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 SETTING THE TRANSPACIFIC KITCHEN TABLE: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF FOOD IN THE KOREAN AMERICAN DIASPORA(2024) Kim, Jung Min; Forson, Psyche W; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Setting the Transpacific Kitchen Table: The Cultural Politics of Food in the Korean American Diaspora” is a material culture analysis of key dishes and ingredients of the Korean American diaspora. The study begins in South Korea following the Armistice on July 27, 1953 and follows the movement of Korean people, foods, and ideas to the United States in the decades after the war to the present day with a specific focus on three dishes: Budae jjigae (Army Base Stew), kimchi (traditional fermented vegetable), and rice. This dissertation unpacks the recipes and some of the meanings of these dishes to understand and contextualize their importance in Korean and Korean American foodways historically and into the present moment. Central to this project is the material “afterlife” of these ingredients and dishes- some introduced by foreign powers, while others are the most Korean of dishes- the lingering impact on how Korean and Korean Americans create place and meaning from these dishes. How do these dishes come to be? How do they come together to become symbolic of the Korean diasporic experience? In answering these questions, I hope to document and interrogate the range of emotional, cultural, and material responses that budae jjigae, kimchi, and rice have engendered from artists, chefs, mothers, and everyday Koreans and Korean Americans. With the increase in visibility and popularity of Korean foods in the American food lexicon, the aim of this study is to help historicize and contextualize this rise through exploring the complex relationship between Korea and the United States through foodways. In doing so it will interrogate and analyze the “entanglements” of transpacific power and political economies through foodways to understand the dialectic between state power and community resilience and resistance.Item LAST DANCE, LOST DANCE: STRATEGIZING INDETERMINACY TOWARD LIVE AND EMERGENT CHOREOGRAPHIES(2023) Villanueva, Carlo Antonio Ortega; Keefe, Maura; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Last Dance, Lost Dance is a 30-minute interdisciplinary performance piece that explores the concept of indeterminacy in performance. Indeterminacy—the phenomenon of a performer making decisions during performance—is a reifying analytical perspective from which dance improvisation can be seen, applied, and understood. Instinctively directed and choreographed by Carlo Antonio Ortega Villanueva, Last Dance, Lost Dance resists the fixity of choreographic form in pursuit of relational, responsive collaborations in performance strategy and (interdisciplinarily) with theater design. To do so, Last Dance, Lost Dance reschedules choreography to include the moment of performance, through the use of improvisational strategies; and reconfigures choreography to include the design and movement of mise en scène. As a result, Last Dance, Lost Dance commands the full apparatus of the theater despite its imposed rubrics for form, beauty, and aesthetic; and its choreography emerges in real time, authored live by its performers. These experimental modes of choreography ask and dance the question: “What is the relationship between form and possibility?” This document, “Last Dance, Lost Dance: Strategizing Indeterminacy Toward Live and Emergent Choreographies,” supports and contextualizes Last Dance, Lost Dance with discussions of dance and the archive, Asian American postmodern performance, and photographic and narrative documentation of the creative research, development, and critical reflections of Last Dance, Lost Dance; it is accompanied by an archival video of the performance.Item GENRES OF MEMORY AND ASIAN/AMERICAN WOMEN’S ACTIVISM(2022) Bramlett, Katie; Enoch, Jessica; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As human rights and racial inequality dominate public discourse, it has become increasingly clear that Americans are invested in conversations of public memory. The removal of confederate monuments and demands for equity in memorialization for people of color underscore the point that who is remembered and how they are honored is important. Further, the growing awareness of violence against Asian/Americans and the hate crime against Asian/American women in Atlanta has emphasized the need to understand the history of violence against Asian/Americans, Asian/American gendered stereotypes, and the Asian/American activists who fight for equal rights. This dissertation examines three distinct memorial genres—a statue, a traveling exhibit, and a documentary—created by Asian/Americans about Asian/American women activists. My interdisciplinary research engages feminist memory studies, Asian/American studies, and cultural rhetorics to investigate how public memory activists leverage the affordances of different memorial genres to recover Asian/American women’s activism. I consider the ways Asian/American women’s memorials contest the past and navigate the politics of memorialization to influence the present. Each chapter considers how memorials not only remember past activism, but also work to reframe current conversations about Asian/American women in more just and equitable frameworks. I claim that my chosen memorials are created by memorial activists and each seek to expand U.S. memory beyond traditional gendered stereotypes that are pervasive in the United States.Item Irrational Women: Healing Cultural Trauma Through Decolonial Consciousness and Hybrid Spirituality in Chicana and Pinay Narrative Fiction(2021) Quijano, Laura Michelle; Rodríguez, Ana Patricia; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What discursive strategies do women of color have at their disposal to confront and dismantle white supremacist patriarchy? Pinay (Filipina) and Chicana authors engaging with this question, like Ana Castillo, Evelina M. Galang, Jessica Hagedorn, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Emma Pérez, and Carmen Tafolla, seem to conclude that the hybrid and