Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item The Long Tradition: Black Women and Mothers in Public Discourses(2009) Sanders, Tammy L.; Struna, Nancy L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Document THE LONG TRADITION: BLACK WOMEN AND MOTHERS IN POPULAR DISCOURSES Tammy Sanders, Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Directed By: Chair and Professor Nancy Struna Department of American Studies With her insightful analysis, Nancy Lurkins in &ldquoYou are the Race, You are the Seeded Earth:&rdquo Intellectual Rhetoric, American Fiction, and Birth Control in the Black Community (2008), asserts &ldquo(past) black leaders promoted the ideal of black domesticity and moral motherhood as a counterstrategy to white attacks. Over time, appreciating and even desiring black motherhood came to be identified with black communal pride and as a result black women became responsible for upholding the entire race&rdquo (47). Similarly, recent history has proved to be no different when it comes to the responsibility of black mothers. This dissertation will explore how public discourses involving the social sciences, films, and novels historicize, represent, and re-envision black motherhood. It will investigate how these discourses about motherhood are shaped by the historical moment of their occurrence and what they tell us about the attitudes of those establishing critical thought. By examining texts like the Moynihan Report, Ann Petry's The Street, Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun, and the 1974 film Claudine, this project will analyze the rhetoric of scholars about black motherhood alongside popular images of black mothers to illustrate how they overlap and how black women's bodies are consistently at the nexus of academic, social, cultural and political conversations. In an attempt to further complicate mothering studies by using black feminist thought as my lens, this dissertation seeks to tease out the interconnectedness of historical moments and discourses without perpetuating traditional gender norms as it relates to black female identities.Item DIVERSITY VS. THE DOCTORATE (1967-2008): THE EXPERIENCES OF BLACK AND LATINO STUDENTS THEN AND NOW(2009) Hodge, Kristen; MacDonald, Victoria-María; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since its inception in 1965, Affirmative Action has played a pivotal role in integrating predominantly white institutions of higher education with Black and Brown faces. However, at the doctoral level only marginal increases have been made over the past 30 years in the number of Black and Latino students awarded Ph.D.s. In an effort to better understand the historical phenomenon of under-representation at the doctoral level among Black and Latino students, a qualitative research study was designed that examined both the historical evolution of their lived experiences at predominantly white institutions, and the forms of capital they used to navigate through the academy. Understanding and comparing how these students have been able to navigate through these historically excluded spaces was a key goal of this research because it leant itself to the construction of a "new story" of higher education. In addition to understanding their lived experiences and their use of social/cultural capital, their narratives were also used to explore the broader concept of diversity and how it has functioned within American culture over time. The cultural landscape of higher education was an ideal locale to investigate the past and current state of race in America because much of what happens within university and college settings reflects the broader race relations of society at large. Affirmative Action served as the backdrop to construct the two historical time periods from which I drew my study participants: "Affirmative Action Implementation" and "Affirmative Action Dismemberment." A total of eight participants were recruited according to when they started their doctoral programs and divided into two comparison groups: first generation (4) and second generation (4). Critical Race Theory (CRT), Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCRT), and a Community Cultural Wealth framework were used as the theoretical lens to situate the findings. Several patterns emerged including: race and cultural space; persistence; and social activism.Item "An Unpleasant Wartime Function": Race, Film Censorship, and the Office of War Information, 1942-1945(2007-04-30) Wagner, Jessica Lauren; Gilbert, James B.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This paper will try to untangle how the U.S. Office of War Information's Bureau of Motion Pictures tried to enact change in the world, using Hollywood films, during World War II. It will also show how inconsistencies within the agency and lack of support from the President, Congress, and Hollywood often sabotaged the Bureau's project. I argue that a structural component and a thematic component helped cripple the OWI's Bureau of Motion Pictures. First, the extremely decentralized, bureaucratic and conflict-laden nature of the government information network, and the limited enforcement power of the OWI and in particular the Bureau of Motion Pictures, limited its success. Second, the BMP's passionately liberal and racially progressive interpretation of U.S. war aims helped contribute to its downfall. The BMP operated during a watershed moment in race relations, in which hierarchies of racial and ethnic groups were shifting