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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Item Narrating Tragedy: From Kennedy to Katrina, From Sports to National Identities(2007-11-26) Gavin, Michael; Struna, Nancy L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)On September 11, 2001, Major League Baseball commissioner Allan 'Bud' Selig postponed the baseball season to offer proper respect to that day's terror victims. On September 16, 2001, when the major league season resumed, sports columnists across the nation-state referred to the New York Yankees as 'America's team.' When the Yankees made their run to the World Series, many columnists argued they 'healed the wounds of the nation.' Likewise, as water settled in the French Quarter after Hurricane Katrina, columnists suggested the New Orleans Saints were 'capable of healing the nation' and referred to them as 'America's team.' When the Saints returned to the Superdome in 2006, many columnists suggested the region and nation were both healed. This dissertation uses discourse analysis to reveal the constructions of and contestations for dominant versions of national identity and memory in which sports columnists engaged in the context of tragedies like the John F. Kennedy assassination, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina. In examining sports columnists' work over five decades, I offer a historical overview of sports columns and their relationship to dominant discourses of race and national identity. In the process, I contend that the voices comprising mainstream sports columnists through the 1960s generally constructed a mythological national identity that privileged whiteness. By the late 1990s, however, the voices comprising mainstream sports columnists included both those who constructed and confronted white hegemony. Interestingly, some of those columnists supporting whiteness were minorities; and some of those confronting whiteness were themselves white. Hence, I argue that whiteness is a standpoint, not a condition of skin color. Likewise, I contend that mainstream sports columnists confronting whiteness work within a system often identified as producing hegemony in order to dismantle it, and potentially exert a great amount of cultural power.Item Disturbing the Peace: Cultural Narratives and Reparations(2007-09-19) Scott, Jesse James; Parks, Sheri L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Disturbing the Peace: Cultural Narratives and Reparations African Americans' pursuit of reparations began in the eighteenth century and continues in the present. At the twilight of the twentieth century, African American slavery and reparations for that experience became a controversial topic in popular and public discourse. Inevitably, the conversation turned to economics, specifically monetary compensation. Responding to this now-global controversy, Nigerian scholar Chinweizu observed that reparations are not primarily about money. Instead, he insists, reparations are about psychological repairs, institutional repairs, educational repairs, self-made repairs, repairs of all types. Drawing on Chinweizu's conception of reparations, "Disturbing the Peace: Cultural Narratives and Reparations" examines Toni Morrison's Beloved, Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying, Sidney Lumet's The Wiz, Spike Lee's Get on the Bus, and Marc Forster's Monster's Ball as cultural narratives that illuminate the pitfalls of pursuing reparations that are restricted to the legal arena. While this dissertation responds to a historical-political project, I do not offer these cultural narratives as political instruction on how to pursue reparations. Rather, this project examines how individuals and communities within these cultural narratives pursue reparations outside of the legal arena. Despite popular representations of the pursuit of reparations as being primarily about money, I argue that the pursuit of reparations is also a narrative pursuit that disturbs the highly imagined peace of national unity. As such, investigating cultural narratives for the ways in which they engage and revise popular notions of reparations encourages a more expansive approach to identifying and repairing racial injuries for individuals and communities. Narrative does more than calculate debts; it reminds individuals of what they owe both to themselves and to the communities they inhabit, reminds them that their lives and their histories are more than notations in slave ledgers, and reminds them that they are, first and foremost, human beings. Against this legal history, the cultural narratives under consideration in "Disturbing the Peace" suggest, as does Chinweizu, that reparations depend on communities' willingness and/or ability to initiate self-made repairs.Item Field Notes from the Light: An Ethnographic Study of the Meaning and Significance of "Near-Death Experiences"(2007-08-03) Gordon, Laura Suzanne; Caughey, John L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is based on a comprehensive study which investigated the meaning and social significance of "near-death experiences" (NDEs) by situating 50 experiencers (NDErs) as the "inside" experts on these profound, subjective experiences and their real-world impact. I used a phenomenological, "person-centered" ethnographic approach, new to Near-Death Studies, to make experiencers' lives the orienting framework for my study. Informed by "reformist" qualitative-research ethics and health-education-and-counseling values, I analyzed study-participants' life-history narratives against medical-scientific Near-Death Studies explanatory models, an NDE-Integration-Trajectory (NDE IT) patterns model, and social construction and identity-alternation theory. My findings were, first, that study participants' descriptions of NDE impact and aftereffects, which matched previous findings, were adequately explained by neither social construction nor medical-scientific theory. Second, participants in this and previous studies described significant NDE interpretation and integration problems, in which I recognized a previously unidentified, health-education-and-counseling-related, pattern of unmet NDE integration needs. Third, my findings supported the previous NDE IT findings and model; and also recognized the importance of individuals' multiple cultural meaning systems in shaping their NDE integration patterns.. Fourth, 29 of 50 study participants had not sought out and did not identify Near-Death Studies as a useful NDE integration context or resource; and they described it negatively if they mentioned it at all. Moreover, the 21 participants who had sought a connection with Near-Death