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 Between Body and Spirit: Indian Influences on Modern Japanese Art(2024) Chiu, Chao Chi; Volk, Alicia; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation contributes to ongoing examinations on modern transcultural exchanges between Japan and other Asian countries in the field of Japanese art by investigating the influence of India on itinerant Japanese artists throughout the twentieth century. In doing so, it challenges prevailing assumptions that Japanese artistic engagement with foreign culturesoperated entirely within an imperialistic context. Among the many Asian countries that served as sources of artistic inspiration for Japan, India stood out from the rest because of its esteemed spirituality in the eyes of Japanese intellectuals. Contemporary Japanese writings emphasized India’s importance as the birth place of Buddhism and framed the South Asian country as a bastion on Asian spiritual fortitude against the influx of Western materialism. Consequently, India also attracted Buddhist artists across Japan to visit its ancient temples and museums to its art. While these Japanese abroad expressed their admiration towards India’s religiosity and adherence to keeping its traditions alive, they also fantasized about the exoticism and corporeality embodied in Indian art and contemporary locals. Such fantasies were visualized intheir works in visual icons such as half-nude females with elaborate poses, Buddhist figures, including the Buddha himself, with exaggerated Indian ethnic features, and tropical plants and animals representing a long-lost past. I argue that Japanese adaption of Indian styles and themes into their art was characterized by a precarious harmony between spiritual and corporeal elements in the artist works. Furthermore, each artist defined “spirituality” and “corporeality” in distinct way, which led to diverse approaches. My dissertation revolved around four artists as case studies: Arai Kanpō, Nōsu Kōsetsu, Ishizaki Kōyō, and Sugimoto Tetsurō. By examining the careers, writings, and artworks of each artist, I will highlight how Japanese artists interpreted Indian materials and utilized them to create unconventional works. Furthermore, I would contextualize these artists’ work in the development of Japanese perspectives toward India throughout the twentieth century, expressed through contemporary writings that praised India for its spiritual fortitude but also denigrated them as an inferior Asian country. Examining the artists’ life and works in connection to changing perspectives towards India, Buddhism, and religious art in modern society, this dissertation explores the nuances of Japan’s artistic interaction with foreign materials beyond the context of colonialism and imperialism.Item TRACING TRANSCOLONIAL INTIMACIES: RELATIONAL RESISTANCE THROUGH THE OCCUPATION OF JAPAN (1945-1952)(2024) Itoh, Megu; Woods, Carly S.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Tracing Transcolonial Intimacies seeks to respond to the central question, “how can we work together across difference?” by exploring rhetorical strategies that bring people together across the divisions of coloniality. I enact a relational approach to rhetorical studies, to decenter individual subjectivity and to spotlight resistant relationalities. I combine this with a transcolonial framework, which grapples with the multiple vectors of coloniality. Such orientations enable the theorization of transcolonial intimacies, or mutual recognitions of humanity which bring the Other into the self. This project thus illuminates transcolonial intimacies as a form of resistant relationality obfuscated by colonial hegemonies. I am particularly invested in locating and analyzing transcolonial intimacies through the Occupation of Japan (1945-1952), a period defined by the collision between the Japanese and US empires, and the subsequent rupture of the Japanese empire. The three case studies thus seek to understand how Japanese civilians and Americans involved with the Occupation found opportunities to connect across three themes: race, gender, and foodways. These transcolonial intimacies reverberate, existing within a lineage of solidarities that draw from the past and extend into the future. To reckon with such relations of resistance, which move across time and space, I trace fragmented texts and artifacts situated in archives across national and cultural borders. Chapter 1 foregrounds relationships between Black American men soldiers and Japanese women civilians during a time of anti-fraternization and shared segregation under global white supremacy. Themes from the early twentieth century, such as the world color line and Black internationalism, regained relevance and functioned to reimagine Black American-Japanese solidarities. Chapter 2 examines how American women working for the Occupation and Japanese women union leaders collaborated on the adoption of menstruation leave. I argue that menstruation