American Studies Theses and Dissertations
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Item ACTS OF QUEER RESILIENCE: TRAUMA AS IDENTITY AND AGENCY IN LGBTQ POLITICAL ASYLUM(2022) Perez, Christopher J; Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution is the impetus for asylum seekers to flee their home countries and seek protection elsewhere. Much of the scholarly literature and published legal cases correlate persecution with trauma and approach traumatic events of asylum seekers as always living with barriers or as a “victim.” Additionally, while there is extensive research and scholarly work on LGBTQ immigrants, there is little work specifically on LGBTQ asylum seekers, which suggests these stories matter and have value but often go unheard. Whose stories are told, heard, and valued with immigrants, and specifically asylum seekers? And, what are the risks or advantages of telling stories? For asylum seekers, making a credible case of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution places their trauma in an exchange of capital that advances neoliberal governmentality in the U.S. The nation-state benefits when resourceful “victims” of persecution ask for protection. Neoliberal governmentality can be traced to Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower” where the body is viewed as a laboring machine, disciplining the body to optimize its capabilities and extort its forces. Biopower is literally having power over other bodies in “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations.” Although neoliberal governmentality is a necessary component in discussions of political asylum, its reductionist aim leaves little room for agency for asylum seekers or those with asylum status. How might political asylees use their identities and trauma to subvert neoliberal governmentality? I argue that LGBTQ asylum seekers use their own tactics and techniques in an “art” of self-determination or what I call queer resilience to navigate and negotiate systems and structures of power. While there is no doubt that trauma exists for asylum seekers, using trauma to categorize asylum seekers as lacking, weak, defective, or even victims is a reductionist approach in understanding asylum seekers’ identities and agency. Trauma is operational in how one negotiates structures and systems of power, different spaces, building networks, and obtaining resources. Trauma offers both a useful entry into the legal aspects of political asylum processes and also advances discussions of subjectivity and epistemology. Using narrative analysis, grounded theory, poststructuralist theory, and queer theory, this dissertation unpacks the creative agency of LGBTQ asylum seekers as they make sense of their lives, form their identities, navigate spaces, and negotiate systems of power to “queer” political asylum processes. More specifically, using interviews and examining published cases and other published archival materials, this dissertation details the story of a gay man from a Latin American country who successfully gained asylum in the U.S. and how his asylum process, his trauma, and his racial, gendered, and sexual identities contributed to his agency, which subverts political asylum and offers new ways to consider the operation of biopower, governmentality, and self-determination.Item “LEARN AS WE LEAD”: LESSONS FROM THE FRONT LINES OF THE POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN(2021) Hufnagel, Ashley Marie; Padios, Jan; Hanhardt, Christina; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the spring of 1968, over six thousand poor people—black, chicano, white, Puerto Rican, and Native American from rural areas to urban centers—converged on Washington, D.C. to call attention to poverty and inequality in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. This six-week demonstration was part of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final and oft-forgotten Poor People’s Campaign. Fifty years later, thousands of people in over forty states have taken part in reviving this movement as the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival (PPC 2018+), co-chaired by Bishop William Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. From low-wage workers’ fight for $15/hour minimum wage in the South to the Apache struggle to protect sacred land from copper mining in Oak Flat, Arizona; from the battle to stop emergency managers from poisoning and privatizing water services in Michigan to the urgent demands to abolish the criminalization of black, immigrant, and poor communities, “Learn as We Lead” investigates how local and national organizers are utilizing the vehicle of the campaign to build a broad-based movement across lines of identity, geography, and issue, while centering the leadership of the poor. Drawing on participant observation within the campaign, interviews with over forty grassroots leaders from twenty-seven states, and archival research, this dissertation uncovers how movement practitioners are reproducing and reformulating a long history of multiracial and multi-issue class politics—from the welfare rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the National Union of the Homeless of the 1980s and 1990s, from the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) of the early 2000s to the Moral Mondays and low-wage worker movements of recent years. In a time of deepening political, economic, environmental and health crisis, leaders with the PPC 2018+ offer critical insights on forging class consciousness and solidarity across difference.Item Broken City: Race, Property, and Culture(2018) Casiano, Michael; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Broken City: Race, Property, and Culture is an interdisciplinary study situated within the fields of urban history, African American Studies, and ethnic studies that examines Baltimore City during a period that roughly spans the late-nineteenth century to the mid-1950s. Using archival sources and close readings, this study examines city law, newsprint, popular culture artifacts, public health periodicals, reform publications, and social scientific production to narrate how, during this period of massive urban growth, theories of black life and culture manifested in city policy around the question of property and its regulation. This dissertation’s contribution to similar studies around the question of black geographic exclusion and containment is to highlight the ways that property controls—and the bases of municipal power itself—were bound up in the intentional criminalization, pathologization, and destruction of black communities, all of which were justified by persistent cultural critiques of black fitness for civil life centered on gendered and sexualized assumptions. The dissertation’s interrelated local investigations narrate social dramas that both exhibited culturally-specific interpretations of black life and precipitated institutional mandates guided by—or reproductive—of those interpretations. One investigation analyzes the discourses of black deviance that animated Baltimore’s crusade against the “cocaine evil” in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century to demonstrate how municipal power grew during this period to account for Jim Crow-era investments in disciplining black Baltimoreans and white desires to justify residential exclusion. Another investigation charts how, in the city’s racial covenants, black people became indexed as “nuisance,” a legal maneuver that allowed developers and white homeowners to categorize black people as a hazardous land use whose exclusion was protected under property rights. All told, these investigations demonstrate how, in Baltimore, the basis of