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 Hollow Ground: Industry, Extraction, and Ecology in the Floodplains of Early Maryland(2024) Hess, Sophie; Bell, Richard; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Hollow Ground: Industry, Extraction, and Ecology in the Floodplains of Early Maryland,” investigates histories of natural resource commodification, environment, and culture in the Patapsco River Valley, or “The Hollow” as it was called by its first European settlers. Beginning in the seventeenth century, English colonists seized the powerful currents of the Patapsco and the forests surrounding it, the ancestral floodplains of Piscataway and Susquehannock peoples, to build large-scale agricultural projects and industrial factories. These operations altered the environment, and as the valley grew into a center of extractive production, its communities experienced more frequent and severe floods which have continued into the present. This dissertation examines these entwined consequences of environmental capitalism and settler colonialism through a site-specific, multi-century lens, studying how humans, plants, and animals within various spaces of production—iron furnaces, wheat fields, grist and cotton mills, schools, prisons, local governments, and family units —experienced industrialization. It traces trace labor ecologies within communities of enslaved, convict, and low-wage workers, and the ways that soil exhaustion, flooding, and other environmental forces both threatened these enclaves and created opportunities for freedom. This work uses a microhistorical methodology to intervene in histories of energy transition, labor, and the Anthropocene. “Hollow Ground” argues that early American industrialism can help us to better understand how local desires for capital growth have accumulated into global processes of toxic emissions, and how the frontline issues faced by post-industrial communities today relate not only to global production but to local histories of extraction and the culture that perpetuates it. These same communities also hold critical histories of commoning, stewardship, labor resistance, and environmentalism that can help create a blueprint for survival in the face of the climate crisis.Item Queer Ecology of Monstrosity: Troubling the Human/Nature Binary(2023) Thomas, Alex Jazz; Steele, Catherine K; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As a form of visual communication, monsters in popular culture represent and reinforce the changing thoughts and emotions cultures have toward the human/nature binary. This binary, historically supporting discrimination based on race, gender and sexuality, and the environment’s abuse, is often supported through monstrous representations of the Other, but this is a limited view of a monster’s potential. I argue that contemporary hybrid monsters that blend humans and nature together in one queer, boundary-defying body represent U.S. society’s changing relationship with nature while giving the audience a new form of connecting or identifying with the environment and Othered body that critiques the popular ideology of both being something to fear or use. In this study, I advance a monstrous splice of queer theory and ecocriticism that probes the plasticity and queerness of humans and the environment allowing for new narratives, forms of life, and discourses about naturalization and the environment. Through queer ecological theory and methodology, I examine visual and contextual media to study the monster’s potential to embody nature, people, and their conjoined discrimination. The plasmaticness and subversive culture of animation and comics let the monstrous thrive in their display of the plasticity of humans and the environment. I structure my analysis into three case studies focusing on the potential of monsters to critique evolutionary ideology, human exceptionalism, and ecological interaction in light of queer theory’s critique of what is ‘natural.’ Radford Sechrist’s television series Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts and K.I. Zachopoulos and Vincenzo Balzano’s graphic novel Run Wild oppose human exceptionalism by visually plasticizing humanity and giving animals culture and agency in a way that rejects anthropocentric thinking. The monsters of Tomm Moore and Ross Stewart’s independent film, Wolfwalkers and Morvan and Nesmo’s ecological detective novel Bramble critique the cultural separation of urban and green spaces that has excused racial and sexual violence by displaying humanity’s innate connection to nature. Finally, Marguerite Bennett’s erotic graphic novel Insexts and select episodes from Tim Miller’s Love, Death, & Robots challenge evolutionary ideology. In this last case, characters retain their femininity and humanity in their monstrous transformations, rejecting evolutionary and societal inferiority and ultimately showing they can still retain parts of themselves and be powerful and deadly. Taken together, these texts span genres, writing/drawing styles, intended age groups, and environmental