American Studies Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2740
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Item Living With Death: Black American Trauma in the Age of the Spectacular(2018) Young, Kalima Y; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)On September 15, 1955, Jet, a national Black magazine, printed the image of Emmitt Till’s battered, disfigured corpse on its cover. Images such as Emmitt Till’s corpse are visual testimonies of Black pain, wounding and death. This imagery has been used for racial control and subjugation since the era of lynching photography in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, Black pain, wounding and death imagery has also been used for Black liberation purposes, such as the photos and film of Black citizens in Birmingham being attacked by police dogs and sprayed with high-pressure fire hoses. These images helped spur anti-segregation and the voting rights activism in the Black American civil rights movement of the mid 20th century. Contemporary videos capturing U.S. police officers killing Black Americans have forced many to acknowledge the disproportionate numbers of Black Americans targeted by state violence. These videos have sparked recent civil rights protests in cities across the nation, including Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland, and have galvanized online social movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #SayHerName, which illuminates Black women’s experiences of police violence. Living With Death: Black American Trauma in the Age of the Spectacular asks: What does it mean to be Black and to be the subject, witness and consumer of Black pain, wounding and death imagery? What impact do these images have on Black collective identity formation and Black cultural production? Using embodied image schema analysis, discussion group data, in-depth interviews, textual analysis, and auto-ethnography, this project examines viral videos of Black pain, wounding, and death and Black Cultural Workers’ (BCW) responses to these visual texts. An afro-futurist examination, this project grapples with the concept of Black life in response to the anti-blackness that has structured the world (Wilderson 2010) since the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, framing Black life as existing in/and out of time. By unpacking the role of spectacle, surveillance, and consumption on Black Americans’ witnessing practices, identity, and cultural production, Living With Death: Black American Trauma in the Age of the Spectacular illustrates the ways Black people navigate anti-Blackness to live fully and vibrantly under the specter of death.Item BROWNGIRL NARRATIVES: EXPLORING COMING OF AGE IN THE GOLDEN ERA OF HIP HOP (1986-1996)(2012) Chae Reddy, Melissa Kim; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)&ldquoBrowngirl Narratives&rdquo seeks to gain a clearer understanding of what we can learn from textual evidence about experiences of browngirls coming of age during the post-civil rights Golden Age of Hip Hop (1986-1996) by examining contemporary literature, film, social media and music produced by and about these black women. It is an inquiry into the ways in which browngirls coming of age in the United States negotiated the dominant scripts existing in their lives to craft their own stories. The aim is to utilize an interdisciplinary, black female-centered framework to fully problematize phenomena such as self-creation, empowerment, and sexual exploration in the lives of black women coming of age during 1986-1996. This study is an examination of black female bidungsromane&mdash black female cultural texts illustrating the coming of age/development processes. Additionally, it is an investigation into what we can learn about the ongoing individuation processes for post-civil rights browngirls by engaging various texts. This project shows pieces of their narrative by examining hidden scripts amongst Ntozake Shange's choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide| when the rainbow is enuf; Tyler Perry's feature film adaptation, For Colored Girls and the dialogue which surfaced as a result; the life, work and politics of artist Erykah Badu, and; social media texts such as blogs. The selected narrative texts can be unpacked and analyzed using the bildungsroman as a lens to view concepts of self-discovery--&ldquotracing the development of complex and multidimensional&rdquo browngirls, exploring &ldquowho she is and how she became that way.&rdquo What do these stories reveal about the journey toward a self-defined identity for browngirls marginalized by race, gender, class and sexuality coming of age in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s? What can the cultural texts tell us about how their experiences growing up during this particular period shape their sense of love relationships, family, community, and the self? The research discloses important overlooked narratives&mdash &ldquomeaningful and endearing stories about their experiences that are not solely focused on heterosexual romance&rdquo&mdashalong with hidden transcripts or subtexts that reveal important phenomena for this particular group of women regarding identity construction, black female representation and sexuality.