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 Becoming Your Labor: Identity, Production, and the "Affects of Labor"(2021) Benitez, Molly; Hanhardt, Christina; Padios, Jan; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Becoming Your Labor: Identity, Production, and the’ Affects of Labor’,” analyzes the role work plays in our lives by focusing on how Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPoC) and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Queer (LGBTQ+) trades workers navigate their identity in the workplace and beyond. This project draws on autoethnographic and ethnographic research with LGBTQ+ identified trades workers over a span of six years plus select historical evidence. Bringing together feminist and queer of color critique, affect theory, and theories of work, this dissertation considers what I call the ‘affects of labor’ – the visceral and active consequences of our working environments that metabolize through our bodies and produce our identities, relationships, and communities. “Becoming Your Labor” focuses on the experiences of LGBTQ trades workers in the Pacific Northwest. While focusing on LGBTQ+ and QTBIPoC trades workers, this research emphasizes how the experiences and lessons of a precise group of workers has much to teach us about larger systems of power shape labor, identity, and community. Individual chapters address how workplace culture is created through history, affects, and bodies; how workers implement various strategies for survival; and how these strategies have consequences for workers, their families, and communities. Chapter one delves into the racist and patriarchal foundation of the trades and the culture of abuse, violence, and toxic masculinity, these foundations have fostered. Here I define the ‘affects of labor.’ In chapter 2 my co-creators speak about how they navigate the affects of their labor at work, specifically harassment, bullying, and fear, and the strategies they enact such as ‘wearing a mask,’ changing their physical appearance, and trying to hang with ‘the boys.’ Chapter three addresses what happens when the “affects of labor” that come home with us. In this chapter trades workers describe how their work has had impacts on their home lives due to depression, violence, and addiction. Chapter four pivots from a focus on the “negative” ‘affects of labor’ to their liberatory potential centering on the experiences of workers employed at Repair Revolution, an LGBTQ+ owned and operated automotive repair shop. The project makes two critical interventions: it traces an alternate genealogy for affect theory through feminist and women of color critique; and it offers the ‘affects of labor’ as a new framework to think through how affects do more than stick to, move, or push, but actually produce and reproduce bodies and identities. In an era in which discussions of workplace power and culture have entered the mainstream – from the “Me Too” movement to the popular claim that the problem of police violence rests on “a few bad apples” – this dissertation aims to offer new understandings of the consequences of work and urges us to think more critically about the dialectical process in which workers, their families, and communities are produced by labor.Item The Favor of Another: Labor and Precarity in Contemporary Fiction(2019) Macintosh, John A.; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Favor of Another: Labor and Precarity in Contemporary Fiction examines how fiction since 1980 responds to changes to the composition of labor and of work itself. In particular, it is interested in the representation of service sector work in the novels of Stephanie Danler, Don DeLillo, Helen DeWitt, Mohsin Hamid, Jamaica Kincaid, Chang-rae Lee, Imbolo Mbue, Dinaw Mengestu, Bharati Mukherjee, Stewart O’Nan, and Merritt Tierce. The dissertation argues that these novelists develop aesthetic strategies to respond to issues including globalization, immaterial labor, entrepreneurial subjectivity, and financialization. Novels about domestic work register a push-pull dynamic of labor migration from the Global South and in doing so ascribe alternately too much or too little agency to domestic worker characters. The challenge of representing restaurant work leads to a strategy of formal and affective repetition to mimic the routine of interactive service. Novels critical of entrepreneurship either expose cliché as the underlying trope of innovation or reflect the failure of entrepreneurial discourse to account for workers at the bottom of the labor market. Although literary criticism about finance tends to insist on abstraction, reading financial novels for labor reveals the contradiction between that representation and reality. While the labor novel seems to have waned, the dissertation reconceives the genre by examining a range of formal responses to work in novels not often read together. Its analysis concludes that reading for labor not only reveals how fiction registers changes in political economy, but also revises our understanding of the contemporary novel more broadly. The novels studied also provide insight into interdisciplinary debates about social and economic precarity since the mid-1970s. Often defined in terms of degraded work and the retrenchment of the welfare state, theorists emphasize a neoliberal restructuring of the economy as the cause of precarity. The dissertation argues instead that precarity is inherent in capitalist economies and its reemergence is symptomatic of prolonged economic stagnation. Taking seriously the etymological overtones of precarious—the dependence on the favor of another—it argues that the end of precarity requires not nostalgia for a previous arrangement of labor, but a challenge to the wage system itself.Item TWO STRIKES AND YOU’RE OUT: THE CONVERGENCE OF COLD WAR POLITICS, LABOR, AND ETHNIC TENSIONS IN THE JULY 1946 STRIKES AT KIRKUK AND ABADAN(2019) Hobson, Tiffany Claire; Wien, Peter; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis explores the convergence of Cold War politics, labor issues, and ethnic conflict on the local scale during the labor strikes which occurred in July 1946 at the oil refineries in Kirkuk, Iraq and Abadan, Iran. The roles of the local communist parties in leading the strikes are weighed against the workers' economic concerns to determine that the workers’ motivations for striking extended beyond political support for any particular party, and claims that the violence which ended the strikes was the result of inherent ethnic conflicts are debunked through examination of both regions’ ethnic histories.Item Cultivating Politics: The Formation of a Black Body Politic in the Postemancipation Louisiana Sugar Parishes(2018) Calhoun, John; Bonner, Christopher; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The capture of New Orleans by Union forces in 1862 led to the emancipation of thousands of slaves across Louisiana’s sugar parishes. This early emancipation preceded the abolition of slavery elsewhere in the South, and it held far-reaching