Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item El Broadway in Spain: Musical Theatre, Cultural Transpositions, and Artistic Process(2019) Reales Gregory, Jose David; Frederik, Laurie; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Broadway musical has been shaped by a distinctly American identity, but its rapid international success underscores the need for research which further explores the complexities surrounding its cross-cultural jump into countries with their own histories and identities. In a country where performance research sits largely on flamenco, guitar, and zarzuelas, the 21st-century Spanish stage has been transformed by an unprecedented boom in musicals such as Chicago, West Side Story, Billy Elliott, Phantom of the Opera, and The Lion King. This dissertation follows theatre makers of Spain and dives into their productions of Broadway musicals to uncover the cultural, linguistic, and social negotiations behind their creative experiences. I journey into Spain’s past to decode various constructions of Spanish identity through musical performance, examining how the function of musical performance changes with shifting notions of nationhood. I look at Madrid and its professional companies, tracing urban and economic factors that feed into the replication of Broadway’s symbolic space. Joining the creative process of individual artists, I watch how amateur groups performing Broadway musicals in civic spaces of the provinces unite against a backdrop of local traditions to define their community through distinct linguistic and creative translation processes. Finally, I turn to a national Broadway musical theatre festival to determine how competition, programming, and workshop sessions construct audiences’ ideas of legitimacy for the purposes of strengthening belonging within the community. The transposition of these Broadway-style musicals to Spain are subject to the pressures and cultural politics of their space which creates new intersecting sites for the exploration of belonging between city and world, region and nation, and self and community. Ultimately, the Broadway musical genre is historically embedded with hegemonic power structures that, while consistent with the globalized market and its artistic community in the United States, are tough to negotiate at local and individual levels in other cultures – raising questions about the sustainability of national arts in today’s world.Item MEMORY AND RECONCILIATION IN THE SPANISH TRANSITION TO DEMOCRACY: 1975-1982(2017) Carias, Sebastian E.; Herf, Jeffery C; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the Spanish transition to democracy from 1975 to 1982. It is an analysis of important political leaders of Spain and important political parties. The research questions are why after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco’s did Spain become a constitutional monarchy? How did the political leaders work together towards a consensus to democratic transition without causing another civil war? I analyze three things: political amnesty of prisoners and exiles, the creation and ratification of the 1978 Constitution, and the rise and success of the Spanish Socialist Party. Ultimately, the political leaders worked together and had a policy of reconciliation to move towards a democratic nation.Item Compañeros del exilio: Una cartografía de resistencia después de la Guerra Civil española(2017) Taylor, Kathryn; Naharro-Calderón, José María; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation studies the cultural production of three intellectual couples following the Spanish Civil War. Using a variety of genres, my project explores and problematizes traditional approaches to the study of literary and artistic productions in the Post-Civil War period. While previous studies of women’s texts have often been limited to describing feminine difference and noting the oblivion and exclusion of female voices from the canon, I argue that women’s voices need to be considered as part of a larger cultural discourse. By establishing a dialogue among texts created by literary couples, we see the variety and complexity of experiences and responses both during and after the war. Also, while traditional approaches have studied the texts produced in exile separately from those created in Spain, I include texts written in both territorial Spain and exile. Through an examination of responses and strategies of resistance utilized in both spaces, I challenge both the idea that Inner Spain was left with a cultural void after the exodus of 1939, and the myth that there was no communication between the interior and exterior of Spain. The first chapter reconsiders the works of María Teresa León in relation to her husband, Rafael Alberti. León’s literary persona has long been overshadowed by the very public voice of Alberti, and most studies of her work have focused on this fact rather than on her extensive literary production. By looking at a number of texts by León, some of them completely overlooked by the canon, we see themes similar to Alberti’s, particularly a dedication to their political ideals and the future of Spain. In the second chapter, I question the claim that the exodus of Spanish intellectuals at the end of the Civil War left the country devoid of cultural values by studying the works of Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio and Carmen Martín Gaite. The case of Martín Gaite is notable because she achieved more fame and recognition for her work than her spouse. Although she was writing in a very conservative Spain for women, she used strategies of the fantastic to undermine patriarchal domination that clearly influenced her husband’s works. In the final chapter, I examine the work of Jomí García Ascot and María Luisa Elío, who accompanied their parents into exile in Mexico as children. While a common assumption is that they should have adapted perfectly to their new country, the uprootedness of living in exile and a phantom Spain become