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 Performing Race and Belonging in the Modern City: Richard Bruce Nugent, Yinka Shonibare, Hank Willis Thomas, and Les Sapeuses as Postcolonial Flâneurs(2021) Singer, Alison Elizabeth; Ater, Renee; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In Performing Race and Belonging in the Modern City: Richard Bruce Nugent, Yinka Shonibare, Hank Willis Thomas, and Les Sapeuses as Postcolonial Flâneurs, I examine four transnational case studies that each seeks to disrupt the power of colonialism through art and material culture by considering race and visual culture within the geopolitical boundaries imprinted on the spatial makeup of the modern city. The artists and subculture movement include Richard Bruce Nugent, Yinka Shonibare, Hank Willis Thomas, and Les Sapeuses of the Congo. I consider the ways in which they incorporate a concept that I term postcolonial flânerie, referencing the nineteenth-century Parisian concept, that calls attention to historical relationships of power enacted through intertwined ideas of gazing and surveillance in the contested space of the city. Each artist tethers the visual language and formal elements of their writing or artwork to the nineteenth-century colonial era and the European flâneur. Their work exists in and hovers between two temporal locations at once: then and now, here and there. They assert their right to space by metaphorically inserting themselves, through their writing or artwork, into the historical space of modernity – and the city – that previously excluded them. Through their varying acts of postcolonial flânerie, the artists and writers in this dissertation assert their belonging in the spaces of the city. As I show, they take up literal space in different ways, such as constructing large scale public artworks that feature black subjects; they traverse the invisible boundaries of segregated spaces in the city through the simple act of walking and being; and they take up historical space by inserting themselves into the modernist canon through their revisionist art or writing that looks back to nineteenth-century Europe in different ways. It is important that the subjects of this dissertation bind their work to nineteenth-century Europe. The modernist canon has long excluded people of color and failed to recognize the ways in which modernism and its developments are intertwined with both colonialism and the history of slavery. Each of the case studies that I examine reinterprets the historical flâneur vis-à-vis race and the idea of taking up space regarding the ongoing social and political regulation of public space and the city.Item The Global Invention of Art: Race and Visual Sovereignty in the Colonial Baltic World, 1860-1920(2019) Pushaw, Bart; Mansbach, Steven A; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines the role of art and visual culture in the Baltic Provinces of Imperial Russia, present-day Estonia and Latvia, between roughly 1860 and 1920. This period witnessed the unraveling of a strict social hierarchy that for centuries had long incubated a Baltic German elite, while suppressing the lives and aesthetic expressions of Estonians and Latvians. After the abolition of serfdom, dramatic social, political, and cultural gains transformed possibilities for indigenous Balts, yet most scholars suggest that art and visual culture were not concomitant with the rapid progress of the era. I reveal instead how images and the ability to assume the power of image-making—what one scholar has called “visual sovereignty”—were pivotal to changing these social stratifications. The dissertation examines the ramifications of the necessity to invent “art” when native languages possessed no word to designate “artist” or “painting” as late as 1900. Since Eurocentric models of art history have preconditioned us to accept the fine arts as intrinsically natural to society, we have no model to grapple with the reality that art could be epistemologically novel, as it was for Latvians and Estonians. Working at the intersection of art history’s global turn, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory, I extrapolate the discourses of seemingly disparate but simultaneous happenings across the globe to reveal that the art world of the colonial Baltic was a microcosm of global nineteenth-century debates about race, medium, and modernity. At its core, the study investigates how art assumes significance for disenfranchised populations. The first chapter reveals how indigenous thinkers invented “art” in relation to their spatial experiences, from public monuments to intimate wooden chests. The second explores why photography became the most valued of all visual media, while the third contextualizes how painting, once deemed foreign and culturally irrelevant, could suddenly assume viability by the 1890s. The fourth chapter examines how native artists deployed the conventional genre of landscape painting to transcend the contingency of race in cultural production after 1905. The conclusion offers directions for global art history, revealing the planetary ramifications of Baltic coloniality.