UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item Black Racial Grievance, Black American Identity, and Black Political Participation(2024) St Sume, Jennifer; Laird, Chryl; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the relationship among Black racial grievance, Black American identity, and Black political participation. Black racial grievance is defined as the extent to which Black individuals believe their racial group is mistreated in the United States. This study is divided into three articles. The first article explores the link between Black racial grievance and Black American identity. Political science research has found that racial discrimination makes Black people feel less American (Huddy and Khatib 2007; Kam and Ramos 2008; Theiss-Morse 2009; Levundusky 2017). However, the consequences of discrimination and how they shape what it means to be a Black American remain underexplored. This paper addresses this critical gap, arguing that Black Americans consider their racial group’s treatment and the consequences of this treatment in their self-conception as Americans. I propose a new six-item measure of Black racial grievance, capturing Black perceptions of unfair treatment regarding their racial group, the current significance of racial grievance, and their awareness of these grievances across social, political, and economic domains. Using two national samples, I find that Black people who score higher on the racial grievance measure—indicative of a belief that the mistreatment of their racial group is a problem to be addressed across American society —feel less American. These findings underscore the importance of institutional inequality in Black politics. The second article examines the relationship between Black racial grievance and Black political participation. Previous research has employed measures such as relative deprivation, group consciousness, politicized collective identity, and linked fate to predict Black political participation. However, these measures fail to explain how individuals define their personal Black racial grievance, overlooking how these grievances shape Black participation. These shortcomings are driven by the assumption that little variation exists in Black political behavior. Accordingly, I argue that Black Americans rely on specific evaluations of racial grievance to determine whether to participate in politics. I develop a refined measure of Black racial grievance that captures the extent to which an individual perceives their racial group as being treated unfairly across various domains. I validate this measure through factor analysis and assess its robustness by comparing it to previous measures. As a proof of concept, I find that Black people who score higher on the racial grievance scale—those who feel their group is treated unfairly in more domains of society—and feel strongly attached to their racial group are more likely to participate in politics. The third article investigates the causal links among Black racial grievance, Black American identity, and Black political participation. Current research suggests that Black participation is motivated by perceptions of discrimination (Klandermans, 2014). To date, scant research has explored the interplay among Black racial grievance, Black American identity, and Black political participation. Therefore, this study addresses this gap by evaluating how Black racial grievance shapes political behavior among Black Americans. Using data from a national survey of 505 Black adults, I introduce a new measure of Black racial grievance and explore its impact on political engagement. The findings reveal that while experiencing racial discrimination increases racial grievance, it also complicates the relationship with political participation. Specifically, elevated levels of racial grievance correlate with decreased political participation in contexts where individuals feel disillusioned with the prospect of systemic changes. Thus, Black people with high Black racial grievance may choose not to vote or engage in political campaigns if they believe these actions will not lead to meaningful change. This article illustrates how Black racial grievance can sometimes hinder political action. Overall, this dissertation offers three significant contributions to the study of Black political behavior. First, it provides a novel framework to explain how Black people process racial mistreatment. Second, it highlights the intricate interplay among racial grievance, identity, and political action. Third, it lays the groundwork for future research on policy interventions tailored to the unique challenges faced by Black Americans. Ultimately, this work enhances the understanding of systemic marginalization and improves the ability to foster a more inclusive and equitable democracy.Item 21st CENTURY AMERICAN TRUMPET SONATAS: THE PERFORMANCE PRACTICE AND PEDAGOGICAL INFLUENCES OF FOUR SONATAS(2024) Rudy, Brennan; Gekker, Paul C; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Sonatas for trumpet and piano have played an impactful role in the development of the trumpet as a recital instrument. Thorvald Hansen’s 1903 sonata for cornet and piano was the earliest sonata for our instrument, later leading to the first two sonatas for the Bb trumpet and piano in 1939 by German composer Paul Hindemith and Soviet composer Boris Asafiev. The first American sonata for trumpet and piano was written by Harold Shapero in 1940 and was dedicated to his teacher, Aaron Copland. These early