English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item The Problem of the Prism: Racial Passing, Colorism, and the Politics of Racial Visibility(2020) Hawkes, DeLisa; Wong, Edlie L.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In The Problem of the Prism, I argue that activist writers challenged the normalizing of white supremacy and imagined black futurity within the intersections of racial visibility, nation, and culture by transforming and repurposing racist and colorist ideologies. Through a wide range of cultural materials, I recuperate overlooked discourses on race and color by broadening the parameters through which we understand the black-white color line. Focusing on neglected texts by understudied authors allows for a deeper consideration of how assumed ancestry and legal segregation impact America’s construction of citizenship and social hierarchies. For this reason, I consider how critical attention to skin complexion and visible ancestry illuminates institutionalized feelings of inferiority. I call these the politics of racial visibility. In the first chapter, I consider Albion Tourgée’s 1890 novel Pactolus Prime and the ways in which it offers readers an examination of how the black-white color line fosters notions of inferiority within both races. In chapter two, I argue that Sutton Griggs inspires the “New Mulatta,” a revision of the “tragic mulatta” trope, that inspires race pride throughout the Black Diaspora by rejecting colorist ideologies. In chapter three, I recover the works of Olivia Ward Bush-Banks and Sylvester “Chief Buffalo Child” Long Lance as critical lenses through which to deconstruct black separatism by considering African-Native American identities within New Negro philosophy. I argue that their works reconceptualize the “tragic mulatta/o” outside of the confines of the black-white binary while acknowledging the fraught relationship between African Americans and Native Americans. Thus, their works reveal a black-red color line that disables anti-racist and anti-colonialist collaboration. In the final chapter, I argue that 1940s and 1950s Ebony magazine articles shift readers’ attention to racial anxieties within the “white” appearing spectrum of the black-white color line to critique internalized racism. By addressing social implications anticipated within racial ambiguity in the space of the home, this commercial magazine allows readers from all socioeconomic backgrounds to engage with pressing concerns over racial visibility. Ultimately, Ebony magazine’s persistent focus on colorism and racial passing brings the efforts of nineteenth and early-twentieth-century authors full circle.Item Insurrection in Black: Reading Race and Revolt in the Long Nineteenth Century(2019) Bruno, Timothy William; Levine, Robert S; Wong, Edlie L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Insurrection in Black: Reading Race and Revolt in the Long Nineteenth Century” examines depictions of black rebellion in American and African American literature spanning from the 1830s to the early 1900s. From enslaved uprisings and black armies to worker strikes and insurgent plots, black rebellion appeared as a recurring image across the antebellum and postbellum periods. “Insurrection in Black” argues that these images of rebellious violence functioned speculatively, imagining for readers new identities, social movements, and communities. The dissertation explores black rebellion’s cultural work in novels, speeches, newspapers, autobiographies, and polemics by Robert Montgomery Bird, Richard Hildreth, Jabez Delano Hammond, Gerrit Smith, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucy Parsons, Sutton E. Griggs, Thomas Dixon, and Pauline Hopkins. A comparative approach to these texts reveals that, far from representing a stable or straightforward politics, black rebellion in print often served competing ends not necessarily aligned with black freedom struggles. Ultimately, this dissertation does more than reveal the speculative power inhering in depictions of rebellious violence: “Insurrection in Black” brings black militancy to the center of the long nineteenth century’s literary and cultural life.Item Instituting Violence: Spaces of Exception in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century American Fiction(2017) Slaughter, Nicholas Allen; Wyatt, David; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the War on Terror’s onset, American studies have popularized philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s argument in the treatises Homo Sacer (1995) and State of Exception (2003) that modern governments have come to operate in a permanent state of emergency. Agamben terms this phenomenon a “state of exception” in which law may be set aside at any time. Critics have productively applied this theory to post-9/11 U.S. government actions like surveillance programs, torture, and military interventions. Scholarship treats the Guantanamo detention center as the epitome of a localized, perpetual suspension of legal and ethical norms. Yet insufficient attention has been paid to other spaces of a similarly exceptional nature throughout American history. In “Instituting Violence,” I examine twentieth- and twenty-first century fictional representations of institutionalized sites home to unregulated violence while also engaging in current critical conversations about political and economic violence. Preceding Agamben’s political theory, much American literature depicts this exceptionalism across a wide array of sites. I explore four categories of spaces of exception represented across a range of genres, considering their interconnections and histories. In each text, a space that appears to operate as an exception to American legal and moral norms proves to reveal the normal but obscured relationships of power between the privileged and exploited. In addition to how these texts explore longer histories of such violent spaces, I consider how American writers self-reflexively examine the efficacy of their art for meaningfully engaging audiences in ethical discourses about history and justice.Item The Feeling American: Emotion Management and the Standardization of Democracy in Cold War Literature and Film(2017) Singleton, Kelly Anne; Auerbach, Jonathan; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines how strategies of emotion management influenced the development of American literature and film during the Cold War period. Focusing primarily on the High Cold War Period of 1949 to 1962, it argues that a government-funded postwar boom in the psychological and social sciences resulted in a “psychological turn” in American culture that sought to solve social problems by teaching Americans to manage their emotions in keeping with scientifically-established standards for democratic behavior. Proponents