American Studies

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ABLE-BODIED WOMANHOOD: DISABILITY AND CORPOREALLY EXCLUSIONARY NARRATIVES IN BLACK AND WHITE WOMEN’S RIGHTS DISCOURSES, 1832-1932
(2016) Temple, Heidi Anne; Struna, Dr. Nancy L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This project is a feminist disability rhetorical analysis of US black and white women’s rights movements from 1832-1932. Guided by Disability and Feminist Theory, it works to identify the presence and use of patterns of disability tropes in women’s rights discourses. From Lucretia Coffin Mott to Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Mary Church Terrell, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Addie Hunton, this project interrogates the rhetorical work of dominant narratives and lesser known voices in women’s rights discourses. I argue that early black and white women’s rights advocates often utilized and repeated a disability rhetoric that relied on disability metaphor, narrative prosthesis, and corporeally exclusionary narratives in order to construct definitions of womanhood. Their insistence on cognitive ability as a marker of “fitness” and “ability” provided the foundation for rights arguments based on ableist assumptions of autonomy and citizenship. I also argue that this use of disability rhetoric relied on and furthered a pervasive ableist ideology present not only in many of these movements, but in US society. In the process, US black and white women’s rights discourses have continually elided women with disabilities from women’s rights discourses because their bodies (physically, cognitively, and/or psychologically) did not meet the ableist prerequisites set for claiming women’s rights during this time period.
ACTS OF QUEER RESILIENCE: TRAUMA AS IDENTITY AND AGENCY IN LGBTQ POLITICAL ASYLUM
(2022) Perez, Christopher J; Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution is the impetus for asylum seekers to flee their home countries and seek protection elsewhere. Much of the scholarly literature and published legal cases correlate persecution with trauma and approach traumatic events of asylum seekers as always living with barriers or as a “victim.” Additionally, while there is extensive research and scholarly work on LGBTQ immigrants, there is little work specifically on LGBTQ asylum seekers, which suggests these stories matter and have value but often go unheard. Whose stories are told, heard, and valued with immigrants, and specifically asylum seekers? And, what are the risks or advantages of telling stories? For asylum seekers, making a credible case of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution places their trauma in an exchange of capital that advances neoliberal governmentality in the U.S. The nation-state benefits when resourceful “victims” of persecution ask for protection. Neoliberal governmentality can be traced to Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower” where the body is viewed as a laboring machine, disciplining the body to optimize its capabilities and extort its forces. Biopower is literally having power over other bodies in “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations.” Although neoliberal governmentality is a necessary component in discussions of political asylum, its reductionist aim leaves little room for agency for asylum seekers or those with asylum status. How might political asylees use their identities and trauma to subvert neoliberal governmentality? I argue that LGBTQ asylum seekers use their own tactics and techniques in an “art” of self-determination or what I call queer resilience to navigate and negotiate systems and structures of power. While there is no doubt that trauma exists for asylum seekers, using trauma to categorize asylum seekers as lacking, weak, defective, or even victims is a reductionist approach in understanding asylum seekers’ identities and agency. Trauma is operational in how one negotiates structures and systems of power, different spaces, building networks, and obtaining resources. Trauma offers both a useful entry into the legal aspects of political asylum processes and also advances discussions of subjectivity and epistemology. Using narrative analysis, grounded theory, poststructuralist theory, and queer theory, this dissertation unpacks the creative agency of LGBTQ asylum seekers as they make sense of their lives, form their identities, navigate spaces, and negotiate systems of power to “queer” political asylum processes. More specifically, using interviews and examining published cases and other published archival materials, this dissertation details the story of a gay man from a Latin American country who successfully gained asylum in the U.S. and how his asylum process, his trauma, and his racial, gendered, and sexual identities contributed to his agency, which subverts political asylum and offers new ways to consider the operation of biopower, governmentality, and self-determination.
