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 City of Hope and the 1968 Poor People's Campaign: Poverty, Protests, and Photography(2017) Bryant, Aaron E; Sies, Mary Corbin; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Scholars have produced rich materials on the civil rights movement since Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968. These resources generally offer the familiar narratives of the period, as they relate to King’s earlier campaigns as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). This includes research on demonstrations in Alabama, Mississippi, Washington, and Memphis. Few studies offer insights on King’s final crusade, the Poor People’s Campaign, however. As an original contribution to civil rights research, the following study offers an overview of King’s antipoverty crusade to contextualize the movement’s impact on America’s past and present. This study presents new insights on the movement by introducing previously undiscovered and unexamined archival materials related to the campaign and Resurrection City, the encampment between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial that housed campaign participants. Photographs, architectural drawings, and other visual materials supplement evidence collected from primary documents and other archival sources. While the investigation of written records and printed materials helps the study construct a chronology of events to frame a historical narrative of the campaign, graphic materials presented in the study add eyewitness perspectives and visual evidence to help shape the study’s conclusions. Perceptions of the Poor People’s Campaign were unfavorable as media coverage fed national fears of riots and civil disorder. Additionally, national memory recorded the efforts of the campaign’s leadership as inadequate in filling the void left by King’s assassination. King’s antipoverty campaign, however, had its merits. It was a microscope on poverty and a critique that focused public attention on poverty nationwide. It was a catalyst to important federal and grassroots programs that laid the groundwork for later legislation and social change. The campaign was also a precursor to subsequent civil and human rights movements. In addition to bringing social concerns related to race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic justice to the public fore, King’s antipoverty crusade introduced age, gender, and quality-of-life issues to a national discourse on equality. Additionally, the campaign represented a change in sociopolitical activism as protest movements shifted from civil rights to human rights campaigns. Equally important, however, the campaign was the final chapter of King’s life and, conceivably, his most ambitious dream.Item "To Go to Nature's Manufactory": The Material Ecology of Slavery in Antebellum Maryland(2018) Perry, Tony; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the environmental history of slavery in Maryland and attends specifically to the ways enslaved people’s relationship to their environment manifested in their everyday lives. In this project, I advance an ecological analysis that foregrounds networks of relation between slaves, slaveholders, soils, plants, animals, and cold weather. Grounding my analysis in the everyday world of slavery, my dissertation employs a framework I call material ecology, which utilizes object-oriented analysis as a means of thinking through, unpacking, and rendering the ecology of slavery in Maryland. Using this approach, I organize each of my chapters around a class of objects that materialize different ecological relations. As the points at which such relations converge, cast-iron plows, enslaved people’s shoes, slave-made charms, as well as stews and similar one-pot meals disclose distinctive interactions between the enslaved and their environment. From my analysis of the relationships that cohere around these objects, I argue that in antebellum Maryland slaves and slaveholders differently mobilized elements of their environment against one another in their multiform contests over power. Examining the ecological networks informing these contests illustrates the extent to which the environment in enslaved people’s lives was simultaneously antagonistic and empowering.Item BETWEEN F* WORDS: RURAL & GAY LIBERATIONIST REFRAINS IN THE SOUTHEAST, 1970-1981(2017) Ezell, Samuel Jason; Hanhardt, Christina; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Between F* Words is an affective history of how gay liberationism persisted through its intersections with back-to-the-land movements in the 1970s Southeast. In telling an affective history, I show how liberationism is best understood as more than a reasoned political choice; rather, it crucially involves specific ways of viewing and feeling in an increasingly globalized world. Specifically, its politics complemented critiques of a divisive system with lateral strategies for staying connected. By tracing gay liberationist networks from rural Ozark and Appalachian sites to cities like New Orleans and Atlanta, I prioritize a regional analytic which, unlike models predicated on the urban “gay ghetto,” hinges on rural-urban connection. This project, then, sets gay liberation both within everyday life and in unexpected places as a way to imagine expanded LGBT political cultural maps. Employing analysis of oral history interviews, newly available archival materials, and the print culture of RFD (a rural gay serial published in the Southeast from 1978-2009), Between F* Words is a description of the subject formations of Southeastern gay liberationist collectives who felt the word gay no longer represented their political cultures. Using Felix Guattari’s concept of the refrain, I read the words and images of those in the culture to characterize the orientational, emotional, psychic, and corporeal dimensions of improvised subjectivities like the faggot, sissie, gentle man, and Radical Faerie. At the same time, I show how these regional refrains emerged in contrast to similar West Coast ones. Their