messages. They provide a wide range of monster representations and give audiences new ways to view and understand the issues surrounding what we see as ‘human’ or ‘natural’, balancing empowerment, subversivism, and condemnation.Item From Censors to Shouts: Ecologies of Abortion in American Fiction(2023) Schollaert, Jeannette; Walter, Christina; Smith, Martha Nell; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“From Censors to Shouts: Ecologies of Abortion in American Fiction” registers the urgent need to revisit the literary methods of abortion storytelling in multiethnic American women’s fiction with a close attention to one of its most significant tropes: the herbal abortifacients that signify as both code and medicine, recalling the Victorian “language of flowers” as well as essentialist metaphorical connections between femininity, reproduction, and the natural world. This project traces the literary history of herbal abortifacients from abortion’s censorship and criminalization in the nineteenth century to present-day movements to reclaim or “shout” one’s abortion. The fictional mentions of plants known to be abortifacients demonstrate how literature can communicate reproductive and plant knowledge. “From Censors to Shouts” also offers a window into how the practice of domestic herbalism (a gendered and often racialized practice) evolves over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries by pairing a cultural historical analysis of the herbs themselves alongside considerations of how authors’ fictional deployments of these herbs work towards visions of reproductive and environmental justice. “From Censors to Shouts” considers fiction from multiethnic American women writers including Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Summers Kelley, Josephine Herbst, Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, Ntozake Shange, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine. The fictional depiction of herbal abortifacients reveals our continued attention to plant knowledge and self-managed herbal abortion. Understanding how these plant names and knowledges have remained crucial rhetorical, cultural, and visual signifiers of abortion access is vital to understanding the reclamation of these knowledges as we re-commit to the fight for abortion rights and reproductive justice amidst a new legal landscape.Item Atmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination(2022) Moro, Jeffrey; Kirschenbaum, Matthew G; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Atmospheric media are techniques and technologies for the rationalization of air. They take many forms, from the meteorological media of weather maps and satellites, to the infrastructural media of ventilation and climate control, to the embodied media of the breath. This dissertation explores these atmospheric media as fundamental conduits for the cultural work of managing the air, and in turn, for managing climatological catastrophe. Through readings of diverse media objects, from electronic literature and science fiction to 3D printers to air conditioning in data centers, “Atmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination” argues that scientists, artists, and laypeople alike have come to imagine the air as a computer, one that they might program as a way out of environmental crisis. Braiding interdisciplinary insights from environmental media studies, literary studies, and the digital humanities, this dissertation explores how computation smooths over atmospheric difference with the standardization of data, and in doing so, further imperils our shared skies.Item La nature et l'Autre dans Chocolat, Tintin au Congo et Vendredi ou la vie sauvage; une lecture écocritique et post-coloniale(2021) Le Saux, Guilhem Mael; Eades, Caroline; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Tintin in Congo (1931) by Hergé, is an example of the colonial discourse colonial empires propagated to reduce both nature and the Other to inferior beings. Chocolat (1988) by Claire Denis, and Vendredi ou la Vie Sauvage (1971) by Michel Tournier, offer a critical perspective on said colonial discourse. With those three texts, among others, I offer an analysis of how the colonial and neocolonial discourses destroy, exploit and reorganize colonized spaces, nature and peoples. In the first chapter, I develop the destruction of both local cultures and natures in order to make way for colonial empires’ exploitation. In a second chapter, I go over the practices of how colonial empires exploit both natural resources and peoples in colonized spaces. Finally, in a third chapter, I explain how colonial empires intend to reconfigure colonized spaces under a European model; be it language, religion or the use of nature.Item DECENT, SAFE, AND SANITARY? PUBLIC HOUSING AND THE ENVIRONMENT OF EASTERN WASHINGTON, D.C., 1940-1965(2020) Shapiro, Justin; Zeller, Thomas; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the relationships between the physical environment and the history of public housing in Washington, D.C. from the 1940s to