Alternative Imaginaries, Gothic Temporalities: An Ethnography of the Cultural Construction of Aging in the Goth Subculture
(2016) Bush, Leah J.; Paoletti, Jo B.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This ethnographic thesis examines the cultural construction of aging in the Goth subculture in Baltimore, Maryland. Formed in Britain in the late 1970s, Goth retains a relatively high number of Elder Goths who participate in the subculture beyond their youth. By combining interdisciplinary analyses of Goth in the American imaginary with the lived experience of Goths over 40 in everyday life and the nightclub, I argue that participation in the Goth subculture presents an alternative to being aged by culture. Elder Goths subvert constructions of age-appropriate normativity by creating individualized “Gothic temporalities” to navigate through the challenges of adulthood and imagine their futures. This thesis underscores the importance of reconceptualizing aging as a lifespan project. Deconstructing age categories moves authority away from structural forces which support ageism and places power in the hands of individual agents.
America the Charity Case
(2005-10-21T13:22:27Z) Michel, Sonya
The U.S. government has inappropriately relied on private philanthropy to provide relief in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Charities are not up to the task, and corporations have taken advantage of the situation to promote themselves. All of this has consequences for the victims of this disaster. Americans should be able to count on relief as a right of citizenship, not a matter of charity.
An American River: Discourses of Ecocatastrophe, Sustainability, and Belonging in the Potomac River Basin and Beyond
(2019) Kier, Bailey; Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
An American River: Discourses of Ecocatastrophe, Sustainability, and Belonging in the Potomac River and Beyond is a queer ecological intervention in American, Queer, Trans(Gender), and Popular Culture Studies. It critiques the primary reliance on the category of culture to analyze the ways media, science, public policy, and the state make knowledge assumptions about sex, gender, and reproduction to construct stories about environmental catastrophe, species, and kind. Transdisciplinary methods are used to uncover the ecologies, relations, adaptations, and resiliencies that might not otherwise be possibly investigated and known, and challenge conventional popular discourses of environmentalism and conservation in an effort to create the intellectual equivalent of biodiversity. Three distinct but interrelated cases are considered. First, an examination of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Island interrogates how sex, gender and reproduction were intimately tied to discourses of wilderness, nature and nation, and the ways in which those concepts have been sanitized for consistency with modern sensibilities about an appropriate memorial for an “environmental” president. Next, a consideration of the popular discourse around the emergence of “transgender fish” in the Potomac River leads to an analysis of how trans-related language and concepts can be used to enrich human understanding of transformations and interactions across ecologies, species, and populations. I offer “interdependent ecological transsex” as a term broadly defined through a hormonal, metabolistic, and adaptive prism to imagine other bodies—not just transsexual human bodies, but fish, bodies of water, and any other kind of body that experiences change in relation to a larger ecology. Third, I examine the possibilities for queering agriculture, or envisaging alternatives to mainstream rhetorics of agriculture, food security, and farming. An American River concludes arguing human knowledge about nature, environmentalism, race, reproduction, and transsexuality is laden in antroheterocentric assumptions about progress, degeneracy, and evolution that is problematic for ethically and equitably addressing social and environmental problems. A queer eco ethic is presented to offer ways humans might begin to imagine nature and the environment differently.
Amish Women, Business Sense: Old Order Women Entrepreneurs in the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Tourist Marketplace
(2008) Graybill, Beth E.; Caughey, John L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation is an examination of Amish businesswomen and gender roles in the tourist marketplace of Lancaster County, PA. Tourism in Lancaster is a $1.5 billion business; most tourists come because of the Amish and values associated with them. Recently, tourism has come to provide an important source of income for many Old Order Mennonite and Amish women, whose business enterprises cater primarily to a tourist market. Among the Amish, known for their separation from wider society, tourism now puts many women on the front lines in dealing with outsiders, a monumental shift historically. Thus, this ethnography of Amish businesswomen serves as a useful lens for examining Amish women's changing gender roles in Lancaster County today. Moreover, it fills a significant gap in the literature, as little has been written about Amish women, to date. Mine is a micro-study that examines tourism, entrepreneurship, and gender through the words of Amish women themselve, and my analysis of them. Using ethnography and life history I examine the lives of Old Order Amish and Mennonite women whose businesses range from quilt shops to greenhouses to serving meals in their homes. As I show, the ways in which these women handle their business, family, and community roles sometimes involves extensions of traditional roles and sometimes departures from them.
