In late October 1952, the Pan-Africanist leader George Padmore sent a letter to Kwame Nkrumah, the future first president of Ghana. “Brother,” he wrote, “since the storm in Kenya I have been working night and day.” Padmore was referencing an event in Kenya that had occurred only two days prior: Operation Jock Scott, during which the British colonial administration rounded up thousands of suspected supporters and leaders of the notorious “Mau Mau” movement. “Brother,” he continued, “it is hell let loose. Only the gods of Africa know how it will end.” Padmore’s letter was penned in London and travelled over 4,000 miles to reach Nkrumah in what was then the Gold Coast. It was through such transnational networks that the meaning of particular anticolonial African conflicts was articulated, discussed, and contested. And within both colonial and anticolonial networks on the Continent during the post-WWII era, few historical moments held more salience than that of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya (1952-1960).This dissertation (“‘The Storm in Kenya’: Mau Mau in Systems of Thought”) examines the international impact and legacy of the Mau Mau Uprising through analyzing a diverse body of source material drawn from archival collections located in Kenya, Great Britain, Portugal, France, and the United States. I reconstruct visions of Mau Mau in order to show how this event came to be understood in both other parts of the African continent and the wider world—visions which often compete against, or overlap with, one another. Through examining how Mau Mau was understood outside of Kenya, I show that the ways in which Mau Mau was embedded in broader networks and knowledge systems grants us novel insights into the political, intellectual, and social history of decolonization in Africa. “The Storm in Kenya” covers not only the period of the Mau Mau Emergency (which comprised most of the 1950s), but also historicizes the conceptual frameworks brought to bear on this movement both prior and subsequent to this period. The broader arc of the dissertation also engages with the comparative study of European imperialisms, Pan-African thought, and the history and theory of post-WWII counter-insurgency.

This dissertation argues that the pervasiveness of retro in today’s popular music culture is part of a larger story about transformations not just in the music industry, but in global capitalism. I take up the broad usage of the retro concept developed in the 2000s by Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds, for whom retro not only describes musical revivals and new acts committed to period stylization; retro designates a larger cultural situation where pop music’s very recent past looms ever-greater over its present. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s concept of the nostalgia mode and his approach to periodization, they concluded that retro indexes cultural exhaustion and music’s severance from historicity, if not the “end of history” itself. By contrast, I argue that retro is less about historical closure than a new way of relating to music as history. Across three case studies of retro, I demonstrate why we are listening to more “old” music than ever before and how the reactivation of music history can further different cultural and political ends. In a history of rock radio that culminates in the Classic Rock format, I show how the emergence of nostalgia formatting heralded a new era for rock’s self-commemoration. While the music industry canonizes the past in order to resell it, distorting our sense of history in the process, I show how musical revivals “from below” can use music history toward resistant ends. Rather than simply trying to repeat the past, I argue that revivals carry history into the present. In an analysis of the 1980s boogie-funk revival known as the modern funk scene, I show how bygone music genres can serve as sites of cultural recovery, continuity, and community building. Though grassroots musical revivals have contributed to a growing interest in music history, the biggest contributor to today’s listening habits derives from the growth and popularity of streaming platforms. As I show in a case study of Spotify, financialization has transformed the music industry in ways that bias our listening toward older catalog titles. A materialist account of retro therefore provides a history of the present.

Abstract: Catholic Interracialism in New Orleans, 1930-1980: A Historical Survey with Implications for the Post-Katrina Moment

The actions of the church today, in particular the possibility and limitations of a Catholic interracial program, may be understood as part of a longer historical process of interracial activism in the Catholic church. Explorations of that history in turn provide insight into the complex racial and political order in the city today. In the early 1930s, black Catholic layman Thomas Wyatt Turner called for a national black Catholic organization to represent the voices of black Catholics in the struggle for racial equality. For Turner, blacks needed to be the architects of the movement for racial justice in the Church. Ultimately, the Church’s decision to temper their approach to racial justice resulted in the repression of Turner’s organization, the Federated Colored Catholics, and black self-determination in the Church more generally. By the 1940s, blacks were still attending racially segregated Catholic Churches in New Orleans where the Catholic interracial movement found its strongest supporters. In this period, while some prominent blacks did have a say in the trajectory of the Church’s social action plan, they were still underrepresented at interracial social action meetings. As the Catholic church in New Orleans struggled to implement the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954) in the 1950s and 60s, black Catholics once again asked that they be the architects of their own liberation, but once again they were underrepresented. In the 1970s when the Associated Catholic Charities resettled thousands of Vietnamese refugees in New Orleans East, the Church disregarded the impact their resettlement efforts would have on an already economically and politically bereft city. Blacks argued that the economic assistance the Catholic Church provided the Vietnamese community was not the same assistance they offered the black community. In this period, black Catholics reinvigorated by the Black Power movement began to call for the creation of black Catholic clerical and lay organizations. At this point, blacks were done asking for a seat at the table, now they demanded one.

