and Angola) between the 1950s and the 1980s. During this period the countries in question were undergoing significant political changes, and film was an important medium used in the process of transformation. Portugal went from a fascist dictatorship to a democracy in 1974, Angola and Mozambique became independent in 1975, and Brazil became a military dictatorship in 1964. One of the purposes of my study is to explore and contrast the film-related policies in effect under different governments. In the case of Portugal, fascist colonialism used film as a form of propaganda to support its occupation of Mozambique, Angola, Cabo Verde and Guinea-Bissau. With the 1974 April revolution that ended the dictatorship, film was used to advance the democratic values of the revolution. The previously mentioned African countries, especially Angola and Mozambique, used Third Cinema as a counter-discourse to Portuguese propaganda, showing in a series of documentaries how their struggle for independence was legitimate. In the case of Brazil, directors of Cinema Novo criticized neocolonialism in Brazil; the movement began in the late fifties, but underwent through significant changes when a military coup established a dictatorship that would last until 1985. In spite of the extensive common ground among the diverse Lusophone countries, very few studies have thus far used a transatlantic approach. I start from Gilroy’s conception of the Atlantic Ocean as a space of cultural exchange, and from Shu Mei Shih and Fran?oise Lionnet’s notion of minor transnationalism to explore such issues.

The improbable trajectories of Mexico and Cuba give rise to compelling questions: in what ways have the revolutionary governments of Mexico and Cuba been able to practice successful defiance of the United States hegemon of the twentieth century? And how has that defiance helped to define U.S. foreign policy in Latin America? This dissertation presents a detailed examination of the contexts surrounding both the Mexican and Cuban Revolutions and their struggle against imperialist-driven interventions by the United States in Latin America and the Caribbean. I argue that through strategic decisions, the Mexican and Cuban revolutionary governments were able to ward off U.S. intervention and create a process of independence that in turn became a trajectory for defiance in modern Latin America and the Caribbean through revolution, petroleum nationalization, and the establishment of a strong party system that harnessed the power of social movements through public buy-in to revolutionary principles. The theoretical underpinnings of this Latin American Studies interdisciplinary dissertation incorporates Immanuel Wallersteins World Systems Theory, which provides a perspective on the development of imperialism and the rise of neoliberal free-market capitalism through an examination of the developmental processes of former dependent and colonial territories. Additionally, I use the approach developed by Theda Skocpol in Social Revolutions in the Modern World to inform the comparative historical method. I emphasize Skocpol's theories of social revolution that stress the importance of geopolitical relations during twentieth century revolutions. I also incorporate Charles Tilly's theory of social movements and Max Weber's concept of charismatic authority. Bringing these diverse theoretical traditions into productive dialogue through my analysis, I develop the concept of 'natural resource revolutions:' a concept that can illustrate the mechanisms that bring together organized groups to challenge local and international pressures and coercive historical relations that favor local and international elites. I also develop 'charismatic revolutionary leadership' as a conceptual tool from which to view the national and global social forces shaping the success of social movements that aims to liberate national resources from imperial hegemony around the globe. Through 'charismatic revolutionary leadership,' Lázaro Cárdenas and Fidel Castro were successful because there were institutional dynamics inherent in revolution that facilitated the nationalist implementation of natural resource sovereignty. Specifically, they both came into power on the heels of the institutionalization of radical constitutions, strong social movements, and effective political party formation. And finally, the Mexican and Cuban Revolutions birthed constitutions that created the legal precedent for implementing national sovereignty as a new goal for their reconstituted political structures. The contributions of this dissertation are significant because they link theories of world systems and social revolutions in the modern world to social movements and the dynamics of charismatic authority to what took place in Latin America during the 1930s and 1960s vis-à-vis the use of natural resource nationalization as a diplomatic weapon. It is my hope that these empirical and theoretical contributions can be used to explore the dynamics between the United States and other world powers throughout Latin America and the Caribbean and go on to inform research into other core and periphery country relationships.