Archival Body/Archival Space: Queer Remains of the Chicano Art Movement, Los Angeles, 1969-2009
(2011) Hernandez, Robert Lyle; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation proposes an interdisciplinary queer archive methodology I term "archival body/archival space," which recovers, interprets, and assesses the alternative archives and preservation practices of homosexual men in the Chicano Art Movement, the cultural arm of the Mexican American civil rights struggle in the U.S. Without access to systemic modes of preservation, these men generated other archival practices to resist their erasure, omission, and obscurity. The study conducts a series of archive excavations mining "archival bodies" of homosexual artists from buried and unseen "archival spaces," such as: domestic interiors, home furnishings, barrio neighborhoods, and museum installations. This allows us to reconstruct the artist archive and, thus, challenge how we see, know, and comprehend "Chicano art" as an aesthetic and cultural category. As such, I evidence the critical role of sexual difference within this visual vocabulary and illuminate networks of homosexual Chicano artists taking place in gay bars, alternative art spaces, salons, and barrios throughout East Los Angeles. My queer archive study model consists of five interpretative strategies: sexual agency of Chicano art, queer archival afterlife, containers of desire, archival chiaroscuro, and archive elicitation. I posit that by speaking through these artifact formations, the "archival body" performs the allegorical bones and flesh of the artist, an artifactual surrogacy articulated through things. My methodological innovation has direct bearing on how sexual difference shapes the material record and the places from which these "queer remains" are kept, sheltered, and displayed. These heritage purveyors questioned what constitutes an archive and a record, challenging the biased assumption that sexuality was insignificant to the Chicano Art Movement and leaving no material trace. The structure of my dissertation presents five archive recovery projects, including: Robert "Cyclona" Legorreta, Joey Terrill, Mundo Meza, Teddy Sandoval, and VIVA: Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists of Los Angeles. The restoration of these artists also reveals the profound symbiosis between this circle of artists, Chicano avant-gardism, and the burgeoning gay and lesbian liberation movement in Los Angeles. My findings rupture the persistent heterosexual vision of this period and reveals a parallel visual lineage, one which dared to picture sexual difference in the epicenter of Chicano art production.
Artful Identifications: Crafting Survival in Japanese American Concentration Camps
(2005-04-20) Dusselier, Jane Elizabeth; Kim, Seung-kyung; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
"Artful Identifications" offers three meanings of internment art. First, internees remade locations of imprisonment into livable places of survival. Inside places were remade as internees responded to degraded living conditions by creating furniture with discarded apple crates, cardboard, tree branches and stumps, scrap pieces of wood left behind by government carpenters, and wood lifted from guarded lumber piles. Having addressed the material conditions of their living units, internees turned their attention to aesthetic matters by creating needle crafts, wood carvings, ikebana, paintings, shell art, and kobu. Dramatic changes to outside spaces of "assembly centers" and concentration camps were also critical to altering hostile settings into survivable landscapes. My second meaning positions art as a means of making connections, a framework offered with the hope of escaping utopian models of community building which overemphasize the development of common beliefs, ideas, and practices that unify people into easily surveilled groups. "Making Connections" situates the process of individuals identifying with larger collectivities in the details of everyday life, a complicated and layered process that often remains invisible to us. By sewing clothes for each other, creating artificial flowers and lapel pins as gifts, and participating in classes and exhibits, internees addressed their needs for maintaining and developing connections. "Making Connections" advances perhaps the broadest possible understanding of identity formation based on the idea of employing diverse art forms to sustain already developed relationships and creating new attachments in the context of displacement. The third meaning offered by this project is art as a mental space of survival. In the process of crafting, internees pieced together mental landscapes that allowed them to generate new ideas and alternative discourses. As recent psychoanalytic scholarship suggests, these artful identifications with loss encompassed radical political possibilities because they keep melancholic struggles alive and relevant to the present. Regardless of whether we understand these crafting examples as tools for remaking inside places, re-territorializing outside spaces, making connections, or artifacts of loss, it is clear that for Japanese Americans incarcerated in complex places of oppression, art evolved into portables spaces of resistance.
