In recent years, a number of humanities scholars have called for event-driven ethnographies of the particular as a tactic to mitigate the flattening of other people’s everyday lives, thoughts, and purposes, which has been so frequently represented in literature. What “messiness,” what oddities have been omitted from accounts that generalize about entire communities based upon a researcher’s few interactions with a few interlocutors? The following essay is an experimental attempt to tell a story from fieldnotes and recollections dating to the mid-1970s when I undertook 45 months of dissertation research among Tabwa people in what is now southeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. At many steps along this quirky narrative path, contingent truths are at play based upon what I understand to have been my Tabwa interlocutors’ ways of understanding such experiences—with the past tense here suggesting that an “ethnographic present” must be dated, especially given the turbulence of Congolese histories these last decades. Endnotes provide glimpses of Tabwa thinking, again based upon my sameday written records and after-the-fact memories of what a few particular people told me. I offer these in quite deliberate defiance of the standard editorial caveat that notes are not meant to be a parallel text: in this case, they are! Furthermore, my essay has no firm conclusion, no wrap-up, no convenient understanding. Instead, readers are invited to consider circumstances that struck me as unusual as they occurred, and to draw their own conclusions about how to understand the events and persons so described, including the anthropologist.

Part One of this thesis explores how the non-profit organization Invisible Children, Inc. misrepresented the conflict between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Acholi victims in Northern Uganda. This analysis of misrepresentation within the organization's films and ephemera was mainly concerned around the historical evidence and deliberate silencing of opposing opinions. Part Two illustrates how the use of pain can be employed as props in the American portrayal of "Africa", and how this portrayal can be, in turn, used to further subjugate the "idea of Africa" in American imaginaries, subsequently reinforcing Western hierarchy.

Contemporary African artists Yinka Shonibare, MBE and Djibril Diop Mambety investigate the intimate effects of colonial materiality at large, utilizing colonial era aesthetics in their work while circumventing its indexicality, finding instead new methods with which to discuss individual experience, the colonial, and the postcolonial. To address the psychological import of extant colonial material culture, I analyze these artists' particular negotiations of plural locales and temporalities in their respective bodies of work as methods of re-archiving the colonial tangible and built environments in terms of individual experience.

Gender Studies scholarship on colonialism links psychology, in terms of power dynamics and sexuality, to nation-building, racism, and empire fatigue. This decoding of humanity's most large scale colonial projects and most intimate reactions in a grand sweep of analysis, to and fro, is a task partially taken up by Shonibare and Mambety. Their work deals in terms of scale shifts, from local to global, individual to empire, and from the intimate to the immense.

This project is an arts-based examination of a series of Virgin Mary apparitions that occurred in Bol, Croatia, from June 25, 1946, until the end of September that year. The narrative focuses on two perspectives: that of Božidar Jakšić, a resident of Bol in 1946 who was imprisoned by the Yugoslavian government under the charge of conspiracy and perpetuating propaganda, and that of the artist-author, a first-generation queer American whose family comes from Bol. Based on Božidar’s journal, the artist-author uses various narrative devices and performances to reconstruct the events that occurred

Cape Verde is located at the geographical and cultural crossroads between West Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The archipelago's location physically isolates the islands, while a lack of financial opportunities encourages Cape Verdeans to emigrate to study or work. Cape Verde is a point of union for many nations around the world and many Cape Verdeans identify with being both European and African. The islands are divided culturally and linguistically while united as part of the Cape Verdean Kriolu mosaic. Opposition between isolation and union has developed divisions regarding which languages and traditions will be privileged as markers of national identity. These tensions create the context for the archipelago's first contemporary dance company, Raiz di Polon. I show how director Mano Preto has innovated a style that blurs boundaries using techniques rooted in the archipelago's folk practices and informed by intercultural collaboration. Through conducting participatory ethnographic research, accessing archives, collaborating on performances and documentating the company's work, I clarify both the strengths and the constraints of migratory flows, globalization, and the financial need for a global audience. Four strategies are employed to analyze Raiz di Polon: a grounding of key historical events that built a culture of adaptation and resistance; a discussion of Kriolu as a mode of ontological expression to which to compare movement; a dissection of the performance "Cidade Velha" that reimagines the nation through narratives and the development of a "kriolized" movement lexicon; and an examination of RDP as a local, regional, and global dance training center. Five case studies highlight how Raiz di Polon's impact can be evaluated through festival and musical concert contexts. This project makes the case that RDP succeeds in reclaiming muted postcolonial histories, uniting internal archipelagic divides, and promoting sustainability through the creation of a corporeal Kriolu lexicon. I show that RDP is emblematic to Cape Verdeans who seek to officialize Kriolu against contestations regarding the archipelago's identity as an African Nation. This dissertation shows the impact of dance, art, creolity and globalization on the autonomy of small nations and highlights dance as an important subject of diaspora and globalization studies.