This thesis analyzes Les Soleils des Independances (1968) by Ahamadou Kourouma and Trop de Soleil Tue l’Amour (1999) by Mongo Beti with the main objectives of examining how the postcolonial societies in Africa are touhced by many kind of problems addressed by authors in literature. In fact, the two books chosen for this exercise cover the question of the disappearance of traditional beliefs, the poor management of economical and political aspects of the societies, the dictatorship under the name of democracy, corruption as a norm, and many other points. In both Ahmadou Kourouma’s and Mongo Beti’s work, poor and vulnerable characters provide a way to be in the heart of the social life that tends to exclude those poor. While Kourouma tends to be more optimistic than Beti, both however talk about the societies’ need for change— changes in tradition as well as economic, societal, political and mental changes, because without such considerations, the question of the future is uncertain. With this variety of problems shown in the novels, and knowing the great number of African novelists around the world underlining these kinds of problems, we came to the observation that the people are suffering to help the rich to maintain their wealth. The poor cannot react because the situation does not allow any protest since the police are an ally to the dictator. This alliance maintains an undesirable status quo, and, since the characters in the novels, as the human beings in real life, tend to suffer from blindness and also from slowness, the writers try to awaken them by forcing them to action.

In Chile, wounds from the Pinochet dictatorship of 1973 to 1990 still fester under the surface of its post-transitional society. The regime of terror lives on in economic policies, architecture, the country's grave-pocked landscape, and in the everyday lives of Chileans. My research examines a former prison and torture center that has been converted into a cultural park: a space of culture, art, and community, sanctioned and administered by the state. It serves as a microcosm for Chile, which has chosen to erase its violent past while also perpetuating a system of class stratification and power structures that come directly from the dictatorship. Translation of title. Prison of culture: Aftermaths of the Chilean dictatorship in a community arts center

This dissertation consists of two essays of public economics. In the first essay, I build a new and rich quantitative model of unsecured and secured debt to study the impact of the 2005 bankruptcy reform law on the foreclosure crisis during the great recession. I find that the bankruptcy reform did not significantly affect the foreclosure rate, but it moderately lowered the foreclosure rate by raising the opportunity cost of a bad credit record, thereby making households less likely to default simultaneously on mortgage contracts and on unsecured credit contracts. In the second essay, I use a game theoretical model to show how political institutions shape prospects of economic growth. The study predicts that everything else equal, economies that are the most likely to grow are those with the strongest political institutions: the lowest probabilities of occurrence of a coup d'etat and the lowest probabilities of falling in an absorbing state of dictatorship. Consistently with empirical facts on growth, the relationship predicted between dictatorship and economic growth by the model is a non-linear one: given a probability of falling in the state of dictatorship, the occurrence of growth depends on the discount factor of citizens. The essay also shows that even when the economy is already growing as a dictatorship, a one-shot transition to democracy is still desirable to citizens as it reduces the payoffs that are necessary to provide dynamic incentives to politicians in power.

This essay analyzes the connections between some of the theories about masculinities and the sociopolitical context of Chile under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in the movie Tony Manero, by Pablo Larrain, and the novel Mala onda, by Alberto Fuguet. It proposes that the dictator and consequently the ideology of dictatorship are exacerbated representations of masculinity, and this study signals their inherent contradictions and repercussions in this country\'s social environment during its period of authoritarian regime. From this perspective, the protagonists of both fictional works, who come from different social and economic sectors of the Chilean society, can be considered oppressed individuals and oppressors themselves within this context, establishing different kinds of relationship with it. The oppression that they suffer is not only characterized by the authoritarian practices in force but also "and mainly" by the explicit and implicit guidelines of a "code of masculinity" that is put across by the regime and which affects society as a whole. Additionally, actively or passively and in a more or less conscious way, from the male groups to which they belong, both leading characters dominate (or try to do so) the groups of men from lower levels of the hierarchical social ranking and all groups of women. Therefore, oppression is an effective tool used to help maintain the structure of the dictatorship itself and, as a result, the ideological basis of men\'s domination.