Becoming Your Labor: Identity, Production, and the "Affects of Labor"
(2021) Benitez, Molly; Hanhardt, Christina; Padios, Jan; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
“Becoming Your Labor: Identity, Production, and the’ Affects of Labor’,” analyzes the role work plays in our lives by focusing on how Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPoC) and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Queer (LGBTQ+) trades workers navigate their identity in the workplace and beyond. This project draws on autoethnographic and ethnographic research with LGBTQ+ identified trades workers over a span of six years plus select historical evidence. Bringing together feminist and queer of color critique, affect theory, and theories of work, this dissertation considers what I call the ‘affects of labor’ – the visceral and active consequences of our working environments that metabolize through our bodies and produce our identities, relationships, and communities. “Becoming Your Labor” focuses on the experiences of LGBTQ trades workers in the Pacific Northwest. While focusing on LGBTQ+ and QTBIPoC trades workers, this research emphasizes how the experiences and lessons of a precise group of workers has much to teach us about larger systems of power shape labor, identity, and community. Individual chapters address how workplace culture is created through history, affects, and bodies; how workers implement various strategies for survival; and how these strategies have consequences for workers, their families, and communities. Chapter one delves into the racist and patriarchal foundation of the trades and the culture of abuse, violence, and toxic masculinity, these foundations have fostered. Here I define the ‘affects of labor.’ In chapter 2 my co-creators speak about how they navigate the affects of their labor at work, specifically harassment, bullying, and fear, and the strategies they enact such as ‘wearing a mask,’ changing their physical appearance, and trying to hang with ‘the boys.’ Chapter three addresses what happens when the “affects of labor” that come home with us. In this chapter trades workers describe how their work has had impacts on their home lives due to depression, violence, and addiction. Chapter four pivots from a focus on the “negative” ‘affects of labor’ to their liberatory potential centering on the experiences of workers employed at Repair Revolution, an LGBTQ+ owned and operated automotive repair shop. The project makes two critical interventions: it traces an alternate genealogy for affect theory through feminist and women of color critique; and it offers the ‘affects of labor’ as a new framework to think through how affects do more than stick to, move, or push, but actually produce and reproduce bodies and identities. In an era in which discussions of workplace power and culture have entered the mainstream – from the “Me Too” movement to the popular claim that the problem of police violence rests on “a few bad apples” – this dissertation aims to offer new understandings of the consequences of work and urges us to think more critically about the dialectical process in which workers, their families, and communities are produced by labor.
BETWEEN F* WORDS: RURAL & GAY LIBERATIONIST REFRAINS IN THE SOUTHEAST, 1970-1981
(2017) Ezell, Samuel Jason; Hanhardt, Christina; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Between F* Words is an affective history of how gay liberationism persisted through its intersections with back-to-the-land movements in the 1970s Southeast. In telling an affective history, I show how liberationism is best understood as more than a reasoned political choice; rather, it crucially involves specific ways of viewing and feeling in an increasingly globalized world. Specifically, its politics complemented critiques of a divisive system with lateral strategies for staying connected. By tracing gay liberationist networks from rural Ozark and Appalachian sites to cities like New Orleans and Atlanta, I prioritize a regional analytic which, unlike models predicated on the urban “gay ghetto,” hinges on rural-urban connection. This project, then, sets gay liberation both within everyday life and in unexpected places as a way to imagine expanded LGBT political cultural maps. Employing analysis of oral history interviews, newly available archival materials, and the print culture of RFD (a rural gay serial published in the Southeast from 1978-2009), Between F* Words is a description of the subject formations of Southeastern gay liberationist collectives who felt the word gay no longer represented their political cultures. Using Felix Guattari’s concept of the refrain, I read the words and images of those in the culture to characterize the orientational, emotional, psychic, and corporeal dimensions of improvised subjectivities like the faggot, sissie, gentle man, and Radical Faerie. At the same time, I show how these regional refrains emerged in contrast to similar West Coast ones. Their Southeastern networks were acutely aware of their proximity to the fomenting Moral Majority which would become a conservative cornerstone of the Reagan-era national political economy. Galvanized by the racism, sexism, and homophobia at the heart of the conservative political culture which they saw taking root in the Jim Crow geography around them, these gay liberationist subjectivities were shaped by regional forces. Between F* Words draws upon this history not only to propose the regional as a crucial scale for any radical analysis responsive to economic development schemes but also to imagine radical LGBTQ political subjectivities to be affectively formed within the daily experience of such divisive regional development.
