Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item All That Hunger, All That Thirst(2024) Singh, Subraj; Brandchaft Mitchell, Emily; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)These stories are set in Guyana, and feature characters who demonstrate how the offshoots of colonialism continue to be expressed within the minds and bodies of formerly colonized peoples. Because of this, violence, avarice, addiction, oppression, and death occupy large roles within these stories, emerging out of character motivations, and emphasizing traumas experienced by both the individual and the collective. Through the use of realism and fabulism, Standard English and Guyanese Creole, as well as various storytelling structures and techniques, the narratives in this manuscript seek to highlight the sprawling and insidious nature of colonialism, and to bring attention to the harmful legacies that have been installed in its place.Item Postcolonial Refashionings: Reading Forms, Reading Novels(2009) Comorau, Nancy Alla; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation reads the postcolonial novel through a lens of novel theory, examining the ways in which the postcolonial novel writes a new chapter in the history of the novel. I explore how Postcolonial writers deploy--even as they remodel--the form of the British novel, which provides them a unique avenue for expressing national and individual historical positions and for imaginatively renegotiating their relationships to the canon and the Commonwealth, past and present. In doing so, they remake the forms they have inherited into the genre of the postcolonial novel. The novel, due to its connection to modernity, the nation, and the formation of the subject, holds different possibilities for postcolonial writers than other forms. My dissertation answers readings of postcolonial texts, which, while often superb in their interpretation of the political, fail to focus on genre. In a fashion, postcolonial novels are read as anthropological works, providing glimpses into a culture, and in a peculiar way the novel comes to operate as the native informant. Given the proliferation of the Anglophone postcolonial novel, I argue that it is important that we consider how the postcolonial novel renders established genres into new forms. I focus on a set of postcolonial novels that specifically engage with canonical British novels, calling attention to the fact that while they share much with their predecessors, they function differently than the novels that have come before them. Unlike early postcolonial arguments about empire "writing back" to the center, which position postcolonial and "English" writers in an antipodal power struggle, I argue that the Anglophone postcolonial novel is at once a descendent of the British novel and a genre unto itself--forming a new limb from the British novel's branch. In doing so, these novels perform new ways of writing modernity, the nation, and the subject. Working from a Bakhtinian theory of the modern novel as a form that creates newness, I demonstrate how postcolonial writers use the history and tradition of the British novel to write, revise, and refashion the novel in English.Item Screams Somehow Echoing: Trauma and Testimony in Anglophone African Literature(2008-07-26) Brown, Michelle Lynn; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Postcolonial literary critics note persistently recurring representations of colonial violence in post-independence Anglophone African novels. I suggest that complex psychological and political processes of colonial trauma compel this narrative repetition. This dissertation juxtaposes postcolonial and trauma studies in order to analyze literary representations of colonial violence in terms of race, gender, identity, and the post-independence nation-state. To do so, I engage with black feminisms, African history, Subaltern Studies, and Latin American testimonio studies. I contend that, despite variations in aesthetic mode, melancholia, haunting, and mourning recur in realist and postmodern Anglophone African and diaspora novels with interesting variations beyond the usual stylistic differences. This tendency spans sub-Saharan Africa, the Atlantic, and generations. My work suggests that we use the vocabulary of psychoanalysis to fruitfully read post-independence literature as testimony representing the trauma of colonial occupation. Trauma and justice studies teach that testimony is the route to surviving productively after an experience of traumatizing violence. While mine is not the first analysis of Anglophone African literature to employ the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, it is the first to suggest doing so in the context of traumatic testimony. I explore three modes of telling--testimonial bodies, censored testimony and its ghosts, and trans-generational testifying wounds--represented in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments (Ghana, the United States, and France), Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (Zimbabwe), Nuruddin Farah's Maps (Somalia), Moses Isegawa's Abyssinian Chronicles (Uganda and the Netherlands), Meja Mwangi's Carcase for Hounds (Kenya), Helen Oyeyemi's The Icarus Girl (Nigeria and Britain), and in Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (South Africa). Modes of telling crisscross the continent, suggesting that traumatic suffering binds different communities together. Read as traumatic testimonies, the texts critique the intersected, normalizing discourses of globalization, trans-Atlantic migration, women's rights, and decolonization. They demonstrate that moments of national birth mark historical sites of potential for the collective to revise the past, create a national citizenry, and chart a socially progressive future through transformative mourning processes.