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 To Drink a Cup of Fire: Morality Tales and Moral Emotions in Egyptian, Algerian, and French Anti-Colonial Activism, 1945-1960(2019) Abu Sarah, Christiane Marie; Wien, Peter; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the 1940s and 1950s, newspapers in Egypt, Algeria, and France debated the behavior of activists who sacrificed themselves for a cause, calling them “hysterics,” “radicals,” “fanatics,” and “terrorists.” Underlying these debates was a core question: what “rational” person would choose to sacrifice himself for a cause? To learn how activists answered their critics, and to explore transnational patterns of activist exchange, this study explores two revolutionary moments: the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 and the Algerian Revolution of 1954–1962. Focusing on four Egyptian clubs (the Muslim Brotherhood, Young Egypt, the Egyptian Movement for National Liberation, and the Workers’ Vanguard); three Algerian organizations (the Front de Libération Nationale, the Mouvement National Algérien, and the Parti Communiste Algérien); and three French anti-colonial networks (the Jeanson network, the Curiel network, and the Mandouze network), the study analyzes data recovered from activist journals, tracts, court cases, police confessions, and memoirs—data gathered through multi-archival research conducted at the Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis (Amsterdam), Dar al-Kutub (Cairo), The National Archives (London), and the Service Historique de la Défense (Paris). The result is a cognitive and behavioral history of transnational activist movements. Setting aside the motive-based question of why activists made certain decisions, the study surveys how activists made decisions and narrativized behaviors. Three types of stories are examined: stories of affiliation, stories of aggression, and stories about morality. Each set of stories is linked to a research question. How did individuals decide to affiliate with certain clubs over others? How did activists decide to commit violent attacks? And what role did morality tales, moral rationalizations, and “moral emotions” (like disgust, shame, and anger) play in these processes? As the study contends, activists drew on a common toolkit of cognitive and behavioral strategies to make decisions, negotiate behavior, and mobilize support for decolonization—crossing ideological, religious, and national boundaries in the process. Activist storytelling thus highlights the hybridity of Arab and French moral imaginaries, revealing how activists practiced emotions and produced movements. Their stories also foster awareness of how individuals negotiate concepts of right and wrong, both in public and in private.Item Constructions of Violent Jamaican Masculinity in Film and Literature(2008-07-28) Harewood, Gia; Collins, Merle; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Greg Dimitriadis and Cameron McCarthy sketch out what they see as an emergent postcolonial aesthetic percolating in the postcolonial artist's imagination. According to their analysis, postcolonial artists make meaning in their work through three critical motifs that help shape this aesthetic: "counterhegemonic representation, double or triple coding, and emancipatory or utopic visions" (19, italics in original). Counterhegemonic representation "rework[s] the center-versus-periphery distinction . . . to look beyond its strictures to new histories, new discourses, new ways of being" (24). Double coding combines "two or more fields of reference or idiom in any given work" pulling images from places such as "the East and the West, the first world and the Third, the colonial master and the slave" (26). And utopic visions are about "imagining possibility even when faced with impossible barriers" (30). My project is fundamentally interested in constructing healthy (masculine) identities and its arguments are ultimately guided by their first and third motifs. Using feminist theory, masculinity studies, cultural studies and postcolonial theory, I focus on the representation of black Jamaican men as violent criminal beings in three films (The Harder They Come, Third World Cop and Shottas), two novels (The Harder They Come and For Nothing at All) and one ethnographic travelogue (Born Fi' Dead). I argue that "real/reel" Jamaican masculinity is ultimately connected to gun violence and the most popular films out of Jamaica over the past thirty years only perpetuate this image. While not the only source for role models, visual images play a significant role in the lives of young men (and women) who are trying to live up to social standards of masculinity. With limited access to social mobility, they often emulate the shotta (gangster) glory that they see sparkling on the screen. Through close readings of these texts, I show how hegemonic masculinity is reinforced and reveal that non-violent models of masculinity do exist, despite being overshadowed by violent "heroes." I call for that "utopic vision," to excavate the vulnerable and intervene on behalf of peace to help young men and boys find alternative models of masculinity and ultimately create sustainable communities.Item (Re)Mapping the Black Atlantic: Violence, Affect, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Caribbean Women's Migration Literature(2007-05-29) Shaw, Barbara L.; Rosenfelt, Deborah; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a project of literary reclamation, canonical revision, cultural analysis, and interdisciplinary remapping. Drawing on American studies, women's studies, postcolonial studies, and Caribbean studies, particularly performance theory and recent theoretical work on affectivity, it analyzes the negotiations of protagonists who move back and forth between and among cultures and nations, exploring complex possibilities for subjectivity, identity, and citizenship within worlds of domestic and neocolonial violence. Collectively, America's Dream, The Line of the Sun, Geographies of Home, Breath, Eyes, Memory, and The Unbelonging re-map Gilroy's influential theory of the Black Atlantic in three ways: by tracing the legacies of colonization in relation to interpersonal violence; by re-writing national narratives of the metropole from migrant Caribbean women's perspectives; and by including Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, as well as Jamaica, within its purview. While arguing for the complex personhood of these migrant protagonists and elucidating their legacies of pain and healing, alongside their victimization and resistance, this dissertation also provides a materialist analysis of cultural production, examining how these books circulate as objects in the global/local economy of book selling and distribution. Through a