Beyond Scraps: Narrating Traumatic Health Experiences Through Scrapbooking
(2010) Reynolds, Dawn M; Struna, Nancy; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
For centuries, women have served as the primary storytellers of domestic life. In volumes known as scrapbooks, women collect family snapshots and memorabilia for generations to enjoy. Traditional scrapbooking tends to highlight cheerful familial themes, such as weddings, births, and other life milestones. Contemporary online iterations of the age-old artform have begun publicly incorporating stories of traumatic health experiences. In this dissertation, I attend to the scrapbooking projects created by a selection of women who address personal health issues. I examine narrative and rhetorical strategies employed in health trauma scrapbooks, contending that women use the craft to preserve a sense of self while also publicly voicing social concerns. I combine feminist textual analysis and ethnographic-inspired observation to illustrate how scrapbooking comprises a form of knowledge production narrating women's collective wisdom about survival. The scrapbook projects I explore demonstrate techniques crafters use to manage cultural memories by reformulating their self-image as social change activists rather than as mere enthusiasts engaging in a trite hobby. This dissertation explores a selection of health concerns women raise through the craft, with a particular emphasis on breast-cancer themed scrapbooks. Applying breast cancer scrapbook pages as a case study, I illustrate how women deploy online scrapbooking in the service of health narration, thereby claiming a public voice about the illness experience. As I show in the final part of the dissertation, scrapbookers coalesce in activist communities, carving out a platform from which to press for social justice. I conclude by revealing ways that scrapbookers utilize the World Wide Web to facilitate health activism and public narration of traumatic health experiences. This dissertation is designed to elevate the place of contemporary scrapbooking in American Studies scholarship. Because the scrapbook has been both poorly preserved and grossly understudied, the earnest task of my project is to offer a useful model for analyzing women's trauma scrapbook pages that resonates for future scholars. I seek, above all, to raise awareness about the scrapbook as a relevant cultural artifact that contains richly contextual narratives of self and society.
Beyond the Railroad People: Race and the Color of History in Chinese America
(2009) Thompson, Wendy Marie; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Past discourses on Asian Americans, specifically Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans, have historically focused on specific racial interactions with white America that fell somewhere between exclusion and assimilation. However, lost in these discussions are the different nonwhite interracial hybridities that did and continue to inhabit Chinese immigrant and Chinese American lives. This study offers a departure from dominant scholarly conversations that reproduce the master narrative of Chinese immigrants coming to the United States, building the railroads, and assimilating just enough to become what white America has termed the "model minority" and shifts the analysis and conversation to look at other experiences, opening up a racial narrative that situates Chinese bodies in proximity to black and nonwhite America. In applying theoretical perspectives from race and ethnic studies, history, visual culture studies, and immigration studies to examine a broad range of texts, I have discovered that Chinese men using racial passing as a tool to cross American borders illegally, Gold Mountain frontier experiences that included significant contact with Native people, husbands and fathers refusing to bow to greater community pressures and disown their black wives and mixed race children in the Mississippi Delta region, and the presence of Chinese women of African descent in local California Miss Chinatown beauty pageants all suggest that how Chinese people saw themselves racially and continue to see themselves was and is more complex and fluid than the master narratives depict and many Americans appear to believe. contributes to the growing field of Asian American studies by establishing a dialogue between counter-hegemonic discourses and works that give agency and voice to various Chinese Americans whose lived racial realities that included kinship with nonwhite Americans complicate what it means to be Chinese, immigrant, or American. This dissertation also intervenes in the field of American Studies by expanding how we gauge the many ways race, power, and agency shape bodies, relationship, communities, and national identities in the United States.