In other words, a complete history of Catholic interracial organizing must necessarily include a discussion of the black Catholic response. Although the Church stumbled to model true racial inclusion in much of the twentieth century, by the twenty-first century, the destruction and suffering left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina allowed the Church to come full circle in its implementation of a Catholic interracial program. Post-Katrina, the Archdiocese of New Orleans, not only provided much needed social services, but it also successfully meditated conflicts between residents and the local and state governments. The Church bridged racial divides through religious worship and verbally committed itself to ensuring that the ‘new’ New Orleans would remain racially and economically diverse. While scholars have glorified specific periods of the Catholic interracial movement arguing that it achieved some change, but ended after integration in the 1960s, my study purports that it has in fact continued well into the twenty-first century. In this post-Katrina moment, the church’s Catholic interracial plan has proven more successful than at any other time in its attempted implementation, in significant part because of black Catholic activism.

The radical Black Christians I compare in this study situated their god-talk precisely at the intersection between Black futurity and Christian eschatology. Black Theology and the End of Time examines how Black theologians during the 1960s and 70s preached, wrote, and organized around the return of Christ at the end of time by looking at how and why they used discourses of Christian eschatology to call forth transformative political futures. In particular, my dissertation stages an encounter between the preeminent Black theologian of the twentieth century, Dr. James Hal Cone (1938-2018), and the founder of Black Christian Nationalism and minister at Detroit’s Shrine of the Black Madonna, Rev. Albert Cleage Jr./Jaramogi Abebe Ageyman (1911-2000). Far from figuring Christianity as something that was essentially opioidic, these Black Power theologians developed a radical, eschatological vision centered on the problem of white supremacy.

On Tumult: A Political Theory of Noise makes audible the inextricable relationship between noise and power. Rather than hearing noise as merely an effect of struggles between the powerful and the powerless, this dissertation argues that noise is at the very heart of what is being struggled over, who is engaged in these struggles, and how that struggle is carried out. On Tumult examines the unruly crowd and its sound, taking seriously the original etymology of noise that posits a metonymic association between the two. Through a critical reading of three canonical theorists of noise—R. Murray Schafer, Jacques Attali, and Tricia Rose—I explore noise’s conflation with social disorder to gain a better understanding of the sono-politics of sovereign power and the forms of policing required for power’s reproduction. Protest, in its profane refusal to be silent and its ethical demand to be heard, challenges sovereign power over possession of what acoustic ecologist R. Murray Schafer called the Sacred Noise, meaning a capacity to make noise that can’t be silenced or censured. According to the political theorist Jacques Attali, this noise of civil unrest portends a radical transformation of social order that can only be constrained through a sacrificial noise, as either new musical forms or as permitted protest and limited riots, mediating the potential for revolutionary violence. Tricia Rose’s study of the discursive and social policing of rap artists and fans gives a more specific example of this process, detailing a long historical movement to contain Black noise tied to the persistent haunting fear of Black insurrection. By attuning to these thinkers and expanding upon their studies of noise, this dissertation demonstrates that sound studies’ is founded upon a convergence of aesthetics, media theory, political theology and the phenomenology of power. Ultimately, On Tumult argues for noisemaking’s capacity to materialize the radical imagination through the experience of sound crossing where bodies are otherwise constrained by borders, boundaries and bondage, showing us how those prohibitions might be further challenged, transgressed, and one day abolished.

Making Water Liquid: Hydraulic Settlement in California’s Central Valley provides a social, spatial, and historical account of the role of water management in the Anglo conquest of California. This work focuses on the San Joaquin Valley from the mid-nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century to evaluate efforts by settlers, farmers, scientists, engineers, and administrators to render land and water into objects of knowledge, ownership, investment, and use. Drawing on archival research and fieldwork, I develop the concept of hydraulic settlement to describe the strategic use of hydraulic infrastructure, governmental institutions, and financial instruments to carry out a mode of colonial settlement and capital accumulation defined by its relationship to the manipulation and control of water. Charting a contingent history from Indigenous reservations and swampland reclamation through canal irrigation, hydraulical materialism, and political hydrography to water districts, groundwater extraction, and the bonds of settlement, this research reveals how the seemingly neutral processes used to manage, measure, and monetize water belie understudied histories of dispossession, exclusion, inequality, and violence.

