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 ACTS OF QUEER RESILIENCE: TRAUMA AS IDENTITY AND AGENCY IN LGBTQ POLITICAL ASYLUM(2022) Perez, Christopher J; Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution is the impetus for asylum seekers to flee their home countries and seek protection elsewhere. Much of the scholarly literature and published legal cases correlate persecution with trauma and approach traumatic events of asylum seekers as always living with barriers or as a “victim.” Additionally, while there is extensive research and scholarly work on LGBTQ immigrants, there is little work specifically on LGBTQ asylum seekers, which suggests these stories matter and have value but often go unheard. Whose stories are told, heard, and valued with immigrants, and specifically asylum seekers? And, what are the risks or advantages of telling stories? For asylum seekers, making a credible case of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution places their trauma in an exchange of capital that advances neoliberal governmentality in the U.S. The nation-state benefits when resourceful “victims” of persecution ask for protection. Neoliberal governmentality can be traced to Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower” where the body is viewed as a laboring machine, disciplining the body to optimize its capabilities and extort its forces. Biopower is literally having power over other bodies in “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations.” Although neoliberal governmentality is a necessary component in discussions of political asylum, its reductionist aim leaves little room for agency for asylum seekers or those with asylum status. How might political asylees use their identities and trauma to subvert neoliberal governmentality? I argue that LGBTQ asylum seekers use their own tactics and techniques in an “art” of self-determination or what I call queer resilience to navigate and negotiate systems and structures of power. While there is no doubt that trauma exists for asylum seekers, using trauma to categorize asylum seekers as lacking, weak, defective, or even victims is a reductionist approach in understanding asylum seekers’ identities and agency. Trauma is operational in how one negotiates structures and systems of power, different spaces, building networks, and obtaining resources. Trauma offers both a useful entry into the legal aspects of political asylum processes and also advances discussions of subjectivity and epistemology. Using narrative analysis, grounded theory, poststructuralist theory, and queer theory, this dissertation unpacks the creative agency of LGBTQ asylum seekers as they make sense of their lives, form their identities, navigate spaces, and negotiate systems of power to “queer” political asylum processes. More specifically, using interviews and examining published cases and other published archival materials, this dissertation details the story of a gay man from a Latin American country who successfully gained asylum in the U.S. and how his asylum process, his trauma, and his racial, gendered, and sexual identities contributed to his agency, which subverts political asylum and offers new ways to consider the operation of biopower, governmentality, and self-determination.Item “LEARN AS WE LEAD”: LESSONS FROM THE FRONT LINES OF THE POOR PEOPLE’S CAMPAIGN(2021) Hufnagel, Ashley Marie; Padios, Jan; Hanhardt, Christina; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the spring of 1968, over six thousand poor people—black, chicano, white, Puerto Rican, and Native American from rural areas to urban centers—converged on Washington, D.C. to call attention to poverty and inequality in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. This six-week demonstration was part of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final and oft-forgotten Poor People’s Campaign. Fifty years later, thousands of people in over forty states have taken part in reviving this movement as the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival (PPC 2018+), co-chaired by Bishop William Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis. From low-wage workers’ fight for $15/hour minimum wage in the South to the Apache struggle to protect sacred land from copper mining in Oak Flat, Arizona; from the battle to stop emergency managers from poisoning and privatizing water services in Michigan to the urgent demands to abolish the criminalization of black, immigrant, and poor communities, “Learn as We Lead” investigates how local and national organizers are utilizing the vehicle of the campaign to build a broad-based movement across lines of identity, geography, and issue, while centering the leadership of the poor. Drawing on participant observation within the campaign, interviews with over forty grassroots leaders from twenty-seven states, and archival research, this dissertation uncovers how movement practitioners are reproducing and reformulating a long history of multiracial and multi-issue class politics—from the welfare rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the National Union of the Homeless of the 1980s and 1990s, from the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) of the early 2000s to the Moral Mondays and low-wage worker movements of recent years. In a time of deepening political, economic, environmental and health crisis, leaders with the PPC 2018+ offer critical insights on forging class consciousness and solidarity across difference.Item “Intimate Entanglement: The Gendered Politics of Race and Family in the Gulf South"(2019) Bearden, Joshua L; Lyons, Clare; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Intimate Entanglement: The Gendered Politics of Race and Family in the Gulf South,” uses manuscript court records, newspapers, records of colonial administrators, and accounts of merchants and travelers to investigate the ways in which cross-cultural peoples practiced an adaptive gender culture in the Gulf South in the era between 1740-1840. “Intimate Entanglement” argues that a protean understanding