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 Speculative Citizenship: Race, National Belonging, and the Counterfactual Imagination in the Literature of the Long Reconstruction(2024) Ewing, Annemarie Mott; Levine, Robert S.; Wong, Edlie; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Speculative Citizenship: Race, National Belonging, and the Counterfactual Imagination in the Literature of the Long Reconstruction” explores how key Reconstruction writers addressed citizenship as a guiding concept. Writers such as Charles Chesnutt, Albion Tourgée, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Ohiyesa (Charles Eastman), and Edward A. Johnson revealed the malleable, unstable, and speculative nature of US citizenship and the Reconstruction era itself. Even as the 14th Amendment formally defined citizenship for the first time in 1868, its interpretations varied, causing citizenship to remain a contested concept with actively negotiated legal inclusions and exclusions. Debates and uncertainties about citizenship provided an opportunity for Reconstruction writers to delineate more capacious concepts of citizenship than its evolving legal definitions. This dissertation examines Reconstruction authors’ use of what I am calling the “counterfactual imaginary,” a mode characterized by dislocating, retrospective, or utopian speculation that works to represent the fluid boundaries of national belonging. The counterfactual, often signaled by conditional tenses, considers what could have been and what might be. Conditional tenses best express the expansive, utopian possibility of Reconstruction while depicting its present injustices. The authors discussed in my dissertation focus not only on citizenship’s legal definitions in their writings, but also on citizenship as it was performed and practiced. They speculate, sometimes wildly in experimental fiction, about what sort of world could still be created. They forecast a nation in which citizenship and national belonging were defined more inclusively than in the courts or Congress. Collectively, “Speculative Citizenship” illuminates inclusions and exclusions afforded by the 14th amendment. The first and fourth chapters examine literary portrayals of the ways the 14th amendment expanded citizenship in two ways—intentionally to African American men and inadvertently to corporations through the establishment of the concept of corporate personhood. The 14th amendment, Albion Tourgée and Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton suggest, established corporate personhood in ways that aided Westward expansion and the dispossession and exclusion from full citizenship of Mexican Americans and Indigenous peoples. The second and third chapters explore two exclusions of the amendment–the brief exclusion of former Confederates from the rights of full US citizenship and the ongoing exclusion of Indigenous people both in terms of a refusal to grant citizenship and a parallel refusal to recognize Indigenous sovereignty. Foregrounding the perspectives of authors like Ohiyesa (Charles Eastman) and student writers publishing in Indigenous boarding school newspapers offers new ways of looking at how citizenship and national belonging were conceptualized in the literature of the long Reconstruction era and beyond.Item "We Heard Healthcare": The Long Black Freedom Struggle as Health Justice(2023) Catchmark, Elizabeth; Enoch, Jessica; Fleming, Jr., Julius; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In her project, Elizabeth Catchmark traces the ways Black liberation organizers have positioned a guarantee of health as a prerequisite for citizenship since Emancipation. Their challenges to white supremacy named the violence of the state in making Black America sicker and organized communal acts of care to enable their survival in the wake of state neglect. By situating health justice as key to full participation in civic life, these activists refuted a disembodied interpretation of citizenship and offered instead an embodied, capacious vision of racial justice that acknowledges the entanglements of our environments, bodies, and minds. The genealogy Catchmark develops demonstrates that the right to health is a constituent feature of the Black political imagination across the long Black freedom struggle. Ultimately, she finds that Black liberation organizers, through their racial-justice informed theorizations of health and citizenship, illustrate that democracy and health are inextricable from the eradication of white supremacy while offering new ways forward for public policy, racial justice organizing, and interpersonal care.Item REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MILITARY IN 20TH CENTURY ETHNIC AMERICAN LITERATURE(2017) Fontenot, Kara Parks; Nunes, Zita C; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 20th century ethnic American literature, writers deploy representations of the US military to expose the operations of American hegemony, articulate relations of power, reveal how they are maintained, identify contradictions in the rhetoric of American nationalism and imagine not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic, and national lines. As a national institution controlled by the US government and consuming labor in the form of military service from citizens of all classes, races and ethnicities in ways that reflect existing relations of power in American society at large, the US military presents a unique and powerful site for articulation of relationships between nation, race, and class. As evidence, this dissertation explores six American novels, all published in the 20th century and taking as their subject matter US military involvement in declared and undeclared military conflicts of that era. Close readings of these novels bring our attention to three specific examples of political projects for which representations of the US military in literature have been deployed: to question constructions of American nationalism by highlighting contradictions and inconsistencies, to consider the military’s institutionalized labor practices in order to explore relationships between race and class as well as imagine means of struggling for social justice, and to critique US foreign policy and military operations overseas. These writers individually and collectively refuse to examine race and/or ethnicity in isolation but instead consider these aspects of subjectivity in the context of national identity, class relations, immigration, globalization, and other social forces. While the relationship between ethnicity and military service has been addressed in other disciplines, such as history, political science, and social science, I argue that literature is a medium especially well-suited for this exploration as it not only allows for the articulation of existing social relations but also for the imagination of not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic, and national lines.Item Citizen-Civilians: Masculinity, Citizenship, and American Military Manpower Policy, 1945-1975(2013) Rutenberg, Amy