Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Discourse and Dissent in the Diaspora: Civic and Political Lives of Iranian Americans(2013) Zarpour, Mari Tina; Freidenberg, Judith N; Anthropology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines the political agency of Iranian immigrants. Through the rhetorical device of "political talk" which encompasses politically- and civically- oriented discourse, action and ideology, this research follows political talk as it presents itself in two locations within the public sphere: in the life course of Iranian Americans, and through online discourse. Methods used included a combination of conventional ethnography (participant observation, informal interviews, life history interviews), and virtual ethnography to develop a typology of political and civic action. Life history interviews provided an understanding of the meanings informants assigned to political and civic action within the larger trajectory of their lives, especially within the context of migration experiences. Virtual ethnography involved the analysis of three different Iranian digital diaspora communities. First, this research found that the civic and political spheres of engagement are linked, and that Iranian immigrants use organizations to learn participatory democracy. It illustrates how ethnic organizations, online and offline, act as both vehicles and activators for immigrant political participation and further civic engagement in the U.S. Additionally, this research uncovers how factors (age at migration, length of time in U.S., particular migration experience) impact notions of belonging and solidarity. It unpacks immigrant political agency to demonstrate the range of behaviors and activities which constitute political and civic participation. It contributes to understanding modes of citizenship and belonging by relating individual, historical, and situational variables in order to understand the relationship between homeland events, immigrant politicization and political behavior. Analysis of the three digital communities evidenced the multiple ways that digital diasporas can be a forum for engaging politically and in creating political community by allowing for a diversity of voices. Finally, merging conventional and virtual ethnography highlighted the dominant discourses about participation in larger society, and demonstrated the formation of a distinctly Iranian-American civil society.Item Freedom, Kinship, and Property: Free Women of African Descent in the French Atlantic, 1685-1810(2012) Johnson, Jessica Marie; Berlin, Ira; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Freedom, Kinship, and Property: Free Women of African Descent in the French Atlantic, 1685-1810” examines the role kinship and property played in the lives of free women of African descent in the Atlantic ports of Senegal, Saint-Domingue, and Gulf Coast Louisiana. Over the course of the long eighteenth century, a distinct cohort of African women and women of African descent recognized as not enslaved, enjoyed status and position in the slaveholding French Atlantic. Free status allowed them to claim their own labor, establish families, accumulate property, and demand the rights that accompanied freedom. However, free women of color’s claims to freedom, kinship, and property were not always recognized, and during the tumultuous era of the founding of the French Atlantic world these women struggled to secure livelihoods for themselves and their progeny. “Freedom, Kinship, and Property” explores the ways French Atlantic free women of African descent labored to give meaning to their freedom. This study developed out of my broader interests in Atlantic slavery, diaspora studies, and the histories of black women and of free people of color. Using travel narratives, notarial records, parish registers, and civil and criminal court records, “Freedom, Kinship, and Property” describes the lives of women of African descent in eighteenth-century Senegal, Saint-Domingue, and Gulf Coast Louisiana. In Senegal, African and Eurafrican women's commercial networks and liaisons with European men secured them prized positions in local trading networks and the society being built at the comptoirs. In Saint-Domingue and Gulf Coast Louisiana, free women of color manipulated manumission laws, built complicated kinship networks, and speculated in property to support families of their own. Free women of African descent created kinship networks, established material wealth, and maneuvered through a world of slave trading, international warfare, and revolution. Considering how free women of color negotiated kinship and property as they moved with slaves and goods between Atlantic port cities sheds important light on the formation of the black Atlantic over time.Item The Changing Spatial Distribution of the Population of the Former Soviet Union(2009) Heleniak, Timothy Edmund; Geores, Martha E; Geography; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)When it existed, the Soviet Union was a closed economic and migration space with tightly-controlled movement of goods, people, and ideas across its borders. It was also an ethnically complex region with 130 different nationalities, fifty-three with territorially-based ethnic homelands, of which fifteen became the successor states to the Soviet Union. The breakup of the Soviet Union, the transition towards market economies, and the liberalization of the societies have together greatly impacted the lives of people in the region. Many found themselves in countries or regions with dramatically shrunken economies or as ethnic minorities in newly independent states and many have chosen migration as a strategy of adaptation to the new circumstances in which they found themselves. Using established migration theory, this dissertation examines the causes of migration among the fifteen successor states since 1991. The main test was to compare the relative impact of economic factors versus ethnic factors driving migration movements in the post-Soviet space. The results showed that while some of the movements could be classified as people migrating to their ethnic homelands, a majority could be explained by neoclassical economic theories of migration and the large income differentials that have resulted from the economic transition. Other theories that have been found to explain migration in other world migration systems were found to also be applicable in the former Soviet Union.Item Sisters in the Spirit: Transnational Constructions of Diaspora in Late Twentieth-Century Black Women's Literature of the Americas(2007-04-24) Minto, Deonne Nicole; Collins, Merle; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is an interdisciplinary project that draws upon literary theory, diaspora and transnational studies, black feminism, and anthropology. It argues that, in contrast to their male counterparts who produce "high theory" about the African diaspora in the Americas -- a theory that tends to exclude or marginalize women and remains tethered to nationalist constructions -- black women writers use their literary works to unsettle the dominant gendered racial hierarchy, to critique national discourses, and to offer a vision of a transnational Americas. This study invokes an 1891 conception of the Americas advanced by the Cuban revolutionary Jose Marti, and it explores how the vision of these women writers rearticulates Marti's early concept of "Nuestra America" (Our America), transcending geographic, temporal, and linguistic boundaries. Organized around issues of historiography, black cultural formation, gender and sexual politics, and racial spacialization, this project cuts across the North/Central/South/Caribbean division of the Americas, topples the primacy of "America" (read as the United States of America) in diasporic discourses, and engages the writing of black women of the Americas in terms of their literary characterization of the transnational exchanges that have produced and continue to re-articulate diaspora in the region. Furthermore, this study engages and enlarges a notion of a "Dutch pot diaspora," as presented in Maxine Bailey and Sharon Mareeka Lewis's play Sistahs. This transnational conception of diaspora recognizes the persistence of nation and the ways in which black subjects across the Americas negotiate limiting national constructions through transnational identifications. Using poetry, drama, and novels by authors from Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, such as Toni Morrison, Erna Brodber, Luz Argentina Chiriboga, and Tessa McWatt, this dissertation reveals a transnational, diasporic poetics of the Americas.Item RETURNED DIASPORA, NATIONAL IDENTITY AND POLITICAL LEADERSHIP IN LATVIA AND LITHUANIA(2005-05-09) Skulte, Jennifer Annemarie; Tismaneanu, Vladimir; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dissertation looks at the phenomenon of diaspora political participation in their homelands through focusing on one aspect of diaspora homeland political action: holding political leadership positions in the homeland. Specifically, the research asks: When are returned diasporans able to enter into political leadership in their homelands and how do they act as political leaders? Furthermore, does this hold across countries or are the factors allowing for returned diaspora to become political leaders country-specific? The research focuses on two of the three Baltic states, Latvia and Lithuania. Each country has witnessed significant returned diaspora participation in national political leadership as well as share a number of characteristics. In the research, when and how returned diaspora enter political leadership and how they act as political leaders in the countries is investigated through intensive field work and other research, analyzed, and then compared across countries. Characteristics that differentiate returned diaspora individuals from non-returned diaspora, here, "natives," are highlighted and analyzed. Overall, the research and analysis yields three important findings. Return diaspora enter homeland political leadership when there are political opportunities to do so. These opportunities are created by regime change, how political institutions and processes are structured and how national identity is formally and informally defined. Furthermore, returned diaspora political leaders display characteristics and actions that seem to be rooted in both their experience and time abroad as well as rooted in their identity as members of diasporas with strong ties to specific homelands. They also act in the political realm in different ways relative to natives and draw support and information from different national and international networks. This research adds to the body of knowledge on the institutional and cultural legacies of Sovietization. The research also highlights the importance of how national identity is defined in creating political opportunities for returned diasporans to enter homeland politics. While the case of diaspora impact on postcommunist Baltic politics may be rooted in a specific historical context, the more general impact of diasporas on politics in their homelands is a phenomenon with which not only academia but real politics will need to contend.Item Salvation Abroad: Macedonian Migration to North America and the Making of Modern Macedonia, 1870-1970(2005-04-18) Michaelidis, Gregory; Gerstle, Gary; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the establishment of Macedonian diaspora communities in North America, and the concurrent development of Macedonian national identity, between 1870 and 1970. Taking a transnational approach to cultural history, it ultimately finds a reciprocal relationship between Macedonian migration and identity by focusing on key nationalist leaders and organizations, as well as the crucial points of transformation in the evolution of Macedonian national identity. By blurring the boundary between Canada and the United States - as did many migrants from Macedonia who saw the two countries as "Upper" and "Lower" America - this study emphasizes migration rather than settlement in order to unveil nationalism's religious, cultural and political components. The dissertation, therefore, is grounded not in the cement of a single national narrative, but in the cultural products that result from passages - physical, spiritual, and social - among nations. As the nineteenth century ended, a climate of deprivation and violence compelled tens of thousands of men from the Macedonian region to depart their troubled corner of the Balkans and find economic salvation abroad. Like their fellow villagers, most of the migrants considered themselves to be geographically Macedonian but culturally Bulgarian. Almost none identified with a nationality in the modern sense. This study argues, however, that more than simply fulfilling an economic mission abroad, the migrant men, and later their families, capitalized on the freedoms North America offered to forge a broader "salvation" that fundamentally changed their national and ethnic worldview. Put another way, migration catalyzed a process in which the migrants became, simply, "Macedonians." Far from leaving behind the political and cultural battles of their homeland, the migrant communities formed political, cultural, and religious organizations that sought to influence the policies of both their host and home countries. But defining the new Macedonian nation proved a contentious issue. As the migrant communities cleaved into left- and right-leaning factions during the middle and latter years of the twentieth century, the nature of Macedonian identity, which, I argue, was intimately connected to notions of Macedonian cultural history, became a fiercely contested subject, and remains so today.