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.
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Item FALL MFA DANCE THESIS CONCERT 2023: AN IMMERSIVE WORLD(2024) Jn.Baptiste, Shartoya Rochelle; Kachman, Misha; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis seeks to describe the scenic design process for The Fall MFA Dance Thesis Concert (FMFA) choreographed by Javier Padilla and Gerson Lanza at the University of Maryland - College Park, School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies through research, documentation, photographs, and other design materials. Some of the following materials included in this thesis were used as tools to convey the scenic design to the choreographers and the production team: research images, sketches, photographs of the 1⁄4" scale white and colour models, a complete drafting packet, paint elevations, a properties list, and book. Photographs from the production and a written reflection on the design process are also included.Item Reading the Contemporary Body in the Works or Eduardo Lalo and Rita Indiana Hernández(2021) Lewis, Matthew C; Quintero-Herencia, Juan Carlos; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is interested in specificities of Caribbean bodies and the strategies that are used to perform, imagine, and make sensible the textual body so that it may be read through archipelagic contexts. I posit that the multi-disciplinary works of Dominican Rita Indiana Hernández (Santo Domingo 1977) and Puerto Rican Eduardo Lalo (Cuba 1960) turn a critical and creative eye to the corporealities that have been obscured and overshadowed by exotified, mainstream, and normative bodies and their representation. I argue that we tell stories with our bodies, and, likewise, the body is a text to be performed, read and made sensible. However, what we understand for the body—its capabilities and its limits—is a direct product of how these narratives have been politically and socially constructed, appropriated, and implemented in hegemonic discourses. My intervention lies questioning what narratives and images or the body are produced and privileged in these texts: how do these corporealities become sensible and make sense of the other bodies around them? What are the potential corporeal poetics and politics that may tie these texts together? By looking at the representation of anonymous bodies, the creation of Puerto Rican body-images, and the Dominican bodies situated within primal soundscapes, I suggest that these specific texts break with both preconceived and prescribed notions of a “Caribbean identity” and what it may mean to be Caribbean. This dissertation aims to interrogate the limits of hegemonic discourses of nationality and history by engaging with the ways in which the texts of Hernández and Lalo perform their own relationship to the contemporary, always crossing and challenging limits, imagining transitive bodies in constant motion, and implementing diverse strategies to produce and inhabit contemporary intervals that fiercely reject fixed and prescriptive notions of what a Caribbean body is, or of what it is capable.Item PALOS MUSIC AND FIESTAS DE MISTERIOS IN THE PROVINCE OF SANTIAGO, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC(2018) Hernandez Sang, Victor; Rios, Fernando; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Musicians, religious leaders, and devotees of the Dominican religion Las Veintiunas Divisiones commonly assert that palos percussion music is performed in fiestas de misterios solely for religious purposes, namely, to facilitate spirit possession and entertain the misterios (deities). Based on fieldwork conducted in the Province of Santiago, this thesis demonstrates that palos music fulfills an additional important purpose in these occasions, that of attracting devotees and potential devotees. In Santiago, many practices in this religion and music are unconventional compared to other regions in country. Examining these unorthodox practices, I argue, reveals the extent to which palos musicians cater to the aesthetic preferences of the human spectators they wish to entice to attend these fiestas. Another interesting facet of the tradition that I examine is the participation of non-devotee drummers in religious ceremonies, a phenomenon that is not common in analogous Afro-Caribbean traditions such as Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santería.Item 'Irishness' in Caribbean and Latin American Literature: The Diasporic and Liminal(2017) Glynn, Douglas Michael; Cypess, Sandra M; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation examines representations of the diasporic Irish within the varied literary imaginaries of the Caribbean and Latin America and argues that these representations create a literary paradigm surrounding ‘Irishness’. The project begins by offering a racialized historical overview of the Irish commencing with the conquest of Ireland and following up to the modern day. I then relate observations elucidated by this overview to current conceptions of Irish identity while specifying many of the diaspora spaces to which the transatlantic Irish arrived. I utilize a transamerican approach to literature which permits cross-cultural and multilingual readings of texts that would otherwise remain in isolation to each other. Putting my study into dialogue with scholars like Robin Cohen, William Safran, Avtar Brah and Laura Zuntini de Izarra, I define the terms ‘diaspora’ and ‘diaspora space’ while seeking to underscore the corollaries between these concepts and representations of the Irish in diaspora. After establishing the ways in which I understand and use these terms, I employ the works of Victor Turner and Sandor Klapcsik, among others, to lay down my theoretical framework of the liminal and liminality. In doing so I directly interconnect theories of diaspora and liminality which provides a unique theoretical perspective, and later interject my own nascent theory of the ‘figure’ to better deconstruct the Irish characters under study. Reading a selected corpus of literature from writers such as American-Guatemalan Francisco Goldman, Cuban Zoé Valdés, Jamaican Erna Brodber, Mexican Patricia Cox, American Carl Krueger, and Argentines Rodolfo Walsh and Juan José Delaney, through the liminal process allows me to analyze literature from multiple perspectives while decentering previous literary criticism that has not recognized this multiplicity embedded in liminal readings of narratives. Over the breadth of the project I look to these and other scholars in my efforts to (re)define, dissect, work and wield