municipal power and development, rooted in the protection and maintenance of property, was and continues to be based in the containment of black life through cultural prescriptions of black deviance.Item Multiraciality Enters the University: Mixed Race Identity and Knowledge Production in Higher Education(2016) Allen, Aaron; Hanhardt, Christina; Struna, Nancy L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Multiraciality Enters the University: Mixed Race Identity and Knowledge Production in Higher Education,” explores how the category of “mixed race” has underpinned university politics in California, through student organizing, admissions debates, and the development of a new field of study. By treating the concept of privatization as central to both multiraciality and the neoliberal university, this project asks how and in what capacity has the discourses of multiracialism and the growing recognition of mixed race student populations shaped administrative, social, and academic debates at the state’s flagship universities—the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles. This project argues that the mixed race population symbolizing so-called “post-racial societies” is fundamentally attached to the concept of self-authorship, which can work to challenge the rights and resources for college students of color. Through a close reading of texts, including archival materials, policy and media debates, and interviews, I assert that the contemporary deployment of mixed race within the US academy represents a particularly post-civil rights development, undergirded by a genealogy of U.S. liberal individualism. This project ultimately reveals the pressing need to rethink ways to disrupt institutionalized racism in the new millennium.Item Too Much to Belong: Latina/o Racialization, Obesity Epidemic Discourse, and Unassimilable Corporeal Excess(2016) Griff, Ellen Cassandra; Paoletti, Jo B; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines the discursive constructions of Latina/o bodies as excessive in order to examine how Latinas/os are excluded from belonging to the U.S. nation-state. By approaching Latina/o Studies from a Fat Studies perspective, it works to more adequately address the role of embodiment in determining processes of racialization that directly impact Latinas/os in the United States, especially in light of the role of race and racism in “obesity epidemic” discourse. This dissertation argues that cultural and even physiological explanations about the Latina/o propensity for “overweight” and “obesity” create a discourse that marks the Latina/o body as demonstrating an unassimilable corporeal excess. In turn, the rhetoric of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” are rendered inapplicable to Latinas/os, as demonstrated by both nativist and seemingly pro-immigrant discourses that posit Latina/o physical excess in the form of fatness as detrimental and even dangerous to the U.S. nation-state.Item Dissembling Diversities: On "Middled" Asian Pacific American Activism and the Racialization of Sophistication(2014) Ishii, Douglas S.; Hanhardt, Christina B; Wong, Janelle; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Dissembling Diversities: On Asian Pacific American Arts Activism and the Racialization of Sophistication interrogates how contemporary Asian Pacific American (APA) arts activism and representation has been shaped by the bureaucratic administration of "diversity" after 9/11/2001. Through close readings of texts, it specifically examines Asian American representation within scripted network television programming, graphic novels and comic strips, and indie rock as iterations of panethnic activism in media advocacy, graphical storytelling, and the independent media arts. It understands these cultural forms and diversity itself through the framework of middlebrow culture, which is constituted of texts disseminated through popular culture that normalize the accumulation of cultural capital - or non-financial embodiments of class status such as education and literacy - as cultural citizenship. Dissembling Diversities makes evident how the elevation of these texts through discourses of "Art" and "diversity" relies on the association of cultural capital with whiteness, particularly through the racial exclusivity of their representations and through how the forms' history of class elevation expresses a white/anti-Black divide. Because of its dependence on cultural capital, the visibility for issues facing Asian American communities as expressed through the creation of art participates in the racialization of sophistication. In other words, deployments by APA artists and activists of traits associated with cultural sophistication - such as artistry, learnedness, worldliness, and status - can both illustrate Asian Americans' contributions to a culture of diversity, while reinforcing other racial, sexual, and gender exclusions through class hierarchy and respectability. However, APA activisms that contest the exclusivity of cultural capital can challenge these white/anti-Black class schemes. As such, Dissembling Diversities not only critiques APA arts activism's complicities with the racialization of sophistication, but also examines how it can turn sophistication against itself in imagining past "diversity."Item Creating Spaces of Home: Haitian Women's Journey of Migration, "Lakay!"(2012) Poinson, Manouchka; Bolles, A. Lynn; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The literature on Haitian women immigrants has not offered a comprehensive portrayal of their experiences in America, but has treated their plight as a neutral entity, void of differences. Even more distressing, there is a lack of focus on the Haitian women's experiences in the U.S. based literature. However, the true experience of many Haitian women migrants is that they have been either the first to migrate and or the focal point of the migration process in terms of recruitment. This study addresses the specificity of Haitian women's experiences in the Washington, D.C. area, not one of the long established immigration centers in the U.S. An intersectional approach that maps the simultaneity of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class and legal status on the lives of these immigrants allowed theories of space, identity and notions of home to be developed. How did this group of women attempt to create "Lakay" in the metro Washington, D.C. area? Taking an ethnographical approach, this project centralizes an American immigrant population that has occupied a marginal if not invisible space by theorizing Haitian women's experience and giving them a voice in the broader framework of migration studies. Furthermore, the project will illustrate Haitian women's migration stories through examining their roles within their family, the community and transnationally through an analysis of the cultural understanding of Haitian women as central pillars of society. In particular, this ethnographic study explores the everyday lives of Haitian women as immigrants and also provides an in-depth analysis of their social worlds. We find that Haitians in the Washington, D.C. area were not visible due in large part to the small population size, the dispersal of the community, both factors that contributed to the lack of prominent social institutions that have historically drawn immigrants to an area. Despite this, the participants have created a space of home in Washington D.C. in which their investment in the community lies mainly in the churches and organizations to which they belong. From a transnational perspective, home for the participants is also simultaneously located in the U.S. and in Haiti, where they long to return.