College of Arts & Humanities
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/1611
The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item TONES IN BLACK: A HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN BASS/BARITONES IN CLASSICAL MUSIC: IN THE ECHOES OF ANCESTORS, A PIONEER’S VOICE(2024) McIlwain-Lightfoot, VaShawn Savoy; Short, Kevin C.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation project has three major foci: a) to trace the history of classically trained African American Bass/Baritone vocalists through performance, recordings, and narrative; b) to recognize the historical performances of African American Bass/Baritone vocal pioneers and the significant contributions they made to the accessibility of opportunities for other African Americans within these voice types; and c) to discuss how Bass/Baritone community performances can promote social connectedness and DEI in opera. In addressing these foci, the paper will emphasize how the performances of Bass/Baritone vocal artists, past and present, have a) made African Americans, in general, more acceptable to White audiences and b) changed the perceptions of White Americans about who African Americans are and what they are capable of. Methodology involved securing physical/digital historical data from newspapers, journals, and books; collecting photos, programs, and articles from the private library of a former University of Maryland professor; conducted oral history interviews of students and progeny of the first African American Baritone to sing with a major opera company in the U.S. (Todd Duncan); delivered community performances domestically and internationally as a current example of the legacy of African American classical vocal artists, specifically Bass/Baritones. This project’s accounting of historical performances can serve to recognize unknown or forgotten contemporaries and predecessors.Item Mirror Made of Quartz(2024) Drummond, Kassiah Ania; Bertram, Lillian-Yvonne; Weiner, Joshua; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Mirror Made of Quartz" is a poetic exploration about community divided into four sections that reclaim the displaced emotion of rage with empathy. In the first section "Naming a Better Word for Love", the collection bargains the complexities of expressing love amidst trust and compromise. The next section "(Womb)an", explores how the gift of a name to a daughter, echoes the title of motherhood itself as both are becoming their new roles for the first time. The womb carries legacy, tradition, and trauma. The third section "I Think About Being Black a Lot", dedicates itself to exploring the aspects of the color as an identity, by delving into various culturally impactful folklores, redemption for the unsolved history, and new perspectives to the misunderstood. Finally, the title section, "Mirror Made of Quartz," serves as a supportive reflection of myself by commentating on my name, body, and the person I hope to become with tangible optimism.Item Cultivating Politics: The Formation of a Black Body Politic in the Postemancipation Louisiana Sugar Parishes(2018) Calhoun, John; Bonner, Christopher; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The capture of New Orleans by Union forces in 1862 led to the emancipation of thousands of slaves across Louisiana’s sugar parishes. This early emancipation preceded the abolition of slavery elsewhere in the South, and it held far-reaching implications for the freedpeople of the sugar parishes. In this thesis, I argue that early emancipation fostered the rise of a powerful black body politic in the sugar parishes that would endure throughout Reconstruction and beyond. This body politic aimed to protect black people’s unique conception of freedom as both white Southerners and white Northerners endeavored to circumscribe that freedom for their own purposes. In pursuit of this goal, the mobilized sugar workers employed a broad range of political tools, ranging from extralegal violence to labor organization. These methods proved effective and safeguarded the freedom of black sugar workers for decades after the Civil War despite attempts by both Democrats and Radical Republicans to dissolve and demarcate that freedom respectively.Item “WELCUM, OONA. TIME FA WE LAAN BOUT GULLAH” (WELCOME, EVERYONE. TIME FOR US TO LEARN ABOUT GULLAH): PENN CENTER’S ROLE IN THE PRESERVATION OF GULLAH GEECHEE’S CULTURAL HERITAGE(2016) Chaplin, Jennie; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Welcum, Oona. Time Fa We Laan Bout Gullah” (Welcome, Everyone. Time for us to learn about Gullah): Penn Center’s Role in the Preservation of Gullah Geechee’s Cultural Heritage focuses on the historic Penn Center, formerly the Penn School, on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, as a selected site of analytical inquiry and as a premier cultural institution that preserves Gullah history and heritage. This project makes use of interdisciplinary methods from several fields—material culture, museum studies, self-ethnography, visual analysis, and historic preservation, among others—to illuminate the history and culture of the Gullah people. I use these methods to argue that the Penn Center presents a competing “voice” to prevailing discourses because it rewrites and revalues Gullah history. This dissertation delineates how the Gullahs have responded to the dominant discourses through counter-narratives, cultural practices, and individual and community activism. It argues that the Penn Center disrupts discourses seeking to stereotype the Gullah culture by functioning as a site of resistance to mainstream definitions, as a site of the reclamation of voice and agency in the process of self-definition, and as a site for the preservation and celebration of Gullah Geechee culture and cultural identity. In demonstrating the contribution of the Penn Center, this dissertation renders attention to issues related to race, class, and gender as these issues have surfaced in the history and culture under discussion. This project also offers analysis of material culture housed at the Penn Center’s York W. Bailey Museum. Drawing upon the theories of Stuart Hall on cultural identity and E. McClung Fleming on material culture analysis, this study offers analysis of cultural objects and photographic images found in this museum space. This dissertation concludes with oral history narratives that further illuminate the competing “voices” found that shed light on Gullah cultural identity and the manner in which Gullah people must navigate and negotiate the larger American sociopolitical landscape.Item ‘DEVOTED TO THE INTERESTS OF HIS RACE’: BLACK OFFICEHOLDERS AND THE POLITICAL CULTURE OF FREEDOM IN WILMINGTON, NORTH CAROLINA, 1865-1877(2016) Jackson, Thanayi Michelle; Rowland, Leslie S.