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 Persistence and Resistance: Examining the White Racial Frame in Metal Music(2024) Creek, Meghan J; Lie, Siv B; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I examine how systemic racism and white supremacy have shaped the metal scene in the Western World, the ways in which the scene’s white racial frame is maintained, and how scene members are challenging this racial hierarchy. One of the main aims of this dissertation is to bring to the fore the diverse range of political and racial ideologies present in the metal scene. To gain insights into how the metal scene has served as an incubator for neo-Nazism and other white supremacist causes for over thirty years, I designed this project to analyze both the overt and covert ways in which white supremacy affects the metal scene. Chapter One is a case study of one of the most influential metal musicians of all time, Phil Anselmo, whose white supremacist behaviors and rhetoric and simultaneous, continuous popularity and success provide ample evidence of how the metal scene’s white racial frame is constructed and maintained. Chapters Two and Three investigate the metal scene’s opposing and diverse political orientations, drawing mostly on historical and current discourses and events tied to black metal, an extreme metal subgenre with deep-rooted ties to neo-Nazism. I compare the artistic aesthetics and non-musical communicative acts of certain far right and anti-fascist black metal bands to illustrate the ways in which overt and covert white supremacy operate and how some artists are subverting the aesthetic conventions of black metal to contest the scene’s white racial frame. I also discuss the extramusical anti-fascist activism by members of the scene, shining a spotlight on the work of the international Antifascist Black Metal Network, which formed in 2021. This dissertation is grounded in an interdisciplinary approach to research. In addition to drawing on frameworks from multiple fields in combination with musicology, such as semiotic anthropology, sociology, and linguistics, I incorporate methodologies from both historical musicology and ethnomusicology. I conducted semi-structured interviews with six individuals, participant observation at live musical performances, virtual fieldwork, and digital archival work. Most of my research is qualitative, but in Chapter Two I rely, in part, on a quantitative approach to gather evidence to support my argument that there are many more white supremacist metal bands than the average person in the scene realizes. My research findings demonstrate that the growing far-right faction within the metal scene do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, I argue that overt manifestations of white supremacy are but one effect of the metal scene’s white racial frame. By drawing attention to the less visible and unrecognized manifestations of white supremacist ideologies, my work emphasizes the significant effects of white supremacy still inherent to the scene today, adding to and expanding the ways in which those who study and participate in this genre think about and discuss these important issues.Item 'At all Times, and in all Places, Adored and Oppressed': Gender, Temporality, and Conjectural History in the Transatlantic World, 1600-1800.(2020) Durand, Emilee; Chico, Tita; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines scenes which imagine the collision between primordial time and the time of history to demonstrate that conjectural history is a productive term for understanding how temporality is embedded in constructions of race and gender in transatlantic literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The collision of temporalities in the texts of this dissertation is a product of an Enlightenment project. This project depended upon the temporalization of difference as a mechanism for narrating the progress of human societies. The following readings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts consider the transatlantic encounter as one inextricably involved with the process of the temporalization of difference. While this dissertation examines texts often included in the category of transatlantic literature, it also reads conjectural histories as joint participants in creating fictions about the Americas. Viewed in this way, conjectural history identifies both a mode of creating knowledge and certain kind of narrative which can emerge from a variety of texts irrespective of genre. Indeed, as this dissertation demonstrates, prints and maps, plays and poems, travel narratives and novels can all mobilize conjectural histories of their own. Drawing out the imaginative work required by conjectural histories, this dissertation shows how they are conceptually linked to more recognizable transatlantic encounter narratives. Because of its immediate and continual association with “early,” “young” or “backwards” humanity, the Americas as setting for encounter, both fictionalized and historical, necessarily activates the temporality of pre-history. Such a textual and visual collision theorizes difference through a temporal architecture. Scenes in which contact, social contract, and sexual contract are collapsed mobilize their own conjectural histories, using temporal frameworks to construct the genres of race and gender. By embedding these scenes in remote times and spaces, texts authorize and naturalize sets of relations between nascent human categories. The texts examined in this dissertation demonstrate how the reenactment of contact works to create narratives of human progress racialized and gendered by/within a temporal architecture made possible by contact’s collision of temporalities.Item “Intimate Entanglement: The Gendered Politics of Race and Family in the Gulf South"(2019) Bearden, Joshua L; Lyons, Clare; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Intimate Entanglement: The Gendered Politics of Race and Family in the Gulf South,” uses manuscript court records, newspapers, records of colonial administrators, and accounts of merchants and travelers to investigate the ways in which cross-cultural peoples practiced an adaptive gender culture in the Gulf South in the era between 1740-1840. “Intimate Entanglement” argues that a protean understanding of the gendered dynamics within the family allowed Anglo-Native peoples to eschew the racial categorization imposed upon them by Anglo-Americans while also self-fashioning identities that allowed for maximum autonomy and for the protection of their wealth and status within Native communities. Familiar with both the matrilineal/matrifocal familial