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 Fictions of Hybridity in the Anthropocene: Literature and Science in the Works of Rétif de la Bretonne(2021) Bezilla, Charlee Myranda; Benharrech, Sarah; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Experiments in genetic engineering have raised environmental, medical, and ethical questions concerning the manipulation of biological processes. Does modifying an organism in this way change its nature? What do increasingly complex relations between human and machine, organism and technology, mean for human identity and our relations with non-human lifeforms? These questions rest on uneasy but persistent dichotomies of nature and culture, of the humanities and the sciences, and on notions of modernity and progress central to ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Conceptions of humans as distinct from nature—what anthropologist Philippe Descola names the “nature/culture” divide—are deeply imprinted in the Western psyche and reflected in disciplinary divisions separating the humanities and the sciences, what Bruno Latour calls the “Internal Great Divide.”These questions about hybrid beings, manipulating nature, and the nature/culture divide were particularly pertinent in eighteenth-century French literature and natural history, a period coinciding with the nascence of biological science wherein many thinkers locate the beginnings of the “Anthropocene,” an epoch in which human activity has markedly affected earth systems. Drawing on methods from literary studies and ecocriticism, I examine how literary texts engage debates on the mutability of species, the nature of man, and anxieties about governing populations that remain relevant today. Through the lens of Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne’s 1781 novel La Découverte australe par un homme-volant, I engage close readings of the novel alongside natural historical texts to consider the possibilities of “hybridity” as a tool for understanding literary production, the relationships between humans and nonhumans, and how the domains of fiction and science can come together. I find that these texts posit hybridity as a promising intervention, despite growing concerns about degeneration stemming from crossbreeding experiments. After analyzing the formal aspects of the “hybrid” text and its paratexts in Chapter 1, in Chapter 2, I examine how the novel incorporates, interrogates, and extends contemporary theories about the nature of humans and animals. Chapter 3 explores the manipulation of hybrid creatures and proto-eugenicist politics in La Découverte australe alongside key texts from the period to trace how the novel engages contemporary discourses of perfectibility and degeneration. Chapter 4 shows how the novel promotes mechanical technology, along with biological hybridization, as tools of imperialism and societal improvement at a pivotal moment leading up to the industrial revolution.Item A Host of Memories: Mixed Race Subjection and Asian American Performances Against Disavowal(2020) Storti, Anna; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation develops the concept of racial hosting to conceptualize mixed-raceness as an embodied palimpsest of past, present, and future. A Host of Memories: Mixed Race Subjection and Asian American Performances Against Disavowal argues for the importance of uncovering the disavowed, residual, and violent conditions of racial mixture. The project situates queer theories of temporality and feminist theories of situated knowledge in relation to Asian Americanist critiques of memory. I contend that the Asian/white subject is both an index to track the colonial condition across time, and a host that harbors the colonial desires we have come to name as hybridity, multiracialism, and post-racism. Each chapter builds towards a methodology of memory to, on the one hand, track the sensorial life of mixed-raceness, and on the other hand, document how the discourse of multiracialism obscures mass violence and the colonial ideology of racial purity. Chapter one advances the framework of white residue through an examination of the case of Daniel Holtzclaw, the Japanese/white police officer serving 263 years in prison for assaulting 13 Black women. I then narrate the life of Elliot Rodger, the Chinese/white mass shooter and involuntary celibate. Opening the study in this way dispels the notion that racial mixture renders racism’s past obsolete. I then shift to mixed race artists whose performances of desire, memory, and time include a fervent belief in queer and feminist possibility. Chapter two illuminates how a femme aesthetic of retribution surfaces as a response to racial fetish. This chapter spotlights performances by Chanel Matsunami Govreau and Maya Mackrandilal. Chapter three forwards the concept of muscle memory to study how the accumulation of history is deposited into the body and enacted through movement. Here, I contemplate the queer and trans dance of Zavé Martohardjono. Chapter four de-idealizes hybridity through the oeuvre of contemporary artist Saya Woolfalk. To end, I refer to the photography of Gina Osterloh to force a reckoning with the pressures to remember and claim ancestry. Mixed race subjection, I conclude, is an embodied phenomenon with reverberating implications for the structure of racial form writ large.Item U.S. Governmental and Native Voices in the Nineteenth Century: Rhetoric in the Removal and Allotment of American Indians(2006-07-14) Black, Jason Edward; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study situates institutional and American Indian discourses at the interstices of 19th century ideologies that underscored interactions of the U.S.-Native relationship. Specifically, the project argues that both U.S. governmental and American Indian voices contributed to the policies of U.S.-Native relations throughout the removal and allotment eras. Simultaneously, these discourses co-constructed the identities of both the U.S. government and American Indian communities and contributed textures to the relationship. Such interactions demonstrated the hybridity extant in U.S.-Native affairs in the nineteenth century. That is, both governmental and indigenous discourses added arguments, identity constructions and rhetorical strategies to the relationship. Ultimately, the study argues that this hybridity helped shape "Indian" policies and constituted cultural identities in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. American Indians, it is contended, achieved numerous goals in terms of impeding the removal and allotment policies. Likewise, by appropriating the U.S. government's discursive frameworks and inventing their own rhetorical strategies, American Indian communities helped reshape their own and the government's identities. Natives, further, worked through the government's homogenization of indigenous culture to organize a pan-Indianism that allowed them to unify in opposition to the government's policies and constructions of American Indian identities. During the first third of the twentieth century, American Indian agency was shown to impact the U.S.-Native relationship as Natives urged for the ultimately successful passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 and the Indian New Deal of 1934. American Indians concomitantly challenged the government-instigated negative identity constructions of Natives. Similarly, American Indians interrogated the government's self-professed positive identities; in the process, they illustrated how the U.S. government acted through deception and fraud. In the end, Native communities were granted increased discursive power, though the U.S. government still retained its control over American Indians. The Indian Citizenship Act and the Indian New Deal - where this study concludes - demonstrated the prevalence of this hybridity. Early twentieth century hybridity was built incrementally through the removal and allotment periods, and existed as residues of nineteenth century U.S.-Native relations.