American Studies Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2740
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Item BLACK REMOVAL AND INVISIBILITY: AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF RACE AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE 21st CENTURY(2018) Benjamin, Tatiana; Wong, Janelle; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation, Black Removal and Invisibility: At the Intersections of Race and Citizenship in the 21st Century, uses the experiences of Black immigrants as a lens to examine anti-Blackness and citizenship within the contemporary U.S. immigration system. I explore how Black immigrants sit at a unique intersection of Blackness and (un)documentation that produces significant vulnerabilities. Black undocumented immigrants occupy an ambiguous and often untenable position within the U.S. nation-state. They are simultaneously included in the broad category of “Black American” and excluded from the category of “American” by virtue of their lack of citizenship. Their exclusion, I contend, is based both on Blackness and status as unauthorized immigrants. I examine their exclusion by addressing the following questions: How does an emphasis on “invisibility” help us to better understand how immigrant rights organizations in the U.S. address and represent the needs of Black immigrants? In what ways have the experiences of Black immigrants been rendered marginal to social justice movements? What are the consequences of their marginalization for political representation? Lastly, how are Black immigrants responding and transforming the immigrants’ movement? I rely on qualitative methods, including participant observation and in-depth interviews to explore these questions.Item "Pushed Out" and Pulled In: Girls of Color, the Criminal Justice System, and Neoliberalism's Double-Bind(2013) White, Elise M.; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This ethnography of court-involved girls in New York City argues that the last three decades have been a period of accelerating transformation of the juvenile and criminal justice systems, and of their encroachment into the lives of urban, low-income girls of color. These processes are inextricably related to a broader set of economic and cultural changes referred to as neoliberalism. Shifts in the material conditions in these girls' communities, largely through the withdrawal of public interest in favor of competition and efficiency, have been accompanied by an ideological framework that instructs girls to be "independent," entrepreneurial, and individually accountable. This discourse of "empowerment" masks important unexamined assumptions imported from previous juridical, sociological, and criminological constructions of girls as deviant: first, that the appropriate epistemological foundations for the study of girls lie outside them; and second, that girls are discrete variables--sites of pathology or victimization, but not of agency or critical capacity. Rather than reduce these girls to a set of pathologies or present them as individual actors making "bad choices," I ground my analysis in girls' narratives and analytic frameworks, tracing the cultural and economic inflections of neoliberalization in their family, community, and institutional lives. I explore the physical and psychic violence being perpetrated against court-involved girls on a daily basis. For these young women of color, the net result of neoliberalization in New York City is a series of double-binds: pairings of violent or threatening message and context that directly contradict one another, and where to acknowledge the disjunction itself provokes further, punitive violence. These double-binds underlie and perpetuate the system of penality and punishment. While a discursive legacy of individual pathology still colors the construction of these girls in the cultural dreamwork, I argue that it is the system itself that has become pathological, contributing in essential ways to the production of girls as delinquent and deviant. This dissertation explores this production, alongside girls' methods of coping, resisting, and sometimes perpetuating, neoliberal narratives. It concludes with recommendations arising from the dramatic re-envisioning of urban girls of color as civic actors and central members of our communities.Item WORLD WAR II AND U.S. CINEMA: RACE, NATION, AND REMEMBRANCE IN POSTWAR FILM, 1945-1978(2011) Chester, Robert Keith; Gerstle, Gary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation interrogates the meanings retrospectively imposed upon World War II in U.S. motion pictures released between 1945 and the mid-1970s. Focusing on combat films and images of veterans in postwar settings, I trace representations of World War II between war's end and the War in Vietnam, charting two distinct yet overlapping trajectories pivotal to the construction of U.S. identity in postwar cinema. The first is the connotations attached to U.S. ethnoracial relations - the presence and absence of a multiethnic, sometimes multiracial soldiery set against the hegemony of U.S. whiteness - in depictions of the war and its aftermath. The second is Hollywood's representation (and erasure) of the contributions of the wartime Allies and the ways in which such images engaged with and negotiated postwar international relations. Contrary to notions of a "good war" untainted by ambiguity or dissent, I argue that World War II gave rise to a conflicted cluster of postwar meanings. At times, notably in the early postwar period, the war served as a progressive summons to racial reform. At other times, the war was inscribed as a historical moment in which U.S. racism was either nonexistent or was laid permanently to rest. In regard to the Allies, I locate a Hollywood dialectic between internationalist and unilateralist remembrances. On one hand, narratives of the U.S. as the dominant wartime power affirmed the nation's benevolence and might, attesting to the United States' right to dictate the terms of postwar international politics. On the other, progressive filmmakers used images of the Allies to challenge postwar U.S.