This thesis is a photographic essay that examines the work of memory in Argentina related to the dictatorship of 1976 and its aftermath. In it, I examine various sites of memory that can be broadly defined as archival, performative and pedagogic and attempt to relate these sites to the scene of contemporary memory. An estimated 30,000 people were disappeared during “El Proceso” from 1976-1983 and these absent visages continue to haunt the nation. Officials from the outgoing regime remained protected from prosecution for 20 years after the formation of the constitutional government. Over time and without access to juridical redress, Argentine human rights groups have resorted to assorted means to recuperate the memories of the disappeared and the excesses of the regime. Groups like Las Madres de Plaza Mayor, HIJOS, and Grupo Etcetera developed performative practices – from the sanguine march to the carnavalesque protest. Neighborhood associations attempted to mark and recuperate former clandestine detention centers as public sites. Student activists mark sites with elaborate murals narrating the cityscape’s connection to its political ghosts. Municipal and provincial organizations emerged to catalogue, film, record, archive and listen. Lastly, with the election of center-left president Nestor Kirchner (2003-2007) and his commitment to this memory work, along with his support of the legal prosecution of former regime officials, there emerged more monumental projects such as the creation the Parque de la Memoria and the memory museum at the largest detention and torture center in Argentina during the dictatorship, ESMA. This study enters into these sites of memory and attempts to narrate their affect and grammar in relation to the politics of memory that Argentines continue to struggle with to this day.

This dissertation explores Chilean narratives produced since the 1973 coup d'état (from the dictatorship and post-dictatorship periods) and analyzes representations of disappearance, which range from the institutionalized practice of enforced disappearance during the dictatorship, to the erasure of inconvenient histories and memories during the transition to democracy, and the persistent vanishing of marginal subjects in neoliberal democratic Chile. Focusing on the work of Ana Vásquez, Luz Arce, Ariel Dorfman, Roberto Bolaño, and Diamela Eltit, who present disappearance in numerous forms and in a variety of genres (novels, testimonio, drama, film, and texts that blur generic boundaries), I argue that, as one of many authoritarian continuities in democratic Chile, disappearance persists in the present. My study begins to articulate other manifestations of disappearance that extend beyond the notion of enforced disappearance as a phenomenon contained during the dictatorship period, and constitutes a space for rethinking disappearance in neoliberal democracies.

Professor Joseph Bendersky claims that Harvard Political Scientist and German emigre Carl J. Freidrich's Weimar-era constitutional ideas were "Schmittian to their core" but that Friedrich's experience as a naturalized U.S. citizen led him to embrace American liberalism. This thesis argues to the contrary that Friedrich's Weimar-era thought lacked two essential axioms of Schmitt's philosophy: that democracy requires a people who are substantively homogeneous and that sovereignty even in a democracy can only genuinely be exercised by a single individual. Friedrich, however, played a crucial role in the New Deal reconfiguration of American liberalism by leading a movement among American social scientists during the 1930s and 40s toward playing a more direct role in policymaking. ironically, the liberal ideas of Friedrich's that emerged out of this reconfiguration and would persist for decades after World War II contained strong elements of both "core" Schmittian axioms.

