American Studies Theses and Dissertations
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Item "Get Dressed Up For The End Of The World!": The Reinvention of the Elder Goth Subculture During a Time of Crisis(2024) Bush, Leah J.; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is an ethnographic examination of relationships between subcultural identity and Gothic social worlds in the Elder Goth subculture in Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Formed in Britain in the late 1970s, the Goth subculture is characterized by a distinct morbid aesthetic and an overwhelming emphasis on the color black. The subculture retains a relatively high number of Elder Goths who participate in the subculture beyond their youth. This interdisciplinary project draws from the lifespan perspective of age studies and aspects of performance studies and queer utopian theory. Individual identities and Gothic communities are built and sustained through subculturally specific fashion and embodied practices at nightclubs, outdoor gatherings, and the phenomenon of virtual streaming dance nights which emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project also considers how meaning is made in subcultural places. Elder Goths draw on the subculture’s embrace of dichotomies in life, commitment to adaptation, and deepen their investment with the subculture at transitional points in their lives. Subculture is thus a fluid process of worldmaking which unfolds over the life course. This dissertation underscores the power of agency in making new and better worlds.Item Black Nightmare Imaginary: Popular Music, Collective Trauma, and the Intransigence of Antiblack Violence(2024) Donnell, Dallas Taylor; Bruce, La Marr J; Avilez, GerShun; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Black Nightmare Imaginary: Popular Music, Collective Trauma, and the Intransigence of Antiblack Violence” is an interdisciplinary examination of the Black Nightmare Imaginary, a form of ideological common sense about the precarity of Black life and the necessity of various modes and maneuvers of contestation and escape needed to survive. I argue that Black Americans have shared access to a psychic repository of scenes and scenarios of antiblack violence that exist in vivid detail out of a collective awareness of the omnipresent violence foundational to Black life itself. Black musicians can tap into this shared terrain of terror through creative works that return us to these traumatic moments and perform perseverance in the face of that trauma. These scenes of violence include the horror of the auction block, the humiliation of the minstrel show, the degradation of the social services visit, the tension of a traffic stop, and more. This is the stuff of our nightmares—the full spectrum of antiblack violence that persists through what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlives of slavery.” Foregrounding these scenarios of violence, Black musicians create works that can be read as enacting tactics of resistance to that violence. These tactics include vigilantism, nihilism, opacity, and marronage. Incorporating sonic, visual, literary, and discursive methods, I use the theoretical lens of the Black Nightmare Imaginary to do interdisciplinary analyses of the songs, music videos, album covers, and journalistic representations of a set of post-Civil Rights era Black musicians—including Mary J. Blige, Prince, N.W.A, 2pac, and Sister Souljah. This work challenges prevailing attitudes that misunderstand and devalue Black creative works with simplistic binaries of good /bad, positive/negative, political/apolitical. To the contrary, these are complex works that reckon with both the life and death stakes of the violence foundational to Black American life and the irreducibility and irrepressibility of that life to its influence.Item Performing Archives: How Central Americans Perform Race in the DMV(2024) Hernandez, Wanda Roselee; Guerrero, Perla M.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Performing Archives: How Central Americans Perform Race in the DMV examines the lives of Central Americans in the Washington metropolitan area, also known as the DMV, between 1960 and 2000. I explore how Central Americans were racialized and how their personal archives demonstrate quotidian performances of race and community formation in the region. To determine how Central Americans were racialized, I discursively analyze local newspapers, as well as letters, congressional proceedings, and reports sources, to make sense of the racial ideologies that circulated regionally. The racial meanings ascribed to Central Americans is significant because it shapes how others perceived them. These perceptions also had material impacts on their lives, informing where they live, where they work, their experiences in schools, and interactions with police. Local media, politicians, and bureaucrats used language and images to construct Central Americans as a racial Other. In their racialization, they also used African Americans as a comparative foil, resulting in an ideological binary between Blackness and Latinidad in the region. Central Americans were described as Spanish-speaking, brown, working-class, “illegals,” and delinquents. This homogenized Central Americans, a racially and ethnically diverse diaspora. As a method of self-documentation and self-preservation, Central Americans’ personal archives complicate and contest this dominant discourse. Reading personal archives performatively