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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Subject: search.filters.subject.Black Feminism

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    STAGING BLACK WOMEN’S HISTORIES: RECOVERY AND RECUPERATION IN THE THEATRE OF GLENDA DICKERSON
    (2018) Long, Khalid Yaya; Chatard Carpenter, Faedra; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation is a critical study of artisan and pedagogue Glenda Dickerson (1945-2012). Glenda Dickerson, whose career spans a little over forty years, held many roles within the field of American/Black/Feminist theatre: playwright, director, folklorist, performer, choreographer, adapter/conceiver, and educator. Dickerson was the second African American woman to direct on Broadway with the 1980 production, Reggae, a Musical Revelation. After a successful run in commercial theatre, Glenda Dickerson chose to place her efforts in developing works more intended for academic and community-oriented theatre. Dickerson’s career in theatre was quite distinctive. Despite the ways in which Glenda Dickerson challenged racial and gendered boundaries within both professional and academic theatre, and with her pioneering of contemporary Black theatre as well as a Black feminist theatre, Dickerson’s legacy is still largely unknown, and, most strikingly, severely under-documented within the scholarly histories of theatre and performance. Accordingly, this dissertation provides a genealogy of Dickerson’s career, highlighting some of the historical and socio-cultural influences that shaped her life and work in the theatre. Additionally, this dissertation critically examines several of her unpublished, contemporary dramatic works: Kitchen Prayers: Performance Dialogue on 9/11 and Global Loss (2001), Identities on Trial: A Kitchen Protest Prayer (2003), Sapphire’s New Show: The Kitchen Table Summit (2004), and Barbara Jordan, Texas Treasure (2005). By highlighting major themes found within these works and providing both a historical and theoretical study of her writing, devising, and staged performances, this dissertation aims to situate Dickerson as a forerunner of contemporary Black theatre as well as contemporary Black feminist theatre
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    "Nothing About the Rape:" Generative Silencing in Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber
    (2014) Webb, Calvin Allan; Wong, Edlie; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This project, which focuses on Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber, explores the relationship between storytelling, witnessing, and lived experience. By interrogating the intersection of black feminism, speculative fiction, and slave narratives in the backdrop of the Haitian Revolution, Hopkinson's work shows that some silencing can be constructive, even essential, for survival.
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    "Tell Me Your Diamonds" Story Bearing in African American Women's Life History Narratives
    (2014) Smith, Shanna Louise; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In 1994, a week prior to the release of her family memoir The Sweeter the Juice, African American writer, Shirley Haizlip was a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The episode, "Denying my Race," unveiled the ways some members of Haizlip's bi-racial family sought to pass for white, while others lived successful lives as African Americans. During the publicized reunion, members of both sides of the racial coin worked toward coming to terms with their identities. In telling this story, Haizlip took on the role of the female story bearer, the writer of the family narrative who is positioned two or more generations beyond the story she tells. What does it mean to be a living archive, a black woman who carries the mantle of an uneasy familial past and makes it her body of work? What does it mean to investigate a wound in the family that is representative of larger cultural injuries that occurred during pivotal moments in black history? How can deeply entrenched cultural wounds open dialogue, establish common ground, and create spaces for empathy and understanding across race, gender, sexuality, and class? Each of the women, about whom I am writing in this dissertation, helps to address these questions. A'Lelia Bundles, Shirlee Haizlip, and (Carole) Ione have all been afforded the opportunity to labor with their fingers to corroborate the oral narratives handed to them. The fruit of their labor are their life histories: On Her Own Ground, The Sweeter the Juice, and Pride of Family, respectively. The titles signal familial pasts that intersect with the complexities of gender and labor, race and racial passing, class and privilege. Using personal life histories like that of Haizlip, Bundles, Ione and others I seek to better understand the ways in which women writers can foster more generative understandings of African American life histories and the ways in which they are situated as sites for social change.