Southeastern networks were acutely aware of their proximity to the fomenting Moral Majority which would become a conservative cornerstone of the Reagan-era national political economy. Galvanized by the racism, sexism, and homophobia at the heart of the conservative political culture which they saw taking root in the Jim Crow geography around them, these gay liberationist subjectivities were shaped by regional forces. Between F* Words draws upon this history not only to propose the regional as a crucial scale for any radical analysis responsive to economic development schemes but also to imagine radical LGBTQ political subjectivities to be affectively formed within the daily experience of such divisive regional development.Item “WELCUM, OONA. TIME FA WE LAAN BOUT GULLAH” (WELCOME, EVERYONE. TIME FOR US TO LEARN ABOUT GULLAH): PENN CENTER’S ROLE IN THE PRESERVATION OF GULLAH GEECHEE’S CULTURAL HERITAGE(2016) Chaplin, Jennie; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Welcum, Oona. Time Fa We Laan Bout Gullah” (Welcome, Everyone. Time for us to learn about Gullah): Penn Center’s Role in the Preservation of Gullah Geechee’s Cultural Heritage focuses on the historic Penn Center, formerly the Penn School, on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, as a selected site of analytical inquiry and as a premier cultural institution that preserves Gullah history and heritage. This project makes use of interdisciplinary methods from several fields—material culture, museum studies, self-ethnography, visual analysis, and historic preservation, among others—to illuminate the history and culture of the Gullah people. I use these methods to argue that the Penn Center presents a competing “voice” to prevailing discourses because it rewrites and revalues Gullah history. This dissertation delineates how the Gullahs have responded to the dominant discourses through counter-narratives, cultural practices, and individual and community activism. It argues that the Penn Center disrupts discourses seeking to stereotype the Gullah culture by functioning as a site of resistance to mainstream definitions, as a site of the reclamation of voice and agency in the process of self-definition, and as a site for the preservation and celebration of Gullah Geechee culture and cultural identity. In demonstrating the contribution of the Penn Center, this dissertation renders attention to issues related to race, class, and gender as these issues have surfaced in the history and culture under discussion. This project also offers analysis of material culture housed at the Penn Center’s York W. Bailey Museum. Drawing upon the theories of Stuart Hall on cultural identity and E. McClung Fleming on material culture analysis, this study offers analysis of cultural objects and photographic images found in this museum space. This dissertation concludes with oral history narratives that further illuminate the competing “voices” found that shed light on Gullah cultural identity and the manner in which Gullah people must navigate and negotiate the larger American sociopolitical landscape.Item Breaking through the Margins: Pushing Sociopolitical Boundaries Through Historic Preservation(2016) Hopkins, Portia Dene; Williams- Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Breaking through the Margins: Pushing Sociopolitical Boundaries Through Historic Preservation” explores the ways in which contemporary grassroots organizations are adapting historic preservation methods to protect African American heritage in communities that are on the brink of erasure. This project emerges from an eighteen-month longitudinal study of three African American preservation organizations—one in College Park, Maryland and two in Houston, Texas—where gentrification or suburban sprawl has all but decimated the physical landscape of their communities. Grassroots preservationists in Lakeland (College Park, Maryland), St. John Baptist Church (Missouri City, Texas), and Freedmen’s Town (Houston, Texas) are involved in pushing back against preservation practices that do not, or tend not, to take into consideration the narratives of African American communities. I argue, these organizations practice a form of preservation that provides immediate and lasting effects for communities hovering at the margins. This dissertation seeks to outline some of the major methodological approaches taken by Lakeland, St. John, and Freedmen’s Town. The preservation efforts put forth by the grassroots organizations in these communities faithfully work to remind us that history without preservation is lost. In taking on the critical work of pursuing social justice, these grassroots organizations are breaking through the margins of society using historic preservation as their medium.Item Tax Rebels: The Rise of the White Property Owner in Cobb County, Georgia(2015) Barron, Mark Alan; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The objective of this dissertation is to document how white property owners in Cobb County, Georgia achieved political, economic, and social influence over local and state affairs by the mid-twentieth century through processes of racial privileging and policy-making. Prior to World War Two, the county’s white property owners were historically divided into two competing political factions of equal demographic size with one faction residing in rural unincorporated parts of the county, and the other in urban centers. For much of their history, these two factions waged political battles against one another over the distribution of real and personal property taxes. In 1937, the two factions joined forces to push for a statewide homestead exemption to lower property taxes collected at the state and county level. The sudden loss of revenue financially devastated local governments across the state. In Cobb, city and county politicians and civic leaders began to search for new ways of raising revenue, including home-building campaigns, expansion of municipal utilities, and the courtship of federal investment. Through a combination of local planning and federal