of emotion management believed it could accomplish the Soviet goal of creating a harmonious, classless society without requiring radical social revolution or totalitarian forms of control that would violate American principles of freedom and democracy. To that end, American policymakers used the findings of social scientists to develop narratives that: 1) modeled how to behave in the event of a nuclear attack, 2) equated happiness with the American standard of living, 3) made emotional malleability the foundation for a democratic personality, and 4) linked racism to deviation from the norms of liberal white psychology. The works of several mid-century American authors and filmmakers provide an important counterpoint to the optimism of this official emotion management narrative as they: 1) challenge the government’s sanitized representation of nuclear war, 2) document the unhappy effects of middle-class organization culture, 3) express anxiety over the alienating effects of emotional labor, and 4) reject the equation of mental health and American identity with specifically white cultural standards and forms. In contrast to emotion management’s conservative emphasis on individual psychological adjustment, these works suggest that only systemic structural changes can resolve the problems of American democracy. This historicist approach analyzes propaganda films, government bulletins, popular magazine articles, and period sociological studies alongside close readings of novels (Philip Wylie’s Tomorrow! (1954) and Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955)), films (Don Siegel’s The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962)), and the story collections of African American authors Langston Hughes and Alice Childress.Item Imaginary Escapes: Fugitive Identity in African American Literature(2014) Burnham, Rewa Tyhirra; Nunes, Zita C; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the antebellum period, the fugitive has been one of the most consistent figures in African American literature. This study explores the descendants of this figure, focusing on representations of the black fugitive that have emerged in late post-civil rights literature by African American authors. Each author creates a fugitive writer-protagonist who, unable to produce a racial identity narrative to suit his or her experience, abandons traditional literary genres and reading practices--such as the written poem, slave narrative, autobiography, bildungsroman, and academic literary criticism--in favor of performance, interactive reading, speculative autobiography, and hybrid forms of scholarship. Ultimately, fugitive protagonists represent the author's own negotiations of racial identity in the post-civil rights period while connecting the authors to the most foundational aspects of the African American literary tradition.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 Sum of the Parts: The Trilogy in McCarthy, Roth, and Morrison(2013) Egan, Caroline Louse; Wyatt, David; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the function of the trilogy form in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, Philip Roth's American Trilogy, and Toni Morrison's Love Trilogy. The Border Trilogy is comprised of All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain; the American Trilogy is comprised of American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain; and the Love Trilogy is comprised of Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. Written in the waning years of the twentieth century, McCarthy's, Roth's, and Morrison's use of the trilogy ran counter to the formal practices of postmodern fiction and to the ideological predilections of contemporary criticism. They used the trilogy form to apprehend an extensive history out of the rubble of postmodernism, which often militated against such large-scale attempts at representation. What the three authors end up producing are contemporary versions of grand narratives, appropriate for the end of the twentieth century: individual novels that are discrete, localized, and contained within themselves, but also epic cultural geographies whose breadth exceeds the limits of the single novels. Taken as a whole, the three books in each trilogy demonstrate that history must be diversely narrated and the storytelling structures that constitute that history should be shuffled, alternated, and changed up as necessary. No one single novel is sufficient to the task of encapsulating that multiplicity of narrative approaches--not even literary monoliths like Beloved or American Pastoral. The three novels in each trilogy must be read together in order to comprehend the narrative largess of late twentieth century American history. To paraphrase Hayden White, the authors in this study use the trilogy form in order to investigate how histories get invented, not found. McCarthy, Roth, and Morrison deploy the trilogy to configure--to invent--this history as a problem of scale, identifying coordinates and providing a way to cognitively map the past so that we gain a sense of its totality, to use Frederic Jameson's word. Once we can apprehend the totality of he past, we can begin to make sense of it.Item Global Sympathy: Representing Nineteenth-Century Americans' Foreign Relations(2013) Sillin, Sarah; Levine, Robert S; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Over the past two decades, scholars have established sympathy's key role in nineteenth-century literary culture and the development of U.S. nationalism. While examining the bonds that feeling forges among citizens, however, critics have largely neglected the question of how sympathy also links Americans to the larger world. Representations of global sympathy--wherein characters from different cultures share one another's joy and pain--pervade nineteenth-century U.S. literature. My project analyzes how authors narrativized the nation's political, territorial, and cultural changes, while underscoring the persistent importance of feeling in defining America's global role. "Global Sympathy" tells a story about what happens when writers imagine Americans as the kith and kin of foreign peoples. Beginning in the early national period, the first chapter explores how James Fenimore Cooper employs tropes of foreign friendship to establish Americans' equality to the British, inviting readers to re-imagine the British Empire as a valuable trading partner. My second chapter considers the importance of Christianity to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Maria Cummins, whose Protestant American heroines become metaphorical sisters to people in Italy and Syria, respectively. Read together, these pre-Civil War writers evoke confidence in Americans' ability to navigate foreign relations amidst political instability. Yet with increasing U.S. expansion, writers in the second half of the nineteenth-century expressed growing concern about America's foreign influence. Chapters three and four center on minority writers who employ sentiment to criticize the effects of imperialism on "foreign" peoples both within and outside the nation. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton participates in Gilded Age literary critiques of America as unfeeling and undemocratic, and develops an international courtship narrative to convey U.S. oppression of both "native" Californios and foreign nations like Mexico. Pauline Hopkins's turn-of-the-century fiction constitutes part of a broader body of literary responses to the Spanish-American War. Hopkins questions U.S. imperialism and racism by imagining the world, rather than the nation, as a family. More broadly, this project analyzes how Hopkins and all of the writers I study translate foreign politics into intimate terms and--by depicting U.S. citizens' affective ties to diverse peoples--insist on America's obligations to the international sphere.Item Brave New Narratives: Postrace Identity and the African American Literary Tradition(2012) Williams, Laura Camille; Washington, Mary Helen; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines late twentieth&ndashcentury and millennial black middle&ndashclass fiction, often described as the New Black Aesthetic (NBA), as a vital and expansive aspect of literary studies and racial discourse. I focus on fictional depictions to analyze the narration of race in a so&ndashcalled postrace era. The novels in my study have in common protagonists who are writers that resemble their NBA authors. As imagined writers creating narratives in texts, these protagonists show how narratives make race. Because they exhibit the unique position that the NBA occupies in a post&ndashCivil Rights U.S., the protagonists featured here provide both counter&ndashnarratives and dominant narratives of race. The term &ldquopostrace&rdquo dominates current discourse about race in the U.S., often to imply a class arrival and an advance beyond racial constructs. I argue that NBA fiction characterizes the post&ndashCivil Rights black middle class as not moving past race, but rather inexorably engaging and confronting race in tandem with gender, class, sexual orientation, and/or nationality. Black middle&ndashclass protagonists in NBA fiction occupy a transient social position in which they experience figurative returns to the past. I call these returns &ldquopostrace moments&rdquo&mdashnarrative moments that connect contemporary protagonists to collective memories and political histories of race and other forms of social identity. My introduction historicizes twentieth&ndashcentury constructs of blackness and postraciality in African American literature. In Chapter One I argue that fiction is the ideal form for examining the narration of race. I show how the protagonist of Trey Ellis's Platitudes narrates himself both in and out of heteronormative definitions of social identity. Chapter Two illustrates how Percival Everett's Erasure allows the author and protagonist to disappear into multiple narratives and counter&ndashnarratives of identity and authorship. In Chapter Three I argue that the protagonist of Danzy Senna's Symptomatic narrates herself in relation to a foil to challenge and confirm conventional tropes. And, in Chapter Four, I show how the protagonist of Andrea Lee's Lost Hearts in Italy narrates black femininity both on the periphery and at the center of empire. My conclusion shows how the NBA and postrace identity can expand literary studies.Item Black Benefactors and White Recipients: Counternarratives of Benevolence in Nineteenth-Century American Literature(2012) Troppe, Marie; Levine, Robert S; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My study examines four African American-authored narratives written between 1793 and 1901 (Richard Allen and Absalom Jones' Narratives of the Proceedings of the Black People, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes, and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition) that depict acts of benevolence by African Americans to white recipients. This work focuses on the power relations represented by acts of benevolence, social perceptions regarding the roles of benefactor and recipient, and authorial choices in the depiction of these acts. The study highlights how these four narratives complicate representations of benevolence, both in terms of race and of the historical contexts in which they were written. Previous scholars have documented the emergence of what they identify as a genre of benevolence texts within nineteenth-century American literature and even identified several subgenres among these texts (including poorhouse stories, seamstress novels, panic fiction, settlement house narratives, and maternal literacy management narratives). My work contributes to this critical literature by identifying what I call counternarratives of benevolence depicting interactions between black benefactors and white recipients, thereby expanding the scholarly discourse surrounding benevolence and challenging the dominant American narrative about it. I call the texts under consideration here counternarratives because they challenge the dominant narrative of black inferiority in benevolent encounters. Unlike benevolence texts previously studied, which usually portray white benefactors and white recipients, white benefactors and black recipients, and even occasionally black benefactors and black recipients--portrayals that often reinforce social hierarchies--the texts I discuss work to disrupt social hierarchies by both uncovering and challenging cultural hegemony. In doing so, they facilitate the expression of black agency and declare African American readiness for full citizenship. Drawing on the methods of social history, cultural anthropology, moral and political philosophy and literary studies, my analysis examines issues of agency, performativity, gift theory, and the psychology of gratitude. My study interprets two canonical and two non-canonical texts to show how benevolence is used as a narrative device to question race and power, to demonstrate a connection between narrative and ideology, and ultimately to destabilize ideologies of race and nation. My study also contributes to current debate about benevolence. By recovering the African American intellectual foundations of today's community-based learning movement within higher education, I raise questions about using traditionally understood nineteenth-century benevolence as a means for teaching students to challenge constructs of race and power in social activist movements in the twenty-first century. The writers I discuss offer a new and important model for community-based learning today.