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 The Global Invention of Art: Race and Visual Sovereignty in the Colonial Baltic World, 1860-1920(2019) Pushaw, Bart; Mansbach, Steven A; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study examines the role of art and visual culture in the Baltic Provinces of Imperial Russia, present-day Estonia and Latvia, between roughly 1860 and 1920. This period witnessed the unraveling of a strict social hierarchy that for centuries had long incubated a Baltic German elite, while suppressing the lives and aesthetic expressions of Estonians and Latvians. After the abolition of serfdom, dramatic social, political, and cultural gains transformed possibilities for indigenous Balts, yet most scholars suggest that art and visual culture were not concomitant with the rapid progress of the era. I reveal instead how images and the ability to assume the power of image-making—what one scholar has called “visual sovereignty”—were pivotal to changing these social stratifications. The dissertation examines the ramifications of the necessity to invent “art” when native languages possessed no word to designate “artist” or “painting” as late as 1900. Since Eurocentric models of art history have preconditioned us to accept the fine arts as intrinsically natural to society, we have no model to grapple with the reality that art could be epistemologically novel, as it was for Latvians and Estonians. Working at the intersection of art history’s global turn, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory, I extrapolate the discourses of seemingly disparate but simultaneous happenings across the globe to reveal that the art world of the colonial Baltic was a microcosm of global nineteenth-century debates about race, medium, and modernity. At its core, the study investigates how art assumes significance for disenfranchised populations. The first chapter reveals how indigenous thinkers invented “art” in relation to their spatial experiences, from public monuments to intimate wooden chests. The second explores why photography became the most valued of all visual media, while the third contextualizes how painting, once deemed foreign and culturally irrelevant, could suddenly assume viability by the 1890s. The fourth chapter examines how native artists deployed the conventional genre of landscape painting to transcend the contingency of race in cultural production after 1905. The conclusion offers directions for global art history, revealing the planetary ramifications of Baltic coloniality.Item Globalization and Ethnic Identity in the Art of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Yong Soon Min, and Nikki S. Lee(2012) Choi, Yookyoung; Shannon, Joshua A.; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation offers a comparative study of the work of three Korean American women artists: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982), Yong Soon Min (1953-), and Nikki S. Lee (1970-). While the works by these three artists have garnered some critical attention, they have never been the subject of in-depth art historical research. Embracing the artistic media of photography, film, and video in their work these three artists express a common concern about their identities as simultaneously Koreans, Americans, and women. By looking at these artists' work together, this dissertation explores how the three artists negotiate their hybrid cultural identities in a globalized contemporary America. This dissertation also examines the role of photography, film, and video as their major artistic media following the art practice of the 1970s' Conceptualism. Cha's subtle and allusive film and video installation, Exilée (1980), for example, features images associated with the colonial history of her home country along with images and text about trans-pacific passage. Min's work from the 1990s includes photographs of writing on her own body, and images referring to historical events in both Korea and the United States. In her performative series of photographs entitled Projects (1997-2001), Lee disguises herself as a member of various social and cultural groups, trying to assimilate into them. Together, the three artists offer an intensive comparative case study of the ways in which hybrid cultural identity can be figured in the contemporary world. Focusing on the interpretive analysis of selected art works, the dissertation will show the unique intensity of the visual arts as a tool to communicate concepts of cultural identities, while also bringing needed specificity to the theoretical debates on the issues of cultural and ethnic identities.Item GLOBAL ASSIMILATION AND GLOBAL ALIENATION: LIVES OF PROFESSIONAL WOMEN IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA(2012) Song, Jing; Kim, Seung-Kyung; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the careers and family lives of "professional, white-collar women" in contemporary China in order to understand the ways in which labor markets, state policies, and gender expectations affect these women's lives in an era of rapid globalization. Drawing on multidisciplinary methods including in-depth interviews with twenty women, content analyses of the biweekly, pop-culture magazine Zhiyin, and the literary analyses of two feminist novels, Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby (2001), and Mian Mian's Candy (2003), I discuss how professional women articulate the meaning of their careers and their family lives, and make sense of their experiences as part of China's path to globalization. Analyzing the ways that professional women construct themselves as "women,"--complying with traditional ideologies of womanhood that historically devalued their achievements in the workplace--I interrogate a category of identity, "professional white-collar women." Thus, I present how these "professional white-collar" women's experiences in their multinational workplaces show that their lives are intricately intertwined with the simultaneous process of being assimilated and alienated as a result of the globalization of China. By arguing that, for these women, instead of increasing their personal agency as independent individuals, their careers serve to develop their desire for materialism and capitalist modernity, I present the irony of China's participation in globalization.