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines black officeholding in Wilmington, North Carolina, from emancipation in 1865 through 1876, when Democrats gained control of the state government and brought Reconstruction to an end. It considers the struggle for black office holding in the city, the black men who held office, the dynamic political culture of which they were a part, and their significance in the day-to-day lives of their constituents. Once they were enfranchised, black Wilmingtonians, who constituted a majority of the city’s population, used their voting leverage to negotiate the election of black men to public office. They did so by using Republican factionalism or what the dissertation argues was an alternative partisanship. Ultimately, it was not factional divisions, but voter suppression, gerrymandering, and constitutional revisions that made local government appointive rather than elective, Democrats at the state level chipped away at the political gains black Wilmingtonians had made.Item "To Strike for Right, To Strike With Might": African Americans and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Baltimore, 1910-1930(2015) Doster, Dennis Anthony; Barkley Brown, Elsa; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“‘To Strike for Right, To Strike With Might’: African Americans and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Baltimore, 1910–1930” examines the nature, character and scope of early civil rights activism among African Americans in Baltimore, Maryland. Utilizing an expansive definition of “civil rights,” it explores not only voting and holding political office, access to public education, and fair housing opportunities; it also considers struggles for access to municipal and social services and struggles related to labor and employment. By placing all of these terrains of struggle under the umbrella of “civil rights,” the dissertation emphasizes the importance of these rights in relation to one another and their importance in the minds and lives of African Americans who struggled for rights in each of these categories as part of a broader struggle for equality. Baltimore has long been recognized for its civil rights activism by scholars who portray the era of the 1930s to 1950s as a kind of “golden age” of civil rights activism in the city, considering such activism to have been dormant prior to that period. The dissertation reveals an active civil rights movement in the city in the decades preceding the 1930s that was led primarily by members of the middle-class but drew widespread support and strength from members of all classes in Baltimore’s African American community. In uncovering the civil rights activism of the period from 1910 to 1930, the dissertation brings to the forefront previously ignored organizations, including the Federation of Parent-Teacher Clubs, the Women’s Cooperative Civic League, the Independent Republican League, and the Baltimore Urban League. It also reveals that the activism of the period from 1910 to 1930 was important in launching major civil rights campaigns of national organizations such as the NAACP, whose residential segregation campaign had roots in the fight in Baltimore. Throughout, the dissertation explores the ways that black Baltimoreans defined priorities and struggled for rights, resulting in a more nuanced understanding of African Americans’ struggles for citizenship and equality at beginning of the twentieth century.Item "The Schools are Killing our Kids!": The African American Fight for Self-Determination in the Boston Public Schools, 1949-1985(2014) Bundy, Lauren Tess; Freund, David M; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines a grassroots movement led by black Bostonians to achieve racial justice, quality education, and community empowerment in the Boston Public Schools during the postwar period. From the late 1940s through the early 1980s black parents, teachers, and students employed a wide-range of strategies in pursuit of these goals including staging school boycotts, creating freedom schools, establishing independent alternative schools, lobbying for legislation, forming parent and youth groups, and organizing hundreds of grassroots organizations. At the heart of this movement was a desire to improve the quality of education afforded to black youth and to expand the power of black Bostonians in educational governance. This dissertation demonstrates that desegregation and community control were not mutually exclusive goals or strategies of black educational activism. I examine the evolution of the goals, ideology, and strategy of this movement over the course of more than three decades in response to shifts in the national and local political climate. This work traces the close ties between this local movement in Boston and broader movements for racial and social justice unfolding across the nation in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. Most importantly, my dissertation puts this movement in conversation with a broader national project of various marginalized groups in the postwar period to radically transform the institutions of democracy. This dissertation challenges a well-known narrative of civil rights and school desegregation in Boston in this period. This story of the so-called Boston "busing crisis" focuses on white resistance, a narrow period of time in the mid-1970s, and court-ordered desegregation. In the rare instances in which black Bostonians are included in this narrative it is as victims or apathetic bystanders. The rhetoric of "busing," particularly the framing of opposition to desegregation as "anti-busing," obscured and continues to obscure the more complex racial politics driving the opposition to the integration of the Boston Public Schools. My scholarship brings light to a much broader and more nuanced history of racial politics in Boston and demonstrates that we cannot understand the period of court-ordered desegregation without examining the decades of grassroots activism which preceded it.Item "And There See Justice Done": The Problem of Law in the African American Literary Tradition(2012) Brown, Christopher Michael; Washington, Mary Helen; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that careful attention to African American literature reveals that the different terms through which we understand race and law are in fact incommensurable, and that the clash of their competing logics constitutes a fundamental, and unremarked upon, organizing theme of the black literary tradition. The law's relationship with its racialized subjects - and its troubled and troubling relationship with African Americans in particular - emblematizes this collision of radically different perspectives. The meaning of equality and freedom, for instance, are ideas often understood in radically different terms by the law and by the literature that critiques it. The rupture produced by