-centrism and bemoan the Cold War nation's military and economic mismanagement of international relations. Emphasizing the contested character of the war's cinematic image, the dissertation recuperates a tradition of dissent, complicating our understanding of World War II remembrance and postwar Hollywood history. The project also considers the relationship between the Department of Defense (DoD) Pictorial Division - the military's liaison with Hollywood - and the film industry. Drawing on DoD records, I show how the postwar state influenced representations of racial diversity, and how the military shaped images of the U.S. in interaction with its wartime Allies.Item White Guilt: Race, Gender, Sexuality and Emergent Racisms in the Contemporary United States(2010) Grzanka, Patrick Ryan; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)White guilt is a culturally and historically contingent emotion rooted in White people's recognition of unearned privileges and collective and/or individual roles in the perpetuation of racism. Situated within the context of neoliberal multiculturalism, this interdisciplinary dissertation investigates contemporary manifestations of White guilt in popular discourse and the lived experiences of young White adults in the United States. As a form of identity-based affect, White guilt may aid in the development of antiracist White people; however, because White guilt retains a focus on the White subject, it may offer limited potential to transform social relationships and systems of inequity. Three interrelated studies compose the methodological work of this project and undertake the task of empirically grounding White guilt so that we may better understand its forms, limits and consequences. The first study interrogates journalists' coverage of three moments of controversy in the early 21st century: Anderson Cooper's "emotional" reporting during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Don Imus-Rutgers University basketball scandal and Isaiah Washington's firing from Grey's Anatomy after allegedly calling a co-star a "faggot." Reporting on these episodes illustrates how multiculturalism manages and defers racial guilt and shame while simultaneously eliding the intersections of identity that structure experience. The second study is the creation and initial validation of a survey-based measure of White guilt (the Test of White Guilt and Shame or "TOWGAS"), which attempts to reconcile several limitations of extant research on racial affect - namely, the persistent conflation of guilt and shame. The third study centralizes the intersectionality of White people's experiences through in-depth interviews with 10 White college students. A modified grounded theory approach is used to explore how gender, sexuality and race together influence how these White people a) perceive Imus, Washington and Cooper and b) conceptualize their own Whiteness and the feelings associated with racism and inequality. Finally, the concept of "emergent racisms" is posited as a critical, working framework with which to investigate White racial affect. This theoretical approach emphasizes the complex interactions between identity, affect, attitudes and context (i.e., situation) that co-constitute the phenomenology of White guilt and shame.Item Race and Mass Consumption in Consumer Culture: National Trademark Advertising Campaigns in the United States and Germany, 1890-1930(2008-02-25) Cserno, Isabell; Thornton Dill, Bonnie; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how and why visual imagery in selected advertising material in the United States and Germany between 1890 and 1930 influenced the materialization of mass consumption as an important part of national culture. What emerges out of this study is a comparison of two different national environments that despite cultural differences relied on discourses on racialized identities to attract consumers and sell brand name products. This dissertation proposes that in both countries, trade card series in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century helped establish visual elements as important communicators to mass consumers, especially by drawing on easily recognizable motifs of patriotic and racialized mythologization. By the turn of the nineteenth century, as newspaper and magazine advertising continued to grow, the visual compositions of advertisements continued to become more sophisticated in both narrative as well as stylistic composition. This work relies equally on scholarship from the traditional disciplines of history and art history, as well as from the growing interdisciplinary work produced in American Studies, especially its subdivision of visual and material culture. The multidisciplinary methods of African American Studies and other related fields such as Black Diaspora Studies have shaped this dissertation's theoretical foundation of the complex processes of racialization. This dissertation examines three brand name products that started using black trade characters as their trademarks: Aunt Jemima pancakes and Cream of Wheat in the United States, and Sarotti Chocolate in Germany. All three product campaigns emerge at a time of complex social and economic changes as both Germany and the United States evolved as powerful nation-states with colonial and imperialist politics.