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 DOMINICAN GAGÁ FROM OUTSIDE AND WITHIN: DISCOURSES ABOUT GAGÁ, RACIAL DISCRIMINATION, AND COMMUNITY ORGANIZING IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC(2024) Hernandez-Sang, Victor; Rios, Fernando; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the discourses that surround Gagá, an African-derived ritual tradition that entails processional music and dance performances to honor deities of Vodou, which is primarily practiced by Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian origin in the Dominican Republic. This study explores the characterization of Gagá from the perspective of outsiders (the media and public figures) and the viewpoint of insiders (the partakers of the tradition). In the analysis, I identify correlates between the characterization of Gagá in the media over time and major political and economic developments in the Dominican Republic. Additionally, I explore the work that community members of Gagá conduct to combat racism and harmful stereotypes about their music and religion. Based on fieldwork, archival research, and compilation of online media, this work provides a nuanced view of the perspective of gagaseros (practitioners of Gagá) regarding their tradition, self-identification, and racial discrimination.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 A BLACK NATIONALIST WORLD: THE RHETORIC OF LEADERS OF THE UNIVERSAL NEGRO IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATION FROM 1914 TO 1925(2022) Carroll, Darrian Robert; Parry-Giles, Shawn; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Black people continue to struggle for freedom. This project examines the way that leaders of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) fought for the freedom of Black people from 1914 to 1925. UNIA leaders rhetorically fought for Black people’s freedom by building on their belief in Black self-determination to practice world-making and envision a public. Turning back to UNIA leaders’ espousal of evaluations of the present and expectations for the future illustrates how UNIA leaders developed a view of a public capable of including all Black people and left behind a roadmap for how to make a more equitable world now. Chapter One investigates Marcus Garvey’s “Address to the 2nd Universal Negro Improvement Association Convention.” Garvey’s evaluations and expectations, his world-making, and his freedom dream, provided the foundation for UNIA leaders’ view of their public as one that included all Black people. Chapter Two examines the rhetoric of UNIA leaders Henrietta Vinton Davis, William Ferris, and Marcus Garvey during the “Africa for the Africans” campaign. The second chapter reveals how leaders’ world-making rhetoric provided them with the opportunity to envision a parallel public—a public inclusive of all Black people and insulated from the negative views of the “dominant” public. The third chapter examines how leaders articulated evaluations of the past and present and expectations for the future to develop a view of their public as one still capable of supporting Black self-determination despite the imprisoning of Marcus Garvey. UNIA leaders like Henrietta Vinton Davis, William Ferris, Amy Jacques Garvey, William Sherrill, T. Thomas Fortune, and Marcus Garvey exemplified a rhetoric of champions as they predicted the future success of their public. The fourth chapter investigates how the most indispensable women leaders of the UNIA reflected on the UNIA’s successes from 1914 to 1925 after the UNIA had passed its prime. Chapter Four turns to Amy Ashwood Garvey’s and Amy Jacques Garvey’s reminisces of Marcus Garvey in their interviews for “The Ghost of Garvey” conducted by Lerone Bennett Jr. In their interviews, Ashwood Garvey and Jacques Garvey produced a rhetoric of falling forward by evaluating the UNIA’s past and expecting that the efforts of the UNIA leaders would have purchase for Black people fighting for freedom in the future. Ashwood Garvey’s and Jacques Garvey’s rhetoric pushed a view of leaders’ public as strong and supportive of Black self-determination into perpetuity. This project concludes by reflecting on what UNIA leaders’ world-making and envisioning of a public illuminate about Black Nationalism in the 1960s and world-making now. Leaders did not get to see their Black Nationalist world come to fruition, but UNIA leaders did bring millions of Black people together around the idea that if they believed in self-determination, the future was theirs for the making. Turning back to UNIA leaders’ rhetoric from 1914 to 1925 evinces how by believing in Black self-determination and articulating their own evaluations of the present and expectations for the future, UNIA leaders charted a path to a different world.Item “THE GREAT QUESTION”: SLAVERY, SECTIONALISM, AND THE U.S. NAVAL OFFICER CORPS, 1820-1861(2021) Bailey, Roger; Bell, Richard; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes how United States naval officers’ beliefs about race and slavery shaped sectionalism between the North and South in the antebellum era. As agents of the federal government operating far from the capital, naval officers had significant influence on the implementation of American foreign policy. With reputations as respected professionals and travelers, they also shaped national discourse with their reports, speeches, and publications. These traits made officers important public figures as the future of slavery became a pervasive issue that increasingly affected American naval operations. The study examines the US Navy’s suppression of the transatlantic slave trade, support for African colonization in Liberia, policing of unauthorized “filibustering” invasions in Latin America, and exploring expeditions. It