the terms ‘diaspora’, ‘liminal’ and ‘liminality’ in a variety of fashions, adding to them my own ideas of perpetual liminality, while extracting and examining the representations of ‘Irishness’ found through each of my textual analyses.Item Occasions for Reading: Literary Encounters and the Making of the West Indies(2011) Esprit, Schuyler Kirshten; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Occasions for Reading" argues for a new methodology of postcolonial reading that traces the origins of Anglophone Caribbean literary history and redirects the routes of West Indian literary production and canon formation. Historically, West Indian writers have sought an "ideal" reader of their work, though the definition and depiction of that ideal reader have varied. Anglophone Caribbean authors' own relationships to the act of reading and to the influence of reading on their own and on their characters' identity formation also direct or re-direct nation and canon formation. By engaging postcolonial theory, reader-response theory, post-structuralism, and reception studies, the dissertation investigates the production of the reader in and of Caribbean literary texts and of the social spaces in which they circulate. This dissertation situates the act of reading at the core of colonial and postcolonial representations of the Anglophone Caribbean and offers the culture of reception as a mode through which the geography of the West Indies is implicated in connecting West Indian people and identities across the diaspora. Acts and scenes of reading in West Indian novels produce a critique of Imperial knowledge production and illustrate how Caribbean subjects transform the intellectual, psychological or political meanings derived from reading colonial texts into a postcolonial epistemology. Such transformations provoke a range of consequences for these character-readers who must either leave the Caribbean region or continue to stake out their legitimacy and rootedness. Reading prompts characters' transgressions or resistance against persistent political, aesthetic or cultural narratives of colonialism historically informing Caribbean identity. By extension, characters' engagements with reading reveal twentieth-century West Indian authors' preoccupations with and resistance to colonial ontology. Issues of race, class, and gender influence the acts and scenes of reading in canonical West Indian novels analyzed in this study, including C.L.R. James's Minty Alley, V.S. Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur, Phyllis Shand Allfrey's The Orchid House, Michelle Cliff's Abeng and Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John. Following the historiography of the function of the reader in West Indian novels, the dissertation contends with contemporary concerns, in the late twentieth and into the twenty-first century, about where and how novels on the Caribbean experience are read, particularly by non-academic reading publics. Significant moments of literary reception in the U.K. and reception culture of Caribbean literature in the United States allow for a focus on contemporary novels and memoirs including Andrea Levy's Small Island and Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother. In an examination of how writers such as Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat have responded to the readers who encounter and assess their work, I critique apparent conflations of Caribbean literature, Caribbean geography or landscape, and Caribbean identity. Slippages in understanding the differences and boundaries between these concepts - literature, geography, and identity - in reading practices warrant a more methodological view of the impact of reading and reception on Caribbean literary history and its global reach. While representations of readers within the Caribbean space reveal a desire for a distinct origin and rootedness in the Caribbean landscape, migrant writers redefine the legacy and relevance of Caribbean literature through a discourse of emotion without boundaries or frontiers. As a whole, this dissertation challenges the dominant view of primarily political origins of postcolonial Caribbean literature, upholding its less recognized genealogy in intellectual and aesthetic discourses.Item Constructions of Violent Jamaican Masculinity in Film and Literature(2008-07-28) Harewood, Gia; Collins, Merle; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Greg Dimitriadis and Cameron McCarthy sketch out what they see as an emergent postcolonial aesthetic percolating in the postcolonial artist's imagination. According to their analysis, postcolonial artists make meaning in their work through three critical motifs that help shape this aesthetic: "counterhegemonic representation, double or triple coding, and emancipatory or utopic visions" (19, italics in original). Counterhegemonic representation "rework[s] the center-versus-periphery distinction . . . to look beyond its strictures to new histories, new discourses, new ways of being" (24). Double coding combines "two or more fields of reference or idiom in any given work" pulling images from places such as "the East and the West, the first world and the Third, the colonial master and the slave" (26). And utopic visions are about "imagining possibility even when faced with impossible barriers" (30). My project is fundamentally interested in constructing healthy (masculine) identities and its arguments are ultimately guided by their first and third motifs. Using feminist theory, masculinity studies, cultural studies and postcolonial theory, I focus on the representation of black Jamaican men as violent criminal beings in three films (The Harder They Come, Third World Cop and Shottas), two novels (The Harder They Come and For Nothing at All) and one ethnographic travelogue (Born Fi' Dead). I argue that "real/reel" Jamaican masculinity is ultimately connected to gun violence and the most popular films out of Jamaica over the past thirty years only perpetuate this image. While not the only source for role models, visual images play a significant role in the lives of young men (and women) who are trying to live up to social standards of masculinity. With limited access to social mobility, they often emulate the shotta (gangster) glory that they see sparkling on the screen. Through close readings of these texts, I show how hegemonic masculinity is reinforced and reveal that non-violent models of masculinity do exist, despite being overshadowed by violent "heroes." I call for that "utopic vision," to excavate the vulnerable and intervene on behalf of peace to help young men