leave served dual purposes of liberation and containment, and also interrogate the story of menstruation leave as it is told through Mead Smith Karras, an economist for the Occupation administration. Chapter 3 illuminates how the total war period and the Occupation forced Japanese people to adapt their foodways for survival. I shed light on American participation within this process, including consumption of the Other and the uncomfortable reckonings that ensue. The dissertation concludes by following reverberations of transcolonial intimacies into the present, with an acknowledgment of what dehumanizes and divides, but also with an invitation to turn towards what humanizes and connects.Item Made Visible: Women Artists and the Performance of Femininity in Modern Japanese Art, 1900-1930(2024) Wies, Lillian T; Volk, Alicia; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation offers a new framework for understanding individual Japanese women artists’ work and the systems of gender oppression that characterized modern Japanese art. It does so by engaging with the visualization of Japanese women artists in the early twentieth century. In response to societal anxiety about the increase of women artists in the perceived male domain of the professional art world, women artists were pressured to conform to standards of normative femininity. Those standards, I argue, can be united under a single archetype, the “female artist,” which came to dominate the visual representation and social imagining of women artists. This study offers a nuanced investigation into the reciprocal relationship between women artists and the “female artist” by focusing on four establishment women painters: Kajiwara Hisako, Shima Seien, Yoshida Fujio, and Kametaka Fumiko. Chapter One establishes the ideological grounding that defined women artists by their gender and pressured them to perform hegemonic femininity, thereby creating the marginalized “female artist” archetype. Chapter Two explores the “female artist” as a visual type, established through photographic reproductions of women artists in women’s magazines and by a painted representation of the type by Kajiwara Hisako. The chapter evaluates the complex ways women artists participated in the construction of the visual type, arguing that women made micro-adjustments to the type that valorized women’s artistic skill even as they upheld oppressive gender ideals. Chapter Three details Shima Seien’s use of self-portraiture to protest the dehumanizing elements of the “female artist” archetype and assert an alternative vision of herself as an artist and individual. Chapter Four considers Yoshida Fujio’s embrace of the “female artist” as part of a journey towards personal and artistic self-determination. The Coda uses the case study of Kametaka Fumiko and the false attribution of her self-portrait, Hanare yuku kokoro, to her deceased husband, Watanabe Yohei, to reflect on how the “female artist” archetype continues to diminish women artists’ position within scholarship. The goal of this study is to make visible the diverse ways modern Japanese women artists negotiated systemic gender discrimination in an effort to recover a sense of their agency and individuality.Item Music Literature During the Allied Occupation of Japan and Debates on the Future of Japanese Music, 1945-1949(2023) DeBell, Joshua Blake; Robin, William; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Research on how countries under military occupation developed their music range from studies of the American occupation of Germany to studies of the Allied Occupation of Japan. Even though studies on Japanese music under occupation mainly focused on how composers dictated this culture, Japanese scholars should also be considered because scholarly writings have historically influenced what styles and aesthetics the Japanese endorsed. This study examines music literature from the University of Maryland’s Gordon W. Prange Collection. From 1945 to 1949, this literature is characterized by scholars studying the hōgaku, European, and American art music traditions. They also advocated that readers appreciate composers, pieces, styles, and genres from European art music, American art music, or hōgaku to establish a new music culture for Japan. However, these authors were divided on whether this music should only employ Western and Japanese styles or be a fusion of both. By examining this literature, this study offers an analysis of an under-researched perspective on music during Japan’s occupation and provides a new musicological approach toward examining occupation cultures.Item Evolution and Eternity in the Landscape of Defeat: Yokoyama Taikan and Mt. Fuji(2023) Mastrandrea, Magdalena; Volk, Alicia; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The end of the Fifteen Year War in August 1945 abruptly dismantled the ideology of art in service of the empire that established Japanese painters had worked under for over a decade. During this time, Yokoyama