argues that up until the secession crisis at the outbreak of the Civil War, the naval officer corps was remarkably resilient to the growing divide between the North and South. Most officers considered themselves to be politically moderate on the issue of slavery, and they tried to curtail the institution’s worst excesses, eliminate threats to the stability of slavery, and promote external, compromise solutions to the nation’s domestic crisis that prioritized rule of law. These solutions sought to unify white Americans around visions of empire and the expatriation of African Americans. In pursuing such goals, officers tried to enact their own version of American foreign policy. Though they had limited material success, their efforts supported political moderatism in the antebellum United States. As more and more Americans took up pro- and antislavery stances, naval officers used federal power and their personal influence to help maintain the belief that compromise could preserve the Union.Item Laughing to Keep Human: Disruptions of Racist Logic in African American Humor(2021) Morgan, Abbey A.; Washington, Mary Helen; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project examines black humorists who challenge the Eurocentric, racist logics delimiting what it means to be human while demarcating blackness as inferior. While many scholars in black humor centralize humor as a means of resistance, a source of comic rage or redress, this project suggests that black humor offers a space to celebrate black humanity as it broadens representations of blackness. By turning to the staged parodies of Frederick Douglass in the 19th century, the stand-up routines of Jackie "Moms" Mabley and Richard Pryor in the 20th century, and the satire of novelist Paul Beatty, the project uses this unlikely assemblage to reveal a lineage of black humor that has effectively and cogently disrupted white supremacist logics while enacting a type of self-actualization of a fuller sense of humanity.Item A New Race of Christians: Slavery and the Cultural Politics of Conversion in the Atlantic World(2020) Fischer, Matthias; Brewer, Holly; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is intended to fill a significant gap in the scholarship on slavery, race, and religion in the early modern Atlantic. Restoring a longue durée approach to the study of colonial history, it argues that there was a long, broad, and vibrant debate over the legitimacy of slavery and race. A central analytical tenet of this work is that religion and race were concepts linked from the early decades of colonization and developed in conjunction with one another. Enslavement predicated on heathenism brought baptism in particular to the center of the debate over whether African slaves could become free by adopting Christianity. Heathenism was central to early justifications of African slavery in the plantation colonies of the New World, and it also played a fundamental role in the construction, contestation, and articulation of racial categories, even if Christianity remained an important marker of colonial identity and social belonging.While the accommodation between the clergy and governors, planters, vestries, and colonial assemblies often conflated Christianity’s moral obligations with colonial self‐interest, religion and religious ideas also helped to challenge and undermine hierarchies based on race. Whether they were Jesuit priests, Anglican ministers, Quaker clerics, or Moravian evangelicals, missionaries of all backgrounds were able to provide a measure of spiritual and material relief to men and women who experienced human, material, and cultural deprivation on a massive scale. In these ways, enslaved and free people of African descent ascribed new meaning to Christianity that transcended narrow European definitions, challenging emergent notions of racial difference. Linking intellectual processes with social and political practices and institutions, this study attempts to resituate the Caribbean as foundational to the creation of a modern consciousness.Item RACE, GENDER, AND CLOSURE IN LATE VICTORIAN FICTION(2020) Butler, Virginia Lynn; Richardson, Brian; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While the study of closure in Victorian fiction has been marked by astute interventions in gender theory, these insights often fail to take an intersectional approach, particularly when it comes to the racial dynamics of the expanding British Empire. Race, Gender, and Closure in Late Victorian Fiction studies how ethnicity, foreignness, and race complicate our preconceived notions of gendered closure that often posit the narrative options for women as a moralistic system that rewards with marriage or punishes with death. With the expansion of the Empire, the Victorian Novel expanded its ability to depict foreign space; however, our understanding of gendered closure has not taken a sufficient correlative leap to include women of color or ethnic bodies that exist outside of the purview of the British domestic sphere. By analyzing the closural ends for English characters in foreign space, the conclusions of hybrid characters and hybridized space, and the fates of characters and spaces subject to imperial control, this project aims to further develop our understanding of narrative closure for Victorian fiction, ultimately demonstrating the limitations of the marriage/death binary for female characters. Race, Gender, and Closure in Late Victorian Fiction shows the rhetorical violence of being forgotten within the text yet reveals the ways in which these lapses express how the line between Victorian and Modernist genre expectations blur, ultimately demonstrating the ideological instabilities of what we perceive as Victorian narrative mainstays of closure themselves.Item