central themes in both of their works. Their collaboration in the mythical film on exile, En el balcón vacío, portrays the decisive influence of Juan Ramón Jiménez, an exile and inner Spain icon of his own.Item La rebeldia de la letra. Escritura, viaje y teoria en la novela espanola y argentina del siglo XX(2012) Gomez-Montoya, Carolina; Demaria, Laura; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach to analyze and problematize the intersections of writing, theory and travel in a body of contemporary literature from Argentina and Spain. In the first chapter, I examined the paths of three travelers, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Victoria Ocampo and Witold Gombrowicz, who despite their dissimilar experiences, produce a form of writing closely linked to movement and becoming. Through the medieval topos of homo viator, which conceives the human as pilgrim and life as a voyage of deciphering, I examine the practice of writing as a constant movement requiring the writer to embark on a journey through what Martin Heidegger called, the holzwege. In so doing, the writer must exit the polis, and from the position of the outsider, the writer will be able to write and do the work of theory. In subsequent chapters, I analyze writing spaces in the novels of Enrique Vila-Matas and Hector Libertella and how those places are, in fact, traveling spaces that question any concept of fixed or permanent belonging. By proposing a practice of writing that is self-reflexive and preoccupied with the possibilities of writing, I look at the responses of Libertella and Vila-Matas to the twentieth century nihilistic malaise that leads to silence. Ultimately, my goal is to construct a theory of writing that portrays the practice of writing as mobile, fluid, and desobedient to national formations and literary traditions.Item Literary Cartographies of Spain: Mapping Identity in African American Travel Writing(2011) Ramos, Maria Christina; Nunes, Zita C; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes the considerable body of twentieth-century African American travel narratives of Spain, including those by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Frank Yerby, and Richard Wright. Building on recent scholarship that has shifted frameworks for understanding cultural processes based on history to ones based on space or geography, it explores the imaginative geographies mapped in these African American travel narratives and examines the use of Spain as a location that permits challenges to the geopolitics inherited from early modern European mappings of the world. Spain's liminal position geographically (between Europe and Africa), historically and culturally (between West and East), and politically (between liberal secularism and religious totalitarianism) provides these writers with a variety of routes through which to both revise the dominant European imaginative geographies of the world and expand theoretical discourses of the politics of location and identity. This dissertation argues that these African American travel narratives of Spain create literary cartographies that remap our global imaginary to enable a reconsideration of racial, ethnic, and national identities and that explore the capacity of transnationalism to transcend these categories. The figure of the Moor is central to these literary cartographies as a shifting signifier of race, ethnicity, and religion, and is used to help map individual and community identity as relational rather than fixed. In these mappings, identity is envisioned within a constantly fluctuating network of flows and mapped in relation to a variety of nodes within that network. This travel writing also highlights the importance of travel as a type of wayfinding for individuals and larger societies in need of critical self-reflection, ultimately attempting to articulate novel ways of building genuine and generative relations to others around the globe.Item Neoliberalism in Translation: Economic Ideas and Reforms in Spain and Romania(2011) Ban, Cornel; Conca, Ken; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Most political economists studying the global spread of neoliberalism have seen it as a form of policy diffusion. Recently constructivist political economists have pointed to the important role of the spread of neoliberal economic ideas in this process. However, they have not provided a theoretical framework for understanding the mechanisms through which neoliberal ideas travel across national policy spheres. To address this gap, this dissertation draws on the claim made by some sociologists that ideas do not stay the same as they travel from one social setting to another, but are "translated" by idea entrepreneurs called "translators". More specifically, this dissertation aims to specify what shapes the result of translation, the pace at which it occurs, and the means through which it can shape policy. In doing this, it makes three contributions to the study of political economy. First, it argues that the content of adopted neoliberal ideas is shaped by the context-specific choices made by translators who employ "framing," "grafting" and "editing" as translation devices. Secondly, the pace of translation is shaped by the density of transnational ties between domestic policy stakeholders and external advocates of neoliberalism. Finally, translated neoliberal ideas are likely to serve as templates for economic policies when they are shared by an intellectually coherent policy team inside a cabinet that can effectively control economic policy decisions. To make thesearguments, the dissertation draws on a comparative historical analysis of the spread of neoliberalism in two "crucial cases": postauthoritarian Spain and Romania.Item SINGING BOUNDARIES: TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF VOCALITY AND THE PERFORMANCE OF IDENTITIES IN THE CANT VALENCIÀ D'ESTIL(2011) Pitarch Alfonso, Carles A.; Provine, Robert C.