Black Gay and Bisexual Men, Internet Access, Memory, and Visual Culture
(2021) Jiles, Robert De Von; Bruce, La Marr J; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Drawing from the fields of visual culture, black queer studies, black feminist theory, internet studies, and affect theory, “Black Gay and Bisexual Men, Internet Access, Memory, and Visual Culture” focuses on black gay and bisexual men who have internet access to create, view, and circulate visual representations about their own experiences and how they challenge, subvert, and reify negative and one-dimensional representations about their lived experiences. The cultural objects analyzed in the dissertation include two episodes from playwright and screenwriter Donja R. Love’s independent scripted web series Modern Day Black Gay and Darius Clark Monroe’s short film Slow. Both cultural objects were released for online viewing and can be accessed for free. As Black queer visual culture, Slow and MDBG trouble a racial and heteronormative visual field that renders black gay and bisexual men as excess. Tapping into affects such as desire, intimacy, love and pleasure, Love and Monroe use memory in the cultural objects to create visual images from the excess. In turn, the cultural objects stimulate black gay and bisexual viewers’ memories, and activate affective encounters occur Slow and MDBG use visual images to interrogate and reinscribe notions about black sexuality, black masculinity, black family and community, black love, same-sex romance, and black religion. This dissertation investigates the relationship between artists, the art objects, and the viewers and look for meaning in their creation, representation and interpretations of gay online hookup culture, gender and sexual stereotypes, and conservative homophobic Christian beliefs and practices. In addition to a textual analysis of the cultural objects, methods in the dissertation include interviews, self-ethnography, several small group screenings of the cultural objects by black gay and bisexual male participants, and group discussions following the screenings about the participants' interpretations of the material and how their experiences relate to the cultural texts.
Black Nightmare Imaginary: Popular Music, Collective Trauma, and the Intransigence of Antiblack Violence
(2024) Donnell, Dallas Taylor; Bruce, La Marr J; Avilez, GerShun; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
“Black Nightmare Imaginary: Popular Music, Collective Trauma, and the Intransigence of Antiblack Violence” is an interdisciplinary examination of the Black Nightmare Imaginary, a form of ideological common sense about the precarity of Black life and the necessity of various modes and maneuvers of contestation and escape needed to survive. I argue that Black Americans have shared access to a psychic repository of scenes and scenarios of antiblack violence that exist in vivid detail out of a collective awareness of the omnipresent violence foundational to Black life itself. Black musicians can tap into this shared terrain of terror through creative works that return us to these traumatic moments and perform perseverance in the face of that trauma. These scenes of violence include the horror of the auction block, the humiliation of the minstrel show, the degradation of the social services visit, the tension of a traffic stop, and more. This is the stuff of our nightmares—the full spectrum of antiblack violence that persists through what Saidiya Hartman calls “the afterlives of slavery.” Foregrounding these scenarios of violence, Black musicians create works that can be read as enacting tactics of resistance to that violence. These tactics include vigilantism, nihilism, opacity, and marronage. Incorporating sonic, visual, literary, and discursive methods, I use the theoretical lens of the Black Nightmare Imaginary to do interdisciplinary analyses of the songs, music videos, album covers, and journalistic representations of a set of post-Civil Rights era Black musicians—including Mary J. Blige, Prince, N.W.A, 2pac, and Sister Souljah. This work challenges prevailing attitudes that misunderstand and devalue Black creative works with simplistic binaries of good /bad, positive/negative, political/apolitical. To the contrary, these are complex works that reckon with both the life and death stakes of the violence foundational to Black American life and the irreducibility and irrepressibility of that life to its influence.