Studies expressed similar dissatisfactions. My findings speak to the need for development of a research agenda and model(s) designed to assess and address the education and counseling needs of tens of millions of NDErs, and their health care providers. My analysis addresses the potential social-wellness value, as well as the needs, of a community of 13 million adult NDErs, in the U.S. alone. It situates its analysis within a context of escalating social and ecological crises and an in-progress paradigm-shift away from the still-official Newtonian/Cartesian material world view of Western culture. It recognizes the potential social value of NDErs' collective visibility as agents, among many others of a (re)emergent sacred worldview; one that is linked to the world views of diverse indigenous knowledge systems as well as of quantum physics.Item Regards français sur l'Amerique: de l'entre-deux-guerres a la Guerre froide(2007-08-02) Dawley, Edward A; Verdaguer, Pierre M; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Regards français sur l'Amérique : de l'Entre-deux-guerres à la Guerre froide (French Perceptions of America: From the Roaring Twenties to the Cold War) examines the reactions of French intellectuals to various aspects of American culture and politics. Based principally on the writings of contributors to Les Temps modernes, a review founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in 1945, this work will examine in great detail the aforementioned co-founders' impressions of the United States as well as the observations of many of Les Temps modernes' contributing writers. Moreover, this dissertation will compare and contrast the views espoused by the Les Temps modernes group with the depictions of the United States exhibited by French thinkers such as André Siegfried, Georges Duhamel, Vladimir Pozner, Frantz Fanon and Bernard-Henri Lévy. This work analyzes these writers' pronouncements on American cultural and political phenomena, including Puritanism, literature, music, race relations, and anticommunism. In light of the above, this dissertation may be considered a study in transcultural perception and the epistemological pitfalls said perception poses. In this regard, people generally judge foreign cultures through the prism of preconceived notions derived in large part from their native culture. This prism, in fact, is a metaphor for the "barriers of otherness" that come into play whenever the act of transcultural perception takes place. This study will examine the effects of these barriers of otherness on the French observers' appreciation of the United States by placing their findings somewhere along a sliding scale ranging from the most objective to the most subjective. The articles by Philippe Soupault and Claude Roy are examples of a relatively objective appraisal of the checks and balances inherent in the way the so-called puritanical moral code is maintained in American society (Chapter 1). At the other end of the scale is the Temps modernes group's totally subjective conjecture on the Rosenberg affair, sparked in large part by the group's Communist sympathies and its stance against the American government (Chapter 5). This study will conclude with a discussion on the varying degrees of certitude associated with various modes of transcultural perception.Item Making Modern Homes: A History of Langston Terrace Dwellings, A New Deal Housing Program in Washington, D.C.(2007-05-30) Quinn, Kelly Anne; Sies, Mary C; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Langston Terrace Dwellings is a complex of 274 units of apartments and row houses in Washington D.C. that opened in 1938 under the auspices of the New Deal's Public Works Administration. Designed by Hilyard Robinson, this modern housing program was built principally by African American professionals for African American families. This study recasts our understanding of modern housing locating it in the broader historical context of modern architecture, urban planning and African American life. Design professionals and residents contributed to the program's early success as an aesthetically pleasing, socially significant community. This work chronicles how African American residents forged a life for themselves and their children in architect-designed modernist apartments and row houses. I begin with an analysis of the application process in which hopeful residents petitioned the federal government; I conclude with a consideration of the pioneering residents' place-making efforts. In Chapters One and Two, I introduce key figures: first, I highlight the ordinary Washingtonians who applied to move into Langston, and then I profile the architect principally responsible for the formal design program. The hopeful residents relied on individual strategies and extensive social networks to secure a spot in government housing; the architect Robinson also developed and honed individual strategies and extensive social networks to advance his architectural practice and to obtain a government contract. I explore the European interwar housing estates he visited in Chapter Three and offer a formal analysis of Langston in Chapter Four. In Chapter Five, I return to the ways in which the first cohort of residents worked to make homes and form community. I marshaled evidence from 2,263 letters applications; city directories; census manuscripts; government project files; private correspondence between architects, reformers and government officials; architectural plans; Sanborn maps; popular and architectural periodicals; and photographs. Additionally, I traced the project's precedents by conducting fieldwork in Europe and the United States. My assessment of the legacy of this project emerged from partnerships with current residents and neighbors. As such, this research relied on a number of interdisciplinary research strategies including graphic documentation, archival research, and community-based collaboration and investigation.