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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Item Portraits of the (In)visible: Examining the Intersections of Race, Religion, and Gender for Black Muslim Women in College(2017) Daoud, Nina; Griffin, Kimberly A.; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Although anti-Islamic sentiments have existed before 9/11, the past 15 years have brought about a distinct set of challenges for Muslim Americans, ones that have seldom been explored within the context of college campuses. Further, higher education scholarship has not addressed diversity among Muslims and the reality that students facing numerous forms of oppression often have unique challenges negotiating their multiple identities. This project recognizes the distinct subjectivities of Black Muslim women, examining how they navigate college at the intersections of their racial, religious, and gender identities. Through the qualitative methodology of portraiture and a Black feminist lens, this dissertation utilizes Patricia Hill Collins’s matrix of domination to present portraits of four Black Muslim women, focusing on how they make decisions about which of their identities to embody throughout their undergraduate years. Data were collected between October 2016 and March 2017, the months leading up to and following the 2016 Presidential Election. As such, this study’s primary contribution lies in uncovering how contextual influences shape the college experiences of students from marginalized backgrounds. More specifically, findings from this study reveal the significance of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the decisive moment as well as how Erving Goffman’s conceptualization of impression management can be used to explicate Black Muslim women’s resistance. As it relates to the decisive moment, or the specific time in which an artist is able to capture a snapshot of a broader image, participants discussed how political discourse about each of their social groups (e.g., Black, Muslim, woman, immigrant) shaped their campus interactions. Additionally, the decisive moment galvanized participants to fight against racial injustices. Relatedly, participants engaged in impression management, employing strategies to resist stereotypes related to one or more of their marginalized identities. In particular, participants intentionally performed their racial and/or religious identities (e.g., through wearing a headscarf, being vocal about racism) as an act of resistance. Overall, findings illuminate issues of power and privilege in different spaces, including the Muslim community, the Black community, college campuses, and the U.S., thereby disrupting narratives of universality among those who identify as Black or Muslim, within higher education and beyond.Item STAGING BLACK WOMEN’S HISTORIES: RECOVERY AND RECUPERATION IN THE THEATRE OF GLENDA DICKERSON(2018) Long, Khalid Yaya; Chatard Carpenter, Faedra; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a critical study of artisan and pedagogue Glenda Dickerson (1945-2012). Glenda Dickerson, whose career spans a little over forty years, held many roles within the field of American/Black/Feminist theatre: playwright, director, folklorist, performer, choreographer, adapter/conceiver, and educator. Dickerson was the second African American woman to direct on Broadway with the 1980 production, Reggae, a Musical Revelation. After a successful run in commercial theatre, Glenda Dickerson chose to place her efforts in developing works more intended for academic and community-oriented theatre. Dickerson’s career in theatre was quite distinctive. Despite the ways in which Glenda Dickerson challenged racial and gendered boundaries within both professional and academic theatre, and with her pioneering of contemporary Black theatre as well as a Black feminist theatre, Dickerson’s legacy is still largely unknown, and, most strikingly, severely under-documented within the scholarly histories of theatre and performance. Accordingly, this dissertation provides a genealogy of Dickerson’s career, highlighting some of the historical and socio-cultural influences that shaped her life and work in the theatre. Additionally, this dissertation critically examines several of her unpublished, contemporary dramatic works: Kitchen Prayers: Performance Dialogue on 9/11 and Global Loss (2001), Identities on Trial: A Kitchen Protest Prayer (2003), Sapphire’s New Show: The Kitchen Table Summit (2004), and Barbara Jordan, Texas Treasure (2005). By highlighting major themes found within these works and providing both a historical and theoretical study of her writing, devising, and staged performances, this dissertation aims to situate Dickerson as a forerunner of contemporary Black theatre as well as contemporary Black feminist theatreItem "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 "Tell Me Your Diamonds" Story Bearing in African American Women's Life History Narratives(2014) Smith, Shanna Louise; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1994, a week prior to the release of her family memoir The Sweeter the Juice, African American writer, Shirley Haizlip was a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The episode, "Denying my Race," unveiled the ways some members of Haizlip's bi-racial family sought to pass for white, while others lived successful lives as African Americans. During the publicized reunion, members of both sides of the racial coin worked toward coming to terms with their identities. In telling this story, Haizlip took on the role of the female story bearer, the writer of the family narrative who is positioned two or more generations beyond the story she tells. What does it mean to be a living archive, a black woman who carries the mantle of an uneasy familial past and makes it her body of work? What does it mean to investigate a wound in the family that is representative of larger cultural injuries that occurred during pivotal moments in black history? How can deeply entrenched cultural wounds open dialogue, establish common ground, and create spaces for empathy and understanding across race, gender, sexuality, and class? Each of the women, about whom I am writing in this dissertation, helps to address these questions. A'Lelia Bundles, Shirlee Haizlip, and (Carole) Ione have all been afforded the opportunity to labor with their fingers to corroborate the oral narratives handed to them. The fruit of their labor are their life histories: On Her Own Ground, The Sweeter the Juice, and Pride of Family, respectively. The titles signal familial pasts that intersect with the complexities of gender and labor, race and racial passing, class and privilege. Using personal life histories like that of Haizlip, Bundles, Ione and others I seek to better understand the ways in which women writers can foster more generative understandings of African American life histories and the ways in which they are situated as sites for social change.