reveals the ways in which Central Americans navigated their racialization through quotidian performances of race. Racial performances refer to Central Americans’ embodied knowledges on race. These performances consisted of learning African American Vernacular English to find belonging, relying on kin networks to transgress the spatial constraints of illegality, or expressing solidarity through declarations and gestures, like head nods. Overall, my argument is twofold. First, I argue that Central Americans’ racialized experiences be understood through their personal archives because they provide insight into the interpersonal effects of, and quotidian responses to, racist structures. Second, I argue that Central Americans’ experiences navigating a region historically defined through a Black-and-white racial binary allows us to understand the processes of race-making more deeply by demonstrating that their racialization is informed by local and hemispheric racism that draw on a variety of signifiers to place others in shifting hierarchies.Item The Laboring Scholar: Community College Geographies and the Politics of Care(2024) Hofmann, Anne Elizabeth; Guerrero, Perla; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"The Laboring Scholar: Community College Geographies and the Politics of Care" is an institutional ethnography that investigates the personal, political, and economic costs to student caregivers seeking a college degree. Through a critical analysis of student interviews and a close examination of community college structures and histories, I deploy an interdisciplinary, qualitative methodology that seeks to topple and contest previous ways of researching two-year collegiate structures in the U.S. I argue that, internally, community colleges offer intermittent respites from the physical and emotional labor of caregiving by being locations of intellectual invigoration and professionalization for students; however, I also address how community colleges’ positioning within larger regional and global political economies ultimately renders them stations of stagnation for many students, especially those with the most overlapping needs and markers of difference. To analyze these concepts, I use an interpretive framework that threads theories of disinvestment, structural exclusion, and predatory inclusion, to explore the use of the term “care,” which is used flexibly across institutional and everyday life to recruit students and animate collegiate recruiting and retention initiatives. I trace the link between two-year schools’ reputation as both places of “opportunity” and “second chances,” and as a stigmatized alternative to “real college.” I do so by examining the language and visual arguments deployed by colleges’ public-facing websites, as situated within broader historical-political narratives about community colleges, and by conducting in-depth interviews with caregiving students. I find that political and popular beliefs regarding studenthood and care work are internalized by students, particularly those with the fewest financial and time resources. Additionally, the overlap between race, gender, and unpaid care work aligns with those students who are the least likely to graduate from college and the most likely to accrue significant debt and physical or mental distress due to their attempts. The study triangulates institutional histories, neoliberal rhetorics of education and success, and student caregiver testimony to conclude that unpaid care labor for biological or chosen family is simultaneously a primary barrier, a fundamental source of personal joy, and a possible location of subversive power for community college students seeking a post-secondary credential.Item SETTING THE TRANSPACIFIC KITCHEN TABLE: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF FOOD IN THE KOREAN AMERICAN DIASPORA(2024) Kim, Jung Min; Forson, Psyche W; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Setting the Transpacific Kitchen Table: The Cultural Politics of Food in the Korean American Diaspora” is a material culture analysis of key dishes and ingredients of the Korean American diaspora. The study begins in South Korea following the Armistice on July 27, 1953 and follows the movement of Korean people, foods, and ideas to the United States in the decades after the war to the present day with a specific focus on three dishes: Budae jjigae (Army Base Stew), kimchi (traditional fermented vegetable), and rice. This dissertation unpacks the recipes and some of the meanings of these dishes to understand and contextualize their importance in Korean and Korean American foodways historically and into the present moment. Central to this project is the material “afterlife” of these ingredients and dishes- some introduced by foreign powers, while others are the most Korean of dishes- the lingering impact on how Korean and Korean Americans create place and meaning from these dishes. How do these dishes come to be? How do they come together to become symbolic of the Korean diasporic experience? In answering these questions, I hope to document and interrogate the range of emotional, cultural, and material responses that budae jjigae, kimchi, and rice have engendered from artists, chefs, mothers, and everyday Koreans and Korean Americans. With the increase in visibility and popularity of Korean foods in the American food lexicon, the aim of this study is to help historicize and contextualize this rise through exploring the complex relationship between Korea and the United States through foodways. In doing so it will interrogate and analyze the “entanglements” of transpacific power and political economies through foodways to understand the dialectic between state power and community resilience and resistance.Item Roger Williams Park: Providence, Rhode Island's Response to the American Urban Parks Movement, 1868-1892(1988) Barbeau, Laura Jo; Caughry, John; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, MD)As a result of industrialization and growth, early nineteenth century urbanites began to lose accessible natural environments. Concern among the middle classes and social elite gave birth to the Rural Cemetery Movement in 1831, which spurred the creation of New York's Central Park in 1858. Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, it was the nation's first example of what became t he Urban Parks Movement. The movement embraced a new landscape aesthetic and philosophy focusing on man's relation to nature and the moral and social benefits of this relationship. Vital to this framework was a belief in the park's ability to improve the social behavior and artistic sensitivities of the lower and working classes. This case study examines how Providence, Rhode Island experienced the Urban Parks Movement from 1868 to 1892. During a three-phase process of implementation , conflict arose over issues of moral improvement, civic boosterism, and real estate speculation. After public debate concerning its location, Providence's first substantial public park, Roger Williams Park, was officially approved by the city government in 1872. Six years later the park was designed by Horace Cleveland in accordance with the landscape aesthetic of the Urban Parks Movement. Cleveland was an associate of Olmsted and one of the nation's few noteworthy nineteenth century landscape architects. This study has utilized primary sources such as mayoral correspondence , public addresses , annual reports, real estate deeds, and plot maps to trace Providence's park-making process. My study of Roger Williams Park concludes in 1892 with the completion of Cleveland's plan and the addition of three hundred acres to the park. This thesis shows how the development of an urban park is the product of particular social and cultural forces.Item Marguerite Higgins: Journalist 1920-1966(1983) Keeshen, Kathleen Kearney; Lounsbury, Myron O.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, MD)The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the journalistic c areer of Marguerite Higgins from 1940 to 1966, to analyze her notions of news and news writing and of the duties of a journalist, and to assess her contributions to the field of American journalism. Marguerite Higgins was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism for international reporting. Her award recognized her war correspondence from Korea, where she firmly established the acceptance of women covering the news from the battlefield. Higgins contributed to mid-twentieth century journalism in signficant ways: she wrote hundred of articles for newspapers and periodicals over the twenty-five years of her career. Her work ranged from cub reporting on the Vallejo (California) Times-Herald, to a twenty-one year career with the New York Herald Tribune, to the rank of syndicated columnist with the Newsday Syndicate in the early Sixties. A graduate of the University of California at Berke ley and of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in 1942, Higgins demonstrated that a woman could handle the professional demands and responsibilities of fast-paced and often danger-filled journalism. In addition to her front-page newspaper stories, Higgins described events of the times in scores of periodicals and in a number of books that include War in Korea: Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent (1951); News Is a Singular Thing (1955); Red Plush and Black Bread (1956); and Our Vietnam Nightmare (1965). In addition in 1962, she wrote a juvenile, Jessie Benton Fremont, and with Peter Lisagor, in 1963, described experiences of some State Department representatives in a collection called Overtime in Heaven: Tales of the Foreign Service.Item Paradise Remixed: The Queer Politics of Tourism in Jamaica(2023) Abdullah-Smith, Hazim Karim; Mirabal, Nancy R; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Employing an interdisciplinary approach, “Paradise Remixed: The Queer Politics of Tourism in Jamaica” examines the dominant historical, literary and ideological narratives of tourism in Jamaica. At the same time, it examines the intersection of tourism and sexuality through an analysis of media representations of homophobia and queer Jamaican discussions of progress. Noting that tourism is a privileged form of mobility, this dissertation uses tourism to interrogate the array of historical and contemporary tensions of class, race, sexuality and how such tensions are negotiated through Black diasporic and queer Jamaican ways of knowing. This dissertation begins by tracing how the promotion of Jamaica as an ideal tourist destination, since the early 1900s, heavily shaped politics and culture on the island and abroad. Jamaica’s reputation as a tourist paradise was manufactured and depended on a continual rearticulation of what Jamaica is and who Jamaicans are. Drawing on a range of media archives from Jamaican newspapers to African American lifestyle publications, this dissertation argues that the success of Jamaica’s paradisical tourist image