dramatically.Item Thinking, Scripting, and Performing: Constructing and Playing the Racial Synecdoche in the Antebellum North(2007-05-06) Jones, Douglas Anthony; Nathans, Heather S; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In my thesis, I argue that between the years of 1830-1842, free African Americans scripted and performed what I term, following historian Patrick Rael, the racial synecdoche. This "character" was a black performative identity that people of color should play on the public stage. The performance team--or those who scripted and performed this new black identity--believed that the performance of the synecdoche would grant free people of color eligibility to perform full civic participation in America's nascent democracy. In this study, I consider the national black conventions of the 1830s as ritualistic sites and as the primary loci where that self-scripting process took place. I characterize this thesis as an intellectual history and hope that it contributes to the vital and ever-growing bodies of African American history and African American theatre and performance history, as well as add contour and complexity to the well-charted Jacksonian period.Item A Tradition of Struggle: Preserving Sites of Significance to African American History in Prince George's County, Maryland, 1969-2007(2007-04-30) Michael, Courtney Elizabeth; Sicilia, David; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines efforts by the citizens of Prince George's County, Maryland to protect and preserve local historic sites significant to African American history. Since the early 1980s, preservationists in Prince George's County have recognized the importance of -- and made specific efforts to find, document and preserve -- sites that tell the story of African American life in the county. Using three case studies, Abraham Hall, Rosenwald Schools and the Butler House, this thesis demonstrates how preserving African American historic sites became a priority in Prince George's County, due to both a shift in local demographics and to changing practices in the field of historic preservation nationwide.Item Raising Black Dreams: Representations of Six Generations of a Family's Local Racial-Activist Traditions(2007-04-20) Daves, John Patrick Cansler; Caughey, John; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)How do local African American leadership traditions develop and change? How do they compare to and connect with national African American leadership traditions? This dissertation explores some answers to these questions through an examination of the history of one middle-class African American family's communal activist legacy. It is built, first, on my research into my adopted family's local, evolving communal-leadership ideology, which extends from the antebellum era to the present; and, second, on my examination of how my family's leadership tradition compare with and connect to patterns in national black leadership conventions. In the chapters, I lay out the basic issues I will investigate, discuss the literature on black leadership, contextualize my study, and introduce and define the concepts of racial stewardship, local racial activism, local racial ambassadorship, and racial spokesmanship which are central to my exploration. I conclude the dissertation with an summation of my work, and how my research contributes to existing scholarly conversations about black leadership traditions found in African American Literature, History and the social sciences.Item "A Different Kind of 'Strange Fruit': Lynching Drama, African American Identity, and U.S. Culture, 1890-1935"(2005-11-07) Mitchell, Koritha; Carretta, Vincent; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since November 1999, the book and exhibition Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America has made nearly 100 pictures of mutilated victims readily available. These images convince Americans that we can plainly see the destruction that mobs caused and encourage us to overlook the disadvantages of equating lynching with the hanging body--what Billie Holiday called "strange fruit." My work argues that we not blindly accept the corpse as the ultimate symbol of racial terrorism by taking seriously the antilynching plays that African Americans wrote in the midst of mob violence (that is, before 1935). The dramatists insisted upon the body's inability to represent the horror of lynching. Rather than describe the crimes perpetrated on America's trees, telephone poles, and bridges, the genre takes us inside black homes where widows and orphans survive only to suffer. Thus, it is clear that the violence continues long after the corpse has disintegrated and that the home itself is a lynched body. When a father is torn from the family, the household is "castrated" and its head removed. (None of the plays mentions women lynch victims.) Yet, the scripts do not merely protest racial violence; they also affirm racial pride. African Americans understood that black identity was vulnerable to the power of representation, especially when technology was making the distribution of negative images more efficient. At the turn of the century, blacks proclaimed themselves sophisticated, modern citizensand they knew that mainstream messages to the contrary frequently caused--but more often did more damage than--physical assaults. So, even as recorded lynchings declined in the 1920s, black-authored lynching plays proliferated, in order to address the dehumanizing violence inherent in how the