sonatas led to other prominent 20th Century trumpet sonatas that were written by American composers Kent Kennan, Halsey Stevens, and Eric Ewazen. As a modern solo instrument, performance and pedagogical practices for the trumpet are strongly based on compositions of the 20th Century or earlier. As we are now almost 25 years into the 21st Century, trumpet sonatas and their composers have continued to evolve and create a lasting impact on the use of the trumpet and its pedagogy. This dissertation will discuss the pedagogical impacts and musical developments of several 21st Century sonatas for trumpet and piano. Accompanying this dissertation are four recordings of some of the most recently published trumpet sonatas from 2015-2023, each by American composers of diverse backgrounds. The four recorded sonatas previously had very few or no professional recordings and exemplify modern developments on traits originally established by composers of early trumpet sonatas. Through this dissertation and accompanying recordings, I hope to encourage the use of modern trumpet sonatas for application in pedagogical instruction, performances, and college and university juries and entrance auditions.Item KALEIDOSCOPE: SELECTED MODERN DUOS FOR WOODWINDS AND PIANO BY AMERICAN COMPOSERS BETWEEN 1900-2000(2023) Adams-Park, Jihong; Sloan, Rita; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the early twentieth century, there was a surge in the number of compositions written in America for woodwind and piano duos. This was a result of the demand for compositions to be written in a neoclassical style. Neoclassical style not only played a critical role in the proliferation of the American duo genre for woodwinds and piano but also facilitated the saxophone’s move into the musical mainstream as a classical concert instrument. This compositional spike in duo creation is also a result of twentieth-century musical eclecticism and should be taken as an important element in the development of American music. Influences such as modernism, folk idioms, jazz and popular music were adopted and fused with classical structures to make duo compositions more accessible to contemporary audiences. The popularity of this duo genre among American composers has been relatively steady and likely will continue to grow. Duo music for woodwinds and piano is accessible for audiences, and it is efficient for collaborations in chamber performance settings.Three recitals were prepared and presented respectively on February 28, 2022, at Gildenhorn Recital Hall of the University of Maryland, November 12, 2022, and January 21, 2023, at the Sunshine Cathedral Church in Fort Lauderdale. The first recital featured duo compositions that use innovative melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic integration between the flute and the piano. The works performed were Sonata for Flute and Piano, Op. 14 by Robert Muczynski (1961), Sonata for Flute and Piano, Op.23 by Lowell Liebermann (1987), Sonata for Flute and Piano by Samuel Zyman (1997), Canzone by Samuel Barber (1961), Night Soliloquy by Kent Kennan (1936), and Vocalise for Flute and Piano by Aaron Copland (1971). The second recital featured compositions for saxophone and piano: Sonata for E-flat Alto Saxophone and Piano by Paul Creston (1945), Picnic on the Marne by Ned Rorem (1983), Duo for Alto Saxophone and Piano by Walter Hartley (1964), Dittico for E-flat Alto Saxophone and Piano by Halsey Stevens (1972), and Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano by John Worley (1975). The contrast among these compositions highlighted the major compositional styles from pre-1960 post-romantic to post-1960 contemporary style. The final lecture recital presented duo compositions with jazz influences composed in the mid- and late-1900s: Sonata for Clarinet and Piano No.2 by Gary Schocker (1999), Introduction and Allegro for Oboe and Piano by Alvin Etler (1952), Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano, Op.29 by Robert Muczynski (1970), Sonata for Clarinet and Piano by Leonard Bernstein (1941), and Quiet and Easy from Deep Ellum Nights by Simon Sargon (1991). Recordings can be accessed in the Digital Repository (DRUM) at the University of Maryland.Item The Symbolist Impulse in American Art across Media circa 1900(2020) Eron, Abby Rebecca; Ater, Renée; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes the Symbolist movement in American art in the years around 1900. Symbolism was an antinaturalistic tendency that prioritized imagination and the intangible psychological realm. A reaction against Realism (and Impressionism, considered Realism’s logical extension), Symbolist art appears otherworldly, fantastic, and obscure. Works gravitate towards shared themes—the femme fatale and femme fragile, dreams, the duality of life and death, anguish, and mystical visions. Symbolism was not an organized movement in the sense of artists’ membership in a particular association but rather a trend in literary, artistic, and intellectual circles. While Symbolism has generally been considered from a European perspective, this dissertation describes a vital Symbolist impulse in American art through an evaluation of works by four artists: Gertrude Käsebier (1852–1934), Alice Pike Barney (1857–1931), Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937), and George Grey Barnard (1863–1938). Each specialized in a different medium: photography, pastel, painting, and sculpture, respectively. This dissertation attends to surface and technique, and it