English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item GENRES OF MEMORY AND ASIAN/AMERICAN WOMEN’S ACTIVISM(2022) Bramlett, Katie; Enoch, Jessica; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As human rights and racial inequality dominate public discourse, it has become increasingly clear that Americans are invested in conversations of public memory. The removal of confederate monuments and demands for equity in memorialization for people of color underscore the point that who is remembered and how they are honored is important. Further, the growing awareness of violence against Asian/Americans and the hate crime against Asian/American women in Atlanta has emphasized the need to understand the history of violence against Asian/Americans, Asian/American gendered stereotypes, and the Asian/American activists who fight for equal rights. This dissertation examines three distinct memorial genres—a statue, a traveling exhibit, and a documentary—created by Asian/Americans about Asian/American women activists. My interdisciplinary research engages feminist memory studies, Asian/American studies, and cultural rhetorics to investigate how public memory activists leverage the affordances of different memorial genres to recover Asian/American women’s activism. I consider the ways Asian/American women’s memorials contest the past and navigate the politics of memorialization to influence the present. Each chapter considers how memorials not only remember past activism, but also work to reframe current conversations about Asian/American women in more just and equitable frameworks. I claim that my chosen memorials are created by memorial activists and each seek to expand U.S. memory beyond traditional gendered stereotypes that are pervasive in the United States.Item "Nothing About the Rape:" Generative Silencing in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber(2014) Webb, Calvin Allan; Wong, Edlie; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project, which focuses on Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber, explores the relationship between storytelling, witnessing, and lived experience. By interrogating the intersection of black feminism, speculative fiction, and slave narratives in the backdrop of the Haitian Revolution, Hopkinson's work shows that some silencing can be constructive, even essential, for survival.Item Reading Utopian Narratives in a Dystopian Time(2008-01-08) Taylor, Deborah; Donawerth, Jane L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a feminist study of the reading process of contemporary utopian novels by women: Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison. These novels are not utopias, in the sense of place, since they are set in dystopian times. Instead, this study explores the reading process as a part of a text's presentation of utopian desire. The first chapter focuses on Le Guin's 1985 Always Coming Home, set in a future United States polluted by environmental toxins and divided between a patriarchal Condor nation, and a communal, matrilineal, and non-hierarchical Kesh culture. Le Guin uses a made-up language, constructed without hierarchies, concepts from Native American story-telling and Taoist philosophy, and multiple narrators to encourage a collaborative reading process where readers weave a utopian vision from the pieces of Kesh culture, balanced against the Condor. The second chapter examines Butler's Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1997). In this future, California has disintegrated into anarchy and violence, and Lauren Olamina survives the razing of her walled community, creates Earthseed - a new philosophy-religion, and founds a utopian settlement that is destroyed by Christian fundamentalists. Butler parodies false utopias--gated communities, company towns, and the Christian Right--and presents Lauren's religion, Earthseed, built on the idea of "God is Change," as a utopian alternative. Butler merges the genres of diary, scripture, jeremiad, and slave narrative to offer a collaborative reading experience. False utopian ideals of exclusivity, security, and institutionalized religion are resisted by meditating on Earthseed Scriptures. The third chapter considers Morrison's Paradise (1998), set in western United States, and recounts the story of an all-black town, Ruby, and its destruction of an all-women "convent" near the town. Because Morrison tells her story with non-chronological fragments and multiple viewpoints, the reader must become the point of view character, constructing a coherent narrative and image of paradise from conflicting accounts. Morrison explores spiritual connectedness and healing by drawing on the history of all-black townships and all-women communities. The narrative strategies of these novels--defamiliarzation, polyvocalism, fragmented structure, and meditation--encourage readers to collaborate in exploring utopian desire.