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 PATHOLOGICAL PREGNANCIES: THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S ASSAULT ON MIGRANT WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH AND HOW BROWN WOMEN ACTIVISTS SPOKE BACK TO POWER(2022) de Saint Felix, Skye; Parry-Giles, Shawn J.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Abortion and immigration are two polarizing political issues in the United States. These issues were made more contentious under the Trump administration (2017-2021) that tapped into cultural and historical memories of abortion as a pathological practice. Situated at the intersection of abortion and immigration rights, migrant women’s reproduction was treated as something to be monitored and controlled to preserve white patriarchal interests. The Trump administration capitalized on the racist and sexist tenets inherent to rhetorical pathology to construct an enemy in migrant women that only his administration was qualified to neutralize through deportation, arrest, and extreme legislation. Rhetorical pathology, in the context of anti-abortion and anti-migrant policies, resulted in contradictory commitments. For instance, the Trump administration and his supporters at once humanized the fetus, but dehumanized Brown women and children by blocking them from entering the country and accessing basic needs. Administrative officials also argued that their anti-abortion platform prevented racial genocide by saving Black and Brown babies while they treated them as enemy threats to be purged from the country. I ultimately argue that white supremacy and patriarchy are unifying ideologies in rhetorical pathology that help these contradictions “make sense” for Trump supporters and anti-abortion groups. In Chapter One, I examine the Trump administration’s efforts to force birth and block paths to citizenship for migrant girls by studying the case of Jane Doe and the abuses she faced in the Office of Refugee Resettlement Custody (ORR). In Chapter Two, I investigate how white supremacists and misogynists co-opted progressive rhetoric to undermine its force by analyzing Trump’s policies that heavily regulated migrant women’s reproduction. Such cruel and unconscionable actions included reinstating (and expanding) the Global Gag Rule and passing “conscience” legislation that allows healthcare providers to discriminate against healthcare they deem “immoral” like abortion care or emergency contraceptives. In this chapter, we also see how conservatives inverted progressive frames like “Black Lives Matter” to argue that “Babies Lives Matter” to fulfill an anti-choice agenda and describe themselves as abolitionists and saviors of Brown children. In Chapter Three, I show the ways in which Brown women activists reappropriated the rhetorical power that conservatives mimicked to justify their inhumane policies. Activist women reclaimed their rhetorical power of definition, shared stories of both horror and community uplift, and used rhetorical secrecy to combat rhetorical pathologizations. Legislation in support of migrant women emphasized healing and care to undermine the rhetorics of pathology. This project ultimately exposes how rhetorical pathology operates in order to neutralize its power and center the voices and experiences of migrant women in abortion and immigration debates.Item Anywhere but the Reich: The Jews of Nazi Vienna's Applications for Emigration Aid, 1938-1940(2021) Wachtel, Jennifer LeeAnne; Rozenblit, Marsha; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss in 1938, an immediate outpouring of antisemitic violence and legislation horrified the Jews of Vienna. Between 1938 and 1940, Viennese Jews applied to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (Jewish Community of Vienna or IKG) for financial aid to emigrate. Through a close examination of emigration questionnaires Viennese Jews submitted to the IKG, I demonstrate the harrowing effect of the Anschluss and Kristallnacht (November 1938 pogrom) on Jews from all social classes. By centering how individual families engaged with the emigration process, I argue that Viennese Jews immediately recognized the need to flee and exercised enormous creativity to escape. Desperate Viennese Jews were willing to emigrate anywhere and obtain any job outside the Reich. Viennese Jews also demonstrated resilience in the face of Nazi terror by applying for financial aid to flee the Reich even as potential havens shut their doors to Jewish refugees.Item "The Biggest Con in History": American Myth-Making in the Stage and Screen Adaptations of Anastasia(2018) Weyman, Jennifer Elizabeth; Haldey, Olga; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The story of Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova has been engrained in the American imagination for nearly a century. This tale has often been told on stage and screen, depicting Anastasia and her most famous impersonator: Anna Anderson. The adaptation of Anna and Anastasia’s tale that has made the most lasting impact is the 1951 French play, Anastasia, by Marcelle Maurette, and its 1954 English translation by Guy Bolton. Four more adaptations have followed that progenitor play: the 1956 film, Anastasia; the 1965 operetta, Anya; the 1997 animated film, Anastasia; and the 2017 musical, Anastasia. These five artistic adaptations evolved from one another, navigating their own history alongside changing American values. This thesis situates each production within American