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 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 Running with neoliberalism: The practice and politics of voluntarism, homelessness, and sweat in urban Baltimore(2014) Clift, Bryan Christopher; Andrews, David L; Kinesiology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Shimmering as a spatial and temporal beacon of private capital investment, Baltimore is built testament to a three-decade transformation wrought upon much of United States. Within this time, Baltimore's city government has been refashioned and repurposed, from primarily focusing on managing the welfare of its citizenry, to becoming preoccupied with the entrepreneurial restructuring of the city as a motor of private capital accumulation (Harvey, 2001; Silk & Andrews, 2006). The pervasive spread of such reformation relied largely upon the uncritical adoption of neoliberal techniques of governance (Rose, 2001; Ong, 2006), and resulted in virtually uncontested elimination of many public services and agencies, and the increased responsibilitization of individuals and communities for social welfare. Philanthropic and voluntarist contributions of private citizens and organizations have come to address some, though certainly not all, of the shortfall in social welfare provision: This has been but one response to the palpable crises resultant of the continual shift to urban neoliberalism. Illustratively, Baltimore's sizeable homeless population becomes evermore dependent on the benevolence of private corporate social responsibility-directed capital and voluntarist physical labor. Through an empirically- anchored explication, this paper moves with the bodies of one private and voluntarist initiative: the Baltimore chapter of Back On My Feet. Back On My Feet is a non- profit organization that "promotes the self-sufficiency of homeless population by engaging them in running as a means to build confidence, strength and self-esteem" (2010). Within this study, Baltimore's Back On My Feet population is engaged through ethnographically-based inquiry, in order to excavate how the bodies of volunteers and those recovering from addiction or homelessness are mobilized as meaningful and viable apparatuses of neoliberal governance. Understanding Back On My Feet and its participants as constituent and contextual elements, this interpretive analysis suggests: how within a neoliberal conjuncture this form of movement subjectifies particular bodies in service of dominant power relations; and how this movement also shapes bodies in tangential or lateral movements possessive of the potential for negotiating dominant power relations.