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 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 TRANS WORLDING WITHIN: DECOLONIAL EXAMINATIONS OF TRANS OF COLOR INTERIORITY(2021) Aftab, Aqdas; Avilez, GerShun; Lothian, Alexis; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues for the importance of reading for interiority in trans of color cultural productions. With so many representations of racialized trans people foregrounding the violated body, the cultural imaginary around trans of color life is saturated with notions of corporeality. In this context, I develop a transworld hermeneutic that refuses an emphasis on the racialized and colonized trans body, which is fetishized by the medical industrial complex and by cultural productions, and instead, turns towards the interior. Examining Black and Dalit diasporic texts, from postcolonial classics such as Nuruddin Farah’s Maps to contemporary novels like Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater to Mimi Mondal’s speculative short stories, I argue that while the corporeal is surveilled by the cis colonial gaze, the interior shows glimpses of world-making practices that are protected from the pornotropic violence of spectacle. While Western epistemologies define trans identity through the lens of Enlightenment-based models of science that focus on the sexed body’s transitions, my emphasis on interiority reconceptualizes trans of color life as intuitive, ecstatic, speculative and spiritual. Using the affective interior as a central framework, my transworld reading strategy offers a departure from essentialist as well as performative understandings of gender: informed by the theories of the spirit, the interior strives to remain opaque to the external gaze, hence guarded from performative effects. Overall, my research reveals how Black and Dalit exclusions from the colonial Human create the possibility of trans becoming; in other words, colonial and racist violence forcibly constructs transness, an experience that is utilized strategically by Black and Dalit writers as a decolonial tool for challenging, dismantling, and rewriting scripts of humanness.Item BLACK COMPOSERS OF THE CLASSICAL MUSIC GENRE FROM THE EIGTHTEENTH CENTURY TO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY(2019) Joyner, Amyr; Salness, David; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation research paper will be an examination of a number of prominent Black composers in the Classical music genre and their influences and contributions to the Classical music violin literature. The overall intent of the paper is to act as an additional resource for violinists and musicians that are interested in exploring the composers and their works, while also increasing exposure to and awareness of Black classical composers. While the purpose of this dissertation lies specifically with exploring influential Black composers, their chosen works in the programs, and how they fit within the broad spectrum of classical music, I am hopeful that it will nevertheless promote a further discussion regarding incorporating a more extended study of minority and women composers in the general curriculum of music institutes, as well as encourage more widespread practice and performances of their works along the likes of Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, and Bartók.Item RELEVANCE, SELF-DETERMINATION, AND UNIVERSALITY THROUGH ST. AUGUSTINE CATHOLIC CHURCH'S GOSPEL CHOIR(2019) Visceglia, Victoria Lynn; Lie, Siv B.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Second Vatican Council provided ample opportunity for individual Catholic parishes to choose music that suited their congregations and contribute to the “Universal Church” through their particularity. St. Augustine Catholic Church in Washington, D.C. formed a gospel choir in light of this newfound freedom. Based on about one year of participant observation, this thesis analyzes the Gospel Choir’s role in making the Mass more relevant and interactive for parishioners. Singers maintain certain practices and ideals of the Church that they know make their ministry more effective while acknowledging the shortcomings of Catholicism at an institutional level. They animate listeners to respond dialogically with the Mass, allowing their lived experiences to inform their spiritual transformations. After more than 40 years, the Gospel Choir continues to navigate the boundaries between sacred and secular, Catholic and Protestant, and contrasting conceptions of African American identity.Item Evidence of Being: Urban Black Gay Men's Literature and Culture, 1978-1995(2014) Bost, Darius; Hanhardt, Christina B; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of black gay men's literary and cultural production and activism emerging at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, focusing in particular on cultural formations in Washington, DC, and New York City. Through an exploration of the work of black gay male writers and activists from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s, I argue that recognizing the centrality of trauma and violence in black communities means accounting for its debilitating effects, alongside its productivity in areas such as cultural and aesthetic production, identity-formation, community building, and political mobilization. Though black gay men's identities were heavily under siege during this historical moment, I show how they used literary and cultural forms such as poetry, performance, novels, magazines, anthologies, and journals to imagine richer subjective and social lives. This project makes three key interventions in the existing scholarship in African American studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Queer Studies, and Trauma Studies 1) this project recovers a marginalized period in U.S. histories of race and sexuality, in particular the renaissance of black gay literary and cultural production and activism from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s 2) the project examines how black gay men have used literary and cultural production to assert more complex narratives of racial, gender, and sexual selfhood 3) it explores how historical trauma has functioned as both a violently coercive, as well as a culturally and politically productive force in black gay lives. The project focuses on cultural movement activities in two cities, Washington, DC, and New York City, to offer a more broad, comparative perspective on urban black gay subcultural life. The first section on Washington, DC, explores the work of DC-based writer and activist Essex Hemphill, and the black LGBT-themed magazine, Blacklight. The second section on New York City looks at black gay writer's group, Other Countries Collective, and writer and scholar Melvin Dixon's novel, Vanishing Rooms. I include individual black gay voices in my study, positioning these voices alongside larger structural transformations taking place in cities during this moment. I also foreground the efforts of self and social transformation that emerged through black gay collectivities.Item Feelin Feminism: Black Women's Art as Feminist Thought(2014) Judd, Bettina A.; Barkley Brown, Elsa; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation contends that the systems of racism, (hetero)sexism, and classism are felt in the body, mind, and spirit and that resistance to these systems must be felt as well. Feelin, a term rooted in U.S. Black culture and derived from Black speech (as in "I'm feelin that!"), is deployed as a way of knowing through which Black women engage and create life-affirming art. I argue for understanding black women's creative production as a site of Black feminist thought, one that continuously negotiates, shares and acknowledges emotion as a form of knowledge that, in Audre Lorde's terms, galvanizes radical thought into "more tangible action." In this project I negotiate these issues through close reading and analysis of the work of three artists: photographer Renee Cox, poet Lucille Clifton, musician Avery*Sunshine. In Cox's photography I examine the ways in which she re-imagines racial shaming and Black motherhood through her own body and mothering practice as represented in her work. Through Clifton's words, poetry, and spiritual and creative practice, I trace a theology of joy. And, I analyze expressions of sacro-sexual ecstasy in Avery*Sunshine's genre ambivalent music. These themes of shame, joy, and ecstasy are prominent not only in the work itself, but also in the artists' experiences of creating that work and in the artists' discussions of their work and worldview. Feminist scholarship and affect theory frame my engagements with feelings and emotions as knowledge. Finally, I propose a methodology for engaging Black women's knowledge production that mandates that we take Black women's anger seriously and interrogate from there. This project practices the modes of knowledge production that it presents. Furthering its argument that Black women's art is a site of feminist knowledge production, research is conducted and presented through poetry, mixed media, and personal narrative in addition to academic research methods and prose.Item Lighting Design of Am I Black Enough, Yet? The Robert & Arlene Kogod Theatre(2010) Dillard, Jonathan Lee; MacDevitt, Brian; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this Thesis is to provide research, supporting paperwork and production photographs that represent the lighting design for Am I Black Enough, Yet? by Clint Johnson at the University of Maryland, School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies. This thesis contains the following documentation: a lighting design concept statement, research images which inspire the lighting design for the production and visually communicate to the director the ideas of texture, color quality, and angle of light; the scenic ground plan and hanging elevations; all three plates of the light plot communicating to the electricians where to hang each individual lighting unit; the channel hookup which supports the light plot; the cue track used to develop and record the cue structure; a magic sheet used to facilitate the design and cueing process, and production photographs documenting the final design.Item The Long Tradition: Black Women and Mothers in Public Discourses(2009) Sanders, Tammy L.; Struna, Nancy L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)ABSTRACT Title of Document THE LONG TRADITION: BLACK WOMEN AND MOTHERS IN POPULAR DISCOURSES Tammy Sanders, Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Directed By: Chair and Professor Nancy Struna Department of American Studies With her insightful analysis, Nancy Lurkins in &ldquoYou are the Race, You are the Seeded Earth:&rdquo Intellectual Rhetoric, American Fiction, and Birth Control in the Black Community (2008), asserts &ldquo(past) black leaders promoted the ideal of black domesticity and moral motherhood as a counterstrategy to white attacks. Over time, appreciating and even desiring black motherhood came to be identified with black communal pride and as a result black women became responsible for upholding the entire race&rdquo (47). Similarly, recent history has proved to be no different when it comes to the responsibility of black mothers. This dissertation will explore how public discourses involving the social sciences, films, and novels historicize, represent, and re-envision black motherhood. It will investigate how these discourses about motherhood are shaped by the historical moment of their occurrence and what they tell us about the attitudes of those establishing critical thought. By examining texts like the Moynihan Report, Ann Petry's The Street, Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun, and the 1974 film Claudine, this project will analyze the rhetoric of scholars about black motherhood alongside popular images of black mothers to illustrate how they overlap and how black women's bodies are consistently at the nexus of academic, social, cultural and political conversations. In an attempt to further complicate mothering studies by using black feminist thought as my lens, this dissertation seeks to tease out the interconnectedness of historical moments and discourses without perpetuating traditional gender norms as it relates to black female identities.Item Cartographic Memories and Geographies of Pain: Bodily Representations in Caribbean Women's Art(2006-11-08) Wallace, Belinda Deneen; Collins, Merle; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Definitely, this dissertation's central intellectual and political aims are rooted in a guiding principle of Caribbean womanhood; and, with black women's bodies located at the center, the goal of this study is to provide new alternatives to understanding "writing the body" by looking to Caribbean women's cultural products as sites of theory formation. The artists and the works selected for this study demonstrate an awareness of the need for a re-evaluation of the metaphor of writing the body which takes into account the specificities of race, ethnicity and nationality. To that end, this study focuses on texts and performances by Caribbean women in order to examine the development of a Caribbean feminist consciousness and its ability to not only convey but also legitimate Caribbean female perspectives and experiences. Dionne Brand, Edwidge Danticat, Marion Hall, Joan Riley and Myriam Warner-Vieyra provide us with an opportunity to trace the processes through which Caribbean women artists write their own bodies and how those bodies can be used to explore larger issues around identity, geography and history. In the music and performances of Marion Hall this project looks closely at the intricacies that comprise women's sexuality, sexual autonomy and sexual identity beyond their objectification as sexual objects for men. In Warner-Vierya's Juletane, Riley's The Unbelonging and Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, the study examines the metropolis as a source of contamination that forces us to recognize madness as a socio-cultural and historical construct with gender specific consequences. Finally, the study concludes with Danticat's The Farming of Bones and Brand's In Another Place, Not Here, where it investigates literary representations of the female body as a representative text that disrupts the official narrative and brings forth a uniquely female historical subjectivity.