the 1960s. The environmental features of public housing complexes, as well as those of the landscape around them, significantly shaped the outcomes of the National Capital Housing Authority’s (NCHA) projects. The scale of public housing construction during that period entailed sweeping and dramatic transformations in the landscape. At the same time, the NCHA found itself constrained by material and financial pressures coming from a variety of bureaucratic and institutional sources. Those pressures limited the NCHA’s ability to respond to environmental stresses at various public housing sites. In the absence of adequate responses from the NCHA, the environment played a significant role in determining the outcomes of the District of Columbia’s public housing program. The physical nature of the NCHA’s choice of sites, as well as the materials that it used, turned public housing complexes into sites of environmental injustice rather than the decent, safe, and sanitary housing that the Authority envisioned.Item An American River: Discourses of Ecocatastrophe, Sustainability, and Belonging in the Potomac River Basin and Beyond(2019) Kier, Bailey; Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)An American River: Discourses of Ecocatastrophe, Sustainability, and Belonging in the Potomac River and Beyond is a queer ecological intervention in American, Queer, Trans(Gender), and Popular Culture Studies. It critiques the primary reliance on the category of culture to analyze the ways media, science, public policy, and the state make knowledge assumptions about sex, gender, and reproduction to construct stories about environmental catastrophe, species, and kind. Transdisciplinary methods are used to uncover the ecologies, relations, adaptations, and resiliencies that might not otherwise be possibly investigated and known, and challenge conventional popular discourses of environmentalism and conservation in an effort to create the intellectual equivalent of biodiversity. Three distinct but interrelated cases are considered. First, an examination of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Island interrogates how sex, gender and reproduction were intimately tied to discourses of wilderness, nature and nation, and the ways in which those concepts have been sanitized for consistency with modern sensibilities about an appropriate memorial for an “environmental” president. Next, a consideration of the popular discourse around the emergence of “transgender fish” in the Potomac River leads to an analysis of how trans-related language and concepts can be used to enrich human understanding of transformations and interactions across ecologies, species, and populations. I offer “interdependent ecological transsex” as a term broadly defined through a hormonal, metabolistic, and adaptive prism to imagine other bodies—not just transsexual human bodies, but fish, bodies of water, and any other kind of body that experiences change in relation to a larger ecology. Third, I examine the possibilities for queering agriculture, or envisaging alternatives to mainstream rhetorics of agriculture, food security, and farming. An American River concludes arguing human knowledge about nature, environmentalism, race, reproduction, and transsexuality is laden in antroheterocentric assumptions about progress, degeneracy, and evolution that is problematic for ethically and equitably addressing social and environmental problems. A queer eco ethic is presented to offer ways humans might begin to imagine nature and the environment differently.Item "To Go to Nature's Manufactory": The Material Ecology of Slavery in Antebellum Maryland(2018) Perry, Tony; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the environmental history of slavery in Maryland and attends specifically to the ways enslaved people’s relationship to their environment manifested in their everyday lives. In this project, I advance an ecological analysis that foregrounds networks of relation between slaves, slaveholders, soils, plants, animals, and cold weather. Grounding my analysis in the everyday world of slavery, my dissertation employs a framework I call material ecology, which utilizes object-oriented analysis as a means of thinking through, unpacking, and rendering the ecology of slavery in Maryland. Using this approach, I organize each of my chapters around a class of objects that materialize different ecological relations. As the points at which such relations converge, cast-iron plows, enslaved people’s shoes, slave-made charms, as well as stews and similar one-pot meals disclose distinctive interactions between the enslaved and their environment. From my analysis of the relationships that cohere around these objects, I argue that in antebellum Maryland slaves and slaveholders differently mobilized elements of their environment against one another in their multiform contests over power. Examining the ecological networks informing these contests illustrates the extent to which the environment in enslaved people’s lives was simultaneously antagonistic and empowering.Item