This dissertation centers on the realization that history evolves and is never complete because the past is elusive and perceptions sway as society changes. Throughout the turn to the twenty-first century, Spain has been moving from resistance to remembrance with regard to individual, cultural and governmental interest in the Civil War and dictatorship of the twentieth century. During the transition to democracy after General Francisco Franco’s death on November 20th, 1975, the reunified government opted to forget the divisive past with the unofficial Pacto de Olvido. Despite this impulse toward resistance, the urge for remembrance at a personal and social level evolved into a, nationwide debate. On December 26th, 2007, the incumbent Congress of Deputies enacted La Ley de Memoria Histórica, a law that mandates attention to previously denied history. In essence, this controversial ruling seeks to promote remembrance of both sides of the Civil War. Contemporary literature, media and film have long been involved in this deeply political and personal work. From the multitude of options, this project selected five renowned texts published between 1992 and 2005. The authors of Autobiografía del General Franco (1992), La voz dormida (2002), El lápiz del carpintero (1998), Enterrar a los muertos (2005), and Soldados de Salamina (2001) belong to what Marienne Hirsch defines as the postmemory generation, the one born following a national trauma. These writers do not have the privileged position of immediate contact with survivors, yet emotional and temporal distance from the events narrated empowers these Spanish authors to create nuanced, literary depictions of war and post-war experiences. In their texts, these writers challenge accepted history, poetically weave a collective memory based on testimonies, illuminate idealistic differences, counter-balance hope with horror, and narrate the transformative experience of historical research. By engaging with the past from the perspective of the present, their narrators articulate the tension between resistance and remembrance. The texts studied here offer five contrastive representations of ways in which versions of history are alternately censured or suppressed, and subsequently unearthed and refashioned in collective and official memory as political power and narrative agency are transformed in an ever-changing society.

This study analyzes one of the most active memories of state repression during democracy in Argentina: the memorial advertisements (recordatorios) of those disappeared by the most recent military dictatorship (1976-1983), which are published on a daily basis in the newspaper Página/12. In this thesis, I focus on the pictures of the victims of state repression that appear within the frame of these memorials as the expression of both cultural and personal memory. The leader of Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, Estela de Carlotto, published the first recordatorio on the tenth anniversary of her daughter’s death, in August 1988. During that same year, 20 relatives of disappeared people went to the newspaper and followed Carlotto’s footsteps, publishing advertisements themselves. Currently, more than 20 years after the first advertisement was published, three to five recordatorios appear in the newspaper every day. The emergence of the recordatorios inaugurates a new discursive genre as contradictory as the disappearance itself. On the one hand, they are connected to the announcements related to the search for missing people (serving the goal of finding a person alive). On the other hand, the recordatorios also resemble obituaries (making a tribute to someone that has passed away). The recordatorio thus emerges as an impossible reality, following the logic of both genres, thus performing both functions in a paradoxical way. This study focuses on the family pictures that appear in the recordatorios and sheds light on how they illustrate the entanglement of the family and the public sphere, and contribute to the debate on the role of personal subjectivity in the construction of collective memory. From a multidisciplinary perspective, the present thesis aims to capture the complexity surrounding these texts and the familial imagery they include, looking at the inherent tension between the private tragedy of a family that has lost one of its members and the public character that stems from their publication in one of Argentina’s national newspapers.

In this work, I propose a critical reading of contemporary Chilean culture in line with. I claim that the current state of the arts is a partial one because it does not address the paradigm of non normative sexuality as it has been claimed by Queer Studies, particularly by M.Warner, challenging social theory, and by Lacanian psychoanalysis in the readings of Zizek and Fink. In the Latin American tradition, I argue with two lines of thought and their definition of culture. The genealogy of Ortiz, Rama, Cornejo Polar and the trend sustained by García Canclini, Barbero and Laclau. I claim that sexuality is a dimension of social life that needs to be reflected upon in order to understand its impact in the formation of contemporary regimes of sexual and cultural domination. Perversion in this context provides us with a theoretical model in which a specific set of pleasures can at same time, sustain and threaten the law. Thus perversion can be understood as a cover up construct that has been used to define normative life. In the dialectic reading I do, shared fantasy is not individual but collective, and it is provided by an economic and philosophical framework generated by liberal thought which perversion uncovers. In Chile in the last fifteen years, the overexposure of intimacy and the reiteration of sexual crimes (pedophilia, fetishism, homosexuality and others) are evident symptoms of the perversion of the social bond. The aesthetic/cultural scene also shares this imprint throughout the symbolic figure of perversion and the narratives of jouissance embodied in paraphilias.

