English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Hidden Networks of Loss: Multi-Ethnic Media and Mourning in Twentieth Century American Literature(2015) Stanutz, Katherine Anne; Mallios, Peter; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Mourning may be generally thought of as a private matter, but it is also a set of socially regulated practices designed to determine which lives are considered socially valuable and relevant. These normative modes of mourning often dismiss the losses and griefs of certain groups. In such scenarios, how do those affected communities mourn and represent their losses? How do marginalized peoples incorporate their losses into public discourse, and how can such losses be understood as publicly grievable? As Judith Butler has demonstrated, grievability has immense political importance: to be grievable is to be acknowledged as living, while being ungrievable denies a person his or her humanity. This dissertation explores these questions via spaces of confinement – internment camps, prisons, and reservations – as they encapsulate the way dominant discourse literally brackets and marginalizes certain groups. Indeed, mainstream networks of information dissemination (like mass media) often do not imagine these communities or their grief, and if they do, it is often sensationalized. The dual pressure of confinement – restrictions regarding circulation and exclusion from normative structures of public grief – then creates a representational bind for authors. But by changing the discursive forms of mourning, writers can reach and appeal to different audiences. This project draws from literary and media sources, charting the public networks that transmitted recordings of loss and shape mourning practices from the 1930s to the 1990s, a period of increased literary publication from marginalized subjects. I use this archive to demonstrate how breaking mourning out of traditional genres – like elegy, eulogy, and epitaph – allows grief to infiltrate dominant discourse, teaching its audiences how to read loss. In other words, genre, and its accompanying expectations, creates alternative ways of expressing (and interpreting) loss that can expand the bounds of what is grievable. By crafting a history of grievable life in American literature, I show how contemporary meditations on loss are rooted in a long-standing cultural discourse and how this history can help us better understand present political protests – and further social justice aims.Item The Black Interior: Work and Feeling in African American Experience(2013) Taylor, Christin Marie; Wyatt, David; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation traces tropes of black workers in order to recuperate the category of labor for literary studies. Following these tropes as they reappear suggests that representations of African American workers have not only had something to say about the stakes of labor as it pertains to social uplift and mobility but also the role of feeling and desire. We might think of these tropes as unveiling dialectics of "push and pull" forces that reside between the confines of the outside world and the soul. By examining tropes of black work in this way, The Black Interior expands materialist readings of labor to include the role of feeling and desire as first elaborated by W. E. B. Du Bois. George Wylie Henderson's Ollie Miss (1935), William Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941), Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples (1949), and Sarah E. Wright's This Child's Gonna Live (1969) use tropes of black work to reorient American consciousness toward the soul as the common root in the human rights pursuits that marked the twentieth century.Item Literary Cartographies of Spain: Mapping Identity in African American Travel Writing(2011) Ramos, Maria Christina; Nunes, Zita C; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes the considerable body of twentieth-century African American travel narratives of Spain, including those by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Frank Yerby, and Richard Wright. Building on recent scholarship that has shifted frameworks for understanding cultural processes based on history to ones based on space or geography, it explores the imaginative geographies mapped in these African American travel narratives and examines the use of Spain as a location that permits challenges to the geopolitics inherited from early modern European mappings of the world. Spain's liminal position geographically (between Europe and Africa), historically and culturally (between West and East), and politically (between liberal secularism and religious totalitarianism) provides these writers with a variety of routes through which to both revise the dominant European imaginative geographies of the world and expand theoretical discourses of the politics of location and identity. This dissertation argues that these African American travel narratives of Spain create literary cartographies that remap our global imaginary to enable a reconsideration of racial, ethnic, and national identities and that explore the capacity of transnationalism to transcend these categories. The figure of the Moor is central to these literary cartographies as a shifting signifier of race, ethnicity, and religion, and is used to help map individual and community identity as relational