of the gendered dynamics within the family allowed Anglo-Native peoples to eschew the racial categorization imposed upon them by Anglo-Americans while also self-fashioning identities that allowed for maximum autonomy and for the protection of their wealth and status within Native communities. Familiar with both the matrilineal/matrifocal familial arrangements of the Five Tribes of the Gulf South as well as the gendered norms associated with the Anglo-American patriarchal family, cross-cultural peoples decided which identities they presented for public consumption depending upon the needs of a particular situation. This practice became prevalent during the colonial era, when increased contact between Anglo and Native peoples created unstable gendered and racial identities. By the early nineteenth century, Anglo-Americans had embraced a rigid definition of white patriarchal identity that centered Anglo men’s ability to control subordinates, own slaves, and exploit property, enslaved persons, and other forms of wealth. At the same time, Anglo-Americans embraced a new racial hierarchy which sought to consign people of Native and African ancestry to the same inferior position. Cross-cultural people fought this new racialization by continuing to practice the flexible understandings of gender that had its roots in the colonial past.Item Cooking with Mama Kim: The Legacy of Korean Women (Re)Defining Cultural Authenticity(2018) Sprague, Justin; Bolles, Augusta L; Kim, Seung-kyung; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)What is considered “authentically Korean,” how those concepts are imagined, and in what ways authenticity is constructed through the vehicles of food and Korean motherhood is the core focus of this dissertation project. This study employs visual and discourse analysis, utilizing historical archives, vlog personalities, cookbooks, web portals, and various forms of food branding and packaging. Within the interdisciplinary field of Food Studies, the conversation regarding authenticity is a fundamental one, with varying work being performed to examine what and how it is employed, and who/what are the gatekeepers that determine the parameters for something as “authentic.” The intervention into this conversation is to explore the ways that authenticity as a theoretical model has intersectional, subjective, or adaptive, potential. This entails employing the term “plastic authenticity,” which is a model of authenticity that favors the positioning of non-normative bodies (i.e., multiracial and diasporic) as brokers of cultural authenticity. In the end, this dissertation contributes to scholarship in Women’s Studies, Food Studies, and Ethnic Studies by pushing the boundaries of how cultural/racial authenticity is constructed, and the ways that women and food have direct impacts as gatekeepers on this process. Analyses range from a historical timeline of Korean immigration to the U.S. with a focus on Korean women, an analysis of a popular YouTube chef, Maangchi, and her employments of the concept of authenticity, analysis of Korean food branding strategies and their claims of authentic Korean food in the U.S., and the website analysis of a mixed-race Korean community to explore the ways that authenticity is invoked by persons not traditionally deemed “authentically Korean.” This research is critical, as it expands the field of research in Korean Studies to not only focus on women and mixed-race Koreans as historical objects, but as active agents in cultural production, meaning-making, and history writing.Item Broken City: Race, Property, and Culture(2018) Casiano, Michael; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Broken City: Race, Property, and Culture is an interdisciplinary study situated within the fields of urban history, African American Studies, and ethnic studies that examines Baltimore City during a period that roughly spans the late-nineteenth century to the mid-1950s. Using archival sources and close readings, this study examines city law, newsprint, popular culture artifacts, public health periodicals, reform publications, and social scientific production to narrate how, during this period of massive urban growth, theories of black life and culture manifested in city policy around the question of property and its regulation. This dissertation’s contribution to similar studies around the question of black geographic exclusion and containment is to highlight the ways that property controls—and the bases of municipal power itself—were bound up in the intentional criminalization, pathologization, and destruction of black communities, all of which were justified by persistent cultural critiques of black fitness for civil life centered on gendered and sexualized assumptions. The dissertation’s interrelated local investigations narrate social dramas that both exhibited culturally-specific interpretations of black life and precipitated institutional mandates guided by—or reproductive—of those interpretations. One investigation analyzes the discourses of black deviance that animated Baltimore’s crusade against the “cocaine evil” in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century to demonstrate how municipal power grew during this period to account for Jim Crow-era investments in disciplining black Baltimoreans and white desires to justify residential exclusion. Another investigation charts how, in the city’s racial covenants, black people became indexed as “nuisance,” a legal maneuver that allowed developers and white homeowners to categorize black people as a hazardous land use whose exclusion was protected under property rights. All told, these investigations demonstrate how, in Baltimore, the basis of municipal power and development, rooted in the protection and maintenance of property, was and continues to be based in the containment of black life through cultural prescriptions of black deviance.Item Immigrant Self-representation: Chinese American Immigrant Writers Ha Jin and Yiyun Li in the International