BLACK REMOVAL AND INVISIBILITY: AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF RACE AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE 21st CENTURY
(2018) Benjamin, Tatiana; Wong, Janelle; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
This dissertation, Black Removal and Invisibility: At the Intersections of Race and Citizenship in the 21st Century, uses the experiences of Black immigrants as a lens to examine anti-Blackness and citizenship within the contemporary U.S. immigration system. I explore how Black immigrants sit at a unique intersection of Blackness and (un)documentation that produces significant vulnerabilities. Black undocumented immigrants occupy an ambiguous and often untenable position within the U.S. nation-state. They are simultaneously included in the broad category of “Black American” and excluded from the category of “American” by virtue of their lack of citizenship. Their exclusion, I contend, is based both on Blackness and status as unauthorized immigrants. I examine their exclusion by addressing the following questions: How does an emphasis on “invisibility” help us to better understand how immigrant rights organizations in the U.S. address and represent the needs of Black immigrants? In what ways have the experiences of Black immigrants been rendered marginal to social justice movements? What are the consequences of their marginalization for political representation? Lastly, how are Black immigrants responding and transforming the immigrants’ movement? I rely on qualitative methods, including participant observation and in-depth interviews to explore these questions.
Book Review of Carmen Lomas Garza by Constance Cortez
(Latino Studies, 2011) Ontiveros, Randy
This article reviews Constance Cortez's 2010 monograph on the Texas-based artist Carmen Lomas Garza. It appears in Volume 9, Issue 4 of the journal Latino Studies.
Breaking through the Margins: Pushing Sociopolitical Boundaries Through Historic Preservation
(2016) Hopkins, Portia Dene; Williams- Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
“Breaking through the Margins: Pushing Sociopolitical Boundaries Through Historic Preservation” explores the ways in which contemporary grassroots organizations are adapting historic preservation methods to protect African American heritage in communities that are on the brink of erasure. This project emerges from an eighteen-month longitudinal study of three African American preservation organizations—one in College Park, Maryland and two in Houston, Texas—where gentrification or suburban sprawl has all but decimated the physical landscape of their communities. Grassroots preservationists in Lakeland (College Park, Maryland), St. John Baptist Church (Missouri City, Texas), and Freedmen’s Town (Houston, Texas) are involved in pushing back against preservation practices that do not, or tend not, to take into consideration the narratives of African American communities. I argue, these organizations practice a form of preservation that provides immediate and lasting effects for communities hovering at the margins. This dissertation seeks to outline some of the major methodological approaches taken by Lakeland, St. John, and Freedmen’s Town. The preservation efforts put forth by the grassroots organizations in these communities faithfully work to remind us that history without preservation is lost. In taking on the critical work of pursuing social justice, these grassroots organizations are breaking through the margins of society using historic preservation as their medium.
The Bridges of Madison County and Iowa: Production, Reception, and Place
(2005-05-12) Wahl, Gregory Ralph; Kelly, R. Gordon; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY AND IOWA: PRODUCTION, RECEPTION, AND PLACE Gregory R. Wahl, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Dissertation directed by: R. Gordon Kelly, Department of American Studies The 1992 Warner Books novel The Bridges of Madison County, the first by Robert James Waller, a University of Northern Iowa Management professor, was a "surprise" success, marketed as literary fiction through a "word-of-mouth" campaign of "handselling" in independent bookstores, which put it on the New York Times bestseller list. Once the love story became a bestseller, the story of its popularity began to appear in mass entertainment media, notably on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" and on the Oprah Winfrey Show. It sold over ten million copies and became the fastest-selling hardcover novel of its era. Bridges' pretension to literariness touched a nerve with New York cultural gatekeeping literary reviewers, who conflated its perceived sub-literary qualities with its Iowa origins, middlebrow readership, and even cultural disease. Readers, however, identified with and participated in the novel's realistic frame narrative, which constructed the story and its setting, Winterset, Iowa, as a text and place where true love was made manifest. Bridges was parodied for its perceived sexism and pretentious language. A movie adaptation was made by Clint Eastwood and Steven Spielberg, and Bridges-related tourism changed the nature of Winterset's economy and community. What can we learn about American culture from the unexpected, record-setting sales success of The Bridges of Madison County, situated as it was on the boundaries of art and popular culture and of local community and mass media? At each stage of the book's communications circuit--production, sales success, differing receptions by reviewers and readers, and reintegration into the setting of Iowa--the case of The Bridges of Madison County illustrates that cultural boundaries are contested and maintained in part by invoking place and region, that the power of mass media depends on the participation of individuals and local community, and that local communities will make their own power in the face of, and out of, the power of mass media.
