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 Counter-Capital: Black Power, The New Left, and the Struggle to Remake Washington, D.C. From Below, 1964-1994(2023) Kumfer, Timothy Daniel; Hanhardt, Christina B; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Counter-Capital: Black Power, the New Left, and the Struggle to Remake Washington, D.C. From Below, 1964-1994” traces how grassroots organizers in the nation’s capital fought for greater control over the city and its future between the War on Poverty and rise of neoliberal austerity, helping to shape its recent past and present. Comprising a set of linked case studies, it explores how a generation of activists forged in the crucibles of the Black freedom struggle and resistance to the Vietnam war responded locally to redevelopment schemes, planned inner-city freeways, nascent gentrification, and an exponential rise in homelessness from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. The campaigns they waged brought them into confrontation with federal administrators, legislators, mayors, and even the president. They also led to moments of collaboration with the state, altering the course of urban and social policy locally and nationally and contributing to the growth of community development and direct service approaches. Going beyond the boundaries of policymaking, the radicals it follows fostered emancipatory and participatory visions for the District and urban life more generally rooted in their movement ideals, ones which remain instructive even as they encountered obstacles to their full realization. Drawing on a diverse array of archival materials including organizational newsletters, meeting minutes, event flyers, campaign brochures, and correspondence; underground press and community papers alongside mainstream news outlets; documentary film and preserved footage; and oral histories and personal interviews, “Counter-Capital” contributes to debates in the fields of African American, social movement, and urban history. The project is further animated by and participates in discussions taking place across the correlating interdisciplinary fields of African American studies, American studies, and urban studies, bringing aspects of these fields that don’t always speak to one another into closer conversation. Laboring at these intersections, it shows how sustained attention to space—and specific places—can reframe the historiography of Black Power and the New Left and how centering activists and their campaigns expands the literature on Washington while troubling conventions in the composite portrait of late 20th C. US cities.Item Reimagining Black Power: Prison Manifestos and the Strategies of Regeneration in the Rewriting of Black Identity, 1969-2002(2006-11-30) Corrigan, Lisa Marie; Parry-Giles, Shawn J.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study is predicated upon an analysis of the manifesto as a rhetorical centerpiece of both black resistance and revolution from slavery to the present in an attempt to build on an obviously significant, yet undertheorized, genre of persuasion. It examines the history of black manifestos and moves to study the utility ands strategies of prison autobiographies and life-writings in the Black Power movement to understand the typology of discourses produced under constant surveillance and violence from the state. To this end, the study examines the life writings or, manifestos, of three Black Power activists: Assata Shakur, Mumia Abu-Jamal and H. Rap Brown (now Jamil Al-Amin). Rather than studying all of their rhetorical actions during the earliest phase of the Black Power movement of the mid- to late 1960s, this study instead features the regenerative strategies within the prison manifestos of Black Power leaders who have been compelled to revise notions of Black Power after many of its leaders and followers were either jailed or killed for their revolutionary actions and commitments during the 1960s. These chapters examine the rhetorical strategies within the autobiographical manifestos that continue Black Power agitation and trace how the writers continue to serve as celebrities and Black Power leaders in a new phase of Black Power agitation. Finally, the study looks at the potentially positive and negative contributions of regenerative Black Power strategies in the autobiographical manifestos of Shakur, Abu-Jamal, and Brown, and traces the circulation of their ideologies through hip-hop culture to see how these activists continue to inform the black public sphere of incarceration.