and boys find alternative models of masculinity and ultimately create sustainable communities.Item Nutrient enrichment effects on mangrove sediments from differing tree height zones in Bocas del Toro, Panama(2008-01-28) Borgatti, Aimee Rachel; O'Neil, Judith M; Marine-Estuarine-Environmental Sciences; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Red mangrove (Rhizophora mangle L.) forests have distinct tree-height zones, with tall trees fringing the ocean and shorter trees in interior stands. A long-term nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) fertilization experiment in Almirante Bay, Bocas del Toro Province, Panama has shown that tree-height zonation is primarily related to nutrient limitation. This experiment was used to test the effects of in-situ nutrient additions and tree zonation on mangrove sediments. The sediments underlying the experimental R. mangle trees were sampled and N2 fixation, 15N, chlorophyll a, percent N and P, and percent organic biomass were quantified. Both N and P additions significantly affected almost every parameter measured in both zones within this experiment. These results are likely to have implications for management since N and P inputs are predicted to increase throughout the tropics and subtropics worldwide.Item Gender, Kinscripts and the Work of Transnational Kinship among Afro-Caribbean Immigrant Families: An Exploratory Analysis(2007-08-23) Forsythe-Brown, Ivy; Thornton Dill, Bonnie; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Using an integrated, quantitative and qualitative, research design this study explores the type, frequency, duration and circumstances of transnational kinship ties among Afro-Caribbean immigrants in the U.S. Focus is on how immigrants maintain kinship connections across international boundaries, the delegation of kin work tasks among family members, and the impact of gender and/or kin designated roles on these activities. Qualitative data is from in-depth semi-structured interviews with multiple members of four English-speaking Afro-Caribbean families, key informants and two group interviews among immigrants with transnational kinship ties (n=41). Quantitative data from a sub-set of the National Survey of American Life (NSAL) re-interview, an integrated, hierarchical national probability sample, is utilized to examine the statistical significance of factors that impact transnational kinship contact (n=101). The notion of kinscripts posited by Stack and Burton (1993) is with combined theoretical perspectives on doing and performing gender, the household division of labor, and literature on Caribbean families and migration to create a lens through which the activities and behaviors of study participants are analyzed. Findings indicate that gender, social class, family size and gender composition, parents residing in the Caribbean, and length of stay in the host nation impact the frequency, extent, and direction of kin contact among NSAL respondents and study participants with transnational kinship ties. Men were found to engage in kin work in the absence of available women in the family to perform kin work tasks. Additionally, the study finds that who executes the majority of kin work in immigrant families tends to be voluntary and closely linked to individual skill and personality.Item CASE STUDY OF A CARIBBEAN FAMILY'S PERCEPTIONS OF CULTURALLY APPROPRIATE AND FAMILY CENTERED SERVICE PROVISION(2007-01-08) Joseph, Lenisa Nicole; Cooper, David; Special Education; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This case study explores a Caribbean family's perceptions of the cultural appropriateness and the family-centeredness of services they received from their service providers. Families' cultural beliefs and the mandates of early intervention services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act are sometimes very different. Researchers have done well to highlight issues of importance to many cultural groups; however, there is as yet no record of Caribbean families' experience. This qualitative study collected data over a two-month period through interviews, observations and document analysis. The constant comparative method was used to analyze the data, resulting in the themes used to describe the phenomenon. The number of years this family lived in the US seems to have resulted in acculturation to the point where their experiences were similar to that of an American family. They perceived the services they received to be family centered.Item Cartographic Memories and Geographies of Pain: Bodily Representations in Caribbean Women's Art(2006-11-08) Wallace, Belinda Deneen; Collins, Merle; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Definitely, this dissertation's central intellectual and political aims are rooted in a guiding principle of Caribbean womanhood; and, with black women's bodies located at the center, the goal of this study is to provide new alternatives to understanding "writing the body" by looking to Caribbean women's cultural products as sites of theory formation. The artists and the works selected for this study demonstrate an awareness of the need for a re-evaluation of the metaphor of writing the body which takes into account the specificities of race, ethnicity and nationality. To that end, this study focuses on texts and performances by Caribbean women in order to examine the development of a Caribbean feminist consciousness and its ability to not only convey but also legitimate Caribbean female perspectives and experiences. Dionne Brand, Edwidge Danticat, Marion Hall, Joan Riley and Myriam Warner-Vieyra provide us with an opportunity to trace the processes through which Caribbean women artists write their own bodies and how those bodies can be used to explore larger issues around identity, geography and history. In the music and performances of Marion Hall this project looks closely at the intricacies that comprise women's sexuality, sexual autonomy and sexual identity beyond their objectification as sexual objects for men. In Warner-Vierya's Juletane, Riley's The Unbelonging and Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, the study examines the metropolis as a source of contamination that forces us to recognize madness as a socio-cultural and historical construct with gender specific consequences. Finally, the study concludes with Danticat's The Farming of Bones and Brand's In Another Place, Not Here, where it investigates literary representations of the female body as a representative text that disrupts the official narrative and brings forth a uniquely female historical subjectivity.