arrangements of the Five Tribes of the Gulf South as well as the gendered norms associated with the Anglo-American patriarchal family, cross-cultural peoples decided which identities they presented for public consumption depending upon the needs of a particular situation. This practice became prevalent during the colonial era, when increased contact between Anglo and Native peoples created unstable gendered and racial identities. By the early nineteenth century, Anglo-Americans had embraced a rigid definition of white patriarchal identity that centered Anglo men’s ability to control subordinates, own slaves, and exploit property, enslaved persons, and other forms of wealth. At the same time, Anglo-Americans embraced a new racial hierarchy which sought to consign people of Native and African ancestry to the same inferior position. Cross-cultural people fought this new racialization by continuing to practice the flexible understandings of gender that had its roots in the colonial past.Item PERFORMING NERD: THE NERD STEREOTYPE IN AMERICAN POPULAR CULTURE(2017) Boynton, Michael John; Carpenter, Faedra; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The primary function of the nerd stereotype—like any other stereotype—is to reinforce and reify cultural hegemony, to delineate who has access to power and who does not. In this dissertation, I argue that the nerd stereotype performs this function in two essential ways: the heteronormative dynamic and the exclusionary dynamic. As a sort of social script, the stereotype reifies compulsory heteronormativity by denouncing those who, in a Butlerian sense, misperform their gender/sexuality with regard to prescribed masculine/feminine behaviors. This heteronormative dynamic is, then, at its core an anti-intellectual one, using prescriptive notions of masculinity and femininity to demonize intelligence and critical thinking. The nerd stereotype also simultaneously operates to ostracize a number of marginalized identities (women, blacks, Asians, Jews, etc.) from educational, scientific, and intellectual empowerment via the exclusionary dynamic, while allowing certain upper-class, straight white males access to that empowerment. Taken together, these two dynamics often seem in paradoxical conflict, simultaneously denouncing intelligence (mocking nerdy white males), yet problematically reserving that intelligence as the province of hegemonic white masculinity. In this contradictory fashion, these two complex dynamics are consistently reflected in the persistent performance of nerd representations as both comic sexual failures and predominantly (although not exclusively) white males. With this configuration of the stereotype in mind, this dissertation examines the ideological origins and popularization of the nerd stereotype in U.S. popular culture from 1945 to 1989, its most formative period. A genealogical survey (or cultural history) of various performance texts (film, television, magazines, etc.) that include stereotypical nerds—from early issues of Archie Comics to the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds—this study focuses on how the nerd stereotype reflects specific moments of identity politics and anti-intellectualism in particular cultural contexts. Using performance studies, cultural studies, and recent scholarship on white masculinity as a theoretical guide for analysis, this work arrives at the conclusion that the nerd stereotype is not only a vitally important facet of American popular culture in a general sense, but also that this stereotype reinforces a general anti-intellectual sentiment while simultaneously scripting intelligence as the province of hegemonic identities.Item Screening Diversity: Women & Work in Twenty-First-Century Popular Culture(2016) Brunner, Laura; Bolles, A. Lynn; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Screening Diversity: Women and Work in Twenty-first Century Popular Culture explores contemporary representations of diverse professional women on screen. Audiences are offered successful women with limited concerns for feminism, anti-racism, or economic justice. I introduce the term viewsers to describe a group of movie and television viewers in the context of the online review platform Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook. Screening Diversity follows their engagement in a representative sample of professional women on film and television produced between 2007 and 2015. The sample includes the television shows, Scandal, Homeland, VEEP, Parks and Recreation, and The Good Wife, as well as the movies, Zero Dark Thirty, The Proposal, The Heat, The Other Woman, I Don’t Know How She Does It, and Temptation. Viewsers appreciated female characters like Olivia (Scandal), and Maya (Zero Dark Thiry) who treated their work as a quasi-religious moral imperative. Producers and viewsers shared the belief that unlimited time commitment and personal identification were vital components of professionalism. However, powerful women, like The Proposal’s Margaret and VEEP’s Selina, were often called bitches. Some viewsers embraced bitch-positive politics in recognition of the struggles of women in power. Women’s disproportionate responsibility for reproductive labor, often compromises their ability to live up to moral standards of work. Unlike producers, viewsers celebrated and valued that labor. However, texts that included serious consideration of women as workers were frequently labelled chick flicks or soap operas. The label suggested that women’s labor issues were not important enough that they could be a topic of quality television or prestigious film, which bolstered the idea that workplace equality for women is not a problem in which the general public is implicated. Emerging discussions of racial injustice on television offered hope that these formations are beginning to shift.Item Beautiful Fictions: Composing the Artificial in the Work of Mickalene Thomas(2015) Shine, Tyler; Shannon, Joshua; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis considers three paintings by the contemporary African American artist Mickalene Thomas. I argue that Thomas uses collage to analyze and highlight the socially constructed nature of identities and surroundings. I propose that collage functions in three ways in Thomas’s work: as a medium, an artistic strategy, and a metaphor for the multiple states of being in the world. Thomas refracts the art historical genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life through a black, queer, female lens that presents the complexities of black female subjectivities. However, the paucity of critical literature on Thomas’s work is