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 The Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival as a Theatrical Event(2007-08-08) Bain, Carolyn; Hildy, Ph.D., Franklin; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)On December 29 of 1938, Tennessee Williams (Thomas Lanier Williams), little known American playwright, encountered the city of New Orleans. Through his engagement with the city's culture of multiple morés, Williams discovered in himself a personal freedom and theatrical productivity that changed the landscape of dramatic literature for the twentieth century. The phenomenon associated with Williams's identity and his experience with New Orleans as participant and spectator did not end with Williams's death, February 23, 1983; it continues today through the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival, drawing thousands of attendees and celebrating its 21st-anniversary March 28 through April 1, 2007. This dissertation consists of six chapters accompanied by three integral videotexts that evidence a framework for understanding the theatrical contexts that inform the festival's processes and outcomes. The dissertation investigates the festival as a case study of the notion of theatrical eventness. The concept of eventness emerged in theatre studies discourse through an international colloquium, the Theatrical Event working group, within the International Federation for Theatre Research (FIRT/IFTR). This dissertation represents an approach to bringing the study of festival into theatre studies through a discussion of its multi-layered communications and its creative outcomes. Chapter One situates the object of study as the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival and questions how theatricality frames communication among attendees while it informs the identity of the festival. Accompanying Chapter One is a videotext summarizing the festival's origins and events. Chapter Two reviews the extra-theatrical influences on theatre studies and the development of the concept of festival as a theatrical event. Chapter Three examines the theatrical context of Williams's encounter with New Orleans. In Chapter Four, the "Stella Shout-off" contest mediates the past and present by eventifying a moment from theatrical history. A videotext evidences the theatricality of the contest. Chapter Five looks at performance and theatrical communications evident in the panels and the master classes. Accompanying the text, a video substantiates the theatricality of Williams's legacy through his relationship with Maria St. Just. In Chapter Six, the dissertation concludes by focusing on the festival's outcomes as the result of the festival's theatrical eventness.Item Smokers and other stories(2007-05-15) Fulton, Richard F., III; Collins, Merle; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This is a collection of seven stories I wrote during my two years at the University of Maryland. I chose to include them because I feel they best reflect my authorial strengths and goals. They exemplify the themes I most often explore: the duality of "good" and "evil" and how the definitions of each change from person to person; the idea of a journey literally and figuratively, of movement; isolation in the modern world; the idea of sanity and its relative flexibility; the imminent threat and promise of chaos, of violence and disorder, in the everyday world.Item The Green Coolness and Shelter of Leaves: Poems(2007-05-06) Heck, April Naoko; Arnold, Elizabeth; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This collection of plain-spoken, free verse poems is primarily a means of knowing and remembering two late family members. The first section is a series of poems tracing the steps of my Japanese great-grandmother, Obaasan, as a Hiroshima survivor. Through research, conversations with family, and imagination, the poems in part interweave a narrative with the process of discovering this narrative. The short, bridging second section consists of poems that deepen concerns about the body's vulnerabilities, and suggest physical experience as one way of relating. In the third section--traveling from east to west, from distant to recent past--a series of poems uncovers a childhood of both nurturance and instability, complicated by economic hardship, issues of identity, and my father's addictions and sudden passing.Item "Sometimes Folk Need More": Black Women Writers Dwelling in the Beyond(2007-05-01) Drake, Simone; Wyatt, David; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The 1970s were a prolific era for Black women's writing. During what is now referred to as the Black Women's Literary Renaissance, Black women writers worked to center Black women's experiences in American and African American literary "traditions" that had theretofore excluded them. This project examines how more recent writing by Black women signifies on the issues and concerns that defined the Renaissance, particularly issues of historical recovery and Black male sexism. Despite the progressive nature of the Renaissance, Black women consistently found that their work was at odds with what Farah Jasmine Griffin calls, "the promise of protection," propagated by Black Nationalism. In response to this patriarchal promise, writers like Toni Morrison, for example, created characters, who like Sula Peace, chose a space of solitude over the patriarchal offer of "protection." I argue that contemporary Black women writers are re-thinking spaces of solitude, and instead proposing a "promise of partnership" that is grounded in a critical gender consciousness. "Sometimes Folk Need More": Black Women Writers Dwelling in the Beyond" is an interdisciplinary study of reformed partnership in the cultural productions of four contemporary Black women writers. Appropriating Homi Bhabha's concept of "dwelling in the beyond," I discuss how these writers imagine a productive and secure space for intra-racial, heterosexual dialogue in Toni Morrison's, Paradise, Erna Brodber's, Louisiana, Kasi Lemmons' film, Eve's Bayou, and Danzy Senna's short story, "The Land of Beulah." Each of these texts suggest that not only do promises of protection leave characters needing "something more," but that previous narratives of kinship and family that were a hallmark of Black women's Renaissance era writing, leave the characters needing "something more," as well. As the texts interrogate familial and heterosexual relationships, they consistently conclude that "the more" is a reformed heterosexual partnership that is grounded in unmotivated respect.Item Exodus: Literary Migrations of Afro-Atlantic Authors, 1760-1903(2007-04-26) Thomas, Rhondda Robinson; Peterson, Carla L.