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The cant valencia or cant valencia d'estil of Valencia is one of the four main living monodic expressive song traditions of Spain. Comprised of non-metric cant d'estil and metric albaes songs mostly used in street serenades, it features a distinctive vocality characterized by a highly-projected, clear, inflected, and flexible voice as well as two melodic styles, of which the more ornamented cant requintat developed at the turn of the twentieth century. I take a historical, theoretical, and ethnographic approach to this Valencian vocal genre and explore the ways in which vocality can help us to understand it better. After examining the origins of the cant valencia and the antiquarian, journalistic, folkloristic, and (ethno)musicological approaches to it, I probe the notion of vocality in a transdisciplinary way: drawing on ethnomusicological theory, anthropology, folklore, semiotics, and other disciplines I show its significance for the development of a musical anthropology of the voice productively based on the ethnographic exploration of the iconicity of style and of two sets of central vocal issues: on the one hand, identity, gender, authority, and sonic histories and geographies; on the other, acoustemology, interpellation, and transcendence. Vocality not only expands usefully the scope of vocal or singing style by encompassing larger bodily-dependent traits of the human voice as central or salient means of aesthetic and ethical production of meanings, but also acknowledges its pre-eminent position in the hierarchy of musical values, since the material/textural qualities of (vocal) sounds iconically shape our first sonorous perceptions and identifications and are thus paramount for communication. I make a first approach to vocality and the performance of collective identities in the cant valencia by showing that its modern stylistic development is linked to two diachronic frameworks: the moments of modern radical situational change in Europe and the construction of Spanish national identity. I also explore how issues of interpellation and transcendence bear on the formation of personal identities of the cantadors d'estil, the specialized cant valencia singers. I show that an emically-informed, etic approach to vocality can afford an understanding of how people can create their own history and affirm their own collective or personal identities in response to larger social processes.Item From Albéniz to Arbós: the Orchestration of Iberia(2010) Carlson, Lindsey; Haggh-Huglo, Barbara; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Enrique Arbós's five orchestrations of pieces from Iberia, the masterly piano work by his close friend, Isaac Albéniz, are among the most frequently programmed works in the Spanish orchestral repertoire today. Increased academic interest in Albéniz's orchestral output has revealed that Arbós's orchestration of Albéniz's piano solo, "El Puerto," from Iberia, bears striking similarities with Albéniz's unpublished orchestration of the same piece. Although Albéniz asked Arbós to take over the task of orchestrating "El Puerto," little is known about the details of this arrangement. To shed light on this issue, I have carefully reviewed the overlapping biographies of these two composers, as well as thoroughly analyzed the two scores for the first time. I conclude that Arbós's orchestration of "El Puerto" is indeed a revision of Albéniz's orchestration, and that this revision was a natural result of their close relationship.Item IGNACIO ZULOAGA AND THE PROBLEM OF SPAIN(2009) Crosson, Dena; Hargrove, June; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: IGNACIO ZULOAGA AND THE PROBLEM OF SPAIN Dena Crosson, Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Dissertation directed by: Professor June Hargrove Department of Art History and Archeology This dissertation examines the career of Ignacio Zuloaga (1870-1945), a highly successful and influential artist during his lifetime, in the context of nationalism and the political and cultural conditions that informed his artistic persona. Positioning himself to both Spanish and foreign audiences as the "painter of Spain," his style and subject matter simultaneously exploited foreign preconceptions about Spain while serving as a lightning rod for the critical nationalist discourse preoccupying Spanish political and cultural leaders during the first decades of the twentieth century. In the 1910s and 1920s the vernacular nationalism he practiced was not opposed to modernism. But by the 1930s, nationalism had become associated with rising fascist movements both in Europe and in Spain. Through a series of case studies this dissertation problematizes the issue of modernism in art and fills an important gap in the study of the critical role of nationalism for the struggle between tradition and modernity in the arts in early twentieth-century Spain. Chapter One examines Zuloaga's influence in France through his affiliation with a group of French artists known as La Bande Noire and describes his important contribution to the rediscovery of El Greco in the last years of the nineteenth century. Chapter Two explores Zuloaga's discovery of the province of Castilla in 1898 as a subject for his work. It charts the significance of Castilla for the nationalist project of the Generation of 98 as well as for the regenerationist Institución Libre de Enseñanza (Free Institute of Learning). Chapter Three maps the growing links between Zuloaga and traditionalist and fascist ideologies, both in France and in Spain, in the 1910s and 1920s. Chapter Four investigates Zuloaga's career both in the context of the foundation and fall of Spain's Second Republic (1931-1939) and the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. Zuloaga's career provides a significant case study for the gradual alignment, of what became traditionalism, with right-wing political ideology, an alignment by no means necessarily apparent before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936.