Taikan, a figurehead of the Nihonga painting genre who infamously called on artists to support the war effort, displayed hyper-nationalist paintings of Mt. Fuji, an icon synonymous with the nation of Japan. As droves of American Occupiers entered the country following Japan’s surrender, artists like Taikan quickly began to adjust their public image to avoid consequences. Yet only two years later, Taikan painted and displayed Landscape of the Four Seasons, an 88-foot-long scroll painting progressing through scenes of mountains, forests, rivers, and most notably, beginning with Mt. Fuji. Although painted in the midst of the Allied Occupation of Japan, when all Japanese media was subjected to strict censorship, Taikan’s use of Fuji at the beginning of this composition blatantly recalls his wartime paintings of the mountain. Despite this, he successfully exhibited Landscape of Four Seasons at the 1947 Japan Visual Arts Academy exhibition, or Inten, the first full-scale Inten since Japan’s surrender. In my analysis of this image, I begin by introducing compositionally similar Mt. Fuji paintings from before the war’s end to establish Taikan as a vehemently nationalistic artist who glorified the empire in the image of Fuji. Through examining the iconography and display of Landscape of the Four Seasons, painted in the dramatically shifted political climate of 1947, I argue that the image of Mt. Fuji, only recently associated with extreme nationalism and militarism, evolved rapidly after Japan’s surrender into a symbol of hope and resilience. The idealistic, symbolic nature of Nihonga painting allowed Taikan to exploit Fuji’s new meaning in defense of his wartime endeavors. Therefore, his Occupation era landscapes of the exact same subject matter evaded suspicion. Landscape of the Four Seasons is evidence of this phenomenon and of Taikan’s full reentry into the mainstream Japanese art world because of its display in the Inten, where it attracted significant attention. In addressing this, I explore the evolution of Mt. Fuji as an icon in the eyes of the Japanese and Americans alike, defining its new symbolism in the postwar period.Item An analysis of negation-dependent times amwu-phrases in Korean, and its theoretical consequences(2020) Bae, Sooyoung; Lasnik, Howard; Preminger, Omer; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this thesis, I revisit the nature of a negation-dependent expression awmu- in Korean. The central claim is that amwu-s do not fall within one of the two well-established categories of Negative Polarity Item (NPI) and Negative Concord Item (NCI). Hence, the taxonomy of negation-dependent expressions needs to be expanded to include a new, third type. Furthermore, I argue that this third type of expression, as exemplified in Korean, calls for a different principle of grammar, which is syntactic in nature, to properly account for its distribution. The thesis is organized as follows. In chapter 1, I introduce the taxonomy and theoretical background of negation-dependent expressions that have been discussed in the previous literature. Then, I review on-going discussions concerning the identity of amwu- in Korean. In particular, two competing perspectives on amwu- are examined: Negative Polarity Item (NPI) approaches to amwu- (Sohn 1994 & Sells & Kim 2006) and Negative Concord Item (NCI) approaches (Giannakidou 2000, 2006 & Yoon & Giannakidou 2016). I also introduce a puzzle: amwu-s cannot be licensed by its apparent licensor (i.e. sentential negation) in derived positions, which is not accounted for under the previous accounts of NPIs or NCIs and motivates the main proposal of the thesis. In chapter 2, I propose that amwu- is a third category of negation-dependent expressions and amwu- and negation stand in a base-generated relationship of constituency. In particular, I show that the interplay between the constituency of amwu- and negation and constraints on syntactic movement explains why amwu- cannot be licensed in derived positions. This argument is further supported by the bound pronoun effect (cf. Grano &Lasnik 2018 for English) that seems to relax the locality constraint between the base position of amwu- and the surface position of sentential negation. In Chapter 3, I examine predictions of an argument I put forth in chapter 2 that the features responsible for the occurrence of overt negation in Korean can be acquired by the relevant heads derivationally. Following Chomsky (1965)'s featural constraint on deletion, I argue that only inherent features, which are not acquired derivationally, are subject to the identity requirement on ellipsis. Thus, the identity condition on ellipsis under my proposal amounts to a requirement to select a feature from the lexicon that is identical to the one selected from the lexicon in the antecedent. I argue that the fact that amwu-s can be used as fragment answers, despite the polarity mismatch with the antecedent clause, receives a natural account as a consequence of the