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.Item Shadow Politics in the Rich Light of Day: Black Youth, Political Socialization, and one Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area High School(2006-06-14) Fishman, Darwin Ben; Walters, Ron; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: SHADOW POLITICS IN THE RICH LIGHT OF DAY: BLACK YOUTH, POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION, AND ONE WASHINGTON, D.C. METROPOLITAN AREA HIGH SCHOOL Darwin Ben Fishman, Doctor of Philosophy, 2006 Dissertation directed by: Professor Ron Walters Department of Government and Politics There is still a lot that is not known about how we develop our political identity and why we retain certain parts of our political identity and shed other parts. Most of the research done in the last forty years was based on the assumption that political socialization occurred during youth and that youth learned some of their most important political lessons while in school. The current field of political socialization has expanded and changed greatly, but still retains youth identity formation as the foundation of most scholarly work. The racial and quantitative bias of this past research on political socialization has been neglected. These theoretical and methodological concerns have provided the basis for my research. To be able to address these issues and to delve more deeply into these issues, I have focused my work on the political socialization of Black youth. I decided to conduct an ethnographic research project to be able examine the political socialization process for Black youth and to be able address some of the larger questions about the field of political socialization and identity politics. This project was based on observations and interviews in one African American History elective class for Juniors and Seniors in a public high school. This high school was located in the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan area, and it was nestled in a poor working class suburban area. The research gave me insight into the lives of Black youth's political socialization from a unique perspective. Unlike past race neutral work and quantitative research, this ethnographic research illustrated how complicated and contradictory Black youth political socialization can be. I found the students' lack of knowledge about local, state, and national political affairs was not matched by an equally apparent lack of interest or enthusiasm for political issues or participation. Instead I found that the students were most passionate and well versed in a few, very specific political areas. This ethnographic approach did not produce a way to avoid these awkward points, but it instead created the space in which many of these contradictory trends could be re-stitched together in a more meaningful fashion.Item Imagined Pasts, Imagined Futures: Race, Politics, Memory, and the Revitalization of Downtown Silver Spring, Maryland(2005-12-05) Johansen, Bruce Richard; Caughey, John L.; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Title of dissertation: IMAGINED PASTS, IMAGINED FUTURES: RACE, POLITICS, MEMORY, AND THE REVITALIZATION OF DOWNTOWN SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND Bruce Richard Johansen, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Dissertation directed by: Professor John L. Caughey Professor Mary Corbin Sies Department of American Studies Through ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and archival research, this study explores differences in people's perceptions of an aging, inner-ring suburb, during a period in which revitalization has transformed its built environment, and its population has become more diverse. To examine how three sets of active residents have thought about and acted in response to transpiring material, social, and cultural changes, my interdisciplinary research draws on methodologies and literatures from anthropology, geography, urban and suburban history, cultural criticism, sociology, and political science. Subjects featured identify as historic preservationists, civil rights activists, and/or through affiliations with an organization devoted to making leadership and civic participation more representative of a multicultural community. I demonstrate that there are significant differences in perception among members of these three sets, and that these variations stem from divergent individual and collective constructions of reality that are rooted in a range of histories, cultures, values, imaginings, and needs. I show that these different orientations affect how individuals relate to their surroundings, which is then reflected in public discourse. I investigate how these differences are exacerbated by internal group dynamics and external political structures that have kept segments of the community divided during the twenty years that revitalization plans have been debated. I illustrate that a reliance on public hearings as the main form of public discourse deepens adversarial relations by inhibiting dialogue and consequently an understanding of the diverse array of perspectives on the commercial built environment that exist. I convey how internal group dynamics that exclude community members with contrary points of view mirrors what occurs in public hearings, further diminishing the effectiveness of civic groups. Finally, this dissertation argues that new processes must be designed to assist oversight of revitalization in multicultural communities like Silver Spring, Maryland, a subject that to date has been insufficiently investigated. I contend that unifying diverse segments of such communities is possible if areas of common concern are identified and new forms of cooperative dialogue and practices of leadership pursued.