This thesis analyzes Pasos bajo el agua (Steps under Water) and Bosquejo de alturas (Impressions of Heights), texts from the Argentine writer Alicia Kozameh, as examples of an embodied l'ecriture feminine. The reading of the literary texts through the theories of French feminists Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Michel Foucault, responds to the main arguments of the thesis. First, women empower themselves through language within power relationships established in patriarchal societies; the empowered female language is written through the female body. Second, l'ecriture feminine is a style of writing not exclusive to women; it is part of heteroglossia and can be written by any person, regardless of the sex. Third, l'ecriture feminine is a legitimate voice in social discourses, deconstructs the male/female dichotomy, and establishes a horizontal and dialectic relationship between different discursive voices. Finally, heteroglossia contributes to the reconstruction of gender relationships.

This thesis examines the relationship between foreign policy autonomy and domestic repression in Romania from 1965 to 1989. This time period coincides with the rule of Romanian communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu. The thesis argues that Czechoslovakia's 1968 Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion that spelled its end had a significant impact not only on Romanian foreign policy, but also on Romanian domestic policy, until the December 1989 Revolution. The legacy of the Prague Spring shaped the prism through which Romania's communist government evaluated threats domestic and foreign; in fact, it led the leadership to conflate the two, to the point where foreign interference was a necessary condition for domestic opposition in the official conception. Approaching the study of Romanian communism within this autonomy/repression dialectical framework, the thesis examines the relationship between ideological fanaticism and public policy in the Ceausescu regime. It discusses the ways in which the regime used tactics of manipulation, persuasion, and repression to cope with threats it saw as simultaneously domestic and foreign. The theory behind this approach, therefore, could be applied to other cases of repressive, autarchic dictatorship. The thesis offers new perspectives, arguments, and evidence, as it includes substantial original archival research as well as discussion of recent Romanian language literature. It is divided into four chapters. Chapter I reviews the literature on Romania’s autonomous foreign policy as well as the literature discussing the relationship between the autonomy policy and Romania's domestic affairs. Chapter II discusses Romania's political "thaw" in the 1960s, Romanian interpretations of the Czechoslovak Prague Spring, as well as Romanian evaluations of the Soviet threat it faced, or did not face, in the late 1960s and beyond. Chapter III discusses the "re-Stalinization" of Romanian politics and society in the years following the Prague Spring and relates the atmosphere of domestic repression to the perception of foreign threat. Chapter IV examines the effects of the autonomous course on the development of Romanian dissidence, opposition, and resistance in the 1980s.

In December 1983, democratic elections ended a brutally repressive seven-year military dictatorship in Argentina. When the military fell, new social and political actors began to surface to assume the space left vacant by the military. These actors emerged from widely disparate domains throughout Argentina, including journalism, law, politics, public health, education, the arts, labor, and many others. In this dissertation, I trace the growth and evolution of some of these new actors, focusing on the emergence of figures from within the specific contexts of civilian political activity, the educational system, and the realm of cultural production. I have chosen these industries because the power of their emergence has made them particularly visible examples of the eruption of social activity that followed in the wake of the dictatorship. Among the topics treated in this dissertation are human rights trials and retroactive justice, peacekeeping operations, educational reform, the development of libraries and archives, state cultural programs, and individual cultural producers and their work to commemorate the traumas of the dictatorship. This dissertation is a story of the intellectual labor of widely disparate individuals in Argentina. I argue that this labor has come to function as a primary element in the building of democracy, and I explore the establishment of new ethical principles and the importance of intellectual work within that process. I also argue that the 1983 transition to democracy brought a remarkable shift that instigated a sudden and powerful upsurge of social and political activity in Argentina. Within this dissertation, I focus on the words and deeds of civilian politicians, military personnel, teachers, librarians, archivists, activists, writers, musicians, architects, and artists, and I explore their active processes of attempting to build a new nation and to come to terms with the trauma of the past.