Jennifer; Muncy, Robyn; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Citizen-Civilians" argues that military manpower policies between the end of World War II in 1945 and the shift to the All-Volunteer Force in 1973 separated military service from ideals of masculine citizenship in the United States. Manpower policies, especially those that governed deferments, widened the definition of service to the state and encouraged men to meet their responsibilities for national defense as civilians. They emphasized men's breadwinner role and responsible fatherhood over military service and defined economic independence as a contribution to national defense. These policies, therefore, militarized the civilian sector, as fatherhood and certain civilian occupations were defined as national defense initiatives. But these policies also, ironically, weakened the citizen-soldier ideal by ensuring that fewer men would serve in the military and equating these civilian pursuits with military service. The Defense establishment unintentionally weakened its own manpower procurement system. These findings provide context for the anti-war and anti-draft protest of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Vietnam exacerbated points of friction that already existed. The war highlighted assumptions about masculinity and citizenship as well as inequities in the draft system that had existed for a generation. This dissertation, therefore, explains the growth of the mechanisms that allowed men to avoid military service, as such avoidance became relatively simple to accomplish and easy to justify. Thus, when draft calls rose in order to support a war that many Americans did not agree with, men used the channels that the Defense establishment had already created for them to avoid serving in the armed forces. This work also demonstrates how policies and ideas about masculine citizenship affected one another. Competing visions of manhood as well as debates over the rights and responsibilities of citizenship influenced policy debates. Moreover, policies took on a social engineering function, as the Selective Service and Department of Defense actively encouraged men to enter particular occupational fields, marry, and become fathers. In this way, this project is an example of the "lived Cold War." It suggests that individual men made career, school, and marriage decisions in response to Cold War policies.Item DEMOCRATIC IMPLICATIONS OF CIVIC ENGAGEMENT IN HIGHER EDUCATION THROUGH GRADUATES WHO WENT ON TO NONPROFIT WORK(2012) Kiesa, Abigail I; Paoletti, Jo; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Three trends have been evident in civil society for at least the past two decades: a gap in civic participation between young people with college experience and those without; increasing investment in college student civic participation by higher education institutions; and a narrowing of opportunities for all Americans to participate in civic life. This last point, some believe, is leading to a smaller, more homogenous and privileged group directing civic life, particularly nonprofit organizations, jeopardizing their democratic role. No research has attempted to bring all of these dynamics into conversation. This exploratory research begins to fill this void. By interviewing participants in one multi-year collegiate civic engagement program, we learned the skills, values and identity as "active citizens" graduates took into nonprofit work. Results suggest that lessons from trainings and civic activities within the program impacted the career choices that graduates made and how they conceive of their work.Item Royal Subjects, Imperial Citizens: The Making of British Imperial Culture, 1860-1901(2010) Reed, Charles; Price, Richard N; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The dissertation explores the development of global identities in the nineteenth-century British Empire through one particular device of colonial rule - the royal tour. Colonial officials and administrators sought to encourage loyalty and obedience on part of Queen Victoria's subjects around the world through imperial spectacle and personal interaction with the queen's children and grandchildren. The royal tour, I argue, created cultural spaces that both settlers of European descent and colonial people of color used to claim the rights and responsibilities of imperial citizenship. The dissertation, then, examines how the royal tours were imagined and used by different historical actors in Britain, southern Africa, New Zealand, and South Asia. My work builds on a growing historical literature about "imperial networks" and the cultures of empire. In particular, it aims to understand the British world as a complex field of cultural encounters, exchanges, and borrowings rather than a collection of unitary paths between Great Britain and its colonies.Item The National Woman's Party's Militant Campaign for Woman Suffrage: Asserting Citizenship Rights through Political Mimesis(2008-09-05) Stillion Southard, Belinda Ane; Parry-Giles, Shawn J.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project attends to ways in which the National Woman's Party's (NWP) militant woman suffrage campaign empowered U.S. women to assert their political agency and help earn women's fully-enfranchised citizenship rights through rhetorical acts of political mimesis. Specifically, this study examines how the NWP mimicked political rituals and rhetorics to simultaneously earn political legitimacy and expand women's citizenship roles in the nation-state. To this end, this project examines the NWP's suffrage discourse between 1913 and 1920 to demonstrate the ways in which the group's mimetic strategies both reified and challenged progressive and wartime notions of U.S. nationalism promoted by President Woodrow Wilson and members of Congress. These chapters trace the trajectory of the NWP's campaign as it mimicked inaugural parades, third-party strategies, and congressional and presidential politicking to empower NWP members with the political authority that rivaled the nation's political leaders. The NWP's mimetic strategies allowed NWP members to constitute their national citizenship identities as they accessed reserved political spaces, demanded the attention of President Wilson and members of Congress, engaged the U.S. citizenry as political actors, and suffered severe backlash against their militant acts. In so doing, the NWP helped normalize women's presence in the political sphere, nationalize the suffrage movement, attract national media attention, and ultimately, earn widespread recognition and political legitimacy. Finally, this study looks at the empowering and disempowering potential of political mimesis as a strategy for social and political change, particularly as the NWP formed alliances and divisions among women in national and international communities. In the process, the project looks at how the NWP's rhetoric of political mimesis shaped and was shaped by the democratizing exigencies of President Wilson's nationalist vision; in turn, the NWP's militant campaign helped re-envision the gendered nation.