This paper shows how Ananya Chatterjea and David Roussève reinterpret their lived experiences to create choreographies about the politics of diaspora on the concert dance stage. I examine how Chatterjea's reconstruction of "classical" Indian dance forms becomes the artistic foundation of her company Ananya Dance Theatre. I analyze how Roussève reinterprets an African American blues music "tradition" to construct the thematic framework of his company REALITY. As their choreographies cross boundaries of culture, race, nation, and sexuality, I argue that their work reveals the complex histories of diasporic communities. Additionally, this paper uses the autoethnographic method to discuss how these choreographers helped me to analyze cross-cultural engagement as a collective inquiry into lived experiences. A video of the performance I created from this particular research is included as supplementary material.

The HIV/AIDS pandemic has required a coordinated, global, public health response to study the disease and develop effective interventions to reduce its spread. In Suriname, South America, socioeconomic and health related disparities shaping Maroon women's lives for generations challenge intervention development due to gendered power dynamics and cultural expectations. In 2002, Fidelia Graand-Galon, an Ndjuka Maroon woman from Suriname, visited the UCLA Fowler Museums' "Break the Silence": Art and HIV/AIDS in South Africa exhibition highlighting the beaded sculptures and colored wireworks of Zulu women in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The artwork had been created as part of an art-based HIV/AIDS-awareness intervention designed to provide women safe spaces to discuss personal issues while making art capable of generating income. She decided to initiate a similar art-based initiative through her organization, the Maroon Women's Network, using the Siyazama approach developed by Kate Wells in South Africa. The Pangi Exhibition Project included HIV-awareness sessions and encouraged Maroon women to create pangi (wrap skirts) with embroidered or appliquéd HIV/AIDS-awareness messages that could be worn in urban and rainforest communities.

In 2004, their awareness initiative entered the national discourse through the "Break the Silence": Art and HIV/AIDS Akoti Kuutu Pangi Exhibition by highlighting their artistry, cultural history, and determination to preserve their vaginal washing practice, which had been identified by public health officials as increasing potential levels of HIV-risk. Through art and performance Maroon women were able to rally community support and challenge public health perspectives. This dissertation uses an ethnographic approach to examine these early Maroon-initiated awareness events and a later series of awareness events developed and presented from 2007 to 2009 by Renatha Ajoni, the first HIV-positive Maroon born and raised in Suriname to go public about her status, to see how Maroon women respond to risk-reduction strategies in Suriname.

Their narratives revealed that communal pressures often silence Maroon women as they choose between adopting behaviors that conform to expectations, but increase risk or revealing their HIV-positive status before being emotionally prepared to do so. I contend that intervention designs, like aggressive condom usage programs, allow Maroon men to maintain their gendered cultural identities while Maroon women have limited intervention options capable of doing so. As a result, particularly in rainforest villages, public health professionals remain challenged by mother-to-child and heterosexual transmission.

