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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2020 - 20212

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    RUBIES IN THEIR CROWNS:AN EXAMINATION OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCH WOMEN AND HEAD FASHION
    (2021) Malone, Shoji Von; Williams Forson, Psyche A; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Church hats and other head adornments are a major component of Sunday morning worship for many Black Christian women. Wearing a hat, also known as a crown, is a part of the Sunday ritual and culture of Black churches. This dissertation, Rubies in Their Crowns: An Examination of African American Church Women and Head Fashion, explores the ways in which Black women’s clothing, especially head adornment, aid in revealing how they self-define, self-actualize, and perform self-awarenesss. I argue that Black church women have used and continue to use head adornment to express themselves socially, culturally, and politically. Through head adornment these women begin to create, define, and express Black womanhood differently throughout time. Methodologies in material culture studies, visual culture studies, cultural studies, and ethnography using intersectionality are employed to conduct close readings of primary sources—images, newspaper articles, catalogues, and church manuals. Additionally, I conducted life history interviews with eleven hat-wearing Black church women. These participants from the Mid-Atlantic to the Midwest, illuminate the ways that head adornments tell stories of access, creativity, and entrepreneurship. In revealing Black women’s role as cultural producers their words also unveil how their hats become decorated crowns.
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    BLACK MADONNA AND MISS AMERICA: IN THE STREETS, ON THE STAGE AND IN THE CHURCH
    (2020) Anderson, Ronya-Lee; Keefe, Maura; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The black female body is a political body that inhabits the collective imagination of a nation. This body constantly negotiates a multiplicity of meanings that have life and death consequences and in turn teach America about herself. What does it look like for this body to take up space? As the black female body navigates the streets, the stage, the church, both private and public space, what concessions must be made? Black Madonna and Miss America is a choreographic and critical investigation of socio-political happenings in conversation with the positioning of the black female icon in the streets, on the stage and in the church. It is cinematic in nature, employing a familiar series of still and moving images tied to a complex historical canon. Black Madonna and Miss America tackles the tension between the public and private; the doing and being of the black female iconic body. The work confronts the worship of the black female body in popular culture; worship undone in the political and economic treatment of that same body. In the making of the work, theory and practice have been lovers, sometimes in harmony, other times, at odds. The practice of making the work in the body challenged and was challenged by the theoretical work of thinking through and researching related issues; some tangental and others glaringly present. What does the performance protest of Colin Rand Kaepernick have in common with black female bodies engaged in their own political and social choreography on stage? How does #BlackGirlMagic both illuminate the work and threaten its potential potency? What does the work borrow from the Black Church and the Black Lives Matter Movement?