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 Class by the Glass: The Significance of Imported Wine Consumption in America, 1750-1800(2007-05-03) Thomas, Catherine Stewart; Sies, Mary C; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This paper analyses the ritual of imported wine consumption in America between 1750 and 1800 and its significance in establishing a wealthy gentleman's power and place within a social hierarchy. My research was conducted by exploring contemporary written and visual records, as well as examining material objects and architectural spaces, specifically pertaining to the Annapolis, Maryland region. Beginning with a study of the varieties of wines consumed and their influence in the politically-charged environment prior to the American Revolution, the paper then explores why and how gentlemen used wine bibbing as an indication of one's identity in a burgeoning society. Quantities of wine-related furniture and decorative objects, in combination with architectural storage spaces, conveyed a life far above that of the average citizen. Finally, this paper examines to what degree historic house museums are interpreting the wine ritual and suggests steps that might be taken to do so more effectively.Item Staging the People: Revising and Reenvisioning Community in the Federal Theatre Project(2007-04-26) Osborne, Elizabeth Ann; Nathans, Heather S.; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Federal Theatre Project (FTP, 1935-1939) stands alone as the only real attempt to create a national theatre in the United States. In the midst of one of the greatest economic and social disasters the country has experienced, and between two devastating wars, the FTP emerged from the ashes of adversity. One of the frequently lampooned Arts Projects created under the aegis of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, the FTP lived for four short, turbulent, and exhilarating years. Under the leadership of National Director Hallie Flanagan, the FTP employed more than 13,000 unemployed theatre professionals, brought some much needed emotional support to an audience of more than 30 million, and fought to provide locally relevant theatre for the people of the United States. Yet, how does a national organization create locally relevant theatre in cities and towns throughout this diverse country? Each chapter addresses the same overarching question: How did the FTP develop a relationship with its surrounding communities, and what were the dynamics of that relationship? The regions all dealt with the question in a manner that was unique to their experiences, and which was dependent upon the political, social, cultural, and economic issues that made the communities themselves distinct. Recognizing these differences is vital in understanding both the FTP and the concept of a national theatre in America. This dissertation considers the perceived successes and failures of specific case studies in both urban and rural locations in four of the five major regions, the Midwest, South, East, and West. The integration of a wide breadth of material, from scripts and playbills to inquiries into the government structure, institutional power formations, and dominant discourse, shape this study into a rich cultural history. Points of entry include the Chicago FTP's productions of O Say Can You Sing? and Spirochete, Boston's Created Equal and Lucy Stone, Atlanta's Altars of Steel and "Georgia Experiment," and the pageants developed in Portland, Oregon. This collection of case studies suggests that the FTP served to both continue and inspire a "people's theatre," ultimately becoming one of the most successful failures of American theatre history.Item The Aesthetics of Intoxication in Antebellum American Art and Culture(2007-04-24) Jordan, Guy Duane; Promey, Sally M; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation, The Aesthetics of Intoxication in Antebellum American Art and Culture, proposes an ambitious re-evaluation of aesthetics in the United States between 1830 and 1860 that locates the consumption of images in relation to discourses of excess, addiction, and dependency. I uncover the antebellum period's physiological construction of looking as a somatic process akin to eating and drinking and offer a new definition of aesthetic absorption not merely as the disembodied projection of the viewer into a pictorial space, but as the corporeal ingestion of the image into the mind of the viewing subject. I demonstrate how this heretofore unstudied and historically-grounded alignment of aesthesis and alimentation played a crucial role in the production and reception of antebellum literature and visual culture. To this end, my dissertation stands as a broad-ranging cultural history that features fundamental reinterpretations of major works of art by Charles Deas, Thomas Cole, Hiram Powers, and Frederic Church.Item Three American Artists at Midlife: Negotiating the Space Between Amateur and Professional Status(2007-05-03) Hummel, Michael John; Caughey, John L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines the life histories of three creative artists who are negotiating the space between amateur and professional status. Using John L. Caughey's "cultural traditions model" in conjunction with other recent life history theory and ethnographic participant-observation techniques, I have created a cultural biography for each of my three informants that details how their artistic identity is influenced by the many cultural traditions they interact with, including national, ethnic, professional, educational, aesthetic, and spiritual traditions. Each informant took entrepreneurial steps to support their artistic identity shortly before the inception of this longitudinal study which follows the ups and downs of the realization of their creative vision over a period of several years. Additionally, in keeping with current ethnographic and life history practice, I discuss my own background as an artist and how that influenced the study, and I reflect on trends in life history and new ethnographic writing and how they impinge upon research on artists. I argue that there is a tension between external and internal identity for artists, of which my informants were well aware. As I discuss this tension, I critique the work of Stebbins and Becker on artists, arguing that Stebbins' otherwise useful definitions of "amateurs" and "professionals" are ultimately too rigid, as my own informants often defy his categorizations both subjectively and objectively. I then suggest that Becker's "art worlds" approach is important in understanding the infrastructure needed for creative artists to flourish, but that it too neglects the significance of subjectivity and does not recognize that key individuals serve as "hubs" of activity. I conclude that the individuals in my study made use of more flexible, related cultural traditions to maintain their internal artistic identities while establishing external ones. Having reevaluated their lives as they entered midlife, they later experienced a "legacy reassessment" following the realization of their original vision. Finally, I conclude that despite outside pressures that challenged and modified the subjective experience of their artistic identity, each of my informants embraced art as a "transcendent" frame which can integrate all other cultural traditions.