Context(2018) Liu, Shuang; Wang, Edlie; Chu, Patricia; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this thesis, I talk about how first-generation Chinese immigrant writers contribute to Chinese American literature through their unique representations of immigrant life. Due to language barriers and other historical reasons, a majority of representations of immigrant life in Chinese American literature have been written by the descendants of immigrants, second-generation writers. Now, there are more Chinese immigrant writers who write immigrant stories in America. To some extent, immigrant writers’ representation of immigrant life is a “self-representation,” since they are writing their own stories. By comparing immigrant writers’ works to those from second-generation writers, I argue that Ha Jin and Yiyun Li are immigrant writers who have contributed to Chinese American literature in three aspects: genre, theme, and language.Item From Karbala to Qādesiyyeh: the Spectacle of Arab “Other” in Persianate and Parsi Literary Traditions(2017) Jamshidi, Abbas; Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad; Richardson, Brian; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In early decades of the twentieth century, a distinct anti-Arab discourse emerged in modern Persianate literature. A complex process of identification and disidentification of self and “otherness” came to cast them as the “other” of the Persianate people who are represented as occupying a higher standing on an imaginary evolutionary scheme. While this view faced strong competing discourses in the 1960s and 1970, prior to the 1979 Islamic revolution, it did not fade completely. The present dissertation argues that the emergence of antiquarianism in Iran and its neighboring cultures in the nineteenth century, and a growing Shi’i conceptualization of “otherness,” underlined the discourse that recast the Arabs as destroyers of Iran’s antiquities. As the title of this project indicates, two traumatic moments define the range of materials examined here. “From Karbala to Qādesiyyeh” tries to demonstrate how the mutable image of the “other” in some Persianate literary environments historically has gone through certain changes where religious conceptualizations of self and “other” were displaced by ethnic ones. Examples of early Shiʿi poetry and performative practices like taʿziyeh performances and cursing rituals are sites where in Chapter One I examine the identity of this religious “other” as it ambivalently consisted of Omayyad Arabs, Ottoman Turks and Uzbeks. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, this ambivalence was reduced in favor of an ethnic “other” who was resolved to destroy not Iran’s Shiʿi faith but the Persian “nation.” This was when the emergent ideology of modern Persian nationalism replaced Shiʿi-Sunni paradigms of self and “otherness” with tropes and discourses derived from colonial sciences of archaeology and anthropology. As a result, the newly conceptualized Arab “other” no longer came from the battle of Karbala (680 CE) which is a foundational moment for the Shiʿi faith; instead, he came from the battle of Qādesiyyeh (636 CE) which marked the downfall of the Sasanian Empire and the advent of Islam in Iran. The career of renowned modern writer, Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951), tends to epitomize this epistemological shift. As a preamble to my study of Hedayat, in Chapter Two, I briefly investigate the emergence of antiquarianism in nineteenth-century Iran in the works of revolutionary poet, Mirzādeh ʿEshqi (1894-1924). I argue that ʿEshqi’s romantic reception of Iran’s antiquities, especially the Ctesiphon ruins where the remains of the Sasanian past could be seen, was a watershed moment for the formation of an antiquarian discourse in modern Persian literature. This was when ʿEshqi transplanted “footsteps of a barefooted Arab” at the Ctesiphon ruins in an effort to restore the latter’s agency as the purported destroyer of Iran’s pre-Islamic glories. As I argue in Chapter Three, Hedayat transformed ʿEshqi’s imaginary encounter with the Arab “other” into a political theatre where presumptions about the inferiority of Arab material culture, especially their uncouth appearance and humble source of subsistence, function as the armature of the evolutionary discourse he directs at them. Hedayat’s appropriation of the findings of European sciences of archaeology and anthropology –popular among elite circles in Iran in 1920s and 1930s – tends to frame his representations of Arabs as some “primitive” people attacking a superior Persian civilization. The racial anthropological underpinnings of his writings reached an unprecedented level when in one of his satirical works, he paraded the Arabs in a human zoo (ethnological exhibition) in Berlin supposedly to expose their “barbarous” deeds and creeds. By submitting the Arabs to the category of “savages,” Hedayat mobilized the pernicious tropes and discourses of certain colonial exhibitions where Africans and “Orientals” were put on display in Europe as signifiers of alterity. In Chapter Four, I argue that certain colonial elites in the Indo-Persian community of India, known as the Parsis, played a vital role in fostering the absorption of colonial sciences of archaeology and anthropology in the elite discourses of history and literature in nineteenth-century Iran. Examining the writings of Manekji Limji Hataria (1813–1890), the well-known emissary who was sent from Mumbai to Iran to improve the lives of its Zoroastrian community, can shed light on how the image of Arabs as “uncivilized” destroyers of Iran’s ancient glories was discursively manufactured by projecting onto them the very practices Hataria observed among contemporary Persians when it came to failing to protect their country’s ancient heritage. The Parsi texts examined here capture a vibrant interplay between age-old Persian concepts, and tropes and discourses they borrowed from European colonial literature. Exploring the intertextual continuities we find between the two traditions can offer fascinating comparative insight