College of Arts & Humanities

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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.

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Thinking, Scripting, and Performing: Constructing and Playing the Racial Synecdoche in the Antebellum North
(2007-05-06) Jones, Douglas Anthony; Nathans, Heather S; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
In my thesis, I argue that between the years of 1830-1842, free African Americans scripted and performed what I term, following historian Patrick Rael, the racial synecdoche. This "character" was a black performative identity that people of color should play on the public stage. The performance team--or those who scripted and performed this new black identity--believed that the performance of the synecdoche would grant free people of color eligibility to perform full civic participation in America's nascent democracy. In this study, I consider the national black conventions of the 1830s as ritualistic sites and as the primary loci where that self-scripting process took place. I characterize this thesis as an intellectual history and hope that it contributes to the vital and ever-growing bodies of African American history and African American theatre and performance history, as well as add contour and complexity to the well-charted Jacksonian period.