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 WAITING ON “THE HIGHER LAW”: HENRY MASSEY AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST PHILADELPHIA’S FUGITIVE SLAVE COURT(2023) LaRoche, Matthew David; Bonner, Christopher J; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Philadelphia’s preeminence as an historical hub of Underground Railroad activity, popularized through the exploits of William Still, is well established. However, a series of archival gaps have virtually erased Philadelphia, and particularly the early years of its fugitive slave court, from the wider historiography of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This work attempts to re-center Philadelphia, as well as its white-led abolitionist organizations and its African American community, in the scholarly discussion over the Act’s origin, intent, and effect. Attempting to overcome archival limitations, this work reconstructs the city’s first fugitive slave court, overseen by Commissioner Edward D. Ingraham from December of 1850 until his death in November of 1854, through the eyes of its participants. Using a close-reading approach, this thesis considers Philadelphia’s resistance to both the Ingraham court and the Act in toto from three perspectives. By comparing the case of Adam Gibson (the first victim of the Ingraham court) to that of Henry Massey, a Maryland freedomseeker and the last person sentenced before Ingraham’s death, this thesis establishes a documentary baseline through which one can trace the court’s evolution across the opening years of the Act’s enforcement. Through recreating the personal and institutional histories of Commissioner Ingraham, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, and the abolitionist lawyers who represented Gibson, Massey, and other freedomseekers, this thesis provides context to evaluate the legal, social, and religious moves made by the city’s elite in response to the Act’s passage. Finally, by drawing out indications of black organization and agency hidden within the internal records of the Abolition Society itself, this thesis attempts to delineate the practical limits of interracial abolitionist cooperation within Philadelphia at the time. Ultimately, this thesis finds that a combination of geographic pressures and ideological guardrails particular to Philadelphia prevented a stronghold of abolitionist outrage from forming an effective counter to the Act, even while comparable cities (Boston, Syracuse, Harrisburg) developed legal and illegal strategies for shutting down their resident fugitive slave courts.Item The Race Palimpsest: Examining the Use of Ancestry Testing in the Rhetorical Construction of Identity(2022) Lee, Naette Yoko; Pfister, Damien S.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Race is a palimpsest or layered rhetorical formulation that imbricates competing interpretations of human diversity. Efforts to understand the race concept and intervene in the effect of systemic inequity have been premised on the treatment of race as a social construction. However, the ascendancy of genetic ancestry testing and related biotechnologies have spurred the reiteration of biological categories, rivaling, or supplanting the constructivist perspective. In this dissertation, racial constitution is a rhetorical process that determines how novel understandings of human diversity are interpreted and integrated into the racial palimpsest. This project proposes a theoretical model for understanding the discursive interaction between genomic testing and current racial categorizations. Three case studies were conducted to demonstrate the operation of Kenneth Burke’s positive and dialectic terms for order in this process. The cases examine the genetic test reveal genre and situate their discursive circulation in digital media ecologies. The findings elucidate the operation of rhetorics of genetic certainty, heritability, and narrative invention through which publics process genetic test results and integrate them into understanding of human difference. This dissertation identifies the need for more accurate discursive terms to make sense of ancestry testing and disrupt the integration of genomic data into the palimpsest of race.Item Zero-Sum Game: GamerGate and the Networked Discourse of Hate(2019) Meyer, Joseph Bernard; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Zero-Sum Game utilizes GamerGate – a 2014 harassment campaign against prominent women in the video game industry – to develop a close reading of networked publics in order to understand how power manifests and is enacted online. I combine Actor Network Theory and Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis to first map and archive GamerGate’s participants, targets, platforms, and media followed by platform-specific feminist readings of discourse occurring across the map. Each chapter focuses on how hate and harassment transform (and are magnified) across platforms, an analysis that is further refracted through multidisciplinary, theoretical frameworks. These frameworks are 1) the gamer technicity that subsumed overt white supremacist heteropatriarchy into developing neoliberal individualism that replaces embodied identity with identity through consumption, 2) the ecology of social media and the interaction of platforms that amplify and transform digital expressive media, 3) a phenomenology of information exploring the mediation of lived experience via networked publics that challenges dominant ideology while also providing the tools for the denial of alternative subjectivities and the construction of alternative information networks, and 4) a consumer choice model of online harassment that builds on the previous three theories to provide consumption of an “apolitical” identity that allows for the abdication of responsibility for the actions of