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 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 Learning From The Media: Perceptions of "America" From Chinese Students and Scholars(2008-02-16) Roberts, Quincy; Struna, Nancy; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This research examines the perceptions that international students and scholars from China form of the United States. This thesis tracks the participants' recollection of their beliefs about the U.S. before arriving and examines the transformations that occurred because of lived circumstances and experiences. The research participants eagerly took advantage of the opportunity to visit and study at American universities, believing that this country had the best there was to offer in terms of educational quality. This perceived superiority of the U.S. was believed to extend into other social and cultural categories as well. Through examining the participant's imagined ideals of life in the U.S. the objective is to understand the importance individuals and lived experiences play in the reception and interpretation of cultural images, as well as foreground the "individual" as the main site to examine the intersection of the "global" and the "local". This is meant to elevate the importance of the individual when studying the impact and influence of globalization in the lives of individuals. By using Appadurai's notion of mediascapes as a means to study popular culture the goal is to understand the local and the global in studying the connection between the imagination and globalization.