Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Jones, Douglas AnthonySubject: search.filters.subject.History, Black

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    Thinking, Scripting, and Performing: Constructing and Playing the Racial Synecdoche in the Antebellum North
    (2007-05-06) Jones, Douglas Anthony; Nathans, Heather S; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In my thesis, I argue that between the years of 1830-1842, free African Americans scripted and performed what I term, following historian Patrick Rael, the racial synecdoche. This "character" was a black performative identity that people of color should play on the public stage. The performance team--or those who scripted and performed this new black identity--believed that the performance of the synecdoche would grant free people of color eligibility to perform full civic participation in America's nascent democracy. In this study, I consider the national black conventions of the 1830s as ritualistic sites and as the primary loci where that self-scripting process took place. I characterize this thesis as an intellectual history and hope that it contributes to the vital and ever-growing bodies of African American history and African American theatre and performance history, as well as add contour and complexity to the well-charted Jacksonian period.