comes after difficult debates about how Jamaica should be represented. Interestingly, the successful touristic representations would greatly impact how African Americans would imagine Jamaica as a tourist destination. By the late 20th century, tourism again becomes a site of fracture and precarity. The calls to end homophobic music and a proposed boycott threatened Jamaica’s image as a welcoming paradise. The leaders of these campaigns, primarily North Americans, deployed a global strategy that brought attention to homophobia in Jamaica. However, these same leaders failed to amplify the nuanced voices of queer Jamaican activists who were progressively gaining visibility, strengthening their own organizations and articulating for themselves what it means to be queer and Jamaican. In recent years, some have even established their own tourism businesses. For example, initiatives like Connek create safe spaces for queer people, spark genuine transnational connections and transform perceptions of queer life in Jamaica. In centering queer Jamaican experiences, this dissertation highlights the nuanced voices, artistic expressions and activism of queer Jamaicans, and acknowledges the safe spaces they have and continue to create through tourism and beyond.Item Counter-Capital: Black Power, The New Left, and the Struggle to Remake Washington, D.C. From Below, 1964-1994(2023) Kumfer, Timothy Daniel; Hanhardt, Christina B; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Counter-Capital: Black Power, the New Left, and the Struggle to Remake Washington, D.C. From Below, 1964-1994” traces how grassroots organizers in the nation’s capital fought for greater control over the city and its future between the War on Poverty and rise of neoliberal austerity, helping to shape its recent past and present. Comprising a set of linked case studies, it explores how a generation of activists forged in the crucibles of the Black freedom struggle and resistance to the Vietnam war responded locally to redevelopment schemes, planned inner-city freeways, nascent gentrification, and an exponential rise in homelessness from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. The campaigns they waged brought them into confrontation with federal administrators, legislators, mayors, and even the president. They also led to moments of collaboration with the state, altering the course of urban and social policy locally and nationally and contributing to the growth of community development and direct service approaches. Going beyond the boundaries of policymaking, the radicals it follows fostered emancipatory and participatory visions for the District and urban life more generally rooted in their movement ideals, ones which remain instructive even as they encountered obstacles to their full realization. Drawing on a diverse array of archival materials including organizational newsletters, meeting minutes, event flyers, campaign brochures, and correspondence; underground press and community papers alongside mainstream news outlets; documentary film and preserved footage; and oral histories and personal interviews, “Counter-Capital” contributes to debates in the fields of African American, social movement, and urban history. The project is further animated by and participates in discussions taking place across the correlating interdisciplinary fields of African American studies, American studies, and urban studies, bringing aspects of these fields that don’t always speak to one another into closer conversation. Laboring at these intersections, it shows how sustained attention to space—and specific places—can reframe the historiography of Black Power and the New Left and how centering activists and their campaigns expands the literature on Washington while troubling conventions in the composite portrait of late 20th C. US cities.Item Lucy Stone: Speaking out for Equality(1995) Kerr, Andrea Moore; Diner, Hasia; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md)This dissertation attempts a cultural, political, and traditional biography of the abolitionist and feminist leader, Lucy Stone, (1818-1893). It also offers a major revision of nineteenth-century historians' treatment of the schism that occurred immediately after the Civil War in the woman suffrage movement. The issue that divided Stone from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony was whether woman suffragists should work to prevent passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Stone led the majority of suffragists in supporting the enfranchisement of freedmen; Stanton and Anthony actively campaigned to defeat black suffrage. The schism that resulted lasted for more than twenty years. During this time, Stone forged the American Woman Suffrage Association into an effective, politically savvy lobbying machine. Its work and its methods formed the model for the organization that would eventually attain woman suffrage in 1920. The dissertation also focuses on Stone's private life, seeing in it both the extraordinary triumph of a singular "public" woman over the restrictions of her time and place, and the desperate personal struggle of the "private" woman, trying to balance marriage, motherhood, and career. Rising from humble, yeoman stock in western Massachusetts, Stone became internationally famous. From her pre-nuptial marriage agreement of 1855 to the unusual conditions of her will written as she lay dying in 1893, Stone attempted to thread her way through a legal, political, and social minefield.