into the polyphony of voices that animates the Persianate literature in its trans-regional reach.Item REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MILITARY IN 20TH CENTURY ETHNIC AMERICAN LITERATURE(2017) Fontenot, Kara Parks; Nunes, Zita C; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 20th century ethnic American literature, writers deploy representations of the US military to expose the operations of American hegemony, articulate relations of power, reveal how they are maintained, identify contradictions in the rhetoric of American nationalism and imagine not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic, and national lines. As a national institution controlled by the US government and consuming labor in the form of military service from citizens of all classes, races and ethnicities in ways that reflect existing relations of power in American society at large, the US military presents a unique and powerful site for articulation of relationships between nation, race, and class. As evidence, this dissertation explores six American novels, all published in the 20th century and taking as their subject matter US military involvement in declared and undeclared military conflicts of that era. Close readings of these novels bring our attention to three specific examples of political projects for which representations of the US military in literature have been deployed: to question constructions of American nationalism by highlighting contradictions and inconsistencies, to consider the military’s institutionalized labor practices in order to explore relationships between race and class as well as imagine means of struggling for social justice, and to critique US foreign policy and military operations overseas. These writers individually and collectively refuse to examine race and/or ethnicity in isolation but instead consider these aspects of subjectivity in the context of national identity, class relations, immigration, globalization, and other social forces. While the relationship between ethnicity and military service has been addressed in other disciplines, such as history, political science, and social science, I argue that literature is a medium especially well-suited for this exploration as it not only allows for the articulation of existing social relations but also for the imagination of not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic, and national lines.Item The U.S. Latina Boom: The Formation of a Feminist Literary Movement, 1984-2000(2017) Morillo, Kara Ann; Ontiveros, Randy J; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The time period that spanned the late 1980s through the early 1990s saw an increase in production of U.S. Latina literature by women. Their production was so prolific it generated a Boom—a renaissance of Latina writing into the marketplace. This dissertation revisits what we may think of as a watershed moment in literary history and popular culture. I examine the impact of the Latina Boom on American literature writ large and on the U.S. publishing industry. Reading against arguments about the mere mainstreaming of ethnic voices, I contend that Latina Boom writers strategically used their respective positions to initiate progressive cultural change within and by way of the literary mainstream. Further, I argue that the Boom spans a wider timeframe than usually acknowledged, extending from 1984 to 2000. What’s more, this extended Boom represents an ongoing a composite of multiple literary, social, and cultural movements that exceeds the bounds of the Boom as an ongoing process of revision, inspiration, and change. When viewed as a collective, intentional effort within the mainstream rather than as individual accomplishment before the masses, the Latina Boom can be better appreciated by scholars and readers for its impact on American publishing and literature. I argue that writers Sandra Cisneros, Cristina García, Julia Alvarez, and Ana Castillo utilized the publishing market’s interest in them to make visible and marketable a feminist literary movement. The biggest outcome of the Boom has been the expansion of the American canon and mainstream marketplace to include more diverse voices in American literature, most notably by a younger generation of writers who found their inspiration in their groundbreaking predecessors. I conclude with a discussion on the Latina Boom’s beneficiaries, which includes authors Cristina Henriquez, Jennine Capó Crucet, Patricia Engel, and Kirsten Valdez Quade.Item Multiraciality Enters the University: Mixed Race Identity and Knowledge Production in Higher Education(2016) Allen, Aaron; Hanhardt, Christina; Struna, Nancy L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Multiraciality Enters the University: Mixed Race Identity and Knowledge Production in Higher Education,” explores how the category of “mixed race” has underpinned university politics in California, through student organizing, admissions debates, and the development of a new field of study. By treating the concept of privatization as central to both multiraciality and the neoliberal university, this project asks how and in what capacity has the discourses of multiracialism and the growing recognition of mixed race student populations shaped administrative, social, and academic debates at the state’s flagship universities—the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles. This project argues that the mixed race population symbolizing so-called “post-racial societies” is fundamentally attached to the concept of self-authorship, which can work to challenge the rights and resources for college students of color. Through a close reading of texts, including archival materials, policy and media debates, and interviews, I assert that the contemporary deployment of mixed race within the US academy represents a particularly post-civil rights development, undergirded by a genealogy of U.S. liberal individualism. This project ultimately reveals the pressing need to rethink ways to disrupt institutionalized racism in the new millennium.