In this dissertation, I build discussions around the use of digital technologies in association with art and art historical contexts to ask greater cultural heritage questions regarding humanity’s relationship with digital technology. My work reflects on the emergence of digital humanities as a field in response to the experimentation and incorporation of digital methods, with an emphasis on extended reality (XR) technologies, for conducting humanities research in relation to arts and culture-based organizations. I investigate the advantages and disadvantages digital tools bring to the field of Art History today. In particular, the project focuses on modes of publishing, display, and information-capture in museums and archives that illustrate a break from “traditional” models. In doing so, I argue that digital modalities provide a distinctly different paradigm for epistemologies of art and culture. Extending previous research in museum studies and media studies, I address a selection of the latest technological interventions within museum and cultural heritage contexts that operate within a spectrum of immersive modalities and use extended reality technologies. The dissertation brings together many humanities disciplines to investigate how sharing XR within a museum both disrupts and complements the time-tested benefits of object-centered methods of display, representation, and education.

The phase “virtual actualities” within the title of the dissertation signals changes in practice that are being brought about as digital technologies, and particularly XR, become incorporated into fields of arts and culture. “Actualities” connote the practical matters associated with producing, presenting, and preserving digitally immersive materials in the contexts of gallery, library, archive, and museum (GLAM) organizations. “Reality” in turn is reserved for the qualities perceived when discussing the characteristics that define 3D and XR production. At the fore in addressing new topics in museum practices and by conducting new experimentation through the application of immersive technologies, this dissertation can offer new information for digital art history, cultural heritage, and museum studies. The aggregation of examples throughout the dissertation aims to provide a survey of the field of XR in its current state within GLAM settings in order to offer insight and guidance for future development and implementation.

This thesis comparatively and critically examines "La Noire de..." (1962) by Ousmane Sembène and "The Belly of the Atlantic" (2003) by Fatou Diome as testimonial pieces of Francophone African literature that share common themes and threads despite the 40 years that separate them. Both narratives deal with issues of cultural alienation as induced by French Colonialism, yearning for transformation, and disillusionment within the Senegalese social climate. Featuring female domestic workers as protagonists, "La Noire de..." and "The Belly of the Atlantic" relate to each other in a way that is of special interest when considering a trajectory of female voices in Senegalese testimonial fiction.

This dissertation tracks the operations of Hassan Jalloh, once a commander in Sierra Leone's devastating civil war, now self-proclaimed "King of West Africa Mystical Power and Culture." Jalloh served in the Civil Defense Forces, a pro-government militia that mobilized the imagery and practices of village hunter traditions in pursuit of local legitimacy and esoteric defense maneuvers including disappearance, metamorphosis, and bullet-proofing. Faced with disarmament and doubtful reintegration at the end of the decade-long war, Jalloh turned to Allah for guidance, then redeployed his troops as the touring Warrior Cultural and Mystical Power Dance Troupe. Through the virtuosic fusion of acts that might variously appear as fearsome masked dancing, military pageantry, bloody self-mutilation, and sleight-of-hand hocus-pocus, Jalloh publicly demonstrates the abilities he acquired in wartime and expounds on themes ranging from Islamic doctrine and cultural reconstruction to nationalism and HIV/AIDS prevention.

Building from more than eighteen months of research employing participant observation, oral histories, archival records, and critical videography, I follow Hassan Jalloh's Warriors and other troupes as they travel throughout the Mende regions of Sierra Leone and across numerous sites at which spectacle is used to manifest, marshal, and mitigate violence. I use Jalloh's program of acts as a thematic link between performances of militias, herbalists, subcultures, and initiatory societies, bringing their shared logics and aesthetics into focus. Each case exemplifies how Sierra Leonean individuals and institutions currently exploit public spectacle to navigate and influence unstable transitions between physical violence of open conflict, memories of violence, and the structural violence of consolidations of political power. Rather than unidirectional transmission from the spectated to the spectator, these performances hinge on a living interface, a relationship summed up in Jalloh's onstage axiom, "I am seeing you seeing me." Spectacles in Sierra Leone are events at which extraordinary visuality conjures crowds for many ends: to judge, to heal, to educate, to manifest invisible forces, and-most importantly in the postwar context-to effect personal and social transformations.