Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item DOMINICAN GAGÁ FROM OUTSIDE AND WITHIN: DISCOURSES ABOUT GAGÁ, RACIAL DISCRIMINATION, AND COMMUNITY ORGANIZING IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC(2024) Hernandez-Sang, Victor; Rios, Fernando; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the discourses that surround Gagá, an African-derived ritual tradition that entails processional music and dance performances to honor deities of Vodou, which is primarily practiced by Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian origin in the Dominican Republic. This study explores the characterization of Gagá from the perspective of outsiders (the media and public figures) and the viewpoint of insiders (the partakers of the tradition). In the analysis, I identify correlates between the characterization of Gagá in the media over time and major political and economic developments in the Dominican Republic. Additionally, I explore the work that community members of Gagá conduct to combat racism and harmful stereotypes about their music and religion. Based on fieldwork, archival research, and compilation of online media, this work provides a nuanced view of the perspective of gagaseros (practitioners of Gagá) regarding their tradition, self-identification, and racial discrimination.Item The Unhealed Wound: Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature and the Continuing Memory of the Duvalier Dictatorship(2019) Edwards, Norrell F; Orlando, Valerie K; Mallios, Peter; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the 1990s, as Haiti continued to withstand the aftershocks of the end of a 29 year father-son dictatorship, the United States and France hovered in the periphery to “help” Haiti’s transition to democracy. World systems theory dictates that a country like Haiti would be relegated to the periphery while countries like the United States and France inhabit the core. The Unhealed Wound: Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature and the Continuing Memory of the Duvalier Dictatorship inverts this dynamic. This work places Port-au-Prince at the core, while New York and Paris—secondary homes to Haitian exiles and emigres—becomes the periphery. Traversing national borders, politics and disciplines, this study investigates how memory, history and literature shape the physical and imagined cityscapes of New York, Port-au-Prince and Paris. Bringing together authors such as Edwidge Danticat, Lyonel Trouillot and Shay Youngblood, Edwards questions and explores dynamics of the Black immigrant body and Haitian body in these cities in the 1980’s, 1990’s and early 2000’sItem PROTEAN GODS: A RETELLING OF HISPANIOLA’S STORY THROUGH THE MAROON(2018) Rivera, Ines Pastora; Ontiveros, Randy; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that an exploration of the maroon, or the runaway slave, in literature can be a means to acknowledging the too-often-repressed historical, political, and cultural connections between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and can also help us uncover more accurate and less restrictive versions of Hispaniola’s story. Hispaniola’s story is often told through the fatal-conflict narrative, reducing Haitian-Dominican relations to an unending cockfight. The fatal-conflict narrative paints the Dominican Republic and Haiti as two nations fated to regard one another as ultimate, foreign archenemies,destined to be in total conflict. It also paints the Dominican Republic and Haiti as two nations whose fight for Hispaniola and for the preservation of their respective cultures is fatal. The formation of the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti has bolstered the fatal-conflict narrative, silencing a shared history of resistance and cross-pollination. My work extends and contributes to existing scholarship by uncovering instances of cooperation and collaboration that suggest alternative views of a united island and that complicate contemporary political and social realities in the Dominican Republic. Rather than reaffirming a discourse of national difference through a focus on the border, I focus on the maroon as a protean figure who undoes the fatal-conflict narrative. I argue that these change agents, the maroons, anchor the island in what Cedric Robinson calls the Black Radical Tradition, the evolving resistance of African people to oppression. Maroon figures also reveal different angles to Hispaniola’s story through their forms of resistance and penchant for metamorphoses. I also examine twentieth and twenty-first century maroons found in Dominican and Dominican American literature. Like their counterparts from the past, modern-day maroons take flight, resist forms of enslavement and oppression, and undergo transformations that challenge conventional ways of thinking about Haitian-Dominican relations and the island of Hispaniola. Writers from the Dominican diaspora—among them Angie Cruz, Junot Díaz, and Nelly Rosario—have played a pivotal role in interrogating history, and more specifically, memories of violence and the repercussions associated with migration. Not only does this interrogation rewrite history, but it offers a means of forging a new, fuller story that erodes the border and expands the island’s boundaries, all the while magnifying the role of the Black Freedom struggle in the making of a whole Hispaniola.Item THE TRAUMA OF THE CARIBBEAN TEXT: ETHICS AND PROBLEMS OF VICTIMIZERS AND VICTIMS, AUTHORS AND READERS(2016) Metz, Jeremy; Nunes, Zita; Orlando, Valerie; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the early 1990s, trauma theory has acquired paradigmatic status as a methodology for studying literary representations of victims of various forms of violence, oppression, and social upheavals. However, with a genealogical