Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Perpetuating Conflict: Postcolonial Intervention in Afghanistan During the Cold War(2023) Dauphin, Edward George; Chung, Patrick; Woods, Colleen; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ArgumentThis thesis argues that during the postcolonial era, Cold War hegemons – The United States of America and the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan’s modernization to ensure their methods of modernization – capitalism and communism – remained the only options for developing nations to modernize. While most believe that American and Soviet intervention into Afghanistan was the result of Cold War geopolitics, I argue that questions of statehood and nation-making were the central factors in superpower involvement in the country. Amid a resurgence of traditional Islamic values, Afghanistan sought to modernize outside of the realm of bi-polar developmental paths imposed by American nation-state capitalism and Soviet communism. Largely founded on Orientalist beliefs, the hegemons refused to recognize the legitimacy of a modern Afghan nation built on Islamism. The hegemons believed that without First World influence, Afghan “tribalism” and “Islamism” were too primitive to possess the capability of progressing towards a modern state, one which they defined using western-orthodox models. Statehood, according to American and Soviet concepts of high modernism posited that a developing nations’ path to modernity adhered to a linear model centered on a market-based economy. According to the hegemons, once the developing nation established a market-based economy, the developing nation would adapt to either a communist or capitalist modes. Method This research for this thesis was conducted using recently declassified primary source material from the CIA’s CREST database, the Wilson Center Online for recently declassified KGB documents, and select memoirs from key individuals. Secondary source material was used to frame the historiographical context of my argument – focusing on how many historians degrade the Afghan peoples’ own agency in their modernization. When necessary, secondary source material was also used in order to fill the gaps left by redacted primary source material. Key concepts used for framing both the USG and KGB’s reasons for intervention included postcolonial modernization, High Modernism and Orientalism, and Traditional Islam. Major FindingsMajor Findings included: 1) Though they “officially” supported self-determination, the Soviet Politburo and USG found new methods to control developing nations; 2) Despite their Orientalist beliefs and hesitancy to support the PDPA, the Soviet Politburo seized the initiative in Afghanistan by planting KGB agents in PDPA; 3) The Soviet Politburo legitimized the PDPA’s modernization as high modernism by claiming that Afghanistan's tribalism created a market system, and the civil war was merely the next step in revolution towards socialism. 4) Realizing they could no longer control the PDPA, the Politburo was compelled to commit military forces to support the PDPA and maintain their influence; 5) The USG refused to recognized Afghanistan's modernization according to their own concepts of high modernism; 6) The USG sought to undermine the PDPA, the Soviet Politburo’s support of the PDPA, and Islamism as a means to modernization. De-legitimizing all three would prove American capitalism as the only viable means to modernization; 7) With no intention of establishing a long-term solution, and with no desire to threaten détente, the USG relied on the CIA and clandestine operations to perpetuate the Afghan Civil War; and 8) By perpetuating the Civil War to drive Afghanistan to become a failed state, the USG gained credibility over the Soviet Politburo. ConclusionWestern definitions of statehood and nationmaking were the driving factors behind USG and KGB intervention in Afghanistan. Afghanistan did not merely serve as the next battleground for hegemonic proxy war, instead the Afghan people sought to pursue a third method of modernization, one which conflicted with western views of high modernism. Due to preconceived notions of Orientalism, the USG and Soviet Politburo were compelled to prevent an alternative method of nationmaking to maintain their bipolar control of the world.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 TRANS WORLDING WITHIN: DECOLONIAL EXAMINATIONS OF TRANS OF COLOR INTERIORITY(2021) Aftab, Aqdas; Avilez, GerShun; Lothian, Alexis; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues for the importance of reading for interiority in trans of color cultural productions. With so many representations of racialized trans people foregrounding the violated body, the cultural imaginary around trans of color life is saturated with notions of corporeality. In this context, I develop a transworld hermeneutic that refuses an emphasis on the racialized and colonized trans body, which is fetishized by the medical industrial complex and by cultural productions, and instead, turns towards the interior. Examining Black and Dalit diasporic texts, from postcolonial classics such as Nuruddin Farah’s Maps to contemporary novels like Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater to Mimi Mondal’s speculative short stories, I argue that while the corporeal is surveilled by the cis colonial gaze, the interior shows glimpses of world-making practices that are protected from the pornotropic violence of spectacle. While Western epistemologies define trans identity through the lens of Enlightenment-based models of science that focus on the sexed body’s transitions, my emphasis on interiority reconceptualizes trans of color life as intuitive, ecstatic, speculative and spiritual. Using the affective interior as a central framework, my transworld reading strategy offers a departure from essentialist as well as performative understandings of gender: informed by the theories of the spirit, the interior strives to remain opaque to the external gaze, hence guarded from performative effects. Overall, my research reveals how Black and Dalit exclusions from the colonial Human create the possibility of trans becoming; in other words, colonial and racist violence forcibly constructs transness, an experience that is utilized strategically by Black and Dalit writers as a decolonial tool for challenging, dismantling, and rewriting scripts of humanness.Item Occasions for Reading: Literary Encounters and the Making of the West Indies(2011) Esprit, Schuyler Kirshten; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Occasions for Reading" argues for a new methodology of postcolonial reading that traces the origins of Anglophone Caribbean literary history and redirects the routes of West Indian literary production and canon formation. Historically, West Indian writers have sought an "ideal" reader of their work, though the definition and depiction of that ideal reader have varied. Anglophone Caribbean authors' own relationships to the act of reading and to the influence of reading on their own and on their characters' identity formation also direct or re-direct nation and canon formation. By engaging postcolonial theory, reader-response theory, post-structuralism, and reception studies, the dissertation investigates the production of the reader in and of Caribbean literary texts and of the social spaces in which they circulate. This dissertation situates the act of reading at the core of colonial and postcolonial representations of the Anglophone Caribbean and offers the culture of reception as a mode through which the geography of the West Indies is implicated in connecting West Indian people and identities across the diaspora. Acts and scenes of reading in West Indian novels produce a critique of Imperial knowledge production and illustrate how Caribbean subjects transform the intellectual, psychological or political meanings derived from reading colonial texts into a postcolonial epistemology. Such transformations provoke a range of consequences for these character-readers who must either leave the Caribbean region or continue to stake out their legitimacy and rootedness. Reading prompts characters' transgressions or resistance against persistent political, aesthetic or cultural narratives of colonialism historically informing Caribbean identity. By extension, characters' engagements with reading reveal twentieth-century West Indian authors' preoccupations with and resistance to colonial ontology. Issues of race, class, and gender influence the acts and scenes of reading in canonical West Indian novels analyzed in this study, including C.L.R. James's Minty Alley, V.S. Naipaul's The Mystic Masseur, Phyllis Shand Allfrey's The Orchid House, Michelle Cliff's Abeng and Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John. Following the historiography of the function of the reader in West Indian novels, the dissertation contends with contemporary concerns, in the late twentieth and into the twenty-first century, about where and how novels on the Caribbean experience are read, particularly by non-academic reading publics. Significant moments of literary reception in the U.K. and reception culture of Caribbean literature in the United States allow for a focus on contemporary novels and memoirs including Andrea Levy's Small Island and Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother. In an examination of how writers such as Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat have responded to the readers who encounter and assess their work, I critique apparent conflations of Caribbean literature, Caribbean geography or landscape, and Caribbean identity. Slippages in understanding the differences and boundaries between these concepts - literature, geography, and identity - in reading practices warrant a more methodological view of the impact of reading and reception on Caribbean literary history and its global reach. While representations of readers within the Caribbean space reveal a desire for a distinct origin and rootedness in the Caribbean landscape, migrant writers redefine the legacy and relevance of Caribbean literature through a discourse of emotion without boundaries or frontiers. As a whole, this dissertation challenges the dominant view of primarily political origins of postcolonial Caribbean literature, upholding its less recognized genealogy in intellectual and aesthetic discourses.