Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item Escritura, derecho y esclavitud: Francisco José de Jaca ante el nomos colonial(2013) Moreno-Orama, Rebeca; Merediz, Eyda M.; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation concentrates on the relationship between law, literature, and slavery in the Hispanic Caribbean of the Early Modern Period. My analysis is based on two letters and a treatise, Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros y sus originarios, en estado de paganos y después ya cristianos (1681), that were written by Capuchin friar Francisco José de Jaca, while he was serving as a missionary in the Caribbean region. His writings set the stage for a discussion of how Spanish hegemonic legal thinking is challenged and redefined from an alternative transatlantic narrative. The concept of nomos colonial that I introduce in this dissertation denotes the symbolic normative space originated by the legal justifications of the Spanish conquest and colonization. Through the exploration of the nomos colonial, my project focuses on how the rhetoric of law served simultaneously as a discursive practice of imperial domination and of cultural resistance. By reclaiming the aesthetic and conceptual originality of Francisco José de Jaca, a neglected author who demonstrated the illegality of Amerindian and African slavery, the dissertation reveals the epistemological shift produced to (re)accommodate the colonial subjects within the nomos colonial. By situating Jaca's contributions in a counter-hegemonic legal corpus that dates back to Antón de Montesinos and Bartolomé de Las Casas, the research re-envisions the ideological debates about slavery in the 16th and 17th centuries. Ultimately, my goal is to reconsider some foundational fictions of the Caribbean world--Amerindian legal status, slavery, and Black subjectivity--by underscoring the relevance of an intellectual whose discourse was constructed from the tension between the Spanish legal tradition and the colonial experience.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 NINETEENTH-CENTURY BANJOS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY: CUSTOM AND TRADITION IN A MODERN EARLY BANJO REVIVAL(2012) Adams, Greg C.; Witzleben, J. Lawrence; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis demonstrates how members of a modern music revival use the banjo to create a counter narrative to America's whiteness. Within this revival, nineteenth-century banjos are central to a growing interest in antebellum, early minstrel, and Civil War era music and culture. As researchers, collectors, musicians, and instrument builders pursue this interest, they explore the dissonances of the legacies surrounding slavery, blackface minstrelsy, and the traumas of the American Civil War. Framing this phenomenon within Eric Hobsbawm's theories of custom and tradition and Thomas Turino's concepts of habits, socialization, and cultural cohort relationships, I argue that this modern revival supports a form of critical ethnography aimed for advocacy on three fronts--advocacy that challenges marginalizing stereotypes, promotes opportunities to rethink the banjo's cultural significance as a national instrument of whiteness, and creates greater infrastructure for the knowledge and material culture amassed by members of the banjo community.Item GRACIOUS BUT CARELESS: RACE AND STATUS IN THE HISTORY OF MOUNT CLARE(2010) Moyer, Teresa; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Historic plantation sites continue to struggle with the legacy of slavery and black history, particularly concerning their significance in American culture. Although enslaved persons are erased from the contemporary landscape of Carroll Park in Baltimore, Maryland, the historical and archaeological record preserves their importance to the Carroll family and the plantation called Georgia or Mount Clare. I argue that historic preservation is a form of social justice when underrepresented historical groups are integrated into interpretations of historical house museums and landscapes. Enslaved blacks held essential roles in every aspect of Mount Clare from circa 1730 to 1817. They became culturally American at the intersection of race and status, not only through the practice of their own cultural beliefs and values, but those of elite whites, as well. Focus on white ancestors reveals only part of the history of Mount Clare: I demonstrate that blacks' own achievements cannot be ignored.Item Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835-1907): Reconstructed Rebel(2007-05-09) Fleming, Tuliza Kamirah; Promey, Sally; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Thomas Satterwhite Noble was a Southerner, a member of slave-owning family, a confederate soldier, and an artist who painted history paintings relating to slavery and freedom in the United States. Between 1865 and 1870, Noble created a series of paintings that directly confronted white America's ambivalent feelings with regard to the issues of slavery, emancipation, and integration--earning him the moniker "reconstructed rebel." The American Slave Mart, 1865 was the first monumental treatment of a slave auction by an American painter and effectively launched his career as an artist of national recognition. Noble was strongly influenced by his French teacher and mentor, Thomas Couture, and his seminal painting Decadence of the Romans when he painted The American Slave Mart. Two years later, buoyed by his success of his first history painting, Noble created the contemporary history paintings Margaret Garner and John Brown's Blessing. Both paintings featured individuals who risked themselves and those they loved in the pursuit of freedom and liberty. In 1868 Noble The Price of Blood, A Planter Selling His Son, a painting which revealed the Southern practice of slave owners selling their slave/children for profit. In 1870, Noble painted a simplified replica of The American Slave Mart titled, The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis. This painting was created at a very difficult time in the artist's career and represents a desire for him to be seen as part of the greater Cincinnati community. Thomas Satterwhite Noble: A Reconstructed Rebel examines how Noble's African American imagery reflected and interpreted issues concerning slavery in the upper South, the internal slave trade, miscegenation, and abolition. This study shifts the scholarly emphasis on Noble's oeuvre from discussions relating to the manner in which African Americans were portrayed before and after slavery to how these images were perceived by contemporary reconstruction audiences.Item The Presentation of Slavery at Mount Vernon: Power Priviledge, and Historical Truth(2005-06-22) McGill, Keeley; Moghadam, Linda; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Although the labor of enslaved Africans and Black Americans played a large part in the history of colonial America, the presentation of slavery at George Washington's Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens is, for the most part, incomplete and leaves visitors with an inaccurate impression of the reality of slavery. This research utilizes questionnaires completed by visitors on-site and field observations of various historical interpretations at Mount Vernon to answer two major research questions: (1) How is slavery portrayed at Mount Vernon? and (2) To what degree are visitors critical of the story of slavery told at Mount Vernon? The results indicated that the presentation of slavery is inconsistent and that the history of slaves at Mount Vernon is marginalized and easily avoided by most visitors.