hate groups and harassment they have allied themselves with. I argue that the driving force behind GamerGate is the reactionary impulse by those who benefit from structures of power to the challenges posed by broadcast experiences and identities unfiltered by hegemonic processes of traditional media structures. GamerGate thus signifies the violent reaction by those in power to the loss of control faced in the digital age as discursive constructions of identity are challenged across platforms.Item 'Irishness' in Caribbean and Latin American Literature: The Diasporic and Liminal(2017) Glynn, Douglas Michael; Cypess, Sandra M; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation examines representations of the diasporic Irish within the varied literary imaginaries of the Caribbean and Latin America and argues that these representations create a literary paradigm surrounding ‘Irishness’. The project begins by offering a racialized historical overview of the Irish commencing with the conquest of Ireland and following up to the modern day. I then relate observations elucidated by this overview to current conceptions of Irish identity while specifying many of the diaspora spaces to which the transatlantic Irish arrived. I utilize a transamerican approach to literature which permits cross-cultural and multilingual readings of texts that would otherwise remain in isolation to each other. Putting my study into dialogue with scholars like Robin Cohen, William Safran, Avtar Brah and Laura Zuntini de Izarra, I define the terms ‘diaspora’ and ‘diaspora space’ while seeking to underscore the corollaries between these concepts and representations of the Irish in diaspora. After establishing the ways in which I understand and use these terms, I employ the works of Victor Turner and Sandor Klapcsik, among others, to lay down my theoretical framework of the liminal and liminality. In doing so I directly interconnect theories of diaspora and liminality which provides a unique theoretical perspective, and later interject my own nascent theory of the ‘figure’ to better deconstruct the Irish characters under study. Reading a selected corpus of literature from writers such as American-Guatemalan Francisco Goldman, Cuban Zoé Valdés, Jamaican Erna Brodber, Mexican Patricia Cox, American Carl Krueger, and Argentines Rodolfo Walsh and Juan José Delaney, through the liminal process allows me to analyze literature from multiple perspectives while decentering previous literary criticism that has not recognized this multiplicity embedded in liminal readings of narratives. Over the breadth of the project I look to these and other scholars in my efforts to (re)define, dissect, work and wield the terms ‘diaspora’, ‘liminal’ and ‘liminality’ in a variety of fashions, adding to them my own ideas of perpetual liminality, while extracting and examining the representations of ‘Irishness’ found through each of my textual analyses.Item Regarding the nature of things(2017) Hird, Kevin; Ruppert, John; Art; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The works discussed and shown herein are an investigation into the properties and possibilities of materials. Prompted by a sense of playfulness and exploration, these works build upon and combine the fields of Dadaism and Minimalism in a manner that explores the conceptual properties of material. This exploration takes places through destructive processes, exposing the interior of solid matter to a thoughtful consideration of its development, underlying structure, and the effect of forces being applied to the materials, both internally and externally.Item The Great House of Benjamin West: Family, Workshop, and National Identity in Late Georgian England(2014) Fox, Abram Jacob; Pressly, William L; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Anglo-American painter Benjamin West (1738-1820) holds a unique position in the history of Western art. Active during the foundational periods of not one, but two, national schools of art to which he could rightfully claim membership, West recognized his inimitable position in the development of English and American art and sought to position himself at the forefront of each nation. This dissertation examines his fluid national and artistic identities over the course of his instructional relationships with his American students, and the shifting personal and professional goals harbored by each party. While scholars have acknowledged the relation of West's pedagogical practice to his identity as an artist, this study presents an organic account of the relationships between teacher and students as an embodiment of West's ongoing and unprecedented attempts at fame, fortune, and legacy. This legacy was central to Benjamin West's identity as an artist. His professional career was dedicated to the self-aggrandizement of his identities as an (exotic) American, a prolific painter of high-minded scenes of history and religion, and the head of a workshop teeming with artists who shared his heritage, though not always his aesthetic inclinations. Over his career he cultivated a reputation as a welcoming instructor, always willing to give advice or lessons to any artist who approached him. This was not solely an act of altruism. Instead, it was the cornerstone of his construction of a proverbial House of West, a workshop-family whose members and their works would reflect back on the genius of the master, just as strongly as his own oeuvre. Through the examination of four case studies of his instruction of American students – that of Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, and a circle of students led by Washington Allston – this study integrates Benjamin West's teaching practice with his career aspirations, positioning his pedagogy within the greater framework of his self-presentation. In doing so, it presents a history