this divergence is revealed in the competing texts of the two cultures: on the one hand, in legal disputes and legal texts, in laws and in the deliberations out of which they are constructed; and on the other, in the cultural productions of the African American community, and in particular in its rich tradition of letters. Reading a broad range of works across that tradition, from the earliest slave petitions to the contemporary novel, I offer a new way to understand the relationship between the law, the African American experience of the law, and the texts that narrate their fundamental disjuncture. Showing that African American literature actually begins with the law, I first investigate the transition of black writing from legal petitions and pamphlets to more literary forms at the end of the eighteenth century. These first black narratives anticipate the inevitable failure of their more legalistic counterparts to remedy injustice, and instead cast their critiques of the law in metaphor. My project then reads both canonical and less-celebrated texts across the entire tradition of African American letters - from Equiano's 1789 Interesting Narrative to Edward Jones' 2003 The Known World - to show that the formal and figurative elements of much of the tradition of African American writing are in fact premised in the law: unexpected and repeated scenes of madness and incompetence attack the illogic of slavery; literary portrayals of black traitors reveal the fundamental tension between black loyalty to the nation and the nation's betrayal of the race; the passing narrative satirizes white anxiety about the law's inability to police the color line; the figure of blindness belies a twenty-first century critique of the law's own colorblindness. And finally, I develop the larger claim that theorizing the rupture between these legal and literary texts can help us to solidify the coherence of an African American literary tradition that is increasingly understood as fractured, and simultaneously resist the law's compulsion to universalize the particular narratives of its many diverse subjects.Item Laboring in the Magic City: Workers in Miami, 1914-1941(2011) Castillo, Thomas Albert; Sicilia, David B; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Laboring in the Magic City" examines the development of class relations in the tourist Sunbelt city of Miami, Florida, from the World War I-era until the eve of WWII. It contributes to the historical scholarship of class relations in the United States by demonstrating how employers and workers continually negotiated economic and political power in the development of the twentieth century city. Specifically, the dissertation explores why Miami's labor history was marked by apparent peaceful class relations--that is, despite successful union activism and other forms of persistent class struggle, the city has not been remembered or imagined as a place where continual or virulent class conflict occurred. Central to my analysis is the concept of harmony discourse -- a worldview that assumed the existence of harmony rather than continual conflict among the classes in matters of economic development and social order. The importance of this perspective is that it challenges historical interpretations that too often assume employer hegemony and worker complicity in the existing political economy. My study thus seeks to infuse new life into the study of class by demonstrating an active and vibrant citizenry existed in Miami, one shaped by both individualistic values of self-interest and by communalism. Harmony discourse represented an engagement with capitalism that remained critical of its results, of the ordering of power, and of the organization of society. At the same time - given the vital role that black workers and middle-class professionals played in the local political economy -- race relations are central in my dissertation. Harmony discourse shaped relations between the white and black communities, and thus reinforced capitalistic relationships while also allowing for internal challenges of existing social structures. "Laboring in the Magic City" is a study of how workers and business interests defined opportunity. It is a story of workers involved in real though at times subtle struggle across a variety of fronts: the workplace, the political arena, community affairs, and in leisure. The dissertation seeks to return to a study of class with a fresh perspective that transcends triumphant deference to and righteous condemnation of capitalism.Item Hidden in Plain View: African American Archaeology at Manassas National Battlefield Park(2010) Martin Seibert, Erika Kristine; Shackel, Paul A.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how the categories of race, class, and/or gender intersected and informed life in an historic, rural, Southern community. Examining African American landscapes of consumption and production in historic, rural Virginia through the archaeological record is essential for understanding the development of African American cultural reproduction through time. Archaeological landscapes that include very early sites for this region and are comprised of material culture from pre-emancipation deposits can provide a framework for understanding how ethnogenesis worked as a method for the community to survive the harsh realities of slavery, redefine themselves as raced, classed, and gendered individuals with relation to their economy on their own terms, and build a foundation on which they could continually resist and transform the categories created for them during later periods in history. Sites that date to the mid nineteenth century and later provide information about the shift in these methods from ethnogenesis to racial uplift. Racial uplift during these later periods became the method which the African American families in this area used to connect themselves with citizenship and the American dream through their consumer and producer behavior. This behavior can then serve to illuminate how relationships of inequality became naturalized and institutionalized and how, through these methods, inequality was continually challenged and transformed. Examining historic and modern twentieth century African American landscapes through archaeological sites can also illuminate the response of the community to a period of intense commemoration by the Confederacy immediately following the Civil War and illuminate the lasting effects of the Lost Cause ideology on modern day race relations. Defining and understanding archaeology through this period not only acknowledges how and why African American history has been left out of modern interpretations, but helps outline new interpretive plans that both challenge visitors to our national parks and attempt a more democratic voice for the National Park Service and for our nation.