American Studies Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2740
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Item You Ain't Messin' Wit My Dougie: Black Masculinities in Post-Millennial Hip-Hop Song and Dance(2012) Nichols, Jason Anthony; Struna, Nancy; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Black masculinities displayed by the hip-hop generation have received quite a bit of attention in academia for the past decade. However, the analysis often begins and ends with an examination of rap lyrics. Bodies communicate concepts like masculinities and femininities, so it is shortsighted to exclude them from an analysis of hip-hop and Black masculinities. This dissertation attempts to complicate and nuance black masculinities post-2000 by viewing them through the lens of rap music, hip-hop dance, movements, and kinesic imagery. Historically, Black Dance has been monitored, controlled, and appropriated because of its ability to build communities and inspire subversion. Hip-Hop is an important mass medium that reifies power relations and hip-hop dance is another element that has been used to substantiate assumptions about Black masculinities. This dissertation argues that the larger implications of hip-hop dance instruction songs are that they can be used to distract from rebellious sentiments, and legitimize patriarchy, consumerism, and violence as authentically Black and male. Many of the case studies in this dissertation involve songs that describe dances, both in instruction and purpose. Just as linguists have argued that a Hip-Hop Nation Language exists, I argue for the existence of a Hip-Hop Kinesic Language (HHKL), in which body movements are a discourse used by hip-hoppers to communicate concepts such as masculinities. This dissertation utilizes Laban Movement Analysis, which provides a language with which to describe the movements used by artists. The song/dances are also connected to the masculine histories and social contexts of the regions out of which they come. The song/dances I selected all received major radio and video play and were recognized in the hip-hop communities as mainstream. The three regions from which the song/dances came from were the East Coast (New York), West Coast (California), and the South (Georgia).Using LMA, the videos of the artists performing the dances and songs were analyzed. This piece reflects larger relationships between the white supremacist state and African Americans, and means by which the latter have subverted the former's desires to dominate them. The state, in an attempt to control African American nationalism and economic and social independence, has co-opted Black art and media including dance. Hip-Hop dance and dance instruction songs have followed this trajectory, but still have the power to inspire and possibly foment resistance. Historically, African slaves in North and South America have used song and dance to strengthen communities and disguise insurrectionary activities. Hip-Hop dance contains the same potential.Item Mary Coble: Performance Art and Poltics of an Archive(2010) Talwar, Savneet K.; Struna, Nancy L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the relationships among performance art, the archive and intersubjectivity. Using methods of critical ethnography, visual and textual analysis, I examine the archive of performance art, and the discourses of the body, especially in the work of performance artist Mary Coble. I explore the ways in which performance art disrupts the ideological discourses of the institutional archive, especially those surrounding the body and constructing normative sexual and civic identities. The institutional archive has served as a guardian of memory that makes it the creator of knowledge. Performance artists work within the conceptual space of an archive as a way to make visible the ideological systems of power; this they do through reenactments and re-presentations, in effect creating a counter-archive of political and gendered memorial spaces. I question how performance artists, critiquing the visual hegemony of the white, male dominated art world, confront issues of identity and difference, including ones of race, gender, sexuality and citizenship. I am interested in how "knowledge" is situated in the embodied experiences of the performer, researcher, artist, community and its participants. In this sense the archive is not simply a site of documentation and knowledge retrieval, but also as a locus of the feelings and emotions that produce knowledge and meaning.Item Disturbing the Peace: Cultural Narratives and Reparations(2007-09-19) Scott, Jesse James; Parks, Sheri L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Disturbing the Peace: Cultural Narratives and Reparations African Americans' pursuit of reparations began in the eighteenth century and continues in the present. At the twilight of the twentieth century, African American slavery and reparations for that experience became a controversial topic in popular and public discourse. Inevitably, the conversation turned to economics, specifically monetary compensation. Responding to this now-global controversy, Nigerian scholar Chinweizu observed that reparations are not primarily about money. Instead, he insists, reparations are about psychological repairs, institutional repairs, educational repairs, self-made repairs, repairs of all types. Drawing on Chinweizu's conception of reparations, "Disturbing the Peace: Cultural Narratives and Reparations" examines Toni Morrison's Beloved, Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying, Sidney Lumet's The Wiz, Spike Lee's Get on the Bus, and Marc Forster's Monster's Ball as cultural narratives that illuminate the pitfalls of pursuing reparations that are restricted to the legal arena. While this dissertation responds to a historical-political project, I do not offer these cultural narratives as political instruction on how to pursue reparations. Rather, this project examines how individuals and communities within these cultural narratives pursue reparations outside of the legal arena. Despite popular representations of the pursuit of reparations as being primarily about money, I argue that the pursuit of reparations is also a narrative pursuit that disturbs the highly imagined peace of national unity. As such, investigating cultural narratives for the ways in which they engage and revise popular notions of reparations encourages a more expansive approach to identifying and repairing racial injuries for individuals and communities. Narrative does more than calculate debts; it reminds individuals of what they owe both to themselves and to the communities they inhabit, reminds them that their lives and their histories are more than notations in slave ledgers, and reminds them that they are, first and foremost, human beings. Against this legal history, the cultural narratives under consideration in "Disturbing the Peace" suggest, as does Chinweizu, that reparations depend on communities' willingness and/or ability to initiate self-made repairs.