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes Afro-Atlantic Exodus narratives that challenged slavery and racism throughout the African diaspora. Although many scholars have examined black writers' Exodus stories, none has explored the early development of these narratives from the mid-eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. My study of the extent to which Exodus stories pervade black literature supports my contention that their use is more complex than scholars have acknowledged. Tracing the origins of American Exodus narratives to the Puritan tradition, I explore how Afro-Atlantic people from Briton Hammon who invokes the Joseph story in his 1760 Narrative to W. E. B. DuBois who appropriates the Joshua story in his 1903 Souls of Black Folk decenter and rewrite white Christians' Exodus narratives, characterizing themselves as one of God's people deserving of freedom and equality. Detailed examinations of the Joseph and Joshua stories are two of the missing components of this discussion; they provide the essential bookends of the story. Quite simply, without an analysis of these narratives and the Moses story, any critique of this topic is incomplete and perhaps even misleading. In contrast to white writers who create linear narratives that chart the Puritans' transatlantic Exodus from European communities to the promised land of the New World, black authors develop multi-layered, sophisticated stories to advance their cause for freedom and equality. I demonstrate this complexity through an analysis of the literary strategies they rely on to develop their Exodus stories. Afro-Atlantic writers include fissures--breaks in the chronology of the biblical story--to depict their many varied experiences. Women writers are responsible for some of the major fissures. Afro-Atlantic writers also conflate biblical and secular/republican discourse as they demand their rights as citizens. Rather than recapitulate the entire Exodus story, they select specific episodes to support their arguments. Finally, in their search for a safe home, they represent their promised land, both in America and abroad, as unstable. Ultimately, Afro-Atlantic writers create Exodus narratives that reflect their persistent, diverse, and competing efforts to achieve their racial uplift goals but the stories do not fulfill the promise of freedom and equality.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 Body in Pieces: Representations of Organ Trafficking in the Literatures and Film of the Americas(2007-04-24) Dix, Jennifer; Peres, Phyllis; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the use of the trope of organ trafficking to critique neoliberal globalization in the Americas. Each chapter addresses a different genre and analyzes texts articulated in response to conditions grounded in different locations. The texts studied include print media from Guatemala and Brazil, Mexican popular film and detective fiction from the U.S. (Tony Chiu's Positive Match and Linda Howard's Cry No More) and Mexico (Miriam Laurini's Morena en rojo, Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz's Loverboy, and Paco Ignacio Taibo II's La bicicleta de Leonardo). Comparative analyses also address Francisco Goldman's The Long Night of White Chickens, Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead. These analyses are linked by their critique of neoliberal globalization and their representation of the human body's commodification. Together, they outline the contradictions of a mobility-dependent regime and establish the inescapable scope of economic changes that alter the relationship between the nation-state and its inhabitants. Neoliberalism also causes changes in the representation of the body. Bodies are represented outside the social structures and institutions that previously gave them meaning. The body's economic value replaces socially ascribed identities. Representations of the commodified body in these texts selectively erase gender and race. This dissertation also explores the construction of a new set of identities grounded in the body. These competing identities of medical and corporeal citizenship demonstrate the problems of establishing identities in market-driven terms of production and consumption. This dissertation also engages in a investigation of the relation of literary genre to content. As my discussion of popular culture demonstrates, generic form partially constrains or shapes the content of these works. In contrast, when literary works are positioned outside of genre constraints, the scope of the meanings attributed to organ trafficking expands, accompanied by formal innovations. My dissertation produces an interrogation of American cultural spaces--understood in the broadest sense--that acknowledges the work of both spatial and cultural forces in the construction of this hemispheric imaginary.Item Raising Black Dreams: Representations of Six Generations of a Family's Local Racial-Activist Traditions(2007-04-20) Daves, John Patrick Cansler; Caughey, John; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)How do local African American leadership traditions develop and change? How do they compare to and