This thesis is about Asian Americans creating and seeking a spaces of belonging, in and between essentialisms of racial, national, ethnic, and cultural borders. Starting from the 1800s, Chinese laborers formed ethnic communities and contested their belonging under the state-sanctioned Chinese Exclusion Acts. State powers as well as transnational forces paved the way for a different racial-urban climate after the 1965 Immigration Acts, which led to the ethnic and class diversification of Asian America and the creation of the "ethnoburb." As the US developed itself into an automobile state that centered White masculinity, Asian American men formed a unique Asian import subculture that augmented this mainstream consumer culture and created a sense of belonging through associations with Japanese transnational forces. From the Los Angeles ethnoburb of the 2000's rose the internationally renowned independent music label Zoom Lens. To demonstrate the necessity of transnational approaches and a focus on subcultural currents in the study of Asian American culture and urbanism, as well as to emphasize the spatially reconfiguring powers of the Internet, I argue that Zoom Lens interpolates between a White supremacist suburban racial landscape, a pan-Asian diasporic identity influenced by Japanese otaku subcultures, and an emergent pattern of metaspatialization of community formation enabled by the Internet.

Symphosius's Latin <em>Aenigmata</em> and the Old English Exeter Book, although known as two related collections of riddles, have not yet been analyzed from the perspective of their connected natures. This thesis seeks to bring the two collections into conversation as a means of discovering new information about the texts and using the textual differences to probe the authors' cultural contexts.

Basketball is considered a revenue sport within the context of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The annual March Madness tournament brings in over a billion dollars in advertising revenue alone. This is just one illustration of the influx of money lining the coffers of the NCAA and Division 1 teams each year, leading many to question why the student-athletes don't receive a bigger piece of the pie. Some pundits argue that the athletic scholarship caps and restriction of player movement enforced by the NCAA lead to players contributing more in revenue to their schools than they receive in scholarship value. We test this claim by using a modified approach to estimate marginal revenue products (MRPs) across collegiate basketball teams. We find that for 37% of the teams in our panel, the players are collectively contributing more to revenues than the amount they cost their institutions. We argue that, based on how a MRP is defined within this context, we cannot say with certainty that the current on-court revenue contributions of the remaining teams do not exceed their costs.