decolonial consciousness emanating from cultural traumas reimagines more just and healing relationships with the self, partners, and communities. These decolonial reimaginings deprivilege and decenter rational thought as the most productive path to understanding, healing, and transformation. The mythic, creative, somatic, and spiritual are at the center of Chicana and Pinay authors’ decolonial, healing processes. In conversation with the relational work of women of color feminists, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, and Leny Mendoza Strobel, this dissertation reads Pinay and Chicana narrative fiction of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries side by side to demonstrate how the historical impact of Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism, and their resulting cultural traumas, have similarly shaped the decolonial discursive strategies that these authors use to dismantle the binaries of race, gender, and sexuality, among others. Chicana and Pinay authors create female protagonists whose irrational experiences provide them with new insights into personal and collective healing, while simultaneously redefining the boundaries of everyday reality.Item A Host of Memories: Mixed Race Subjection and Asian American Performances Against Disavowal(2020) Storti, Anna; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation develops the concept of racial hosting to conceptualize mixed-raceness as an embodied palimpsest of past, present, and future. A Host of Memories: Mixed Race Subjection and Asian American Performances Against Disavowal argues for the importance of uncovering the disavowed, residual, and violent conditions of racial mixture. The project situates queer theories of temporality and feminist theories of situated knowledge in relation to Asian Americanist critiques of memory. I contend that the Asian/white subject is both an index to track the colonial condition across time, and a host that harbors the colonial desires we have come to name as hybridity, multiracialism, and post-racism. Each chapter builds towards a methodology of memory to, on the one hand, track the sensorial life of mixed-raceness, and on the other hand, document how the discourse of multiracialism obscures mass violence and the colonial ideology of racial purity. Chapter one advances the framework of white residue through an examination of the case of Daniel Holtzclaw, the Japanese/white police officer serving 263 years in prison for assaulting 13 Black women. I then narrate the life of Elliot Rodger, the Chinese/white mass shooter and involuntary celibate. Opening the study in this way dispels the notion that racial mixture renders racism’s past obsolete. I then shift to mixed race artists whose performances of desire, memory, and time include a fervent belief in queer and feminist possibility. Chapter two illuminates how a femme aesthetic of retribution surfaces as a response to racial fetish. This chapter spotlights performances by Chanel Matsunami Govreau and Maya Mackrandilal. Chapter three forwards the concept of muscle memory to study how the accumulation of history is deposited into the body and enacted through movement. Here, I contemplate the queer and trans dance of Zavé Martohardjono. Chapter four de-idealizes hybridity through the oeuvre of contemporary artist Saya Woolfalk. To end, I refer to the photography of Gina Osterloh to force a reckoning with the pressures to remember and claim ancestry. Mixed race subjection, I conclude, is an embodied phenomenon with reverberating implications for the structure of racial form writ large.Item Isamu Dreams of Flying(2015) Kauffman, Ashlie; Norman, Howard; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Fictionalized events in the life of Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) are woven with the story of a boy fascinated with airplanes, who grows up to be an artist. This section shows Isamu and his mother, Leonie Gilmour, traveling to Japan to live with his father, poet Yone Noguchi. In Japan, Isamu is raised solely by Leonie. He is surprised when she gives birth to his sister, the dancer Ailes Gilmour. Facing racial discrimination and feeling envy toward Ailes, he departs in 1918 for boarding school in Indiana. Interspersed with this is the story of a boy, David, who builds a model airplane that he wishes to show his mother when he visits her for a week. Raised by his father, he is envious of attention his mother gives her boyfriend. As an adult, David begins dating a woman named Elizabeth, before he moves to Japan to teach art.Item Dissembling Diversities: On "Middled" Asian Pacific American Activism and the Racialization of Sophistication(2014) Ishii, Douglas S.; Hanhardt, Christina B; Wong, Janelle; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Dissembling Diversities: On Asian Pacific American Arts Activism and the Racialization of Sophistication interrogates how contemporary Asian Pacific American (APA) arts activism and representation has been shaped by the bureaucratic administration of "diversity" after 9/11/2001. Through close readings of texts, it specifically examines Asian American representation within scripted network television programming, graphic novels and comic strips, and indie rock as iterations of panethnic activism in media advocacy, graphical storytelling, and the independent media arts. It understands these cultural forms and diversity itself through the framework of middlebrow culture, which is constituted of texts disseminated through popular culture that normalize the accumulation of cultural capital - or non-financial embodiments of class status such as education and literacy - as cultural citizenship. Dissembling Diversities makes evident how the elevation of these texts through discourses of "Art" and "diversity" relies on the association of cultural capital with whiteness, particularly through the racial exclusivity of their representations and through how the forms' history of class elevation expresses a white/anti-Black divide. Because of its dependence on cultural capital, the visibility for issues facing Asian American communities as expressed through the creation of art participates in the