connect with national African American leadership traditions? This dissertation explores some answers to these questions through an examination of the history of one middle-class African American family's communal activist legacy. It is built, first, on my research into my adopted family's local, evolving communal-leadership ideology, which extends from the antebellum era to the present; and, second, on my examination of how my family's leadership tradition compare with and connect to patterns in national black leadership conventions. In the chapters, I lay out the basic issues I will investigate, discuss the literature on black leadership, contextualize my study, and introduce and define the concepts of racial stewardship, local racial activism, local racial ambassadorship, and racial spokesmanship which are central to my exploration. I conclude the dissertation with an summation of my work, and how my research contributes to existing scholarly conversations about black leadership traditions found in African American Literature, History and the social sciences.Item By Custom and By Law: Black Folklore and Racial Representation at the Birth of Jim Crow(2006-11-29) Moody, Shirley C.; Washington, Mary Helen; Pearson, Barry Lee; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)By Custom and By Law: Black Folklore and Racial Representation at the Birth of Jim Crow establishes folklore as a contested site in the construction of racial identity during the emergence and solidification of legalized racial segregation at the end of the nineteenth century. By examining institutional interests, popular culture performances, and political rhetoric, I demonstrate how representations of black folklore played a seminal role in perpetuating a public discourse of racial difference. Alternately, my work introduces new scholarship examining the counter-narratives posed by nineteenth-century African American scholars, writers and folklorists who employed folklore in their various academic works and artistic productions as a vehicle to expose and critique post-Reconstruction racial hierarchies. In chapter one I reveal how constructions of black folklore in ante- and post-bellum popular culture intersected with emergent white folklore studies to provide a taxonomy for codifying racial difference, while simultaneously designating folklore as the medium through which racial representation would be debated. Chapter two recovers the important, but virtually unacknowledged role of African American folklorists in brokering public and academic access to black folk culture and in providing an alternative to the racist constructions of black folklore prevalent in the post-Reconstruction era. Chapter three re-contextualizes Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman as both a response to the larger national discourse surrounding black folklore and also as part of a concerted effort among black intellectuals to first expose how perceptions of racial realities were constructed through representations of black folklore, and then to redefine the role of black folklore in African American cultural and literary works. In sum, my dissertation provides a cultural history of a formative moment in the construction of a late nineteenth century racialized discourse that placed representations of black folklore at its center. My research both recovers the neglected role of early black folklorists and writers in studying and interpreting black cultural traditions and asserts the profound significance of representations of black folklore in negotiating the perceptions and practices that have worked to define US racial ideologies in the nineteenth century and beyond.Item Race, Nativism, and the Making of Class in Antebellum City-Mysteries(2006-12-04) Helwig, Timothy Wade; Levine, Robert S.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study analyzes white working-class identity construction in antebellum popular print culture and offers a fresh perspective on race relations in the antebellum period. By analyzing anti-slavery and nativist political discourses in popular fiction and newspapers of the 1840's and 1850's, I argue that sensational novels by such writers as George Lippard, Augustine Duganne, and Ned Buntline provided space whereby working-class whites could articulate their anxieties toward wage labor and critique the professional classes through a sympathetic identification with free, northern African Americans. My first chapter reveals how city-mysteries, largely bereft of heroic, white working-class agents of change, rely upon dynamic black male protagonists and the racially ambivalent discourse of "wage slavery" to appeal to the multi-racial working classes. In this context, I discuss Lippard's The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk-Hall and New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million, in which Lippard mounts class critique through representations of the "Herculean" black male hero that resonate with contemporary depictions of the white laborer and through class-inflected minstrelsy discourse. My second chapter examines the role of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant nativist discourse in city-mysteries' economic critique of chattel slavery. When Lippard, Duganne, and to a lesser extent, Buntline, present their white working-class characters as the victims of literal and figurative enslavement plots by Catholic officials and dissipated, slave-owning merchants, nativism proves a flexible rhetoric that reinforces the texts' racial sympathy and helps to develop class protest against the professional classes. My third and final chapter illuminates the cross-racial strategies of class protest among early labor newspapers, early African-American newspapers, weekly story papers, and nativist newspapers--an array of under-studied print sources that register the potential and the limits of cross-racial solidarity during the antebellum period.