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 ENGENDERED EXPERIENCES OF FREEDOM: LIBERATED AFRICAN WOMEN IN RIO DE JANEIRO, 1834-1864(2020) Nadalini Mendes, Ana Paula; Williams, Daryle; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Engendered Experiences of Freedom: Liberated African Women in Rio de Janeiro (1834-1864)” investigates how gender differences in daily lives of liberated African women in Brazil shaped the way they experienced freedom. This research argues that gendered-based differences influenced their experiences of freedom in its various contexts, including their relationship to labor, their struggles for emancipation, and their approach to legal system. Moreover, this thesis follows the lives of particular liberated African women through their process of petitioning for emancipation twenty years after they got to Brazil. Although the first half of the nineteenth century was marked by legal efforts to bar importation of slaves from Africa to Brazil, many slave ships entered Brazilian ports successfully. The Rio da Prata, however, was an exception. In November 1834, the British marine intercepted the vessel, that was halfway between Africa and South America. The Anglo-Brazilian Mixed Commission judged the case as a transgression of the Treaty of 1826, that forbade Brazil to participate in the slave trade, condemned the vessel to be a good-prize and liberated more than two hundred Africans. These Africans worked for private houses and public works in a probation system for at least 20 years when the decree 1303 of 1853 allowed them to access the legal system and request their final emancipation. This process lasted for ten years, when in 1864 the Brazilian government declared emancipated all liberated Africans This thesis intervenes in debates about bondage and resistance by considering liberated Africans women inside the context of slavery in Brazil. It argues that these women had a particular way of fighting for freedom, due, first, to their own capacity of resistance, second to their conditions of labor, and, third, to specificities of the Brazilian set of laws. From legal petitions of emancipation, police records, guardians’ declarations, and newspapers advertisements the chapters follow lives of liberated African women from the Rio da Prata to show how they experienced freedom.Item WHICH TEAM DO YOU PLAY FOR?: VISIBILITY AND QUEERING IN BRAZILIAN SOCCER(2019) Snyder, Cara Knaub; Tambe, Ashwini; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Brazilians designate their country “O País de Futebol” (The Country of Football) with a singular vigor. But from its earliest years, the sport has been defined along masculine lines; women in Brazil were actually banned from playing soccer for four decades (1940 - 1979). The exclusion of women, gay men, and trans athletes has come under considerable challenge in the past two decades. This dissertation traces how marginalized groups have claimed access to soccer, and what it means for processes of visibility, assimilation, and ultimately, queering the game itself. Combining ethnographic, archival, and visual methods, the project unfolds over three case studies focused on women, trans, and gay players, respectively. The first chapter presents a history of Brazilian women’s soccer: using media sources and interviews, it tracks tensions between women athletes’ demands to be seen and the gendered forms of disciplining that have accompanied their increased visibility. Such disciplining has contributed to the whitening and feminization of women’s soccer, as seen in the case of the Paulistana tournament, and to the subsequent migration of Brazil’s top athletes. These migrant players have since used their transnational networks to jockey for recognition and a more equitable distribution of resources. My second chapter offers an ethnography of Brazil’s first trans men’s soccer team, the Brazilian Meninos Bons de Bola (MBB, or Soccer Star Boys), to explore futebol as a site for combating invisibility and violence, creating transness, and queer worldmaking. Using a combination of focus groups, ethnographic observations, and interviews, I explore how team members theorize oppression, survive transphobia, and thrive. My third chapter analyzes the challenges facing the Brazilian BeesCats, a cis gay men’s soccer team, as they form the first Brazilian contingent to participate in the international Gay Games. Drawing from ethnographic data from the 2018 Paris Gay Games, I examine the ethnosexual frontiers of this international LGBT sporting event. Ultimately, I argue, the athletes described in this dissertation make claims on their national sport as part of deeper struggles for belonging. In the context of a culturally rightward turn in Brazil, they are also queering futebol and subverting gender ordering.Item Development Begins at Home: Women and the Domestic Economy in Brazil, 1945-1975(2016) Moura, Shawn; Williams, Daryle; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A number of historians of twentieth-century Latin America have identified ways that national labor laws, civil codes, social welfare programs, and business practices contributed to a gendered division of society that subordinated women to men in national economic development, household management, and familial relations. Few scholars, however, have critically explored women's roles as consumers and housewives in these intertwined realms. This work examines the Brazilian case after the Second World War, arguing that economic policies and business practices associated with “developmentalism” [Portuguese: desenvolvimentismo] created openings for women to engage in debates about national progress and transnational standards of modernity. While acknowledging that an asymmetry of gender relations persisted, the study demonstrates that urban women expanded their agency in this period, especially over areas of economic and