intervention, Cobb County’s quest to raise revenue shaped a racialized built environment that privileged the interests of white homeowners and ultimately influenced how white property owners saw themselves and the world around them through the policy-making process. The primary vehicle for this study will be tax policy, a largely understudied yet critical component of the built environment. The trajectory of the white property owner in Cobb County is complicated, as it ties the effects of local, state, and federal policy-making to sets of identity politics influenced by white supremacy and formed over the course of several decades. It is a study long overdue for investigation as it lays the groundwork for understanding how property and financial self-interest would inform the political and social positions of white homeowners in the second half of the twentieth century. Within this convergence of racial and economic issues, one question is paramount: How did the interconnected political and social formations of white supremacy and property ownership change over time within the context of state and local tax policy debates?Item Beyond the Railroad People: Race and the Color of History in Chinese America(2009) Thompson, Wendy Marie; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Past discourses on Asian Americans, specifically Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans, have historically focused on specific racial interactions with white America that fell somewhere between exclusion and assimilation. However, lost in these discussions are the different nonwhite interracial hybridities that did and continue to inhabit Chinese immigrant and Chinese American lives. This study offers a departure from dominant scholarly conversations that reproduce the master narrative of Chinese immigrants coming to the United States, building the railroads, and assimilating just enough to become what white America has termed the "model minority" and shifts the analysis and conversation to look at other experiences, opening up a racial narrative that situates Chinese bodies in proximity to black and nonwhite America. In applying theoretical perspectives from race and ethnic studies, history, visual culture studies, and immigration studies to examine a broad range of texts, I have discovered that Chinese men using racial passing as a tool to cross American borders illegally, Gold Mountain frontier experiences that included significant contact with Native people, husbands and fathers refusing to bow to greater community pressures and disown their black wives and mixed race children in the Mississippi Delta region, and the presence of Chinese women of African descent in local California Miss Chinatown beauty pageants all suggest that how Chinese people saw themselves racially and continue to see themselves was and is more complex and fluid than the master narratives depict and many Americans appear to believe. contributes to the growing field of Asian American studies by establishing a dialogue between counter-hegemonic discourses and works that give agency and voice to various Chinese Americans whose lived racial realities that included kinship with nonwhite Americans complicate what it means to be Chinese, immigrant, or American. This dissertation also intervenes in the field of American Studies by expanding how we gauge the many ways race, power, and agency shape bodies, relationship, communities, and national identities in the United States.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 Infectious Disease in Philadelphia, 1690-1807: An Ecological Perspective(2006-05-15) Anroman, Gilda Marie; Sies, Mary Corbin; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the multiple factors that influenced the pattern and distribution of infectious disease in Philadelphia between the years 1690 and 1807, and explores the possible reasons for the astonishingly high level of death from disease throughout the city at this time. What emerges from this study is a complex picture of a city undergoing rapid cultural and epidemiological changes. Large-scale immigration supplied a susceptible population group, as international trade, densely packed streets, unsanitary living conditions, and a stagnant and contaminated water supply combined to create ideal circumstances for the proliferation of both pathogens and vectors, setting the stage for the many public health crises that plagued Philadelphia for more than one hundred years. This study uses an ecological perspective to understand how disease worked in Philadelphia. The idea that disease is virtually always a result of the interplay of the environment, the genetic and physical make-up of the individual, and the agent of disease is one of the most important cause and effect ideas underpinned by epidemiology. This dissertation integrates methods from the health sciences, humanities, and social sciences to demonstrate how disease "emergence" in Philadelphia was a dynamic feature of the interrelationships between people and their socio-cultural and physical environments. Classic epidemiological theory, informed by ecological thinking, is used to revisit the city's reconstructed demographic data, bills of mortality, selected diaries (notably that of Elizabeth Drinker), personal letters, contemporary observations and medical literature. The emergence and spread of microbial threats was driven by a complex set of factors, the convergence of which lead to consequences of disease much greater than any single factor might have suggested. Although it has been argued that no precondition of disease was more basic than poverty in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, it is shortsighted to assume that impoverishment was a necessary co-factor in the emergence and spread of disease. The urban environment of Philadelphia contained the epidemiological factors necessary for the growth and propagation of a wide variety of infectious agents, while the social, demographic and behavioral characteristics of the people of the city provided the opportunity for "new" diseases to appear.