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 Forensic Injustice: Human Rights, Archival Science and Racialized Feminicide in Guatemala(2016) Vargas, Maria Elena; Struna, Nancy; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The call to access and preserve the state records that document crimes committed by the state during Guatemala’s civil war has become an archival imperative entangled with neoliberal human rights discourses of “truth, justice, and memory.” 200,000 people were killed and disappeared in Guatemala’s civil war including acts of genocide in which 85% of massacres involved sexual violence committed against Mayan women. This dissertation argues that in an attempt to tell the official story of the civil war, American Human Rights organizations and academic institutions have constructed a normative identity whose humanity is attached to a scientific and evidentiary value as well as an archival status representing the materiality and institutionality of the record. Consequently, Human Rights discourses grounded in Western knowledges, in particular archival science and law, which prioritize the appearance of truth erase the material and epistemological experience of indigenous women during wartimes. As a result, the subjectivity that has surfaced on the record as most legible has mostly pertained to non-indigenous, middle class, urban, leftist men who were victims of enforced disappearance not genocide. This dissertation investigates this conflicting narrative that remembers a non-indigenous revolutionary masculine hero and grants him justice in human rights courtrooms simply because of a document attesting to his death. A main research question addressed in this project is why the promise of "truth and justice" under the name of human rights becomes a contentious site for gendered indigenous bodies? I conduct a discursive and rhetorical analysis of documentary film, declassified Guatemalan police and military records such as Operation Sofia, a military log known for “documenting the genocide” during rural counterinsurgencies executed by the military. I interrogate the ways in which racialized feminicides or the hyper-sexualized racial violence that has historically dehumanized indigenous women falls outside of discourses of vision constructed by Western positivist knowledges to reinscribe the ideal human right subject. I argue for alternative epistemological frames that recognize genocide as sexualized and gendered structures that have simultaneously produced racialized feminicides in order to disrupt the colonial structures of capitalism, patriarchy and heterosexuality. Ironically, these structures of power remain untouched by the dominant human rights discourse and its academic, NGO, and state collaborators that seek "truth and justice" in post-conflict Guatemala.Item Rwanda's Voice: An Ethnomusicological Biography of Jean-Paul Samputu(2014) Swanson, Brent; Witzleben, John L.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Rwandan international recording artist Jean-Paul Samputu is one of few musicians from Rwanda who have gained international acclaim. In this dissertation, I will delineate how his life and works serve as a reflection of and a mediator for Rwandan identity, as well as East/Central African popular music identity. Specifically, I will use elements of his biography to situate him in these contexts, and will analyze his works via timbral analysis, transcription, and studio production techniques to demonstrate how his music reflects the aforementioned identities. Mr. Samputu's life and music reflect the complicated narrative(s) of Rwandan identity. He was born in Rwanda, but fled to Uganda just before the 1994 genocide; speaks about forgiveness (a central focus of the RPF's--Rwandan Patriotic Front--Commission for Unity and Reconciliation) around the world; sings in Kinyarwanda, French, English, Luganda, Lingala, and Kiswahili; wrote pro-RPF songs in the early 1990s and still supports current government in various functions within the country and abroad; and performs and records all styles of Rwandan traditional and popular music, as well as many popular and traditional styles found in East/Central Africa. He is one of the key figures in the Rwandan music scene, as he performs regularly there and serves as a mentor for up-and-coming Rwandan popular and traditional musicians.Item Egg from the River's Ice(2013) Djordjevic, Ena; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Drawn from the experiences of enduring genocide, displacement, and resocialization in the United States, "Egg from the River's Ice" acts as a demonstration of irreparability as the poems shift emphasis from past to present. Beginning as rooted in a more traditional, romantic- lyric/narrative formation, these poems--as the weight of experience presses heavier on them-- come to embody a more radical, disjunct, and often fragmented poetic.