English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Mirror Made of Quartz(2024) Drummond, Kassiah Ania; Bertram, Lillian-Yvonne; Weiner, Joshua; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Mirror Made of Quartz" is a poetic exploration about community divided into four sections that reclaim the displaced emotion of rage with empathy. In the first section "Naming a Better Word for Love", the collection bargains the complexities of expressing love amidst trust and compromise. The next section "(Womb)an", explores how the gift of a name to a daughter, echoes the title of motherhood itself as both are becoming their new roles for the first time. The womb carries legacy, tradition, and trauma. The third section "I Think About Being Black a Lot", dedicates itself to exploring the aspects of the color as an identity, by delving into various culturally impactful folklores, redemption for the unsolved history, and new perspectives to the misunderstood. Finally, the title section, "Mirror Made of Quartz," serves as a supportive reflection of myself by commentating on my name, body, and the person I hope to become with tangible optimism.Item TRANS WORLDING WITHIN: DECOLONIAL EXAMINATIONS OF TRANS OF COLOR INTERIORITY(2021) Aftab, Aqdas; Avilez, GerShun; Lothian, Alexis; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues for the importance of reading for interiority in trans of color cultural productions. With so many representations of racialized trans people foregrounding the violated body, the cultural imaginary around trans of color life is saturated with notions of corporeality. In this context, I develop a transworld hermeneutic that refuses an emphasis on the racialized and colonized trans body, which is fetishized by the medical industrial complex and by cultural productions, and instead, turns towards the interior. Examining Black and Dalit diasporic texts, from postcolonial classics such as Nuruddin Farah’s Maps to contemporary novels like Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater to Mimi Mondal’s speculative short stories, I argue that while the corporeal is surveilled by the cis colonial gaze, the interior shows glimpses of world-making practices that are protected from the pornotropic violence of spectacle. While Western epistemologies define trans identity through the lens of Enlightenment-based models of science that focus on the sexed body’s transitions, my emphasis on interiority reconceptualizes trans of color life as intuitive, ecstatic, speculative and spiritual. Using the affective interior as a central framework, my transworld reading strategy offers a departure from essentialist as well as performative understandings of gender: informed by the theories of the spirit, the interior strives to remain opaque to the external gaze, hence guarded from performative effects. Overall, my research reveals how Black and Dalit exclusions from the colonial Human create the possibility of trans becoming; in other words, colonial and racist violence forcibly constructs transness, an experience that is utilized strategically by Black and Dalit writers as a decolonial tool for challenging, dismantling, and rewriting scripts of humanness.Item Cartographic Memories and Geographies of Pain: Bodily Representations in Caribbean Women's Art(2006-11-08) Wallace, Belinda Deneen; Collins, Merle; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Definitely, this dissertation's central intellectual and political aims are rooted in a guiding principle of Caribbean womanhood; and, with black women's bodies located at the center, the goal of this study is to provide new alternatives to understanding "writing the body" by looking to Caribbean women's cultural products as sites of theory formation. The artists and the works selected for this study demonstrate an awareness of the need for a re-evaluation of the metaphor of writing the body which takes into account the specificities of race, ethnicity and nationality. To that end, this study focuses on texts and performances by Caribbean women in order to examine the development of a Caribbean feminist consciousness and its ability to not only convey but also legitimate Caribbean female perspectives and experiences. Dionne Brand, Edwidge Danticat, Marion Hall, Joan Riley and Myriam Warner-Vieyra provide us with an opportunity to trace the processes through which Caribbean women artists write their own bodies and how those bodies can be used to explore larger issues around identity, geography and history. In the music and performances of Marion Hall this project looks closely at the intricacies that comprise women's sexuality, sexual autonomy and sexual identity beyond their objectification as sexual objects for men. In Warner-Vierya's Juletane, Riley's The Unbelonging and Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, the study examines the metropolis as a source of contamination that forces us to recognize madness as a socio-cultural and historical construct with gender specific consequences. Finally, the study concludes with Danticat's The Farming of Bones and Brand's In Another Place, Not Here, where it investigates literary representations of the female body as a representative text that disrupts the official narrative and brings forth a uniquely female historical subjectivity.