This dissertation focuses on the ways that contemporary poetics of the transpacific region (US, Oceania, and Guåhan/Guam) address race and racial subjectivity, by reading the poetry of six transpacific poets with and against frameworks of Black critical theory, decolonial theory, indigenous studies, and whiteness studies. The "translocal solidarity" (Rob Wilson) of Pacific-linked poetics is theorized through a conception of Oceania as a connective place, an oceanic "commons" (Epeli Hau'ofa). This cross-regional framing enables a discussion of an affiliated poetics that moves beyond bordered notions of national racial identities or nation-state derived racial subjectivity¬, in order to examine the ways that poetry across the Pacific ocean connects slavery, anti-Blackness, and colonial genocide to white supremacy and frames alternative visions to it. I argue that through poetry’s ability to voice an ontology of the self that arises from connection to the land as well as its capacity to process, rework, and dismantle language structures, poetry has an unique capacity to carry out decolonial work.

By examining the works of both Black US poets and poets addressing indigeneity and settler colonialism in the Pacific I ultimately seek to address poetry's relationship to racial subjectivity and decolonialization in the wider Pacific context, and posit racial categories as shifting, dynamic sites of intersectional identity, selfhood, and culture. I consider the historical influence of Black radicalism on Black poetics in the US and its conception of Black subjectivities on the contemporary decolonization movement in the Pacific, alongside the influence of Māori and Pacifika radical activism on transpacific poetry and its conceptions of racial subjectivities. As such I think through the unique contributions of this region, broadly construed, to global adoptions, contestations, and reimaginings of racial selfhood.

This dissertation takes a social psychological approach to critical race and cultural studies as it makes use of in-depth interviews and archival data to draw relationships between the personal accounts of musicians who were inducted into the Los Angeles Unified School District’s desegregation effort and the broader sociohistorical context of desegregation within which these accounts were experienced. Specifically, this project explores how youths who attended desegregated schools in the 1980s and 1990s used music to navigate new forms of intercultural social interactions. At times, this meant employing racialized genres to reaffirm intra-communal solidarity and/or subvert the coupling of such genres with racialized bodies, while at others, youths engaged a cross-cultural politics to explore new identities, thus expanding upon existing notions of self, community and cultural belonging. In this sense, music became a site wherein categories of sameness and difference were both erected and obscured. A primary focus of this dissertation is to explore how new forms of social interactions made possible during this era prompted unique (trans)formations of the self among youths who attended desegregated schools, and how these youths took these (trans)formations, and their music, from the schoolyard to the stage as they cultivated intercultural musical scenes that coevolved with the ideological, political and economic currents of the time. In so doing, these musical scenes engaged a cross-cultural politics that began to unsettle the institutions and ideologies of racial segregation and white supremacy, and helped to actively construct the new possibilities, and communities, that emerged during desegregation era Los Angeles. An overarching concern of the dissertation, however, is how this transformative potential has since been repackaged by politicians, policy makers, and both public and private institutions within the city to manufacture the façade of a post-racial American metropolis in a city that continues to be fraught with segregation and racial inequality. As such, contemporary Los Angeles harbors a contradictory and perplexed engagement with multiculturalism that has left racial politics within the city teetering between hope and despair.

War Material: Vietnam and Transpacific Imaginaries of Capital and Transition argues that the slaughtered Vietnamese body and Vietnam more generally – both as material substance and fantasy-driven imaginary – were conscripted to inflate, deflate, and consolidate the making of permanent war as global structure and the permanent war subject as its capture. I observe how Vietnamese slaughter as signifier, because of its idiosyncratic location within the auto-recuperative mythology of U.S. empire, has been used as the material and ideological infrastructures of U.S. asymmetrical warfare domestically and abroad from the Cold War to the present – what I refer to as war material. By thinking the Vietnamese body as war material, this dissertation also seeks to understand the machinations of permanent war as part and parcel of the crisis cycle of racial capitalism, where narratives of Vietnam, or Vietnamese subjects themselves, are deployed to enable the stagnating nation-state to revitalize itself through the invention of new necropolitical targets elsewhere. At the same time, I examine how Vietnam has been used as a global signifier to mobilize anti-imperial and anti-capitalist resistance by Internationalist actors at the geographic and social interstices of empire, despite the obfuscation of this work by anticommunism within the United States.

I divide these concerns of Vietnam across two frames: the counterinsurgent and the insurgent. Based on photojournalistic images of massacre, refugee memoirs, and white ethnostate manifestos, I examine how the evocation of a slaughtered Vietnam was continually deployed for the counter-insurgent and racist exigencies of the capitalist-cum-permanent war state. On the other hand, I examine how those very same histories, images, and narratives of slaughter were used in radical Cuban film and race radical thought to amplify insurgency and radical visions of futurity within the belly of the beast. Altogether, I mark the urgency of revisiting the afterlives of U.S. warfare across Vietnam as a story of racial capitalism in the hopes of uncovering its ongoing reverberations of psychic and material violence in the present and re-enliven its otherwise vexed histories of anti-capitalist solidarities from the past. By turning to these histories, my hope is that a study of Vietnam in a way that centers a materialist genealogy of race will offer resources that can be salvaged to pry open more expanded conditions and imaginaries of collective thriving beyond the capitalist and permanent war state.