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
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Item EL LUGAR DEL LECTOR: UN RECORRIDO A PARTIR DE TEXTOS DE OSVALDO LAMBORGHINI, MANUEL PUIG Y WASHINGTON CUCURTO(2020) Bartis, Sebastian; Quintero-Herencia, Juan Carlos; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation stems from a challenge posed by Argentine writer and poet Osvaldo Lamborghini in a 1980 interview. He affirmed that instead of denouncing or lamenting oppressive practices and discourses, his job was to showcase the ways we are involved intrinsically in those practices, not as victims but as accomplices or tormentors. As readers we are accustomed to fictional representations of injustice and oppression; they scandalize or hurt while also comforting us with the idea that we’re fair and stand on the right side. What Lamborghini’s narrative cancels is the position of the reader as a witness who would learn about injustice to eventually amend it. With this in mind, this dissertation traces an arch spanning the 1920s and the five following decades, allowing us to read under a different light narratives on work, family, and state in Argentine writers Roberto Mariani, Leonidas Barletta, Horacio Quiroga and Roberto Arlt. Lamborghini’s texts are not alone in affirming that violence is not outside the law but rather at its core. The dissertation compares how the novels of Manuel Puig, one of Lamborghini’s contemporaries, also insist on the same ethical task. Both Lamborghini and Puig present the desolation that arises from realizing that the violence present in our laws and discourses is experienced at the same time as absurdities, confusion, and ineludible fatalities. In the final section, the dissertation examines writer Washington Cucurto’s strategy to subvert the mainstream narrative about marginalization in Buenos Aires during the 1990’s. Expanding on Lamborghini’s ethical task, Cucurto subverts the middle-class reader's expectations with his novels. His works operate as a productive deviation both from the pathologization of the marginals and their depiction as defenseless doomed beings. Furthermore, they contest the symbolic and spatial demarcation between the center and the margins to show the centrality of those groups and spaces labeled as marginal.Item TOWARDS A TRANSANDEAN MAPUCHE POLITICS: RITUAL AND POWER IN CHILE AND ARGENTINA, 1792-1834(2017) Zarley, Jesse; Rosemblatt, Karin A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Towards a Transandean Mapuche Politics examines how unconquered indigenous groups in the Southern Cone of South America impacted the transition from colony to nation (1792-1834), a moment when European and indigenous sovereignties were thrown in to question. It focuses on the intersection of indigenous politics and Latin America’s Age of Revolution. This project intervenes in the growing debates over transnational history and borderlands studies to demonstrate how the transandean Mapuche-Spanish frontier was both a political and an epistemological space. Mapuche sovereignty resisted categorizations by empires and nations, impeded the political and economic projects articulated by Europeans and creoles, and compelled foreign actors to participate in Mapuche diplomatic rituals much longer than previously thought. It begins by looking at a late colonial treaty negotiation in 1793 to reconstruct diplomatic rituals developed by Mapuche leaders to defend their sovereignty. This project then extends these insights on both sides of the Andes mountain range until a military campaign led by Argentine President Juan Manuel de Rosas against Mapuche and other indigenous groups inhabiting the Pampas in 1833-1834. By looking at military, ecclesiastical, and Mapuche correspondence from Chile, Argentina, and Spain, it demonstrates that groups like the Mapuche, who inhabited the seemingly marginal frontiers of Spain’s American empire, were in fact central actors in its transformation. Analyzing Mapuche diplomacy in southern Chile and western Argentina from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century demonstrates how indigenous relations in a border region provide different genealogies for our understanding of sovereignty in the Age of Revolution. Mapuche sovereignty ran parallel too, but intersected with the fraught end of empire and formation of nation states. These interactions along the old Spanish/Mapuche frontier, which stretched across the continent from the Pacific Coast of Chile to the mouth of the River Plate, were but the tip of the iceberg in the broader, transandean Mapuche political world that confounded the spatial imaginaries of empires and nations.Item Energizing Sustainable Lifestyles(2017) Sahaniuk, Florencia; Ambrose, Michael A; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The decrease in energy costs to the population of Buenos Aires has increased the consumption of energy and the lack of investment in the infrastructure of the electric grid has caused for the province of Buenos Aires to experience constant blackouts in the built environment. The major blackouts have been seen within the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, where the urban fabric is extremely dense and where the residential areas are consuming large amounts of power during the summer months, December to March, while the energy infrastructure keeps deteriorating and cannot handle the demand of energy. This thesis aims to aid the barrio of Caballito by searching for an architectural solution in the residential realm to alleviate the impact of the blackouts. Caballito, has experienced the most issues with power and while it is away from the tourist areas, it remains very well connected through public transportation and is surrounded by essential amenities that allow for a sustainable lifestyle to be implemented.Item Symbiotic Cities: Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Mass Culture, 1910-1960(2016) Richter, Daniel Alex; Williams, Daryle; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how Buenos Aires emerged as a creative capital of mass culture and cultural industries in South America during a period when Argentine theater and cinema expanded rapidly, winning over a regional marketplace swelled by transatlantic immigration, urbanization and industrialization. I argue that mass culture across the River Plate developed from a singular dynamic of exchange and competition between Buenos Aires and neighboring Montevideo. The study focuses on the Argentine, Uruguayan, and international performers, playwrights, producers, cultural impresarios, critics, and consumers who collectively built regional cultural industries. The cultural industries in this region blossomed in the interwar period as the advent of new technologies like sound film created profitable opportunities for mass cultural production and new careers for countless theater professionals. Buenos Aires also became a global cultural capital in the wider Hispanic Atlantic world, as its commercial culture served a region composed largely of immigrants and their descendants. From the 1920s through the 1940s, Montevideo maintained a subordinate but symbiotic relationship