indicative of a broader problem in contemporary art historical discourse when interpreting works by Black artists and often requires these artists to foreground their cultural and physical differences. This thesis redresses the simplistic interpretations of Thomas’s work by demonstrating the breadth and depth of her conceptual interests and in doing so argues that her works are propositions for how we might conceptualize the history of art.Item Race, Sexuality, and the "Progressive Physician": African American Doctors, Eugenics, and Public Health, 1900-1940(2014) Nuriddin, Ayah; Michel, Sonya A; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis will examine how African American doctors interpreted eugenic thought in the early twentieth century. African American doctors embraced eugenics for its potential to improve the health of their race, thus bringing about a kind of "biological racial uplift." African American doctors thus drew on their discipline to pursue a form of eugenic activism that had internal and external ramifications for the race. . Even though African Americans faced medical injustice, they were not simply the victims of eugenics and scientific racism. They were also critics and proponents of eugenics. The first chapter will address how eugenics shaped African American discussions of public health, and how eugenic ideas about sex and sexuality influenced their discourse and understanding of venereal disease. The second chapter will examine how African American doctors discussed birth control, compulsory sterilization, and abortion within the context of racial uplift.Item The Rebel Cafe: America's Nightclub Underground and the Public Sphere, 1934-1963(2014) Duncan, Stephen Riley; Gilbert, James B; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)From 1934 through 1963, New York and San Francisco nightspots were community institutions and public forums for radical cultural producers, intellectuals, and political dissidents. This dissertation explores bars, nightclubs, and coffeehouses in bohemian Greenwich Village and North Beach as nodal points in alternative social networks connecting patrons and performers marginalized by their Left politics, race, gender, or sexual orientation. It traces unconventional ideas from subterranean domains through their dissemination by the mass media, examining how local political discourse and cultural diffusion informed social change in the twentieth-century United States. This study illuminates nightclubs' cultural function, shedding new light on familiar subjects such as the Beat Generation, jazz, civil rights, and social satire, and linking the Left's Cultural Front of the 1930s to 1950s dissident culture. Nightspots provide useful models to study identity formation and oppositional political consciousness, as patrons and performers challenged dominant social norms through cultural avant-gardism, explorations of sexuality and gender, and interracial alliances. Tourism, meanwhile, contributed to the extension of new social norms into the mainstream. Moreover, drinking establishments served a vital function within the public sphere as spaces of discussion and debate which both critiqued and contributed to mass-media content. As outspoken nonconformists clashed with conservative critics, the result was sometimes legal woes for oppositional figures, from the anarchist libertarians who met in urban cafes in the 1930s to gay-rights activists and the controversial comic Lenny Bruce. Yet the art, literature, music, and satire that emerged from the nightclub underground of the 1950s proved to be forces for social liberation, showing the relation between culture and politics. Subcultural networks provided psychological and material support to the budding gay liberation and feminist movements, as well as the Black Freedom Struggle. By examining the use of public space and built environments, and charting the confluence of culture, politics, and urban geography, "The Rebel Cafe" demonstrates how historical subjects transformed American society by investing nightspots with significance as sites of public discourse.Item Through the Looking Glass: Race and Gender in the Reception of Paintings by Helen Frankenthaler, Norman Lewis, Alma Thomas, and Mark Tobey(2012) Gohari, Sybil Elizabeth; Ater, Renee; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Through an examination of the art world reception of four nonfigurative American artists, this dissertation determines that concerns about race and gender are ever-present, and affected how onlookers interpreted the artists' creations. By focusing on the critical, academic, and market reception of Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), Norman Lewis (1909-1979), Alma Thomas (1891-1978), and Mark Tobey (1890-1976), I conclude that the malleable components of race and gender, elements connected by difference and relegation, fluctuate in the reception. As such, at times race and gender manifest overtly, while at other times, they play indirect roles in the reception of the artists. Further, my work illuminates the fact that later critics and scholars recycled the terminology and ideas about race and gender included in the early reception. I form a nuanced picture of the lives, careers, and output of these artists, underscoring the subjective and manipulated aspects of reception. This layer of detail distinguishes this dissertation from other studies of these artists. I adopt key methodologies, which enable this close consideration of the fine distinctions in their reception. Feminist analysis, reception theory, and auction market analysis uniquely intersect to create a complicated yet clarified picture of reception as a confluence of manipulation factors. I unravel the concept of "art world," to show that this entity is composed of a variety of subgroups, with diverse opinions. The recognition of these variations enables this nuanced understanding of reception. This aspect of my work, as well, is distinctive, and even has broad applications within the field of art history. Exploring in detail how critics and scholars interpreted and constructed the artists and their output, I present the mechanics of race and gender in the reception of four diverse artists. I underscore the structures of power inherent in the categories of identity, and how hierarchies are used to integrate and relegate artists to the margins. This dissertation shows that even within the scope of nonfigurative art creations, interpreters infuse race and gender into their readings of the objects. My work demonstrates the extent to which identity was a core value for twentieth-century critics and scholars.