racialization of sophistication. In other words, deployments by APA artists and activists of traits associated with cultural sophistication - such as artistry, learnedness, worldliness, and status - can both illustrate Asian Americans' contributions to a culture of diversity, while reinforcing other racial, sexual, and gender exclusions through class hierarchy and respectability. However, APA activisms that contest the exclusivity of cultural capital can challenge these white/anti-Black class schemes. As such, Dissembling Diversities not only critiques APA arts activism's complicities with the racialization of sophistication, but also examines how it can turn sophistication against itself in imagining past "diversity."Item The Ghost as Ghost: Compulsory Rationalism and Asian American Literature, Post-1965(2014) Davis, Lawrence-Minh Bui; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the early 1980s, scholarship across disciplines has employed the "ghostly" as critical lens for understanding the upheavals of modernity. The ghost stands metaphorically for the lasting trace of what has been erased, whether bodies or histories. The ghost always stands for something, rather than the ghost simply is--a conception in keeping with dominant Western rationalism. But such a reading practice threatens the very sort of violent erasure it means to redress, uncovering lost histories at the expense of non-Western and "minority" ways of knowing. What about the ghost as ghost? What about the array of non-rational knowledges out of which the ghostly frequently emerges? This project seeks to transform the application of the ghostly as scholarly lens, bringing to bear Foucault's notion of "popular" knowledges and drawing from Asian American studies and critical mixed race studies frameworks. Its timeline begins with the 1965 Immigration Act and traces across the 1970s to 1990s rise of multiculturalism and the 1980s to 2000s rise of the Multiracial Movement. For field of analysis, the project turns to Asian American literature and its rich evocations of the ghostly and compulsory rationalism, in particular Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and China Men, Amy Tan's The Hundred Secret Senses, Nora Okja Keller's Comfort Woman, Lan Cao's Monkey Bridge, Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother, Shawna Yang Ryan's Water Ghosts, and Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being. It outlines a new reading strategy, a new means of conceiving of both Asian American literature and existing "spectral" scholarship as cultural productions. It also addresses a dimension of American history and lived reality that scholarship to date has not only ignored but actively suppressed. And insofar as the reach of "spectral" scholarship extends well beyond Asian American communities and Asian American studies--across an interdisciplinary net of subjects, a cross-cultural set of histories--this project is a necessary corrective with a wide scope of consequence for scholarly practice more generally. What it offers is an alternative approach, an alternative vision, reaching for a progressive politics of the ghostly.Item Model Minority(2013) Kim, David; Mitchell, Emily; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The stories in my thesis explore race politics, the American Dream, the influence of hip-hop in suburban society, and the role of academia in identity formation. The stories feature a Korean-American narrator whose speech undergoes significant transformations, which mirror the constantly shifting circumstances of his life. Change is the overarching theme of my thesis - the kind of change that transpires unconsciously - and the narrator's primary conflict is the struggle to reconcile the multiple identities that have been created as a result.Item "One Raw Material in the Racial Laboratory:" Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese Students and West Coast Civil Rights, 1915-1968(2013) Hinnershitz, Stephanie Dawn; Greene, Julie; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Between 1915 and 1968, Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese students studying at colleges and universities along the West Coast in the United States created, organized, and led influential civil rights groups. Although these students were only "temporary" visitors to the U.S., they became deeply involved in protesting the racism and discrimination that characterized life for Asian immigrants, Asian Americans, and other minorities in California and Washington. With the assistance of larger organizations such as the Young Men's and Young Women's Christian Associations and the World Student Christian Federation, these foreign students formed their own campus groups during the1920s and 1930s that allowed them to build relationships with each other as well as students from other racial and ethnic backgrounds. The discrimination and segregation that visiting students from Asia faced in cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle also prompted them to consider their roles in promoting justice for racial minorities while in the U.S. By leading and participating in petition campaigns, national youth conventions, and labor organizations, students from China, Japan, and the Philippines worked together to build an activist network with African American, Asian American, white, and other foreign students devoted to ending racial discrimination and promoting civil rights and liberties for all in the U.S. Considering the continuity in ideas, ethnic and racial composition, and leadership between pre and post-World War II equality activist groups, I argue that Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese students were key players in the creation of a West Coast civil rights movement that began during the interwar period. By analyzing the records of Asian Christian campus groups, national and international youth group meeting minutes, student newspapers, yearbooks, and local West Coast community newspapers, my dissertation will alter the traditional narrative of civil rights history by arguing that the push for immigrant and human rights was a foundation for racial justice during the twentieth century.