painter engrossed in the promulgation of his name throughout history, through his own artistic output and those of his children and students, as the progenitor of American artists working in the European tradition.Item Tyrant! Tipu Sultan and the Reconception of British Imperial Identity, 1780-1800(2013) Soracoe, Michael; Price, Richard; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues that the figure of Tipu Sultan and the spectacle of the Mysore Wars were a key contributor to shifting British attitudes about empire in the late eighteenth century. Tipu was the ruler of the Indian state of Mysore, acknowledged by contemporaries to be a powerful ruler, a military commander of great distinction - and a hated foe of the British East India Company. Tipu fought three separate wars against the Company; during the course of these conflicts, he was portrayed by the British as a cruel and tyrannical despot, a fanatical Muslim who forced his subjects to convert to Islam and tortured captured British soldiers in his foul dungeons. The widespread presence of this negative "Tipu Legend" testified to the impact that empire and imperial themes exhibited on British popular culture of the era. Tyrant! explores two key research questions. First of all, how did the Tipu Legend originate, and why was it so successful at replacing alternate representations of Tipu? Secondly, what can this story tell us about how the British came to terms with empire - despite initial reluctance - and forged a new imperial identity between 1780 and 1800? Using archival records, newspaper print culture, and popular art and theatre sources, I argue that the vilification of Tipu was linked to the development of an imperial culture. Expansionist Governor-Generals consciously blackened the character of Tipu to make their own aggressive actions more palatable to British audiences at home. Through a process of reversal, preventive war came to be justified as defensive in nature, protecting the native inhabitants of Mysore from the depredations of an unspeakable despot. The increasingly vilified and caricatured representations of Tipu allowed the East India Company to portray itself as fighting as moral crusade to liberate southern India from the depredations of a savage ruler. Company servants were recast in the British popular imagination from unscrupulous nabobs into virtuous soldier-heroes that embodied the finest qualities of the British nation. The study of the faithless and violent character of "Tippoo the Tyrant" ultimately reveals much about how empire is constructed at home and abroad.Item Evening Interruption(2013) Duck, John Austin; Plumly, Stanley; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Drawing heavily on the tradition of the Romantic lyric and using this form to further understanding of the past and present, “Evening Interruption” engages radical formal and sonic disruptions in an attempt, for the speaker, to reconcile the traditional movement of the poetic mind with the rapid degradation of the physical, psychological, and cultural landscapes.Item Egg from the River's Ice(2013) Djordjevic, Ena; Collier, Michael; Creative Writing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Drawn from the experiences of enduring genocide, displacement, and resocialization in the United States, "Egg from the River's Ice" acts as a demonstration of irreparability as the poems shift emphasis from past to present. Beginning as rooted in a more traditional, romantic- lyric/narrative formation, these poems--as the weight of experience presses heavier on them-- come to embody a more radical, disjunct, and often fragmented poetic.Item Crossing Borders: Guillermo Gómez-Peña.(2011) Bolikowska, Agnieszka A.; Cypess, Sandra M.; Spanish Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In Performing Borders: Guillermo Gómez-Peña, I examine selected interdisciplinary and multi-media work of contemporary Mexican-American artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. I develop an alternative set of strategies for reading across-the-border(s) identitarian, artistic and pedagogical encounters in the work of Gómez-Peña. Drawing upon ideas of archive, identity and body in cultural studies, I analyze various performative acts of the artist; varying from visual arts representations, performance art études, public art interventions and the written word. As I juxtapose Mexican, Latin American and Latina/o discourses on identity in Gómez-Peña's work, I aim to see where they overlap and where they differ. Moreover, I search for where Gómez-Peña is creating an identity that is informed by a globalized, cosmopolitan visual culture. I give an account of Gómez-Peña's dialogue with two important identitarian discourses on the Mesoamerican past on both sides of the US-Mexican border: those of Octavio Paz and Aztlán. I analyze the way Gómez-Peña transforms and furthers these two discourses through his reinterpretation of pre-Hispanic codices. Furthermore, I offer a reading of Gómez-Peña's somatic work through its uncanny similarities with the Gonzalo Guerrero figure and discuss a possibility of an identitarian paradigm shift. I examine how Gómez-Peña's performance work reinterprets two theater conventions: Augusto Boal's Forum Theater and the Mexican carpa. I offer a reading of the "Performative Town Meeting" staged at the Smithsonian in the 1990s, and show how Gómez-Peña blends Boal's engaged theater matrix with carpa's ludic conventions to provoke a conversation about the role and limits of performance art. The dissertation concludes with an analysis of an experimental series of workshops that I taught using Gómez-Peña's performative methodology. I examine how the identitarian discussions in Gómez-Peña's work translate into a dynamic classroom scenario as I suggest inherent links between performance and teaching.