Insurrection in Black: Reading Race and Revolt in the Long Nineteenth Century(2019) Bruno, Timothy William; Levine, Robert S; Wong, Edlie L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Insurrection in Black: Reading Race and Revolt in the Long Nineteenth Century” examines depictions of black rebellion in American and African American literature spanning from the 1830s to the early 1900s. From enslaved uprisings and black armies to worker strikes and insurgent plots, black rebellion appeared as a recurring image across the antebellum and postbellum periods. “Insurrection in Black” argues that these images of rebellious violence functioned speculatively, imagining for readers new identities, social movements, and communities. The dissertation explores black rebellion’s cultural work in novels, speeches, newspapers, autobiographies, and polemics by Robert Montgomery Bird, Richard Hildreth, Jabez Delano Hammond, Gerrit Smith, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucy Parsons, Sutton E. Griggs, Thomas Dixon, and Pauline Hopkins. A comparative approach to these texts reveals that, far from representing a stable or straightforward politics, black rebellion in print often served competing ends not necessarily aligned with black freedom struggles. Ultimately, this dissertation does more than reveal the speculative power inhering in depictions of rebellious violence: “Insurrection in Black” brings black militancy to the center of the long nineteenth century’s literary and cultural life.Item Invisible Men, Invisible Women: Labor, Race, and the (re)Construction of American Citizenship in New Deal Post Office Murals(2019) Yasumura, Grace Sayuri; Mansbach, Steven; Ater, Renee; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Invisible Men, Invisible Women: Labor, Race, and the (re)Construction of American Citizenship in New Deal Post Office Murals is a meditation on the historical construction and persistent importance of race in the formation of American national identity and citizenship. Centering on an institutionally marginalized and academically neglected aspect of American art, this dissertation explores the depictions of non-white laborers, from images of African American sharecroppers to Mexican American migrant laborers that appear in scores of Treasury Section post office murals across the United States. Organized around three case studies, this work explores the different ways racialized identities were created, contested, and consolidated within the context of larger debates surrounding the relationship between labor and citizenship in the 1930s. This dissertation reads the murals produced under the Treasury Section as part of the New Deal’s epistemological regimes of intelligibility. In other words, these murals are to be understood as sites where collective identities are visualized and “correct” codes of social conduct are shaped in order to foster a particular vision of the citizens-subject. Treasury Section post office murals are therefore interpreted as part of a complex set of instruments deployed by the New Deal government as it sought to translate ideology into practice and thus actualize codes of racial and gendered conduct and ultimately modes of ideal citizenship.Item The Invented Indian: Race, Empire, and National Identity in Twentieth-Century US Literature(2018) Humud, Sarah Bonnie; Nunes, Zita; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines representations of ‘Indians’ to expose how these fictions underpin white male hegemony and US imperialism. As team mascots, Western sidekicks, or Thanksgiving staples, ‘Indians’ permeate US culture in the twentieth century, though scholars have largely focused on the nineteenth. In the era of US expansion, representations of savage and vanishing Indians justified Native genocide. Scholars have highlighted the role these nineteenth-century ‘Indians’ played in maintaining white male dominance, but this focus on early American literature has obscured the Indian’s ongoing role in maintaining white hegemony. Fictions of Indian incompetence have led to continued abuses and assaults on sovereignty, and despite the social justice gains of the last century, Native land, water, and human rights are still under attack. By analyzing a range of writers including authors of color, women, and white men, my project intervenes in earlier scholarship to reveal an enduring, though often unconscious, commitment to colonial ideologies in twentieth-century US literature. Americans of all races and genders participate in a culture steeped in Indian characters, costumes, and literary tropes. Race and racism are part of the fabric of US culture and language, and US authors reiterate race issues in literature, even if they do so unintentionally. In both canonical and activist literatures, the ‘Indian’ sustains white supremacy by propagating as neutral, if not invisible. In its normalcy, it resists critical inquiry. This dissertation makes three interventions in American literature and Native American studies. First, it highlights the continued colonial mindset in the twentieth century and its consequences for Native peoples. Second, it reveals how the invented Indian in US fiction helps maintain white hegemony. Finally, it underscores that even activist literatures rely on the figure of the ‘Indian,’ meaning they, too, often unconsciously support white male hegemony. As Americans use Indian caricatures to better understand themselves, these metaphors ultimately displace Native peoples and their realities, further obscuring and normalizing their colonization. By examining dominant and resistant literatures side-by-side, my analysis reveals that colonial ideologies remain mostly unquestioned and intact in US culture.
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