implications for the freedpeople of the sugar parishes. In this thesis, I argue that early emancipation fostered the rise of a powerful black body politic in the sugar parishes that would endure throughout Reconstruction and beyond. This body politic aimed to protect black people’s unique conception of freedom as both white Southerners and white Northerners endeavored to circumscribe that freedom for their own purposes. In pursuit of this goal, the mobilized sugar workers employed a broad range of political tools, ranging from extralegal violence to labor organization. These methods proved effective and safeguarded the freedom of black sugar workers for decades after the Civil War despite attempts by both Democrats and Radical Republicans to dissolve and demarcate that freedom respectively.Item The Black Interior: Work and Feeling in African American Experience(2013) Taylor, Christin Marie; Wyatt, David; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation traces tropes of black workers in order to recuperate the category of labor for literary studies. Following these tropes as they reappear suggests that representations of African American workers have not only had something to say about the stakes of labor as it pertains to social uplift and mobility but also the role of feeling and desire. We might think of these tropes as unveiling dialectics of "push and pull" forces that reside between the confines of the outside world and the soul. By examining tropes of black work in this way, The Black Interior expands materialist readings of labor to include the role of feeling and desire as first elaborated by W. E. B. Du Bois. George Wylie Henderson's Ollie Miss (1935), William Attaway's Blood on the Forge (1941), Eudora Welty's The Golden Apples (1949), and Sarah E. Wright's This Child's Gonna Live (1969) use tropes of black work to reorient American consciousness toward the soul as the common root in the human rights pursuits that marked the twentieth century.Item African American Women's Politics, Organizing, and Activism in 1920s-Washington, D.C.(2012) Murphy, Mary-Elizabeth Bradley; Barkley Brown, Elsa; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation offers a social history of African American women's political activism and organizing in 1920s-Washington, D.C. Specifically, I examine the ways that black women worked to reform the school system, protested segregation in the offices of the federal government and neighborhoods, fought for the passage of an anti-lynching law, formed Republican organizations, upheld African American citizenship through commemoration, and recruited more than one thousand women and men to join a labor union, the National Association of Wage Earners. I argue that black women in 1920s-Washington, D.C., reached into the knowledge and skills they derived from black institutional culture, from their location in the city, from their work experiences, friendships, and family life to organize their campaigns and participate in politics. Black institutional culture formed a bridge to women's formal political activism. As churchgoers, dues-paying members of fraternal orders, fundraisers for the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), or participants in social clubs, African American women developed important skills, including fundraising, publicity, and public speaking, which they applied to their more overtly political campaigns. Locating the origins of African American women's political campaigns and organizations within black institutions helps to explain how black women were sometimes able to mobilize hundreds of foot soldiers in a short period of time. Personal experiences also mattered tremendously in women's political activism. Stories and memories passed along from family and friends inspired African American women to wage their wide-ranging campaigns for justice. During the 1920s, black women in ways both large and small, individual and collective--from walking through the streets to recruit members to a labor organization to raising money for a YWCA organizing drive, from marching through the streets in support of anti-lynching bill, to staging protests in front of the Board of Education building--organized to sustain their communities, reform their city, and enact democracy in Washington and throughout the nation. This dissertation relies on a range of sources, including organizational records, personal papers, black and white newspapers, social scientific studies, government documents, court cases, oral histories, Sanborn maps, city directories, and the manuscript census.Item "America was Promises": The Ideology of Equal Opportunity, 1877-1905(2009) Goldstene, Claire; Gerstle, Gary; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"`America was Promises': The Ideology of Equal Opportunity, 1877-1905" seeks to untangle one of the enduring ideas in American history--equal economic opportunity--by exploring the varied discourses about its meaning during the upheavals caused by the corporate consolidation of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. In so doing, a new framework is proposed through which to comprehend the social and political disruptions wrought by the transition from an entrepreneurial to a corporate society. This framework centers on a series of tensions that have permeated the idea of opportunity in the American context. As an expression of capitalism, the ideology of equal opportunity historically occupies conflicted terrain as it endeavors to promote upward mobility by permitting more people to participate in the economic sphere and emphasizing merit over inherited wealth, while it concurrently acts as a mechanism to maintain economic inequality. This tension allowed the rhetoric of opportunity to animate social dissent among rural and urban workers--the origins of Progressive reform--even as it simultaneously served efforts by business elites to temper this dissent. The dissertation examines the discourses about the ideology of equal opportunity of prominent figures and groups located along a spectrum of political belief. Some grounded opportunity in land ownership (Booker T. Washington); others defined it as control of one's own labor (Knights of Labor); while others connected opportunity to increased leisure and consumption (Samuel Gompers and business elites). As this occurred, the site of opportunity shifted away from entrepreneurship toward competition for advancement and investment within the corporation. Most social activists and reformers stressed the conditions necessary for equal opportunity to thrive. They thus reinforced assumptions about the benefits of economic competition and differentially rewarding individuals, even as they objected to the results of that system. And, certainly, some of these arguments led to progressive changes. But because the necessary outcome of equal opportunity was an inequality of economic result, to move beyond the boundaries of equal opportunity ideology demanded a rare willingness (Edward Bellamy) to question the system of economic competition itself.