race was represented in America. In five chapters, this project examines why lynching drama emerged, develops a theoretical framework for understanding the plays, offers close readings of ten plays by black women and three by black men, grapples with the fact that most black-authored lynching dramas were not professionally produced, and argues that appreciating the genre requires complicating our understanding of theatrical value.Item The Black Exotic: Tradition and Ethnography in Nineteenth-Century Orientalist Art(2005-08-29) Childs, Adrienne Louise; Hargrove, June; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study of select works by Orientalist artists Jean-Léon Gérôme and Charles Cordier charts the trajectory of the idea of the black exotic and investigates the symbolism of black figures in Orientalist painting and sculpture. Representations of blacks in Orientalist art served a complex and nuanced function as nineteenth-century European artists fashioned the exotic. At the nexus of traditional tropes of blackness and the new science of ethnography, they were a critical tool used to construct an imagined Orient within the context of Orientalism--the phenomenal passion for the exotic in the nineteenth century. Blacks were multifaceted figures that evoked sexuality, servitude, degradation, and primitive culture while providing decorative beauty and the allure of difference. The trope of the exotic black is rooted in a tradition of representing Africans dating back to the Italian Renaissance. By the nineteenth century ethnographic approaches to race permeated Orientalist ideologies and affected a qualitative shift in how black figures operated in visual culture. Through a critical analysis of the relationship between exoticism and blackness, this study addresses the need for a more specialized interpretation of how attitudes towards race were encoded in nineteenth-century visual arts.Item The Presentation of Slavery at Mount Vernon: Power Priviledge, and Historical Truth(2005-06-22) McGill, Keeley; Moghadam, Linda; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Although the labor of enslaved Africans and Black Americans played a large part in the history of colonial America, the presentation of slavery at George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens is, for the most part, incomplete and leaves visitors with an inaccurate impression of the reality of slavery. This research utilizes questionnaires completed by visitors on-site and field observations of various historical interpretations at Mount Vernon to answer two major research questions: (1) How is slavery portrayed at Mount Vernon? and (2) To what degree are visitors critical of the story of slavery told at Mount Vernon? The results indicated that the presentation of slavery is inconsistent and that the history of slaves at Mount Vernon is marginalized and easily avoided by most visitors.Item MOVEMENT MATTERS: AMERICAN ANTIAPARTHEID ACTIVISM AND THE RISE OF MULTICULTURAL POLITICS(2004-06-07) Hostetter, David L.; Gilbert, James B.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)American organizations that opposed apartheid in South Africa extended their opposition to racial discrimination in the US into world politics. More than three decades of organizing preceded the legislative showdown of 1986 when Congress overrode President Ronald Reagan's veto to enact economic sanctions against the apartheid regime. Drawing on the tactics and moral authority of the civil rights movement, the antiapartheid movement mobilized public opinion with familiar political symbols while increasing African-American influence in the formulation of US foreign policy. Three conflicts in particular shaped American antiapartheid activism: the debate between those holding an integrationist vision of the civil rights movement versus the advocates of a Pan-Africanist view as expressed in the Black Power movement; the tension between the antiracist credibility American leaders sought to project to the world and the anticommunist thrust of American foreign policy which led to a tacit alliance with South Africa; and the dispute over whether nonviolence or armed liberation provided the best strategy for ending apartheid. Three antiapartheid organizations that debated and dealt with these conflicts were the American Committee on Africa (ACOA), the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and TransAfrica. Each group worked against apartheid for more than a decade, combined direct action with other tactics, and included antiapartheid activism in larger efforts concerning Africa and US foreign policy. The efforts of these organizations provide a window through which to examine the conflicts that marked the antiapartheid struggle. Cultural expressions reinforced public sentiment against apartheid. Novels, plays, movies and music provided a bridge for Americans who strove to understand the struggles of those who lived under apartheid. Via the page, stage, screen, and recording studio, apartheid's opponents found a platform to transmit their message to a broad audience of Americans. The similarity of apartheid to American racial segregation provided activists with metaphors to mobilize constituencies that had opposed American racism. Direct action in particular helped dramatize American entanglement with apartheid. By extending the moral logic of the civil rights movement, the antiapartheid movement was able to invoke the themes of equality and freedom central to American civil religion.