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 Metonymies of Color: The Material Discourses of Race in the Irish and Mexican American Experience(2021) Rivera, Patrick Sean; Brighton, Stephen; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Objects and artifacts are potent signs of cultural values, and in popular media they are often used as external signs of racial identity. This dissertation investigates how certain objects and settings come to be identified as characteristic of particular racial groups, and how stereotypes about material culture are then exploited to justify discriminatory political policy. I conduct an analysis of the visual representation of Mexicans and the Irish in U.S. media, beginning in 1840 and continuing to the present era. I identify when and why certain artifacts, like potatoes or sombreros, began to be used as stereotypical signs of each group. In each case, I examine how these metonymies were employed as weapons in contemporary political struggles over land, jobs, and representation. Drawing on the records of Mexican and Irish representation, I develop a theoretical model I term "the material discourses of race” to identify the three ways that objects are turned into signs of racial identity, and to explain why certain objects are repeatedly employed to construct an idealized image of whiteness in U.S. visual culture.Item MIGRATION, MODERNITY AND MEMORY: THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY IN A NORTHEAST PENNSYLVANIA COAL COMPANY TOWN, 1897-2014(2015) Roller, Michael Peter; Shackel, Paul A; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Lattimer Massacre occurred in September of 1897 in the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania. It has been described as the bloodiest massacre of the nineteenth century. In this event, a company-sponsored sheriff and a posse of local businessmen shot into a crowd of striking Eastern European mine laborers, resulting in the deaths of at least nineteen. However, the great significance of the event is not in the body count but the material contexts of its occurrence as well as its pre- and post- histories. Moreover, while the event can be securely consigned to history, the capitalist processes punctuated by this instance of violence are present throughout the century since its occurrence. In the region, coal company towns materialized carefully maintained racialized labor hierarchies in which new immigrants were confined to shanty towns at the periphery. The dissertation operates on an archaeological scale stretched across the longue durée of the twentieth century, documenting the transformation of a shanty town into an American suburb over the course of a century. The archaeological evidence hails from three excavations including a survey of the site of the Massacre and excavations of lots in the shanty enclave. This dissertation examines the trajectory of these settlements across the entire span of the twentieth century. With its primary evidence derived from waste, ruins, surpluses and redundancies accumulated over time, archaeological tellings of history recognize these aspects not simply for their contingency, but their centrality within capitalist social life across the passage of time. In this dissertation, I propose that a critical historical archaeology can contribute substantially to a nuanced understanding of the ironic developments of late twentieth century political economy. Contradiction, sovereignty, governmentality, states of exception, surplus enjoyment, cycles of creative destruction and reterritorialization, renewal, and subjectivation are explored by juxtaposing, grafting and merging archaeological evidence with social theory, textual evidence, ethnographic data and interdisciplinary scholarship to present an archaeological history greater than the sum of its parts. The result is both a history of the community and a schematic for an archaeological history of the twentieth century.