A BOND RATHER THAN A BARRIER? CONSTRUCTING THE ST. LAWRENCE SEAWAY(2014) Brideau, Jeffrey Mitchell; Zeller, Thomas; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A mid-20th century water infrastructure megaproject, the St. Lawrence Seaway is a shipping channel that accommodates ships with a 26-foot draft and allows them to traverse a distance of 2,300 miles, from the headwaters of Lake Superior to the Atlantic Ocean. It also facilitates the production of hydroelectric power, harnessing the river's kinetic energy to produce electrical current. Its official opening, in 1959, unified several formerly discrete elements into a coherent bi-national envirotechnical system. An environmental and technological system embedded in specific social and ecological contexts, the Seaway caused significant disruption - inundated and relocated communities and altered hydrologic dynamics are the most conspicuous repercussions of its construction and continued operation. Despite this contested history, the Seaway has been "naturalized" and masks many attendant ecological and socio-historical transformations. The Seaway's symbolic power is as potent as its social and ecological legacies. The project and associated institutions have become symbols of bi-national cooperation, and are held up as exemplars of transboundary resource management. This symbolic legacy obscures the protracted and acrimonious debate that preceded Seaway construction, as well as alternative possibilities and perspectives marginalized in the process. Accordingly, I contend that the Seaway has both engendered new bonds and simultaneously erected new barriers, transforming the landscape and peoples in myriad and often unanticipated ways. By teasing out the stories concealed by the dominant Seaway narrative, I show that the remaking of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence, between the 1820s and 1960s, materially and discursively reconfigured adjacent societies and landscapes. Using envirotechnical analysis deployed in a bi-national narrative, I explore the Seaway as both a symbol and a reality. The boundaries between these forms are permeable not fixed, and both are crucial to its construction and operation. This story is, at its core, an interrogation of boundaries - a narrative focused on two nations and the river that divides and unites them. It is also about the boundaries drawn between culture and nature, the environment and technology, the abstract and physical, expertise and advocacy, as well as myth and materiality.Item Defining Places: Literary Nonfiction and the National Park Movement, 1864-present(2014) Jacoby, Lindsay Dunne; Fahnestock, Jeanne; Wible, Scott; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The canon of American "Nature writing" has long been recognized for its influence on environmental policy, but the role of specific works in shaping environmental discourse and altering material circumstances has yet to be fully understood, especially from a rhetorical perspective. In response, this dissertation explores how works of Nature writing have functioned as persuasive arguments of definition within the National Park movement. It analyzes how literary nonfiction texts promoted a public understanding of specific landscapes and redefined them as worthy of preservation. The idea of rhetorical ecology underlies this analysis: rather than relying on the commonplace idea that a single author writing a single text can influence an environmental policy, the dissertation traces how a work of literary nonfiction operates within a complex system of texts, writers, readers, institutions, objects, and history. The four main case studies demonstrate how new definitions of place have emerged through works of literary nonfiction, each acting in relationship to a larger campaign that led to the preservation of an American landscape as a National Park: Yosemite, Great Smoky Mountains, Everglades, and Voyageurs. In these landmark campaigns, a prominent work of Nature writing, by a prominent author like John Muir, Horace Kephart, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Sigurd Olson, built upon and contributed to a definitional discourse that enabled people to see a specific landscape differently than it had been seen before. These cases also indicate that, as a landscape changes, the available means of persuasion change, too. Each chapter explores the lines of argument that can be emphasized by rhetors when the place in question defies traditional notions of beauty, grandeur, and purity. Campaigners can rely more or less on aesthetic, economic, scientific, historical, or recreational arguments, depending on the nature of the landscape itself and the rhetorical situation of the campaign. Finally, the last chapter explores the ongoing campaign for a Buffalo Commons National Park on the Great Plains. It follows a recent park debate as it evolves into a discourse of sustainability, and demonstrates how contemporary discussions about sustainable actions are inflected with the discourse of historical campaigns for preservation.