feature specification in the domain of ellipsis. In Chapter 4, I investigate implications of the underlying constituency of amwu- and negation. In particular, I show paradigms of the extended version of Beck & Kim's intervention effect (1997) in constructions where a long-distance scrambled amwu-phrases interact with wh-phrases. I argue that long-distance scrambled phrase can participate in syntactic and semantic operations in its derived positions. This, in turn, challenges the view that long-distance scrambling in Korean should be relegated to PF. In Chapter 5, I investigate the nominal structure of Korean based upon the Numeral Classifier constructions. In doing so, this chapter contributes to the proposed argument that NegP is an optional part of the extended nominal projection in Korean. In particular, I examine a variety of orderings of Numeral-Classifier constructions in Korean and how they are derived. The chapter also argues that elements within a nominal phrase in Korean are also constrained by Cyclic Linearization and Order Preservation (cf. Fox & Pesetsky 2003, 2005; Ko 2005, 2007; Simpson & Park 2019). This suggests the application domains of Cyclic Linearization are not only clausal domains (CP) but also nominal ones (DP), at least in Korean.Item School, State, and Nation: Educational Rhetorics at a Korean Women's College During and After Japanese Colonization, 1918–1965(2019) Tillman, Nathan Wil; Enoch, Jessica; Valiavitcharska, Vessela; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“School, State, and Nation” examines how the leaders and students of Ewha College, founded by American missionaries in 1910 as Korea’s first college for women, used rhetorical strategies to negotiate Japanese colonial power and Korean patriarchal objectives as they pursued their educational goals during and after the Japanese colonial period (1918–1965). This project draws on a range of Korean- and English-language primary sources, including letters, reports, photographs, articles, emblems, and autobiographies, especially the work of Ewha’s last American president Alice Appenzeller (in office 1922–1939) and first Korean president Kim Hwallan (1939–1961). Analyzing these sources, I show how Ewha became a contested site for the competing agendas of the Japanese colonial state, Korean nationalists, and the school community. I argue that Appenzeller, Kim, and Ewha women generally crafted what I call “educational rhetorics,” or the rhetorical strategies leveraged to constantly re/define their school’s relationship with the Japanese state and Korean nation during and after the colonial period. I identify performance, debates about education’s utility, and confession as three categories of these educational rhetorics. “School, State, and Nation” analyzes these educational rhetorics and argues that Ewha women leveraged them during the colonial period 1) to cooperate with the Japanese state while resisting its assimilating and imperializing goals, and 2) to signal their support for Korea’s independence and welfare while insisting on women’s equality in this nationalist project, and, after Korea’s liberation in 1945, 3) to mitigate Korean criticisms of Kim’s wartime collaboration with Japan. Anglophone rhetoric scholars have increasingly diversified our understanding of how rhetoric works in environments outside the US and Europe, examined the role of schools in identify formation and promoting/stifling political activism, and studied the rhetorical power of performance, education, and confession to dis/empower marginalized groups and pursue social reform. “School, State, and Nation” builds on and complicates this rhetorical scholarship by extending it into post/colonial Korea, where the complex environment complicates national and cultural categories of rhetoric, diversifies our understanding of the rhetorical role of women’s colleges in colonial and postcolonial environments, and problematizes definitions of patriotism and collaboration.Item Cooking with Mama Kim: The Legacy of Korean Women (Re)Defining Cultural Authenticity(2018) Sprague, Justin; Bolles, Augusta L; Kim, Seung-kyung; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What is considered “authentically Korean,” how those concepts are imagined, and in what ways authenticity is constructed through the vehicles of food and Korean motherhood is the core focus of this dissertation project. This study employs visual and discourse analysis, utilizing historical archives, vlog personalities, cookbooks, web portals, and various forms of food branding and packaging. Within the interdisciplinary field of Food Studies, the conversation regarding authenticity is a fundamental one, with varying work being performed to examine what and how it is employed, and who/what are the gatekeepers that determine the parameters for something as “authentic.” The intervention into this conversation is to explore the ways that authenticity as a theoretical model has intersectional, subjective, or