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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Item DECOLONIZATION THROUGH REPATRIATION: A NEW GLOBAL HERITAGE MUSEUM FOR AFRICA(2022) Okubadejo, Adeola Olubusayo; Lamprakos, Michele; Cronrath, David; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis investigates and examines the impact of European colonization and imperialism on West African cultural identity through the tracking and placing of items back into their historical contexts. The museum facility aspires to be a symbol of pride and awareness for West African arts and culture; serving and celebrating the West-African community and its arts and cultural heritage beyond borders by repatriating and, in effect, decolonizing its art and artifacts. The establishment of a facility to exhibit and recontextualize looted and returned art and artifacts is a long-awaited, challenging request that would allow them to be seen in its native West African gestalt. As a focal point for international engagement and reflection across a variety of urban contexts, The Museum and Cultural Center facility, through simultaneously redistributing and rehousing, caters to more culturally invested populations, where there is an eagerness for ethnically diverse representation as well as access to people and civilizations the broad populace may not typically engage with.Item Double "Double Consciousness": An Archaeology of African American Class and Identity in Annapolis, Maryland, 1850 to 1930(2015) Deeley, Kathryn Hubsch; Leone, Mark P; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the intersections of race and class within African American communities of the 19th and early 20th centuries in order to expand our understanding of the diversity within this group. By examining materials recovered from archaeological sites in Annapolis, Maryland, this dissertation uses choices in material culture to demonstrate that there were at least two classes present within the African American community in Annapolis between 1850 and 1930. These choices also show how different classes within this community applied the strategies advocated by prominent African American scholars, including Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Nannie Helen Burroughs, as ways to negotiate the racism they encountered in daily lives. One class, the "inclusionist" class, within the community embraced the idea of presenting themselves as industrious, moral, clean, and prosperous to their White neighbors, a strategy promoted by scholars such as Booker T. Washington and Nannie Helen Burroughs. However, another group within the community, the "autonomist" class, wanted to maintain a distinct African American identity that reflected the independent worth of their community with an emphasis on a uniquely African American aesthetic, as scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois suggested. The implementation of different strategies for racial uplift in daily life is both indicative of the presence of multiple classes and an indication that these different classes negotiated racism in different ways. This dissertation explores the strategies of inclusion and exclusion African American scholars advocated; how African Americans in Annapolis, Maryland implemented these strategies in daily life during the 19th and early 20th centuries; and how debates over implementing these strategies are still occurring today.Item In Black and Brown: Intellectuals, Blackness, and Inter-Americanism in Mexico after 1910(2013) Cohen, Theodore; Vaughan, Mary Kay; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"In Black and Brown" examines how blackness and Africanness became constituent elements of Mexican culture after the Revolution of 1910. In refuting the common claim that black cultures and identities were erased or ignored in the post-revolutionary era, it argues that anthropologists, historians, (ethno)musicologists, and local intellectuals integrated black and, after 1940, African-descended peoples and cultures into a democratic concept of national identity. Although multiple historical actors contributed to this nationalist project, three intellectuals--composer and ethnomusicologist Gerónimo Baqueiro Foster (1898-1967), anthropologist Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán (1908-1996), and city of Veracruz poet Francisco Rivera (1908-1994)--most coherently identified Africanness in Mexican history and culture. As these state and local intellectuals read ethnographic texts about African cultural retentions throughout the Western Hemisphere, they situated these cultural practices in specific Mexican communities and regional spaces. By tracing the inter-American networks that shaped these identities, "In Black and Brown" asserts that the classification of blackness and Africanness as Mexican was in conversation with the refashioning of blackness, Africanness, and indigeneity across the Americas and was part of the construction of the Western Hemisphere as a historical, cultural, and racial entity. More broadly, it questions the commonplace assumption that certain nations of the Americas are part of the African Diaspora while others are defined as indigenous.