Broadcasting Birth Control: Family Planning and Mass Media, 1914-1984
(2010) Parry, Manon; Michel, Sonya; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
The history of the birth control movement in the United States is traditionally told through accounts of the leaders and organizations that campaigned to legalize the distribution of contraception. Only recently have historians begun to examine the "cultural work" of printed media including newspapers, magazines, and even novels in fostering support for the cause. This dissertation builds on this scholarship, to examine the films and radio and television broadcasts developed by birth control advocates, and the communications experts they increasingly turned to for guidance, over the course of the twentieth century. As advocates tried to mimic the efforts of commercial advertisers to "sell" health-related behaviors to a wide audience, they crafted the new academic specialty of health communication. I argue that mass media was central to the campaign to transform the private subject of fertility control into one fit for public discussion in the United States. Moreover, the international family planning movement played an instrumental role in establishing and expanding health communication in the promotion of contraception around the globe. As they negotiated for access to cinema and radio platforms from which to promote their cause, birth control advocates toned down their feminist rhetoric of sexual liberation. After the legalization of contraception, censorship and broadcasting conventions affecting educational messages further diluted the kinds of representations they could promote over the radio and on the nation's television sets. As commercial media became increasingly explicit in the 1960s and `70s, family planning promoters conversely expunged sex from their broadcasts for domestic and foreign audiences. In this way, media helped to shape the messages of the movement. Seeking greater creative freedom, some of the family planning community began to cultivate informal partnerships with entertainment media producers, perfecting a strategy abroad that would be brought home to the U.S. The Mexican "education-entertainment" approach has since become the most influential model of family planning communication, replicated around the world in efforts to reintroduce the context of sex and relationships to the promotion of contraceptive use. This history is thus a transnational narrative of the dissemination of messages and the technologies and techniques that delivered them.
Broken City: Race, Property, and Culture
(2018) Casiano, Michael; Parks, Sheri L; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
Broken City: Race, Property, and Culture is an interdisciplinary study situated within the fields of urban history, African American Studies, and ethnic studies that examines Baltimore City during a period that roughly spans the late-nineteenth century to the mid-1950s. Using archival sources and close readings, this study examines city law, newsprint, popular culture artifacts, public health periodicals, reform publications, and social scientific production to narrate how, during this period of massive urban growth, theories of black life and culture manifested in city policy around the question of property and its regulation. This dissertation’s contribution to similar studies around the question of black geographic exclusion and containment is to highlight the ways that property controls—and the bases of municipal power itself—were bound up in the intentional criminalization, pathologization, and destruction of black communities, all of which were justified by persistent cultural critiques of black fitness for civil life centered on gendered and sexualized assumptions. The dissertation’s interrelated local investigations narrate social dramas that both exhibited culturally-specific interpretations of black life and precipitated institutional mandates guided by—or reproductive—of those interpretations. One investigation analyzes the discourses of black deviance that animated Baltimore’s crusade against the “cocaine evil” in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century to demonstrate how municipal power grew during this period to account for Jim Crow-era investments in disciplining black Baltimoreans and white desires to justify residential exclusion. Another investigation charts how, in the city’s racial covenants, black people became indexed as “nuisance,” a legal maneuver that allowed developers and white homeowners to categorize black people as a hazardous land use whose exclusion was protected under property rights. All told, these investigations demonstrate how, in Baltimore, the basis of municipal power and development, rooted in the protection and maintenance of property, was and continues to be based in the containment of black life through cultural prescriptions of black deviance.