rather than fixed. In these mappings, identity is envisioned within a constantly fluctuating network of flows and mapped in relation to a variety of nodes within that network. This travel writing also highlights the importance of travel as a type of wayfinding for individuals and larger societies in need of critical self-reflection, ultimately attempting to articulate novel ways of building genuine and generative relations to others around the globe.Item Worlds beyond Brown: Black Transnational Identity and Self-Narration in the Era of Integration(2011) Myers, Shaundra; Washington, Mary Helen; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Worlds beyond Brown" examines competing constructions of black subjectivity that emerge, on the one hand, in U.S. legal and cultural discourses and, on the other, in black transnational self-narratives written in the putatively post-integration era. I contextually analyze how nation-based discourses--such as Constitutional laws and rulings, mainstream magazine culture, and the Federal Writers' Project--have, in the name of integration, expanded yet at the same time contracted the freedoms of black subjectivity. I show how African American writers have then negotiated the resulting contradictions of national identity by suggesting the possibilities of alternative selves less bound by the nation and its racial categories and practices. Here I track the persistence of segregation's racial categories and relationships across an era of integration as well as African American literary negotiations of the consequent discrepancies of identity. I mine James Alan McPherson's Crabcakes (1998), Andrea Lee's Russian Journal (1981), and Erna Brodber's Louisiana (1994) for their theoretical insights into the making and remaking of black subjectivity as a practice of the nation. These texts suggest how we might fashion identities that resist the fixed racial formulas of the United States--its racial binaries, its racial hierarchies, and its contradictory discourses of freedom and dispossession. Just as these black transnational narratives challenge nationalist constructions of a black geography and black identity, they also necessarily contest and revise the historical frames that facilitate these nation-based geographies and subjectivities. In doing so, these texts disrupt the historical borders that help constitute the dominant narratives of the civil rights movement and standard periodizations, such as segregation and integration, that have been used to tell a seemingly fixed story of inevitable racial progress within the nation. Together, these chapters identify legal and cultural sites--U.S. court rulings, the New Yorker, and the Federal Writers' Project--of nationalist discourses of geography, identity, and history and show how black transnational texts respond by undermining the fixity of these discourses and imagining competing constructions of black spaces, subjectivities, and time.Item "Youse awful queer chappie": Reading Black Queer Vernacular in Black Literatures of the Americas, 1903-1967(2005-08-24) Silberman, Seth Slark; Peterson, Carla L; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Read together, twentieth-century representations of black male homoerotism and homosexuality written up to the Black Arts movement shape and complicate traditional definitions of a black racial literary canon. Far from marginal or clandestine, these black men differently depicted in prose and verse continue the kinds of "networks of affiliation" that Saidiya Hartman finds in the communal connections that shaped black life in the nineteenth-century US during slavery and Reconstruction, ones based on the "metaphorical aptitude" demonstrated by black vernacular folk tales and songs. Community founding was necessarily agile. It depended on presence of mind more than melanin as a strategy to wrest the sign of "blackness" from flesh indicating enslavement. It also incorporated rather than homogenized differences within a black racial "community among ourselves," as Hartman calls it. "Youse awful queer chappie" examines how that kind of wily solidarity and resistance supports a body of texts that both contribute to a black literary tradition that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. characterizes as a gathering of "talking books" as well as fashion a particular hermeneutic and technique I call "black queer vernacular." Sometimes, but not always, with the word queer, the black writers I study with this manuscript, tell a story of black masculinity not fungible but mobile. Any individual text or author provides merely one nexus in a textual technique of characters, types, words, and images that demonstrates how the sign of "blackness" incorporates both race and sexuality. Less a rejoinder to scholarship in the fields of African American studies or gay and lesbian studies, the manuscript draws from poststructuralist, feminist, and queer theory to regard an already present dialogue in twentieth century black literary studies. By moving from W.E.B. Du Bois' landmark The Souls of Black Folk, through the Harlem Renaissance and London's Caribbean Artists movement, toward the Black Arts movement, the manuscript highlights how Diaspora informs, even as it fades from, analyses of black representation. It talks back to, and expands, the defining aesthetics of the black racial literary canon.