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 The Unhealed Wound: Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature and the Continuing Memory of the Duvalier Dictatorship(2019) Edwards, Norrell F; Orlando, Valerie K; Mallios, Peter; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the 1990s, as Haiti continued to withstand the aftershocks of the end of a 29 year father-son dictatorship, the United States and France hovered in the periphery to “help” Haiti’s transition to democracy. World systems theory dictates that a country like Haiti would be relegated to the periphery while countries like the United States and France inhabit the core. The Unhealed Wound: Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature and the Continuing Memory of the Duvalier Dictatorship inverts this dynamic. This work places Port-au-Prince at the core, while New York and Paris—secondary homes to Haitian exiles and emigres—becomes the periphery. Traversing national borders, politics and disciplines, this study investigates how memory, history and literature shape the physical and imagined cityscapes of New York, Port-au-Prince and Paris. Bringing together authors such as Edwidge Danticat, Lyonel Trouillot and Shay Youngblood, Edwards questions and explores dynamics of the Black immigrant body and Haitian body in these cities in the 1980’s, 1990’s and early 2000’sItem As Thread(2013) Dyche, Jessica Kathryn; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As Thread is a collection of poems which keeps account of the categories and modes of loss, using the death of my father as the catalyst, and how memory, as replacement, unravels, tangles, and mends--as thread does.Item Red Hill(2013) Carpenter, Marian Goddard; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Red Hill collects narrative lyrics organized around seasons, the New England landscape, interior domestic spaces, and a reckoning with the marital history of a family. The impetus of many of the poems comes from a consideration of works of visual art while others explore vivid memories.