Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
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.
Browse
3 results
Search Results
Item STICK FLY: A DISSECTION OF PROCESS AND EXPLORATION OF ADVOCACY(2022) Taylor, Zavier Augustus Lee; Mezzocchi, Jared M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The following thesis is a series of observations and explorations documenting my experiences as Media and Projections Designer of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at The University of Maryland College Park’s production of Stick Fly by Lydia R. Diamond. The production opened on April 15th, 2022 as a live performance in the Kogod Theatre. Stick Fly was performed in a black box theater space with direction by Kenyatta Rogers, Scenic Design by Abigail Bueti, Associate Scenic Design by Mollie Singer, co-sound design by Neil McFadden and Gordon Nimmo-Smith, lighting design by Christian Henrriquez, and costume design by Ashlynne Ludwig.Item Moving Pain Home: Cultural Production and Performance Out of Black Trauma and Terror(2020) Gray, Leslie Jewell; Harding, James; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project looks at performances of terror and trauma centering Black bodies and the ways that they perform in everyday life and bracketed performances. In this project, I examine how the work of Black cultural producers questions the imaginary logic of white supremacist hegemony. I argue that this is best theorized through lived experiences of Black people, real and imagined. It is only through the interrogation of performed Black embodiment as traumatic negotiation that we can understand the complex instruments that have ensured the survival of precarious black bodies in a metaphorical war zone. I discuss how Suzan-Lori Parks's 2015 play, Father Comes Home From the Wars Parts I, II, and III as a theatrical development that has responded to intentional and unintentional sites of harm in the forms of oppression and violence. I question the idea of what it means to “go to war” in the context of police brutality inflicted on Black bodies. In the midst of anti-Black sentiment, or a metaphorical war with material consequences enacted against Black bodies, I look at Black people's subjection to hypersurveillance and how countersurveillance or sousveillance can serve as self-defense. If one is able to survive the war, one must then ask how do we come home from it intact, despite the invisible traumas of unending threats. Examining dance as of an act of corporeal linguistic agency, in the final section I look at the transhistorical phenomenon that is blues dancing, specifically honing in on the Slow Drag. I consider how moving beyond its potential as a strategy of survival can lead to identifying in it sources of recovery, resistance, and emancipation. In doing so, I attempt to sift through a history of Black vernacular dance in order to illuminate the possibility that dance, among these other Black cultural products, creates spaces of joy, solidarity, and healing.Item American Blackness and Vergangenheitsbewältigung in Twenty-First Century German Literature and Film(2014) Wall, Christina Noelle; Frederiksen, Elke P; Germanic Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study represents a unique examination of the convergence of constructs of Blackness and racism in twenty-first century novels and films by white Germans and Austrians in order to demonstrate how these texts broaden discourses of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The increased prominence of minority voices demanding recognition of their national identity within Nazi successor states has transformed white German perceptions of "Germanness" and of these nations' relationships to their turbulent pasts. I analyze how authors and directors employ constructs of Blackness within fictional texts to interrogate the dynamics of historical and contemporary racisms. Acknowledging that discourses of `race' are taboo, I analyze how authors and directors avoid this forbidden discourse by drawing comparisons between constructs of American Blackness and German and Austrian historical encounters with `race'. This study employs cultural studies' understanding of `race' and Blackness as constructs created across discourses. Following the example of Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark (1992), my textual analyses show how these constructs create a "playground for the imagination" in which authors confront modern German racism. My study begins with a brief history of German-African American encounters, emphasizing the role American Blackness played during pivotal moments of German national identity formation. The subsequent chapters are divided thematically, each one comprised of textual analyses that explore discourses integral to Vergangenheitsbewältigung. The third chapter examines articulations of violence and racism in two films, Oskar Roehler's Lulu & Jimi (2008) and Michael Schorr's Schultze gets the blues (2008), to explore possibilities of familial reconciliation despite historical guilt. The fourth chapter compares the Besatzungskinder protagonists of two novels, Peter Henisch's Schwarzer Peter (2000) and Larissa Boehning's Lichte Stoffe (2007), with the (auto)biographies of actual Besatzungskinder Ika Hügel-Marshall and Bärbel Kampmann, exposing the modern discursive taboo of `race' as a silence stemming from historical guilt. The final chapter demonstrates the evolution of German conceptualizations of historical guilt through the analyses of Christa Wolf's novel Stadt der Engel (2010) and Armin Völckers's film Leroy (2007).