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.
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Item Reading the Contemporary Body in the Works or Eduardo Lalo and Rita Indiana Hernández(2021) Lewis, Matthew C; Quintero-Herencia, Juan Carlos; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is interested in specificities of Caribbean bodies and the strategies that are used to perform, imagine, and make sensible the textual body so that it may be read through archipelagic contexts. I posit that the multi-disciplinary works of Dominican Rita Indiana Hernández (Santo Domingo 1977) and Puerto Rican Eduardo Lalo (Cuba 1960) turn a critical and creative eye to the corporealities that have been obscured and overshadowed by exotified, mainstream, and normative bodies and their representation. I argue that we tell stories with our bodies, and, likewise, the body is a text to be performed, read and made sensible. However, what we understand for the body—its capabilities and its limits—is a direct product of how these narratives have been politically and socially constructed, appropriated, and implemented in hegemonic discourses. My intervention lies questioning what narratives and images or the body are produced and privileged in these texts: how do these corporealities become sensible and make sense of the other bodies around them? What are the potential corporeal poetics and politics that may tie these texts together? By looking at the representation of anonymous bodies, the creation of Puerto Rican body-images, and the Dominican bodies situated within primal soundscapes, I suggest that these specific texts break with both preconceived and prescribed notions of a “Caribbean identity” and what it may mean to be Caribbean. This dissertation aims to interrogate the limits of hegemonic discourses of nationality and history by engaging with the ways in which the texts of Hernández and Lalo perform their own relationship to the contemporary, always crossing and challenging limits, imagining transitive bodies in constant motion, and implementing diverse strategies to produce and inhabit contemporary intervals that fiercely reject fixed and prescriptive notions of what a Caribbean body is, or of what it is capable.Item Cartographic Memories and Geographies of Pain: Bodily Representations in Caribbean Women's Art(2006-11-08) Wallace, Belinda Deneen; Collins, Merle; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Definitely, this dissertation's central intellectual and political aims are rooted in a guiding principle of Caribbean womanhood; and, with black women's bodies located at the center, the goal of this study is to provide new alternatives to understanding "writing the body" by looking to Caribbean women's cultural products as sites of theory formation. The artists and the works selected for this study demonstrate an awareness of the need for a re-evaluation of the metaphor of writing the body which takes into account the specificities of race, ethnicity and nationality. To that end, this study focuses on texts and performances by Caribbean women in order to examine the development of a Caribbean feminist consciousness and its ability to not only convey but also legitimate Caribbean female perspectives and experiences. Dionne Brand, Edwidge Danticat, Marion Hall, Joan Riley and Myriam Warner-Vieyra provide us with an opportunity to trace the processes through which Caribbean women artists write their own bodies and how those bodies can be used to explore larger issues around identity, geography and history. In the music and performances of Marion Hall this project looks closely at the intricacies that comprise women's sexuality, sexual autonomy and sexual identity beyond their objectification as sexual objects for men. In Warner-Vierya's Juletane, Riley's The Unbelonging and Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, the study examines the metropolis as a source of contamination that forces us to recognize madness as a socio-cultural and historical construct with gender specific consequences. Finally, the study concludes with Danticat's The Farming of Bones and Brand's In Another Place, Not Here, where it investigates literary representations of the female body as a representative text that disrupts the official narrative and brings forth a uniquely female historical subjectivity.Item Making God: Incarnation and Somatic Piety in the Art of Kiki Smith(2006-01-19) Wilkerson, Margaret Randolph; Withers, Josephine; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the ways in which the art of Kiki Smith (b. 1954) implements traditional Catholic material culture and ritual through its propensity, in both subject and materiality, to incarnate spiritual ideas and encourage somatic responses to it. It also considers the ways in which Smith's ambivalent attitudes towards Catholicism inform her work. Born and raised a Catholic, but no longer practicing, Smith values the material imaging of spiritual conditions, and her myriad assessments of the human form affirm her commitment to expressing sacred experience through physical means. However, while embracing Catholicism's incarnational imagination, as particularly manifest in medieval art, Smith also disputes the present-day Church's marked opposition to art that mingles the sacred and profane. The majority of scholarship has positioned Smith's body-based art within the context of the heightening politicization of the American art scene during the late twentieth-century, when arguments over the body and its ideological boundaries dominated political, social, and cultural discourses. While critical to understanding Smith's work and its influences, viewing it from a vantage of body politics and/or feminism alone drastically limits the scope of her work, obscuring the nuanced findings that can be realized when viewing such issues and their dynamic intersections within a framework of spiritual inquiry. Furthermore, this examination of the spiritual significance of Smith's art addresses a significant lacuna in American art scholarship, as scholars recognize the need for further study in the field of the visual culture of American religions. While Smith's work has caught the attention of a wide and far-reaching audience of art critics and scholars, few have thoroughly examined its spiritual dimensions, nor does the literature seriously consider how Smith's work constitutes American religious practice and experience. In articulating the interrelations between a selection of works from Smith's oeuvre and a series of historical and ideological frames, all of which negotiate the recent burgeoning of interest in contemporary art and religion in America and the ensuing debate over art's ownership and public funding, this study develops a fuller, more critical, and more theoretically-driven account of Smith's art production than has previously been assessed.