adaptive, potential. This entails employing the term “plastic authenticity,” which is a model of authenticity that favors the positioning of non-normative bodies (i.e., multiracial and diasporic) as brokers of cultural authenticity. In the end, this dissertation contributes to scholarship in Women’s Studies, Food Studies, and Ethnic Studies by pushing the boundaries of how cultural/racial authenticity is constructed, and the ways that women and food have direct impacts as gatekeepers on this process. Analyses range from a historical timeline of Korean immigration to the U.S. with a focus on Korean women, an analysis of a popular YouTube chef, Maangchi, and her employments of the concept of authenticity, analysis of Korean food branding strategies and their claims of authentic Korean food in the U.S., and the website analysis of a mixed-race Korean community to explore the ways that authenticity is invoked by persons not traditionally deemed “authentically Korean.” This research is critical, as it expands the field of research in Korean Studies to not only focus on women and mixed-race Koreans as historical objects, but as active agents in cultural production, meaning-making, and history writing.Item “Baby Miles”: Reproductive Rights, Labor, and Ethics in the Transnational Korean Reproductive Technology Industry(2018) Kim, Sunhye; Kim, Seung-kyung; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the transnational circuits of the assisted reproductive technology (ART) industry in South Korea to demonstrate how the concepts of reproductive rights and labor have been contested, negotiated, and reconstructed by various actors—including infertile couples, gamete donors, gestational surrogates, state agents, and medical professionals—across national boundaries. This study envisions reproductive ethics as part of a transnational feminist agenda by examining the ethical issues raised by the complicated relationships between intended parents and gamete donors/surrogates. Although feminist scholars and bioethicists address issues of how intended parents practice their reproductive rights and how egg providers/surrogates’ bodies are commercialized and exploited as they navigate the transnational ART industry, very little exists in the way of an integrated framework that allows us to understand the interdependent relationships between intended parents and gamete providers/surrogates, even though both are “users” of ART technologies as well as “patients” of medical procedures. Furthermore, while current research successfully examines the ethical problems of the transnational ART industry, it unintentionally reinforces the binaries between Asian women as exploited objects and White Westerners as liberated subjects. In order to address these issues within the current literature, I position this project to dispute the unilateral understanding of ART by focusing on the complex relationships between Korean intended parents and non-Korean gamete providers and surrogates. In order to analyze the transnational circuits of the ART industry, I use the term “baby miles” to show the great distances people, capital, and technology travel as they interact in the baby-making process. Drawing on three years of multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in Seoul, Bangkok, Taipei, and Kiev, which included in-depth interviews with 60 people as well as participant observation, I argue that while the increased baby miles create unprecedented legal, social, and ethical issues, prohibiting commercial baby-making industries and returning to a “local baby” is not a solution as it reinforces both the ideology that motherhood is “natural” and the stratified reproduction system.Item The Sword and the Pen: Life Writings by Militant-Authors of the Việt Minh and Front de Libération Nationale (FLN)(2016) Hoang, Phuong; Orlando, Valerie K; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines four life writings by militant-authors of the Việt Minh and Front de la Libération Nationale (FLN): Ngô Văn Chiêu’s Journal d’un combattant Viet-Minh (1955), Đặng Văn Việt’s De la RC 4 à la N 4: la campagne des frontières (2000), Si Azzedine’s On nous appelait fellaghas (1976), and Saadi Yacef’s two-volume La Bataille d’Alger (2002). In describing the Vietnamese and Algerian Revolutions through the perspectives of combatants who participated in their respective countries’ national liberation struggles, the texts reveal that four key factors motivated the militants and led them to believe that independence was historically inevitable: (1) a philosophical, political, and ideological framework, (2) the support of multiple segments of the local population, (3) the effective use of guerrilla and psychological warfare, and (4) military, moral, and political assistance provided by international allies. By fighting for the independence of their countries and documenting their revolutionary experiences, the four militant-authors leave their mark on the world using both the sword and the pen.