with Buenos Aires. The two cities shared interlinked cultural marketplaces that attracted performers and directors from the Atlantic world to work in theatre and film productions, especially in times of political upheaval such as the Spanish Civil War and the Perón era in Argentina. As a result of this transnational process, Argentine mass culture became widely consumed throughout South America, competing successfully with Hollywood, European, and other Latin American cinemas and helping transform Buenos Aires into a cosmopolitan metropolis. By examining the relationship between regional and national frames of cultural production, my dissertation contributes to the fields of Latin American studies and urban history while seeking to de-center the United States and Europe from the central framing of transnational history.Item La rebeldia de la letra. Escritura, viaje y teoria en la novela espanola y argentina del siglo XX(2012) Gomez-Montoya, Carolina; Demaria, Laura; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach to analyze and problematize the intersections of writing, theory and travel in a body of contemporary literature from Argentina and Spain. In the first chapter, I examined the paths of three travelers, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Victoria Ocampo and Witold Gombrowicz, who despite their dissimilar experiences, produce a form of writing closely linked to movement and becoming. Through the medieval topos of homo viator, which conceives the human as pilgrim and life as a voyage of deciphering, I examine the practice of writing as a constant movement requiring the writer to embark on a journey through what Martin Heidegger called, the holzwege. In so doing, the writer must exit the polis, and from the position of the outsider, the writer will be able to write and do the work of theory. In subsequent chapters, I analyze writing spaces in the novels of Enrique Vila-Matas and Hector Libertella and how those places are, in fact, traveling spaces that question any concept of fixed or permanent belonging. By proposing a practice of writing that is self-reflexive and preoccupied with the possibilities of writing, I look at the responses of Libertella and Vila-Matas to the twentieth century nihilistic malaise that leads to silence. Ultimately, my goal is to construct a theory of writing that portrays the practice of writing as mobile, fluid, and desobedient to national formations and literary traditions.Item MODERNIZATION AND VISUAL ECONOMY: FILM, PHOTOJOURNALISM, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN BRAZIL AND ARGENTINA, 1955-1980(2010) Halperin, Paula; Weinstein, Barbara; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the relationship among visual culture, nationalism, and modernization in Argentina and Brazil in a period of extreme political instability, marked by an alternation of weak civilian governments and dictatorships. I argue that motion pictures and photojournalism were constitutive elements of a modern public sphere that did not conform to the classic formulation advanced by Jürgen Habermas. Rather than treating the public sphere as progressively degraded by the mass media and cultural industries, I trace how, in postwar Argentina and Brazil, the increased production and circulation of mass media images contributed to active public debate and civic participation. With the progressive internationalization of entertainment markets that began in the 1950s in the modern cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires there was a dramatic growth in the number of film spectators and production, movie theaters and critics, popular magazines and academic journals that focused on film. Through close analysis of images distributed widely in international media circuits I reconstruct and analyze Brazilian and Argentine postwar visual economies from a transnational perspective to understand the constitution of the public sphere and how modernization, Latin American identity, nationhood, and socio-cultural change and conflict were represented and debated in those media. Cinema and the visual after World War II became a worldwide locus of production and circulation of discourses about history, national identity, and social mores, and a space of contention and discussion of modernization. Developments such as the Bandung Conference in 1955, the decolonization of Africa, the Cuban Revolution, together with the uneven impact of modernization, created a "Third Worldism" and "Latin Americanism" that transformed public debate and the cultural field. By researching "peripheral" nations, I add to our understanding of the process of the transnationalization of the cultural field and the emergence of a global mass culture in the 1960s and 1970s.Item Civil Society, Popular Protest, and Democracy in Latin America(2006-10-21) Frajman, Eduardo Ohav; Alford, C. Fred; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation addresses the relationship between mobilized coalitions of movements and organizations emerging from civil society and the promotion of democracy. It offers a critique of major works in political theory that see in civil society the potential to transform democratic politics, primarily through the protection of civil society from the state in order to allow for the development of new identities and forms of sociability. The three main theoretical objections to these works involve their focus on state-civil society relations at the expense of economic factors, the presupposition that consensus is present in civil society, and the assumption that mobilized civil societies are fueled from the grassroots. Four recent cases of civil society mobilizations from Latin America, in Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Bolivia, are presented to illustrate the deficiencies of current theoretical approaches to civil society. The case studies show the importance of material conditions and the framing of specific grievances in the formation of popular movements grounded in civil society.Item The Politics of Labor Unions Laws Policy Making in Argentina(2006-07-12) Gonzalez, Marcela Fabiana; Kestnbaum, Meyer; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The question addressed in the Thesis seek to elucidate how and why did organized labor recover its strength vis-à-vis the state and create for itself a significant political place in the process of labor unions laws policy making in the eighties in Argentina? Drawing inspiration upon the historical institutionalist literature on policy outcomes and Bourdieu's concepts of field and practice sense, we propossed to answer the question by placing our attention on the conditional and contingent political factors as well as the historical and institutional patterns of overlapped and interwoven relationships that shaped labor politics: the trilogy state, labor, and peronist party. Specifically, we focused on organized labor relationally constituted capacities, coherence as a collective actor and capacity to fit its demands toward the state, the two critical dimensions of labor as a political actor to making sense of labor action vis-à-vis the state in the politics of labor unions laws reform.