small-scale ethnographic study of independent publishers, alongside a material and visual cultural analysis of the book covers, it analyzes the politics of publication and canonization of Caribbean women's literature. By centering the Caribbean and its diaspora in an American Studies project, this dissertation pushes the boundaries of the discipline beyond the examination of cultures in the United States or American imperialism in other nations. (Re)Mapping the Black Atlantic asks not only that the Caribbean be considered part of the Americas, but also that the relational aspects of migration between the Caribbean on the one hand, and the United States and Britain on the other, become part of the new cartographies of American Studies.Item Mapping Terrorism: Amorphous Nations, Transient Loyalties(2006-05-04) Saksena, Ritu; Ray, Sangeeta; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Terrorism has a predilection with nations and nationalism and it plays on the symbiotic relationship between nationalism and violence. But "forgetting" this violence and bloodshed was crucial to the perpetuation of the myth of civilized nations. While Postcolonial Studies has offered incisive justifications for anti-imperialist movements and the creation of new nations within the colonizer/colonized paradigm, there is now a need to critically examine terrorism with its demands for new nations with its narratives of violence. This dissertation, Mapping Terrorism: Amorphous Nations, Transient Loyalties is a comparative study of the narratives of terrorism in specific texts that invoke the re-imagining of the narratives of the nation and the re-configuration of national subjectivities. Furthermore, since globalization has extended the national imaginary beyond borders, it has forced us to engage with the implications of diasporic populations that have sometimes attributed to the formation of transnational communities of violence (both real and imagined). Through my analysis of fictional representations of terrorists, terrorism and terrorist acts in cinema and fiction and using the rubric of Postcolonial Studies, I locate these narratives within a discursive space framed by the interstices of dominant discourses, where nation and state do not collide. For my larger overarching argument in theorizing terrorism, I introduce a new category of (anti)nationalisms that includes all forms of variant nationalisms like sub-nationalisms, ethnonationalisms, counter-nationalisms, fundamentalisms, extremism, secessionism etc., each of which is uniquely different but all of which define themselves using the discourse of Nationalism as its oppositional 'Other'. Using this overarching category of (anti)nationalisms offers us a new space - an in-between space, to talk about variant nationalisms that are not necessarily congruent with terrorism. Doing so, offers us the opportunity to address each of these variant nationalisms in depth without having to engage with issues of ethical implications of these imaginings. It is my assertion that (anti)nationalisms are the geneses of all terrorist activities and conversely, terrorism can be argued as constituting the performative aspect of the political agenda of (anti)nationalisms. My dissertation thus addresses a broader need for theorizing terrorism through cultural representations within the framework of Postcolonial Studies.Item Geographies of Violence. Contemporary Chronicles of Violence in the Americas(2005-05-06) Beroiz, Luciana; Peres, Phyllis; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes the works of contemporary artists from the Americas who produce representations of urban violence through multi-media chronicles. The chroniclers studied are the Chilean Pedro Lemebel, the Brazilians Paulo Lins, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, and the U.S. Latinos Joseph Rodríguez, Rubén Martínez, and Luis Rodríguez. The texts produced by these artists not only represent and explain contemporary geographies of violence but also become geographies of violence that audiences need to learn to inhabit and traverse. This dissertation addresses how the chronicle, in particular, articulates violence, identifies the advantages of using this genre to represent urban violence, considers how existing geographies of violence are distributed within the city and discusses how relevant the notion of space is to both their material development and manifestation and their symbolic presence through the chronicle. The comparative textual analysis of the selected chronicles demonstrates how violence is understood and represented by contemporary artists with different backgrounds and exposes the differences and similarities of their representations. Reading these chroniclers comparatively enables the consideration of a variety of different media through which violence is expressed in order to determine how the choices made by the artists affect the reception of their works. Such analysis allows an in-depth study of what these artists do with the genre of the chronicle: first, how having chosen the chronicle affects their particular renditions of violence; second, how the chronicle as a genre is affected by the specific content of urban violence; and, ultimately, how the chronicle is redefined by specific aesthetic manipulations. Finally, because each of the chroniclers selected for this study engages in translation practices, either as translators of their own work or as translators of other artists' work, this dissertation considers how their representations of urban violence are affected when they "travel" across a variety of media-- that is, not only how the choice of media shapes these artists' representation of urban violence and their manipulation of the chronicle but also how their translation or transference from one medium to another impacts on their original representation of violence.Item Violent Delights: Towards a Cultural History of Media Violence Debates(2004-12-06) Kaleba, Casey; Hildy, Franklin J; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Efforts to censor or restrict violent images are actions by which a culture imagines itself through its relationship to aggression and violence. Throughout the twentieth century critics and audiences of violent content in film, television, theatre, and video games have renegotiated their relationship to the images and the degree to which those images affect a national identity. Through an examination of five moments in North American history when controls were publicly discussed or imposed, an analysis of the scientific rhetoric used to support these discussions, and an examination of the possible hegemonic benefits of censorship, this thesis examines attempts to proscribe visual content using Allen Freedman's "scopic regime" as a theoretical framework.