family life deemed "domestic." This dissertation examines periodicals, consumer research statistics, public opinion surveys, personal interviews, corporate archives, the archives of key women’s organizations, and government officials’ records to identify the role that women and household economies played in Brazilian developmentalism between 1945 and 1975. Its principal argument is that business and political elites attempted to define gender roles for adult urban women as housewives and mothers, linking their management of the household to familial well-being and national modernization. In turn, Brazilian women deployed these idealized roles in public to advance their own economic interests, especially in the management of household finances and consumption, as well as to expand legal rights for married women, and increase women’s participation in the workforce. As the market for women's labor expanded with continued industrialization, these efforts defined a more active role for women in the economy and in debates about the trajectory of national development policies.Item ILE AIYE: PERFORMING AFRO-BRAZILIAN IDENTITY THROUGH MUSIC(2011) Mills, Gisèle-Audrey; Witzleben, J. Lawrence; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Originating in Salvador, Bahia, the musical genre and carnival performance known as "bloco afro" combines rhythms based on Afro-Brazilian ritual music played on percussion instruments with lyrics that highlight themes of black pride and resistance. The term `bloco' refers to groups that parade together during carnival, and `afro' describes the emphasis on manifestations of African and Afro-Brazilian culture. At its founding in 1974, the first bloco afro, Ile Aiye, inspired a cultural movement by establishing a visible and intentionally black bloco afro in Liberdade, a historically black community in Salvador. Performed by large collectives of drummers and dancers dressed in brightly colored African clothes, many performers with intricately braided hairstyles or dreadlocks, the music was initially linked to a growing movement of Afro-Brazilian activists in black neighborhoods of Bahia promoting racial consciousness and organizing political interventions to combat racism. This study explores bloco afro as a musical movement within the broader context of the contemporary Movimento Negro (Black Movement) in Brazil, and its role in constructing racial identity among black Brazilians. Primarily an ethnomusicology-based study, a trans-disciplinary approach using cultural studies and performance studies is applied toward developing an analytical framework for bloco afro performance, with a focus on identifying specific factors and processes that create and promote musical meaning and the role they play in constructing black identity.Item MODERNIZATION AND VISUAL ECONOMY: FILM, PHOTOJOURNALISM, AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN BRAZIL AND ARGENTINA, 1955-1980(2010) Halperin, Paula; Weinstein, Barbara; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the relationship among visual culture, nationalism, and modernization in Argentina and Brazil in a period of extreme political instability, marked by an alternation of weak civilian governments and dictatorships. I argue that motion pictures and photojournalism were constitutive elements of a modern public sphere that did not conform to the classic formulation advanced by Jürgen Habermas. Rather than treating the public sphere as progressively degraded by the mass media and cultural industries, I trace how, in postwar Argentina and Brazil, the increased production and circulation of mass media images contributed to active public debate and civic participation. With the progressive internationalization of entertainment markets that began in the 1950s in the modern cities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires there was a dramatic growth in the number of film spectators and production, movie theaters and critics, popular magazines and academic journals that focused on film. Through close analysis of images distributed widely in international media circuits I reconstruct and analyze Brazilian and Argentine postwar visual economies from a transnational perspective to understand the constitution of the public sphere and how modernization, Latin American identity, nationhood, and socio-cultural change and conflict were represented and debated in those media. Cinema and the visual after World War II became a worldwide locus of production and circulation of discourses about history, national identity, and social mores, and a space of contention and discussion of modernization. Developments such as the Bandung Conference in 1955, the decolonization of Africa, the Cuban Revolution, together with the uneven impact of modernization, created a "Third Worldism" and "Latin Americanism" that transformed public debate and the cultural field. By researching "peripheral" nations, I add to our understanding of the process of the transnationalization of the cultural field and the emergence of a global mass culture in the 1960s and 1970s.Item BRAZILIAN MUSIC FOR SAXOPHONE: A SURVEY OF SOLO AND SMALL CHAMBER WORKS(2009) Van Regenmorter, Paula J.; Gibson, Robert L.