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 THE WOMEN AND TAIKO MOVEMENT: QUESTIONING GENDERED LEADERSHIP THROUGH EMBODIED PRACTICE(2021) Coe, Allison Paige; Witzleben, J. Lawrence; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The tradition of North American taiko drumming has been rife with discussion on gender passed down from its Japanese origin. It is known that women, and even more so Asian American women, feel empowered performing taiko. Despite this feeling of empowerment, there has been minimal leadership roles held by female taiko players, roles such as: solo artists, workshop leaders, and composers. Women are also left out of the mainstream narrative of taiko drumming, which centers on masculine performance and performance styles. A coalition formed and launched the Women and Taiko movement—dedicated to solving these issues through webinars and by enhancing the visibility of female leadership. This movement expanded, including the first all-female, professional level taiko performance and women-created compositions. This thesis discusses this movement as a social movement that seeks to disrupt gendered systems of power and embodied knowledge through pragmatic solutions formed through discussions and by performance.Item From "Quare" to "Kweer": Towards a Queer Asian American Critique(2009) Sapinoso, J. Valero (JV); King, Katie R.; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)It is insufficient to think of multiple dimensions of difference in merely some additive fashion--what is needed is a fundamentally different approach. E. Patrick Johnson and Roderick A. Ferguson, respectively, offer such approaches as well as inspiration for this dissertation. More specifically, they posit interventions into queer theorizing and queer studies that attempt to disrupt the (over-)emphasis on whiteness and instead turn the focus to racialized subjectivities. The centrality of African American racial formations in their queer of color critique, however, must be taken into account. Given the vastly different histories between African American and Asian American racial formations, including, but not limited to the ways in which these racial groups have historically been pitted against one another (for the betterment of privileged whites), it is especially important that we consider how the specificities of Asian American subjects and subjectivities might account for distinct queer of color critiques. At the heart of my dissertation is the movement towards a queer Asian American critique, or "kweer studies," that directs attention to nationality and national belonging as a way of expanding beyond the black/white binary which currently predominates. In particular, the key components of nationality and national belonging for queer Asian American subjects and subjectivities that my study foregrounds are cultural, political, and legal citizenship. To this end my dissertation asks, what is needed to imagine and entrench understandings of queer Asian American subjects and subjectivities that are not rendered as alien, always already foreign, or simply invisible within discourses of cultural, political, and legal citizenship? Specifically, through participant observation, critical legal theory, and textual analysis I investigate kinging culture and discourses of U.S. immigration, revealing limits of existing formations that, respectively, have naturalized blackness as the sole focus of queer of color critique, and have narrowly sought queer immigration through seeking asylum and recognition of same-sex partnerships for family reunification, in order to posit a queer of color critique that helps imagine and create more expansive formations and better accounts for the material existence of a fuller range of queer bodies of various colors.Item Under the Arch of Friendship: Culture, Urban Redevelopment and Symbolic Architecture in D.C. Chinatown, 1970s-1990s(2009) Khoo, Evelyn; Gao, James Z; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis explores the history of the urban development and architectural changes in Washington, D.C. Chinatown in the late twentieth century. Urban development in D.C. Chinatown traces the way in which local politics, ethnic community elites and the larger international backdrop of geopolitics and the globalizing economy found expression in the visual streetscapes and architecture in the neighborhood perceived to be a predominantly ethnic site. This essay argues that the case of D.C. Chinatown represents a larger call for a spatial turn in Chinese American history, where more emphasis can be placed on the uses of symbolic architecture in determining Chinese American identity and settlement.Item Artful Identifications: Crafting Survival in Japanese American Concentration Camps(2005-04-20) Dusselier, Jane Elizabeth; Kim, Seung-kyung; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Artful Identifications" offers three meanings of internment art. First, internees remade locations of imprisonment into livable places of survival. Inside places were remade as internees responded to degraded living conditions by creating furniture with discarded apple crates, cardboard, tree branches and stumps, scrap pieces of wood left behind by government carpenters, and wood lifted from guarded lumber piles. Having addressed the material conditions of their living units, internees turned their attention to aesthetic matters by creating needle crafts, wood carvings, ikebana, paintings, shell art, and kobu. Dramatic changes to outside spaces of "assembly centers" and concentration camps were also critical to altering hostile settings into survivable landscapes. My second meaning positions art as a means of making connections, a framework offered with the hope of escaping utopian models of community building which overemphasize the development of common beliefs, ideas, and practices that unify people into easily surveilled groups. "Making Connections" situates the process of individuals identifying with larger collectivities in the details of everyday life, a complicated and layered process that often remains invisible to us. By sewing clothes for each other, creating artificial flowers and lapel pins as gifts, and participating in classes and exhibits, internees addressed their needs for maintaining and developing connections. "Making Connections" advances perhaps the broadest possible understanding of identity formation based on the idea of employing diverse art forms to sustain already developed relationships and creating new attachments in the context of displacement. The third meaning offered by this project is art as a mental space of survival. In the process of crafting, internees pieced together mental landscapes that allowed them to generate new ideas and alternative discourses. As recent psychoanalytic scholarship suggests, these artful identifications with loss encompassed radical political possibilities because they keep melancholic struggles alive and relevant to the present. Regardless of whether we understand these crafting examples as tools for remaking inside places, re-territorializing outside spaces, making connections, or artifacts of loss, it is clear that for Japanese Americans incarcerated in complex places of oppression, art evolved into portables spaces of resistance.