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 Reckoning with Freedom: Legacies of Exclusion, Dehumanization, and Black Resistance in the Rhetoric of the Freedmen's Bureau(2017) Lu, Jessica H.; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Charged with facilitating the transition of former slaves from bondage to freedom, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (known colloquially as the Freedmen’s Bureau) played a crucial role in shaping the experiences of black and African Americans in the years following the Civil War. Many historians have explored the agency’s administrative policies and assessed its pragmatic effectiveness within the social, political, and economic milieu of the emancipation era. However, scholars have not adequately grappled with the lasting implications of its arguments and professed efforts to support freedmen. Therefore, this dissertation seeks to analyze and unpack the rhetorical textures of the Bureau’s early discourse and, in particular, its negotiation of freedom as an exclusionary, rather than inclusionary, idea. By closely examining a wealth of archival documents— including letters, memos, circular announcements, receipts, congressional proceedings, and newspaper articles—I interrogate how the Bureau extended antebellum freedom legacies to not merely explain but police the boundaries of American belonging and black inclusion. Ultimately, I contend that arguments by and about the Bureau contributed significantly to the reconstruction of a post-bellum racial order that affirmed the racist underpinnings of the social contract, further contributed to the dehumanization of former slaves, and prompted black people to resist the ongoing assault on their freedom. This project thus provides a compelling case study that underscores how rhetorical analysis can help us better understand the ways in which seemingly progressive ideas can be used to justify exercises of power and domination. Additionally, this interpretation of the Bureau’s primary role as a mechanism of supervision, rather than support, sheds light on the history of unjust practices that persist today in American race relations. Finally, this study affirms how black people have persevered in inventive and innovative ways to disrupt the pervasive discourse that seeks to destroy them.Item INVENTING AND DELIVERING THE WOMAN CITIZEN: SUSAN B. ANTHONY’S EXTEMPORANEOUS SPEAKING AS A PERFORMANCE OF CITIZENSHIP IN SERVICE OF WOMAN SUFFRAGE(2017) Styer, Meridith Irene; Maddux, Kristy; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Susan B. Anthony became the face of the woman suffrage movement as she traveled across the country speaking and organizing. Anthony began speaking extemporaneously in 1857 and embraced the conversational and immediate performance that remained her dominant practice through her public career. This project examines how Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking functioned as a performance of citizenship in service of her arguments for women’s rights and woman suffrage during three periods of the nineteenth century. My research suggests both theoretical and methodological challenges of studying nineteenth-century extemporaneous rhetoric. I also discuss the problems associated with extemporaneous speaking in a movement for social change and engage the theoretical bounds of how citizenship can be performed rhetorically when liberal and republican citizenship status are denied based on an individual’s identity. The first period includes Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking within the social and religious upheaval of the Burned-over District of Upstate New York before and during the Civil War (1849-1864). My analysis suggests that Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking used a millennial and prophetic invention and delivery that derived from what I call the genre of Burned-over District rhetorical culture. Drawing upon this tradition allowed Anthony to speak persuasively to Burned-over District audiences but rendered her message inaccessible to the policy makers in Albany and Washington D.C. The second case examines Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking during Reconstruction (1865-1874). Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking functioned as a performance of citizenship that both constituted women as equal citizens and provided the impetus for national-level politicians and state legislatures to codify the cultural assumptions of male-gendered citizenship into policy language that excluded women from democratic citizenship rights. The third case examines how Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking functioned as a performance of “character citizenship” during the final years of her professional career in the context of the Gilded Age (1875-1906). Character citizenship manifested in that era as a way to define who was or could be a good American through the lens of gendered, middle-class, white, Protestant values. Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking functioned to frame her as a laudable woman of character who was a respectable authority on the topic of woman suffrage.Item Too Much to Belong: Latina/o Racialization, Obesity Epidemic Discourse, and Unassimilable Corporeal Excess(2016) Griff, Ellen Cassandra; Paoletti, Jo B; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines the discursive constructions of Latina/o bodies as excessive in order to examine how Latinas/os are excluded from belonging to the U.S. nation-state. By approaching Latina/o Studies from a Fat Studies perspective, it works to more adequately address the role of embodiment in determining processes of racialization that directly impact Latinas/os in the United States, especially in light of the role of race and racism in “obesity epidemic” discourse. This dissertation argues that cultural and even physiological explanations about the Latina/o propensity for “overweight” and “obesity” create a discourse that marks the Latina/o body as demonstrating an unassimilable corporeal excess. In turn, the rhetoric of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” are rendered inapplicable to Latinas/os, as demonstrated by both nativist and seemingly pro-immigrant discourses that posit Latina/o physical excess in the form of fatness as detrimental and even dangerous to the U.S. nation-state.Item Symbolic Power as a Dimension of Public Life(1991-11) Klumpp, James F.Argues for a reconceptualization of citizenship built around participation in the symbolic life of a political community. Ties revisions in political theory into revisions in rhetorical theory.Item Inappropriate(d) Literatures of the United States: Hegemonic Propriety and Postracial Racialization(2014) Dykema, Amanda; Chuh, Kandice; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The rise of multiculturalism and its impact on the U.S. academy reached its peak at the end of the twentieth century. Since then the rhetoric of liberal