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 "If I Am Free My Child Belongs to Me": Black Motherhood and Mothering in the Era of Emancipation(2022) Wicks-Allen, Jessica Lynn; Rowland, Leslie S; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Black women’s reproduction was foundational to Atlantic slave societies because it produced future laborers and profits for slaveholders. Although the commodification of bondwomen’s children generated grief, loss, and violence, enslaved women constructed individual and collective practices of motherhood that challenged that commodification. As emancipation reconfigured the social order, black women’s and children’s bodies and labor acquired dramatically new meanings. From the standpoint of former slaveholders, black women’s reproductive capacity and offspring were no longer assets but encumbrances. Meanwhile, emancipation meant that freedwomen could exercise parental rights that had previously been denied. These shifts raise questions about how motherhood and childrearing informed black women’s transition from slavery to freedom in the U.S. South. The dissertation argues that black women’s identities as mothers profoundly affected how they experienced and negotiated freedom. Black mothers sought to exercise self-determination by defining motherhood on their own terms, gaining control over their reproduction, and rearing their children as they saw fit. To achieve these ends, they demanded remunerative employment, custody of their children, protection from violence, child support, education for their progeny, and personal dignity. Reconstituting family and protecting the welfare of their children animated formerly enslaved women’s pursuit and definition of freedom. Whereas formerly enslaved women’s reproductive capacity and children had been assets under slavery, in freedom they became undesirable to employers, generating a whole new set of constraints for black mothers, who, as a result, faced employment discrimination and poverty. In response to these circumstances, newly freed mothers developed a politics of mutual vulnerability that stressed collectivity rather than individualism. If motherhood engendered vulnerability, the embrace of relationality served as a source of black maternal empowerment. While building on previous scholarship that has examined emancipation through the lens of gender, the dissertation deploys a more specific social location—motherhood—to bring black women’s politics into sharper focus, emphasizing the ways in which ex-slave women made and remade freedom through kinship and care work. In so doing, it also reveals that motherhood remained a site of black subjugation, albeit in new ways.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.