foundation in Freud and an empirical basis in the Holocaust, trauma studies have been Eurocentric in orientation. My project seeks to “decolonize” trauma by bringing contemporary psychological and cultural trauma theory to bear on postwar Caribbean literature. Conversely, I use the insights provided by my investigation to reassess certain of the central tenets of trauma theory. I argue that in canonical Caribbean trauma texts, including Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, and Mary Chauvet’s Amour, Colère et Folie [Love, Anger, Madness], characters may be understood best as positioned at the intersection of psychological and cultural trauma theories. Victims of traumatic violence may be members of groups that have perpetrated violence on others; and perpetrators of violence may identify with groups that have been historically victimized. Viewing characters along a psychological trauma axis as individuals, and a cultural trauma axis as members of collectivities with which they identify, opens a range of new intepretive possibilities, and illuminates the manner in which critics respond to trauma texts and to each other. Trauma literature places extraordinary demands on writers and readers who, through empathetic identification with victims, are exposed to potentially destabilizing representations of victimization that transmit something of the experience of the original trauma. I propose a reading practice for Caribbean trauma literature that urges critical readers to maintain an ethical awareness of their own responses to scenes of traumatic violence so as to read the characters of both victims and perpetrators in their full complexity. This work includes an extended case study of the literature that emerged from the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, supplemented by interviews of prominent Haitian authors that I conducted in Port-au-Prince in 2012-2013. Haitian earthquake texts and testimony tend to undermine significant Freudian-derived assumptions of modern trauma theory, including the doctrine of “unspeakability.” I sought in my readings of Haitian earthquake literature to identify a template of common thematic elements and distinct discursive modes that characterize these writings.Item COMPLEXITY IN DISASTERS: A CASE STUDY OF THE HAITIAN EARTHQUAKE RESPONSE(2011) Connor, David J.; Toth, Elizabeth; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This case study explores the development of an international crisis response from the perspective of the United States Coast Guard (USCG). Crisis managers, responders, and communicators from the USCG and from partner agencies were interviewed, as well as representatives from the Haitian publics of the response. The resulting narrative was used to test the previously untested Situational Theory of Problem Solving (STPS) and complexity theory, which had not previously been applied to international disaster response. Findings validated both theories and demonstrated the importance of cultural translators in effecting international disaster response. This study served as a preliminary test of STPS, and a first international application of complexity theory. Practical implications include guidance for crisis managers on how to respond to crises in a complex world, as well as how to harness cultural awareness when responding internationally.Item Nou La, We Here: Remembrance and Power in the Arts of Haitian Vodou(2007-11-27) Brice, Leslie Anne; Promey, Sally M.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Haitian Vodou is vast, accumulative, and constantly in flux, drawing from many sources and traditions as it adapts to changes in the world, as well as to the needs and imaginations of its adherents. With its origins in west and central Africa, along with the strategies for transformation that are at the heart of many religions there, Vodou developed into its current form as a response to forced transatlantic migration, enslavement, encounters with Amerindian traditions, Catholicism, Freemasonry, the complications that emerged in the quest for liberty, the consequences of a successful slave revolt, and the establishment of an independent state. It is largely the last three points that contribute to Vodou's strong military ethos, and with that, Vodou's focus on liberation. Based on field research between 2000 and 2004, in Washington, D.C. and in Haiti, this dissertation examines Vodou visual arts in relation to Haiti's revolutionary history, and how the arts articulate related themes of militarism, liberation, and resistance. Central to this study is remembrance, or the active and purposeful remembering of diverse lived experiences that practitioners evoke, express, and promote through visual and performing arts. Remembrance includes the historical, socioeconomic, political, and sacred realities that shape Vodou practice today and thereby provides a larger context for interpreting visual expressions. Equally important to this interpretation is the sacred world, which includes the spirits, the ancestors, and Vodou cosmological principles. Along the lines of remembrance and the sacred world, this dissertation examines the sacred spaces, altars, and power objects that practitioners create with their own aesthetic sensibilities and cosmological interpretations. It considers how practitioners actively remember and engage the past to empower themselves and their communities in the present. By weaving together the historical, social, the political, and the cosmological, along with an emphasis on practitioner agency, this dissertation underscores the transatlantic scope of Vodou visual creations. In doing so, it brings into focus just how pragmatic this religion and its objects are, and suggests how visuality offers people a sense of self-determinism in their lives.