multiculturalism that valorized diversity has largely given way to a neoliberal multiculturalism that celebrates postracialism as a means to dismantle the institutional programs and critical discourses that took racial difference as their starting point. Yet the racially inflected demarcations between positions of privilege and positions of stigma that have historically characterized the U.S. nation-state remain intact. In this context, how do we read race in contemporary literature by U.S. ethnic writers when celebrations of colorblindness dominate public discourse? As a repository for what Foucault has called subjugated knowledges, minoritized literatures hold the potential to de-naturalize the neoliberal status quo, critique the academic discourse that surrounds it, and engage with the political economy within which it is produced. This project argues that the institutional work of disciplining minority subjects--once openly performed by racialization in a way no longer possible under neoliberal multiculturalism--has been continued in part by political, social, and economic forces I group under the umbrella term propriety. I expose how the designation "appropriate" becomes a prerequisite for political recognition and representation, analyzing representative political texts that are fundamental to contemporary definitions of minority subjects alongside national and literary-critical genealogies of discourses of difference. I argue that attachments to values and forms explicitly identified as "appropriate" conceal and maintain race-based hierarchies characteristic of U.S. national identity formation. In response, I theorize inappropriateness as a category of political and literary representation for exploring questions of visibility and enfranchisement central to the national narrative of the United States. Inappropriateness is a political and aesthetic movement that deploys subjects and forms often denounced as improper to the contemporary era. Inappropriate aesthetic works are those which attempt to distinguish difference from "diversity," influence minority subject formation, and shape knowledge production in ways that are counter to the objectives of neoliberal multiculturalism. Four chapters establish a taxonomy of the ways inappropriateness operates: formally, corporeally, nationally, and historically.Item "Nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer": Portrayals of Masculinity and Ideal Citizenship in World War II Combat Films, 1989-2001(2013) Cerullo, Michelle; Giovacchini, Saverio; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Traditional platoons of World War II combat films were visualizations of an America that could be, rather than a reflection of the America that was. One might assume that, had the trend toward inclusive representation continued, the World War II combat platoons of the films of the 1990s might have included women or homosexuals, since the military of the 1990s was fully integrated on a racial front. Instead platoons' compositions remained unchanged. And in this new context, rather than acting out of a desire to expand the terms of citizenship, these movies represent a closing off of the terms of citizenship. In the face of demands for a change in the terms of civic participation from women, from homosexuals, from disabled citizens, these movies represent a vision of a shared past that is easier than the one currently inhabited by viewers. What does it mean that this period, out of all the periods in the history of the United States is the one that is deemed most worthy of celebration?Item Difficulties in Loyalism After Independence: The Treatment of Loyalists and Nonjurors in Maryland, 1777-1784(2009) Nath, Kimberly; Ridgway, Whitman; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis examines the difficulties the Maryland legislature encountered with Loyalists and nonjurors after independence. It follows how the legislation passed by the Patriot controlled legislature was implemented from 1777 to 1784. The Maryland legislature first passed legislation to identify those not supporting the American Revolution, mainly the Loyalists and nonjurors. This thesis explores the identification process and then the punitive measures, such as British property confiscation and treble taxes, taken by the legislature. This thesis argues that Patriots succeeded in identifying Loyalists, but struggled to seize all British property and failed to generate vast amounts of revenue.Item From "Quare" to "Kweer": Towards a Queer Asian American Critique(2009) Sapinoso, J. Valero (JV); King, Katie R.; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)It is insufficient to think of multiple dimensions of difference in merely some additive fashion--what is needed is a fundamentally different approach. E. Patrick Johnson and Roderick A. Ferguson, respectively, offer such approaches as well as inspiration for this dissertation. More specifically, they posit interventions into queer theorizing and queer studies that attempt to disrupt the (over-)emphasis on whiteness and instead turn the focus to racialized subjectivities. The centrality of African American racial formations in their queer of color critique, however, must be taken into account. Given the vastly different histories between African American and Asian American racial formations, including, but not limited to the ways in which these racial groups have historically been pitted against one another (for the betterment of privileged whites), it is especially important that we consider how the specificities of Asian American subjects and subjectivities might account for distinct queer of color critiques. At the heart of my dissertation is the movement towards a queer Asian American critique, or "kweer studies," that directs attention to nationality and national belonging as a way of expanding beyond the black/white binary which currently predominates. In particular, the key components of nationality and national belonging for queer Asian American subjects and subjectivities that my study foregrounds are cultural, political, and legal citizenship. To this end my dissertation asks, what is needed to imagine and entrench understandings of queer Asian American subjects and subjectivities that are not rendered as alien, always already foreign, or simply invisible within discourses of cultural, political, and legal citizenship? Specifically, through participant observation, critical legal theory, and textual analysis I investigate kinging culture and discourses of U.S. immigration, revealing limits of existing formations that, respectively, have naturalized blackness as the sole focus of queer of color critique, and have narrowly sought queer immigration through seeking asylum and recognition of same-sex partnerships for family reunification, in order to posit a queer of color critique that helps imagine and create more expansive formations and better accounts for the material existence of a fuller range of queer bodies of various colors.