argues that the animating tension of Symbolism lies in the relationship between the material and the immaterial. Alongside imagery and historical context, the dynamism of materiality and immateriality points to the evanescent yet undeniable presence of Symbolism in the United States. Though Käsebier, Barney, Tanner, and Barnard worked independently of each other, grouping them allows for a comparative analysis across media and enables contextualization beyond solo biographical accounts.Item American Hospitality: The Politics of Conditionality in Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction(2020) Gleich, Lewis S; Mallios, Peter L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)American Hospitality rereads the canon of American literature by focusing attention on the centrality of hospitality to the twentieth-century American literary imagination. It argues that twentieth-century U.S. authors employ scenes of hospitality (scenes of welcoming and withholding, of invitation and rejection, of accommodation and imposition) and figures of hospitality (hosts and guests, strangers and trespassers, homes and thresholds, gifts and reciprocations) for three specific purposes: first, to reproduce dominant American discourses of hospitality; second, to critique these same discourses; and third, to model an alternative ethics of hospitality. Faced with the closing of the western frontier, rapid increases in immigration, the growing need to provide assistance to large segments of the population, an escalating call to secure and police the national borders, and the widespread demand to make public accommodations in all parts of the country more hospitable to racialized others, U.S. authors during the twentieth century utilized discourses of hospitality to reflect on the effects that sweeping historical changes were having on the nation’s ability to remain hospitable to peoples both inside and outside its borders. In examining discourses of hospitality in twentieth-century U.S. fiction, American Hospitality makes three principal contributions to scholarship. First, it opens the canon of American literature to reconstruction by tracing the central importance of scenes of hospitality across a wide range of twentieth-century American texts and genres, from highly canonical texts like Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! to less canonical texts like Zitkala-Ša’s Old Indian Legends and Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris’s The Crown of Columbus. Second, it expands on existing work on the subject of American exceptionalism by showing how American exceptionalist narratives rely heavily on scenes and figures of hospitality to justify and disavow acts of exclusion, dispossession, exploitation, and violence. Third, it lays the foundation for theorizing an alternative ethics of American hospitality. Modeled by the texts featured in American Hospitality, this alternative ethics, which I term affirmative hospitality, has four core principles: recognition of the conditional nature of all hospitality exchanges, affirmation of the singularity of the individual, accommodation, and deliberation.Item Assessing the Relationship of Muslim-American Identity with Practices in Mate Selection: Familial Involvement and the Intention to Marry(2018) Al-Mansur, Rafee; Leslie, Leigh A; Family Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Muslim Americans may experience conflict between societal norms and the values of their religion with respect to mate selection. Whereas American norms prioritize autonomy and love, Muslim societies prioritize family and chastity. This study assessed the extent to which Muslim and American identities impact (1) desire to involve family in mate selection and (2) willingness to enter romantic relationships without considering marriage. Researchers partnered with a Muslim matrimonial and dating mobile app to survey U.S. users, resulting in 962 responses. Muslim identity and American identity were both found to be significantly correlated to mate selection practices. Results suggest most Muslim Americans are caught between models: they are transitioning away from traditional mate selection practices which rely on parents to find partners, a major shift in the last 30 years. However, they are also not willing to adopt American practices which do not consider marriage, such as casual dating.Item REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MILITARY IN 20TH CENTURY ETHNIC AMERICAN LITERATURE(2017) Fontenot, Kara Parks; Nunes, Zita C; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 20th century ethnic American literature, writers deploy representations of the US military to expose the operations of American hegemony, articulate relations of power, reveal how they are maintained, identify contradictions in the rhetoric of American nationalism and imagine not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic, and national lines. As a national institution controlled by the US government and consuming labor in the form of military service from citizens of all classes, races and ethnicities in ways that reflect existing relations of power in American society at large, the US military presents a unique and powerful site for articulation of relationships between nation, race, and class. As evidence, this dissertation explores six American novels, all published in the 20th century and taking as their subject matter US military involvement in declared and undeclared military conflicts of that era. Close readings