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 Imagining Other Worlds: Literary Constructions of Alterity through Music(2007-05-14) Bushnell, Cameron Fae; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The late twentieth century has seen a significant increase in the number of literary texts turning to music for thematic content and structural form. I read musical forms as structuring or articulating new forms of nationalism, identity formation, community, memory, and exile. Using vocabulary from postcolonial theory, I argue that sites of alterity identifiable in music challenge existing, dominant cultural formations, promote ethical orientation towards others, and suggest openness to human interrelations. The texts that anchor my study articulate an aesthetic humanism that proposes the musical arts as non-confrontational conceptions of self and other, of the individual and society. In the introduction to their provocatively entitled anthology, Dangerous Liaisons, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat insist on the value of a "contrapuntal juxtaposition" of multiculturalism in the U.S. context and postcolonialism in the international sphere. This phrase - contrapuntal juxtaposition - encapsulates the motivation for my dissertation. On the one hand, my work is contrapuntal in its interdisciplinarity. Revising the critical successes of musicologists, such as Susan McClary and Jeffrey Kallberg, who use feminist and genre theories to interrogate the gender politics readable in musical structures, harmonic progressions, and tonal qualities, I employ theories and practices of Western music to read the cultural, social, and political strategies for subject positioning and human interrelations employed by late-twentieth century novels and poetry. On the other hand, my study juxtaposes American ethnic and postcolonial writings. I use a contested scope for postcolonial literatures in order to focus on sites that might be considered "mature" in their postcoloniality and to find conditions of entrenched and deeply conflicting ideological positions. I contend that musical elements provide a means to critique dominant cultural ideologies and social constructions from within European Enlightenment, of which Western music is a product.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.Item Infant Nation: Childhood Innocence and the Politics of Race in Contemporary American Fiction(2004-04-27) Werrlein, Debra Tonkin; Kauffman, Linda; Chuh, Kandice; English Language and LiteratureInfant Nation considers literary representations of childhood as sites where anxieties about race, class and gender inequalities converge. Popular and canonical representations of American childhood often revere it as a condition that precedes history, lacks knowledge, and thus, avoids accountability. I argue that invocations of this depoliticized ideal mask systems of privilege, particularly relating to white middle-class masculinity. My study highlights literature published between 1970 and 1999, a period marked by growing concern regarding boundaries of race and nation. With special attention to postcolonial and critical race theories, I argue that the authors here portray the United States as a nation infantilized by its desire to reclaim a mythically innocent past. In untidy formulations of nation that mirror their disjointed narrative styles, the novels interfere with the operation of nostalgia in American memory. They revise the ideal of innocent childhood to model a form of citizenship deeply engaged in acts of historical recuperation. I respond to theories of postmodern literature and cultural studies that emphasize the central role memory plays in shaping our future, presenting an analysis I feel is especially urgent at a time when neo-conservative policy-makers subscribe to a Trent Lott-style nostalgia for a mythically innocent pre-Civil Rights era. Chapter One examines Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990). I argue that Hagedorn cedes authentic history to the corrosive powers of assimilationism and consumerism, invoking multiple stories of history’s loss instead. In Chapter Two, I shift focus to the white middle class of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984). I argue that DeLillo implicates patriarchal families and profiteering universities in the cultivation of “innocent” consumer identities that ultimately turn violent. In Chapter Three I discuss Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970). Morrison challenges the myth of American meritocracy, I contend, suggesting that race, class and gender oppressions exist not only in American culture, but in American childhoods. Finally, I examine Lois Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging (1997). I argue that by representing children as historically savvy social critics and not as innocents, Yamanaka models a new adult citizenry. With the other novelists here, she warns a forgetful nation against embracing the infantilized present.