History Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778
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Item Decolonizing Museums and Imagining the Future of Postcolonial Culture in Francophone North & West Africa(2024) Maguire, Caroline Angle; Landau, Paul; Wien, Peter; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a history of the processes of decolonizing and democratizing museums in Francophone Africa between 1950 and 1980. As early as the 1850s, French scholars and imperial authorities founded ethnographic, archaeological, and fine arts museums in their African colonies, which kept artifacts in valorized spaces reserved for elite European audiences while presenting typified representations of African populations. During and after decolonization, a generation of African curators, scholars, artists, and government officials were left to grapple with the colonial legacies of these museums, and to recontextualize them to better reflect postcolonial cultural politics. Contemporary museum professionals – particularly in Western museums whose collections were assembled through colonial violence – have been engaged in debates about tactics to “decolonize the museum” for the past 10 years. This dissertation argues that strategies leveraged by African museographers half a century ago to transform colonial museums should be considered early, progressive attempts to decolonize the museum. While in some circumstances, these strategies are clearly earlier iterations of contemporary efforts to decolonize collections and exhibitions, other practices highlighted in this dissertation in fact challenge the twenty-first century understanding of what it means to “decolonize the museum.” This dissertation also challenges the perception of the museum as a solely Western institution by highlighting African contributions to museographical programming and exhibition. Finally, this dissertation demonstrates that despite their colonial legacies, these museums played a critical role in the elucidation of post-independence national culture in Senegal, Tunisia, and Algeria. To make these arguments, I focus on several specific examples: the Musée Théodore Monod d’Art Africain de l’IFAN in Dakar, the Musée du Bardo in Tunis, and the Musée National des Beaux-Arts in Algiers. Through research in institutional, ministerial, and national archives, site visits and oral history interviews, I analyze how each museum created and represented colonial knowledge during the imperial period. Later, I outline how African curators and museum administrators renovated exhibition spaces to counteract ethnographic narratives, designed education programs to democratize elite spaces, and shared knowledge with other African museum practitioners to decrease reliance on European museological concepts and standards.Item “Freedom in Their Hands is a Deadly Poison”: Print Culture, Legal Movements, and Slaveholding Resistance on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, 1850-61(2018) Chaires, Jacob Wayne; Bonner, Christopher; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The goal of this thesis is twofold: to explain the rise of slaveholding anxiety in relation to the growing free black question, as well as to articulate how slaveholders sought to regain their power. I argue that slaveholders on the Eastern Shore politically organized around ideas and concepts produced in newspapers. Slaveholders utilized new ideas about race and the law to organize, and call upon the General Assembly to enact tougher sanctions on free black mobility. Newspapers are not only a means by which to quote mine, but they are also living, breathing, cultural organisms. They both reflect slaveholding anxieties, as well as play into them. They both record local news events, as well as conspicuously pair those local stories with similar stories from other counties, states, and nations.Item CHESAPEAKE FREE BLACKS AND THE ORIGINS OF THE LIBERIAN STATE, 1776-1848(2017) Brewer, Herbert; BERLIN, IRA; ROWLAND, LESLIE S.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the phased, uneven, and contradictory development of republican ideas in the political thought of Chesapeake free blacks who migrated to Cape Mesurado, West Africa, between the founding of the Liberia colony in 1822 and Liberia’s declaration of independence in 1847, and how their republican ideas shaped the creation of the Liberian state. A key finding is the extent to which the origin of the Liberian state was specifically tied to the development of an embryonic petit-bourgeois social layer of artisans, small traders, shopkeepers, and aspiring merchants among Christian evangelical small property-holding Chesapeake free blacks whose ideas and actions drove the events, thus linking the formation of the Liberian state to the peculiar history of this group. The establishment of capitalist property relations was the founding principle of the Liberian state, and although religion and race were of considerable significance, they were, contrary to what much of the historiography has claimed, of secondary importance in explaining the state’s origins. Liberia’s Chesapeake free black founders tied citizenship to property ownership as well as to race, thereby rooting the state’s origins in a political economy of black identity. The coming into being of Liberian identity was powerfully informed and conditioned by the ideology of property, revealing the tension between the hierarchies intrinsic to the Chesapeake free blacks’ property-bound conception of citizenship and the egalitarian impulse behind their anti-slavery views. The interplay of political and economic events in and around Cape Mesurado during Liberia’s founding, gave rise to a particular social identity – an imagined black nationhood – linked to the idea of property. The development of race consciousness specific to that time and place – for example, the idea of Liberia as an exclusively black space – was tied to a theory of property ownership and to the exigencies of state formation that entailed absorbing and subordinating local African polities, thereby creating new identities and social hierarchies. A careful reading of the correspondence between the American Colonization Society in Washington and the Chesapeake free black leadership at Cape Mesurado shows that by December 1823, within months of settlement, this incipient class of free black property-holders had announced its intentions, to the dismay of its ACS benefactors. In doing so, the free blacks set in motion a series of actions that would lead them, twenty-five years after the colony’s creation, amid debates reflected in published accounts and polemics by both supporters and detractors, to declare Liberia’s independence.Item "Founding a Heavenly Empire": Protestant Missionaries and German Colonialism, 1860-1919(2012) Best, Jeremy; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation investigates the relationship between German Protestant missionaries and secular leaders of colonial politics and culture in the German colonial empire during the nineteenth century. In particular, it examines how missionaries defined their collective identity as an international one against pressures that encouraged mission societies to adopt and promote policies that favored the German colonial state and German colonial economic actors. Protestant missionaries in Germany created an alternative ideology to govern Germans' and Germany's relationships with the wider world. The dissertation examines the formation of an internationalist missionary methodology and ideology by German missionary intellectuals from 1870 and the shift to traditional Protestant nationalism during World War I. It then examines the application by missionaries of this ideology to the major issues of Protestant mission work in German East Africa: territorial rivalries with German Catholic mission orders, mission school policy, fundraising in the German metropole, and international missionary cooperation. In so doing, it revises conventional interpretations about the relationship between Protestantism and nationalism in Germany during this period.