of these novels bring our attention to three specific examples of political projects for which representations of the US military in literature have been deployed: to question constructions of American nationalism by highlighting contradictions and inconsistencies, to consider the military’s institutionalized labor practices in order to explore relationships between race and class as well as imagine means of struggling for social justice, and to critique US foreign policy and military operations overseas. These writers individually and collectively refuse to examine race and/or ethnicity in isolation but instead consider these aspects of subjectivity in the context of national identity, class relations, immigration, globalization, and other social forces. While the relationship between ethnicity and military service has been addressed in other disciplines, such as history, political science, and social science, I argue that literature is a medium especially well-suited for this exploration as it not only allows for the articulation of existing social relations but also for the imagination of not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic, and national lines.Item Representative Works from the Italian, French, and American Schools of Double Bass Playing(2016) Saunders, Ian S.; Stern, James O; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Each successive stage in the double bass’s history required the instrument to adapt to shifting musical aesthetics and technical demands. As a result, arrays of interesting (and sometimes disparate) approaches have emerged in the form of schools, intellectual traditions governed by playing concepts, and national aesthetics. The emergence of each of these various schools contributed to the history and development of the instrument, yet scholarship on the matter is exiguous. By studying and understanding different schools, one becomes aware that generations of pedagogues contributed to the foundation of modern-day mastery. Furthermore, an appreciation of contextual aesthetics and innovations brought forth by these intellectual traditions can inform modern renditions of pieces from these distinct schools. This dissertation focuses on three schools: the first international school created by the Italians, the lost significance of the French school, and the evolution of the American school. Music associated with each school was featured in three recital programs. The first two recitals were performed in the Smith Lecture Hall, and the third in the Ulrich Recital Hall, all at the University of Maryland. A re-recording of George Onslow’s String Quintet No.26 in c minor, Op.67 from the second recital took place on April 4, 2016. Recordings of all three recitals can be found in the Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (DRUM).Item A Century of American Solo Trumpet Music(2014) McNamara, Anne Kovarik; Gekker, Chris; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As a perpetual student of the trumpet's history, pedagogy, and literature, I always try to find new resources and pieces to learn in order to effectively perform and teach at a high level. My dissertation focuses on major American works for the instrument. Through my selection of characteristic repertoire, I explore pieces that provide landmark examples of the evolution of American trumpet music. The organization of my recitals is chronological. My first recital features music from the early twentieth century (1912-1951), the second features music from the middle of the twentieth century (1956-1988), and the third features music from the late twentieth century to the present (1992-2013). My dissertation includes music other than pieces for solo trumpet and piano. While six of my pieces are for this instrumentation, one is for cornet and piano (originally for cornet and band), one is for flugelhorn and piano, five are chamber works involving various instrument combinations including strings and percussion, one is for unaccompanied trumpet and one is for unaccompanied flugelhorn. Performance and careful analysis of these works reveal certain trends in American trumpet music of the past century. Many of the pieces included here contain elements of jazz such as ragtime rhythms, wa wa effects, and stylistic inflections. Other pieces show a strong influence from Aaron Copland's compositional style. His penchant for quartal and quintal harmony has become synonymous with the American sound; other composers such as Halsey Stevens, Kent Kennan, Eric Ewazen, and Jim Stephenson have used similar musical material in the works I have selected.Item A WORLD APART, A HEARTBEAT AWAY(2013) Feng, Xuejuan; Bradley, Karen Kohn; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)When I first came to the US from China, I felt mute and deaf, unable to communicate through the opaque language barrier enveloping me. But with the loss of speech, came the crystallization of other perceived sensations and realizations. Though many ideological differences exist between American and Chinese culture, none became clearer to me than the unspoken ideals of feminine beauty and aesthetics. Like a first language, one's sense of the femininity is consciously and subconsciously shaped by one's environment and culture from an early age, manifesting into one's way of speech, thought and movement. At first, immersed in the US aesthetics, I'd never felt further from home. But the longer I find myself in this country, the more my viewpoint changes of what feminine beauty is and should be.