sociopolitics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, revealing how each production is far more indicative of American ideals than Russian history, particularly with regards to immigration, foreign policy, and feminism.Item BLACK REMOVAL AND INVISIBILITY: AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF RACE AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE 21st CENTURY(2018) Benjamin, Tatiana; Wong, Janelle; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation, Black Removal and Invisibility: At the Intersections of Race and Citizenship in the 21st Century, uses the experiences of Black immigrants as a lens to examine anti-Blackness and citizenship within the contemporary U.S. immigration system. I explore how Black immigrants sit at a unique intersection of Blackness and (un)documentation that produces significant vulnerabilities. Black undocumented immigrants occupy an ambiguous and often untenable position within the U.S. nation-state. They are simultaneously included in the broad category of “Black American” and excluded from the category of “American” by virtue of their lack of citizenship. Their exclusion, I contend, is based both on Blackness and status as unauthorized immigrants. I examine their exclusion by addressing the following questions: How does an emphasis on “invisibility” help us to better understand how immigrant rights organizations in the U.S. address and represent the needs of Black immigrants? In what ways have the experiences of Black immigrants been rendered marginal to social justice movements? What are the consequences of their marginalization for political representation? Lastly, how are Black immigrants responding and transforming the immigrants’ movement? I rely on qualitative methods, including participant observation and in-depth interviews to explore these questions.Item Akwantuo: Plight of the Immigrant(2018) Braimah, Mustapha; Keefe, Maura; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Akwantuo: Plight of The Immigrant was an evening-length dance concert performed March 9, 10 and 11, 2018, at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in partial fulfillment of the Master of Fine Arts degree from University of Maryland’s School of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies. This paper addresses the creation of the original piece, which blends African and contemporary dance with Ghanaian dance theatre. These styles have been linked to the ramifications of the development of dance in Ghana before and after independence. The project situates the choreographer’s personal experience arriving from Ghana at a US airport. This work tackles the feeling of vulnerability, injustice, frustration, humiliation, disappointment and sheer terror of being at someone else’s mercy when being denied a visa or entry into the United States of America. In sum, this paper is a documentation demonstrating the inspiration, research, movement motif, creative process, and conception of the project.Item From "Quare" to "Kweer": Towards a Queer Asian American Critique(2009) Sapinoso, J. Valero (JV); King, Katie R.; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)It is insufficient to think of multiple dimensions of difference in merely some additive fashion--what is needed is a fundamentally different approach. E. Patrick Johnson and Roderick A. Ferguson, respectively, offer such approaches as well as inspiration for this dissertation. More specifically, they posit interventions into queer theorizing and queer studies that attempt to disrupt the (over-)emphasis on whiteness and instead turn the focus to racialized subjectivities. The centrality of African American racial formations in their queer of color critique, however, must be taken into account. Given the vastly different histories between African American and Asian American racial formations, including, but not limited to the ways in which these racial groups have historically been pitted against one another (for the betterment of privileged whites), it is especially important that we consider how the specificities of Asian American subjects and subjectivities might account for distinct queer of color critiques. At the heart of my dissertation is the movement towards a queer Asian American critique, or "kweer studies," that directs attention to nationality and national belonging as a way of expanding beyond the black/white binary which currently predominates. In particular, the key components of nationality and national belonging for queer Asian American subjects and subjectivities that my study foregrounds are cultural, political, and legal citizenship. To this end my dissertation asks, what is needed to imagine and entrench understandings of queer Asian American subjects and subjectivities that are not rendered as alien, always already foreign, or simply invisible within discourses of cultural, political, and legal citizenship? Specifically, through participant observation, critical legal theory, and textual analysis I investigate kinging culture and discourses of U.S. immigration, revealing limits of existing formations that, respectively, have naturalized blackness as the sole focus of queer of color critique, and have narrowly sought queer immigration through seeking asylum and recognition of same-sex partnerships for family reunification, in order to posit a queer of color critique that helps imagine and create more expansive formations and better accounts for the material existence of a fuller range of queer bodies of various colors.