American Studies Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2740
Browse
4 results
Search Results
Item The Long Tradition: Black Women and Mothers in Public Discourses(2009) Sanders, Tammy L.; Struna, Nancy L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Document THE LONG TRADITION: BLACK WOMEN AND MOTHERS IN POPULAR DISCOURSES Tammy Sanders, Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Directed By: Chair and Professor Nancy Struna Department of American Studies With her insightful analysis, Nancy Lurkins in &ldquoYou are the Race, You are the Seeded Earth:&rdquo Intellectual Rhetoric, American Fiction, and Birth Control in the Black Community (2008), asserts &ldquo(past) black leaders promoted the ideal of black domesticity and moral motherhood as a counterstrategy to white attacks. Over time, appreciating and even desiring black motherhood came to be identified with black communal pride and as a result black women became responsible for upholding the entire race&rdquo (47). Similarly, recent history has proved to be no different when it comes to the responsibility of black mothers. This dissertation will explore how public discourses involving the social sciences, films, and novels historicize, represent, and re-envision black motherhood. It will investigate how these discourses about motherhood are shaped by the historical moment of their occurrence and what they tell us about the attitudes of those establishing critical thought. By examining texts like the Moynihan Report, Ann Petry's The Street, Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun, and the 1974 film Claudine, this project will analyze the rhetoric of scholars about black motherhood alongside popular images of black mothers to illustrate how they overlap and how black women's bodies are consistently at the nexus of academic, social, cultural and political conversations. In an attempt to further complicate mothering studies by using black feminist thought as my lens, this dissertation seeks to tease out the interconnectedness of historical moments and discourses without perpetuating traditional gender norms as it relates to black female identities.Item DIVERSITY VS. THE DOCTORATE (1967-2008): THE EXPERIENCES OF BLACK AND LATINO STUDENTS THEN AND NOW(2009) Hodge, Kristen; MacDonald, Victoria-María; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since its inception in 1965, Affirmative Action has played a pivotal role in integrating predominantly white institutions of higher education with Black and Brown faces. However, at the doctoral level only marginal increases have been made over the past 30 years in the number of Black and Latino students awarded Ph.D.s. In an effort to better understand the historical phenomenon of under-representation at the doctoral level among Black and Latino students, a qualitative research study was designed that examined both the historical evolution of their lived experiences at predominantly white institutions, and the forms of capital they used to navigate through the academy. Understanding and comparing how these students have been able to navigate through these historically excluded spaces was a key goal of this research because it leant itself to the construction of a "new story" of higher education. In addition to understanding their lived experiences and their use of social/cultural capital, their narratives were also used to explore the broader concept of diversity and how it has functioned within American culture over time. The cultural landscape of higher education was an ideal locale to investigate the past and current state of race in America because much of what happens within university and college settings reflects the broader race relations of society at large. Affirmative Action served as the backdrop to construct the two historical time periods from which I drew my study participants: "Affirmative Action Implementation" and "Affirmative Action Dismemberment." A total of eight participants were recruited according to when they started their doctoral programs and divided into two comparison groups: first generation (4) and second generation (4). Critical Race Theory (CRT), Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCRT), and a Community Cultural Wealth framework were used as the theoretical lens to situate the findings. Several patterns emerged including: race and cultural space; persistence; and social activism.Item Raising Black Dreams: Representations of Six Generations of a Family's Local Racial-Activist Traditions(2007-04-20) Daves, John Patrick Cansler; Caughey, John; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)How do local African American leadership traditions develop and change? How do they compare to and connect with national African American leadership traditions? This dissertation explores some answers to these questions through an examination of the history of one middle-class African American family's communal activist legacy. It is built, first, on my research into my adopted family's local, evolving communal-leadership ideology, which extends from the antebellum era to the present; and, second, on my examination of how my family's leadership tradition compare with and connect to patterns in national black leadership conventions. In the chapters, I lay out the basic issues I will investigate, discuss the literature on black leadership, contextualize my study, and introduce and define the concepts of racial stewardship, local racial activism, local racial ambassadorship, and racial spokesmanship which are central to my exploration. I conclude the dissertation with an summation of my work, and how my research contributes to existing scholarly conversations about black leadership traditions found in African American Literature, History and the social sciences.Item On the Edge of Freedom: Free Black Communities, Archaeology, and the Underground Railroad(2004-06-09) LaRoche, Cheryl Janifer; Shackel, Paul A.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"On the Edge of Freedom" is an interdisciplinary study of five free black communities that functioned as Underground Railroad sites along the southern borders of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Small rural free black communities along the borders of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers were situated in the landscape to offer sanctuary to runaways as first points of entry within often violent and racially hostile southern regions of the northern border states. I worked with National Forest Service archaeologists, universities, and private non-profit preservation groups. By combining archaeology, with oral and documentary history, genealogy, and cultural landscape studies, I contribute new comparative and theoretical models for explicating African-American history, and identifying and mapping undocumented Underground Railroad sites. The resulting geography of resistance reveals the risks African Americans endured in the cause of their own liberation. Blacks who participated in the subversive work of the Underground Railroad knew the level of violence to which whites would resort in response to black defiance in the face of oppression. Interrelated families played a central role in the establishment of the frontier settlements. Exclusive and independent of white abolitionist activities, virtually every nineteenth-century black settlement, urban or rural, offered some form of assistance to those escaping slavery. African-American, as well as white, Underground Railroad workers were loosely organized to offer assistance within their separate religious denominations although they worked across racial lines. For four out of the five sites, I demonstrate the relationship between the independent black church and the Underground Railroad. Methodist minister and fourth bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, William Paul Quinn, who was instrumental in the spread of Methodism to the northwest, established two churches associated with Underground Railroad sites in this study. Maps, in conjunction with archaeological techniques, are crucial to the identification and recovery of these enclaves. By mapping free black settlements, and black churches, new Underground Railroad routes emerge from the shadows of larger, nearby, better-known Quaker and abolitionist sites. Mapping little known African American Underground Railroad routes has implications for African American preservation initiatives and heritage tourism.