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The subject of Brazilian music commonly brings to mind the genres of samba and Bossa nova; however, in the realm of concert music Heitor Villa-Lobos is most commonly identified as the main representative of Brazil. While the Fantasia for Soprano Saxophone and Orchestra by Villa-Lobos is a keystone of the saxophone repertoire, this project serves to explore the breadth of works available by Brazilian composers for the concert saxophone. The thirty-three composers featured in this work represent compositions spanning the period from 1850 to 2007, written in a variety of styles related to movements in Brazilian music history such as nationalism, Música Viva, Música Nova, and post-modernism. Concerts works have been written for the entire family of saxophones, but the discussion in this study will be limited to compositions for the solo saxophone (soprano, alto, tenor or baritone saxophones) with piano or orchestra as well as small chamber ensembles, duos or trios. Part I of this dissertation offers an overview of the history and the role of the saxophone in Brazilian music, including the instrument's arrival in the country and prominent performers who are key in promoting the concert saxophone within Brazil, while Part II opens with a description of the folk elements that are often drawn upon by Brazilian composers and elements that inherently represent the Brazilian musical language. Biographical information is presented on each composer, in addition to excerpts of the compositions discussed. Information about acquiring the performance materials is also included.Item The Body in Pieces: Representations of Organ Trafficking in the Literatures and Film of the Americas(2007-04-24) Dix, Jennifer; Peres, Phyllis; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores the use of the trope of organ trafficking to critique neoliberal globalization in the Americas. Each chapter addresses a different genre and analyzes texts articulated in response to conditions grounded in different locations. The texts studied include print media from Guatemala and Brazil, Mexican popular film and detective fiction from the U.S. (Tony Chiu's Positive Match and Linda Howard's Cry No More) and Mexico (Miriam Laurini's Morena en rojo, Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz's Loverboy, and Paco Ignacio Taibo II's La bicicleta de Leonardo). Comparative analyses also address Francisco Goldman's The Long Night of White Chickens, Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange, and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead. These analyses are linked by their critique of neoliberal globalization and their representation of the human body's commodification. Together, they outline the contradictions of a mobility-dependent regime and establish the inescapable scope of economic changes that alter the relationship between the nation-state and its inhabitants. Neoliberalism also causes changes in the representation of the body. Bodies are represented outside the social structures and institutions that previously gave them meaning. The body's economic value replaces socially ascribed identities. Representations of the commodified body in these texts selectively erase gender and race. This dissertation also explores the construction of a new set of identities grounded in the body. These competing identities of medical and corporeal citizenship demonstrate the problems of establishing identities in market-driven terms of production and consumption. This dissertation also engages in a investigation of the relation of literary genre to content. As my discussion of popular culture demonstrates, generic form partially constrains or shapes the content of these works. In contrast, when literary works are positioned outside of genre constraints, the scope of the meanings attributed to organ trafficking expands, accompanied by formal innovations. My dissertation produces an interrogation of American cultural spaces--understood in the broadest sense--that acknowledges the work of both spatial and cultural forces in the construction of this hemispheric imaginary.Item Tunnel Vision: Urban Renewal in Rio de Janeiro, 1960-1975(2006-06-01) Kehren, Mark Edward; Weinstein, Barbara; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Following the inauguration of the newly constructed capital of Brasília in April 1960, the former federal district and Brazilian capital of Rio de Janeiro was transformed into the city-state of Guanabara. Although Rio lost its status as the political capital of Brazil after nearly 200 years, extensive urban renewal campaigns to modernize the city were employed by numerous politicians, planners, architects, artists, and ordinary residents to help restore Rio's position as Brazil's "true" capital city. This dissertation examines these urban renewal efforts in Guanabara from 1960 to 1975 - a period when Rio de Janeiro experienced its largest period of population and spatial growth. Whereas many of the urban renewal campaigns and projects for development prior to 1945 were intended to beautify, embellish, and "civilize" the city, the projects of the 1960s and 1970s were highly technical and revolved around integrating the automobile into the urban landscape. The measures of investment and resources devoted to modernizing and reforming the city during the Guanabara period were unprecedented for Rio de Janeiro, consequently resulting in significant spatial, social, cultural, and economic reorganization of the city. "Tunnel Vision: Urban Renewal in Rio de Janeiro, 1960-1975" examines specific projects of urban renewal such as tunnels (Rebouças and Santa Bárbara), expressways, parks (Aterro do Flamengo), subways, overpasses, and beaches while also exploring the technocratic approach to urban planning which was demonstrated through attitudes and principles that often marginalized "non-expert" participation in reforming the city. Using diverse primary sources such as government and urban planning documents, as well as neighborhood association materials, this dissertation also considers broader historical issues such as the politics and culture of military regimes, as well as questions related to the built environment, comparative planning cultures, space, class, race, ethnicity, and popular culture. Furthermore, this study also argues that the politics and culture of urban planning in Rio de Janeiro during the Guanabara period mirrored many of the same political, cultural, and social tensions that existed throughout Brazil and Latin America before and after the Brazilian military coup of 1964.