UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Yasumura, Grace SayuriSubject: search.filters.subject.American Art

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    Invisible Men, Invisible Women: Labor, Race, and the (re)Construction of American Citizenship in New Deal Post Office Murals
    (2019) Yasumura, Grace Sayuri; Mansbach, Steven; Ater, Renee; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Invisible Men, Invisible Women: Labor, Race, and the (re)Construction of American Citizenship in New Deal Post Office Murals is a meditation on the historical construction and persistent importance of race in the formation of American national identity and citizenship. Centering on an institutionally marginalized and academically neglected aspect of American art, this dissertation explores the depictions of non-white laborers, from images of African American sharecroppers to Mexican American migrant laborers that appear in scores of Treasury Section post office murals across the United States. Organized around three case studies, this work explores the different ways racialized identities were created, contested, and consolidated within the context of larger debates surrounding the relationship between labor and citizenship in the 1930s. This dissertation reads the murals produced under the Treasury Section as part of the New Deal’s epistemological regimes of intelligibility. In other words, these murals are to be understood as sites where collective identities are visualized and “correct” codes of social conduct are shaped in order to foster a particular vision of the citizens-subject. Treasury Section post office murals are therefore interpreted as part of a complex set of instruments deployed by the New Deal government as it sought to translate ideology into practice and thus actualize codes of racial and gendered conduct and ultimately modes of ideal citizenship.