Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Constructions of Violent Jamaican Masculinity in Film and Literature(2008-07-28) Harewood, Gia; Collins, Merle; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Greg Dimitriadis and Cameron McCarthy sketch out what they see as an emergent postcolonial aesthetic percolating in the postcolonial artist's imagination. According to their analysis, postcolonial artists make meaning in their work through three critical motifs that help shape this aesthetic: "counterhegemonic representation, double or triple coding, and emancipatory or utopic visions" (19, italics in original). Counterhegemonic representation "rework[s] the center-versus-periphery distinction . . . to look beyond its strictures to new histories, new discourses, new ways of being" (24). Double coding combines "two or more fields of reference or idiom in any given work" pulling images from places such as "the East and the West, the first world and the Third, the colonial master and the slave" (26). And utopic visions are about "imagining possibility even when faced with impossible barriers" (30). My project is fundamentally interested in constructing healthy (masculine) identities and its arguments are ultimately guided by their first and third motifs. Using feminist theory, masculinity studies, cultural studies and postcolonial theory, I focus on the representation of black Jamaican men as violent criminal beings in three films (The Harder They Come, Third World Cop and Shottas), two novels (The Harder They Come and For Nothing at All) and one ethnographic travelogue (Born Fi' Dead). I argue that "real/reel" Jamaican masculinity is ultimately connected to gun violence and the most popular films out of Jamaica over the past thirty years only perpetuate this image. While not the only source for role models, visual images play a significant role in the lives of young men (and women) who are trying to live up to social standards of masculinity. With limited access to social mobility, they often emulate the shotta (gangster) glory that they see sparkling on the screen. Through close readings of these texts, I show how hegemonic masculinity is reinforced and reveal that non-violent models of masculinity do exist, despite being overshadowed by violent "heroes." I call for that "utopic vision," to excavate the vulnerable and intervene on behalf of peace to help young men and boys find alternative models of masculinity and ultimately create sustainable communities.Item (Re)Mapping the Black Atlantic: Violence, Affect, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Caribbean Women's Migration Literature(2007-05-29) Shaw, Barbara L.; Rosenfelt, Deborah; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a project of literary reclamation, canonical revision, cultural analysis, and interdisciplinary remapping. Drawing on American studies, women's studies, postcolonial studies, and Caribbean studies, particularly performance theory and recent theoretical work on affectivity, it analyzes the negotiations of protagonists who move back and forth between and among cultures and nations, exploring complex possibilities for subjectivity, identity, and citizenship within worlds of domestic and neocolonial violence. Collectively, America's Dream, The Line of the Sun, Geographies of Home, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and The Unbelonging re-map Gilroy's influential theory of the Black Atlantic in three ways: by tracing the legacies of colonization in relation to interpersonal violence; by re-writing national narratives of the metropole from migrant Caribbean women's perspectives; and by including Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, as well as Jamaica, within its purview. While arguing for the complex personhood of these migrant protagonists and elucidating their legacies of pain and healing, alongside their victimization and resistance, this dissertation also provides a materialist analysis of cultural production, examining how these books circulate as objects in the global/local economy of book selling and distribution. Through a small-scale ethnographic study of independent publishers, alongside a material and visual cultural analysis of the book covers, it analyzes the politics of publication and canonization of Caribbean women's literature. By centering the Caribbean and its diaspora in an American Studies project, this dissertation pushes the boundaries of the discipline beyond the examination of cultures in the United States or American imperialism in other nations. (Re)Mapping the Black Atlantic asks not only that the Caribbean be considered part of the Americas, but also that the relational aspects of migration between the Caribbean on the one hand, and the United States and Britain on the other, become part of the new cartographies of American Studies.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 "Youse awful queer chappie": Reading Black Queer Vernacular in Black Literatures of the Americas, 1903-1967(2005-08-24) Silberman, Seth Slark; Peterson, Carla L; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Read together, twentieth-century representations of black male homoerotism and homosexuality written up to the Black Arts movement shape and complicate traditional definitions of a black racial literary canon. Far from marginal or clandestine, these black men differently depicted in prose and verse continue the kinds of "networks of affiliation" that Saidiya Hartman finds in the communal connections that shaped black life in the nineteenth-century US during slavery and Reconstruction, ones based on the "metaphorical aptitude" demonstrated by black vernacular folk tales and songs. Community founding was necessarily agile. It depended on presence of mind more than melanin as a strategy to wrest the sign of "blackness" from flesh indicating enslavement. It also incorporated rather than homogenized differences within a black racial "community among ourselves," as Hartman calls it. "Youse awful queer chappie" examines how that kind of wily solidarity and resistance supports a body of texts that both contribute to a black literary tradition that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. characterizes as a gathering of "talking books" as well as fashion a particular hermeneutic and technique I call "black queer vernacular." Sometimes, but not always, with the word queer, the black writers I study with this manuscript, tell a story of black masculinity not fungible but mobile. Any individual text or author provides merely one nexus in a textual technique of characters, types, words, and images that demonstrates how the sign of "blackness" incorporates both race and sexuality. Less a rejoinder to scholarship in the fields of African American studies or gay and lesbian studies, the manuscript draws from poststructuralist, feminist, and queer theory to regard an already present dialogue in twentieth century black literary studies. By moving from W.E.B. Du Bois' landmark The Souls of Black Folk, through the Harlem Renaissance and London's Caribbean Artists movement, toward the Black Arts movement, the manuscript highlights how Diaspora informs, even as it fades from, analyses of black representation. It talks back to, and expands, the defining aesthetics of the black racial literary canon.Item MISERY BABY: A (RE)VISION OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN BY CARIBBEAN AND U.S. BLACK WOMEN WRITERS(2005-05-27) Rellihan, Heather; PETERSON, CARLA L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Emerging from a description of the protagonist in Edwidge Danticat's short story "Caroline's Wedding," the phrase "misery baby," is developed as a critical trope to engage questions of gender, as well as individual, national and regional identity in the Caribbean and the United States. Using misery baby as a template, I discuss two other Caribbean Bildungsromane: Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory. I then analyze Toni Morrison's Beloved to make larger diasporic connections. The characteristics that mark misery baby include her positioning as a coming-of-age character between two nations/cultures; her questioning of false dichotomies; her travel across geographic borders; her ability to negotiate a hybrid identity through a questioning of borders and binaries allowing for the reconceptualization of an ironic nationhood; and lastly her participation in a new way of remembering the past through an understanding of the role of the past in the present.Item El Dorado: The New Quest for Caribbean Unity(2005-04-20) Shields, Tanya Liesel; Collins, Merle; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)El Dorado the gilded man or golden city has always signified the deferred and colonial quest for a New World paradise. It has led explorers, conquistadores, and those they enslaved on fabulous journeys of misinterpretation and trickery. Global reconfigurations in politics, culture and economics generated by globalization on the physicial and psychological infrastructures of poor places, has the Caribbean searching for a redefined El Dorado. Through the medium of literature,this new El Dorado has the potential to fulfill the promise of Caribbean unity, inherent inits geography and history, by subsumingnational interests to regional ones. This dissertation fuses the concerns of globalization, postmodernism and citizenship into the Amerindian Postmodern, a term coined by me, and a framing, largely influenced by the philosophical work of Wilson Harris. I argue that using Amerindian postmodernism applied to regional literature, allows a crossing of linguistic, geographic, nationalistic and economic barriers not addressed by political attempts at integration. Art, as a mediator, has the power to shift consciousness and its political power is demonstrated repeatedly in various liberation struggles and by governmental attempts to repress and restrict how art is created and used. Art culls fact from fiction and desire from apathy,whether the authors' are deliberately part of the process or not. The Introduction and Chapter One articulate and illustre Amerindian postmodernism at its most theoretical. These chapters outline the basic tenets ofthis idea to exploring queestions of identity and resource sharing. Chapter Two investigates therole and status of women using a lens, I call the Sycorax Model, which emergees from postcolonial discourse via relationships expressed in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Examining how women use, abuse and tranform their muted and stated powers for the benefits of their communities is imperitive. Chapter Three examines the Haitian Revolution, as represented in various texts, as one moment during which black people asserted their humanity and the contradictions such a claim engendered. Chapter Four explores how various theatrical forms and festivals concretize the positive ideas of regional nation building and Amerindian postmodernism. In effect, this project aruges that a regional Caribbean nation is a good and necessary thing for Caribbean survival and a process through which the cultural arts will help us navigate. It is the region's new quest for paradise, with the understanding that paradise is a process rather than a final destination.Item Textual Trespassing: Tracking the Native Informant in Literatures of the Americas(2004-11-02) Shemak, April A.; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation reframes notions of two disparate fields of study--postcolonial and U.S. ethnic studies--through an analysis of contemporary narratives located in the Caribbean, Central America and the United States. My choice of texts is dictated by their multiple locations, allowing me to consider postcolonial and ethnic studies as simultaneous formations. Throughout the dissertation I use the trope of trespassing in its various connotations to explore how these narratives represent native spaces, migration and U.S. spatial formations. Furthermore, I explore the manner in which testimonio surfaces as a narrative device in several of the texts. I establish the parameters of my project by describing the disciplines and theoretical discourses with which I engage. I argue that it is necessary to expand the boundaries of U.S. ethnic literature to include the literatures of the Americas. Furthermore, I also consider the implications of the trope of trespassing vis-à-vis my own subject position my own subject position and the narratives I analyze. Chapter two investigates the manner in which, despite contemporary theoretical and cultural critiques of essentialism, one continues to sense a reverence for sacrosanct notions of authenticity, origins, and nativism in contemporary narratives. I explore these themes as they occur in texts from Jamaica, Guyana and Martinique and consider how these novels complicate the alignment of indigeneity with essentialism through their use of postmodern narrative tactics. In chapter three, I shift my investigation to Haitian and Cuban narratives of migration and the manner in which testimony, when it is linked to migration, becomes a means of trespassing especially for refugees who must constructing the postcolonial native space as “corrupt” as they attempt to gain political asylum in the United States. I argue that such texts as Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak! and Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban reflect discourses of disease as a way of representing the “unhealthy” relationships between the U.S. and Haiti and Cuba. Chapter four charts the movement of the native informant from the postcolonial native locale to the ethnic immigrant space. I use Gayatri Spivak’s critique of the postcolonial critic as “New Immigrant-native informant” as an analytical frame for addressing the ways in which Dominican American writers adopt or reject the role of native informant in the novels (for example, Julia Alvarez, Loida Maritza Perez and Nelly Rosario). Chapter five reflects a convergence of postcolonial and ethnic American concerns as it explores the implications of trespassing and testimony in narratives that represent transnational labor practices. I juxtapose the 1991 U.S. Congressional Hearings which address the plight of Haitian sugarcane cutters in the Dominican Republic through an appropriation of testimonial discourse with the subjective representations of migrant workers in the novels of Edwidge Danticat and Francisco Goldman.