American Studies
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Item "Get Dressed Up For The End Of The World!": The Reinvention of the Elder Goth Subculture During a Time of Crisis(2024) Bush, Leah J.; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is an ethnographic examination of relationships between subcultural identity and Gothic social worlds in the Elder Goth subculture in Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Formed in Britain in the late 1970s, the Goth subculture is characterized by a distinct morbid aesthetic and an overwhelming emphasis on the color black. The subculture retains a relatively high number of Elder Goths who participate in the subculture beyond their youth. This interdisciplinary project draws from the lifespan perspective of age studies and aspects of performance studies and queer utopian theory. Individual identities and Gothic communities are built and sustained through subculturally specific fashion and embodied practices at nightclubs, outdoor gatherings, and the phenomenon of virtual streaming dance nights which emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project also considers how meaning is made in subcultural places. Elder Goths draw on the subculture’s embrace of dichotomies in life, commitment to adaptation, and deepen their investment with the subculture at transitional points in their lives. Subculture is thus a fluid process of worldmaking which unfolds over the life course. This dissertation underscores the power of agency in making new and better worlds.Item 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.Item Performing Archives: How Central Americans Perform Race in the DMV(2024) Hernandez, Wanda Roselee; Guerrero, Perla M.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Performing Archives: How Central Americans Perform Race in the DMV examines the lives of Central Americans in the Washington metropolitan area, also known as the DMV, between 1960 and 2000. I explore how Central Americans were racialized and how their personal archives demonstrate quotidian performances of race and community formation in the region. To determine how Central Americans were racialized, I discursively analyze local newspapers, as well as letters, congressional proceedings, and reports sources, to make sense of the racial ideologies that circulated regionally. The racial meanings ascribed to Central Americans is significant because it shapes how others perceived them. These perceptions also had material impacts on their lives, informing where they live, where they work, their experiences in schools, and interactions with police. Local media, politicians, and bureaucrats used language and images to construct Central Americans as a racial Other. In their racialization, they also used African Americans as a comparative foil, resulting in an ideological binary between Blackness and Latinidad in the region. Central Americans were described as Spanish-speaking, brown, working-class, “illegals,” and delinquents. This homogenized Central Americans, a racially and ethnically diverse diaspora. As a method of self-documentation and self-preservation, Central Americans’ personal archives complicate and contest this dominant discourse. Reading personal archives performatively reveals the ways in which Central Americans navigated their racialization through quotidian performances of race. Racial performances refer to Central Americans’ embodied knowledges on race. These performances consisted of learning African American Vernacular English to find belonging, relying on kin networks to transgress the spatial constraints of illegality, or expressing solidarity through declarations and gestures, like head nods. Overall, my argument is twofold. First, I argue that Central Americans’ racialized experiences be understood through their personal archives because they provide insight into the interpersonal effects of, and quotidian responses to, racist structures. Second, I argue that Central Americans’ experiences navigating a region historically defined through a Black-and-white racial binary allows us to understand the processes of race-making more deeply by demonstrating that their racialization is informed by local and hemispheric racism that draw on a variety of signifiers to place others in shifting hierarchies.Item The Laboring Scholar: Community College Geographies and the Politics of Care(2024) Hofmann, Anne Elizabeth; Guerrero, Perla; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"The Laboring Scholar: Community College Geographies and the Politics of Care" is an institutional ethnography that investigates the personal, political, and economic costs to student caregivers seeking a college degree. Through a critical analysis of student interviews and a close examination of community college structures and histories, I deploy an interdisciplinary, qualitative methodology that seeks to topple and contest previous ways of researching two-year collegiate structures in the U.S. I argue that, internally, community colleges offer intermittent respites from the physical and emotional labor of caregiving by being locations of intellectual invigoration and professionalization for students; however, I also address how community colleges’ positioning within larger regional and global political economies ultimately renders them stations of stagnation for many students, especially those with the most overlapping needs and markers of difference. To analyze these concepts, I use an interpretive framework that threads theories of disinvestment, structural exclusion, and predatory inclusion, to explore the use of the term “care,” which is used flexibly across institutional and everyday life to recruit students and animate collegiate recruiting and retention initiatives. I trace the link between two-year schools’ reputation as both places of “opportunity” and “second chances,” and as a stigmatized alternative to “real college.” I do so by examining the language and visual arguments deployed by colleges’ public-facing websites, as situated within broader historical-political narratives about community colleges, and by conducting in-depth interviews with caregiving students. I find that political and popular beliefs regarding studenthood and care work are internalized by students, particularly those with the fewest financial and time resources. Additionally, the overlap between race, gender, and unpaid care work aligns with those students who are the least likely to graduate from college and the most likely to accrue significant debt and physical or mental distress due to their attempts. The study triangulates institutional histories, neoliberal rhetorics of education and success, and student caregiver testimony to conclude that unpaid care labor for biological or chosen family is simultaneously a primary barrier, a fundamental source of personal joy, and a possible location of subversive power for community college students seeking a post-secondary credential.Item SETTING THE TRANSPACIFIC KITCHEN TABLE: THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF FOOD IN THE KOREAN AMERICAN DIASPORA(2024) Kim, Jung Min; Forson, Psyche W; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Setting the Transpacific Kitchen Table: The Cultural Politics of Food in the Korean American Diaspora” is a material culture analysis of key dishes and ingredients of the Korean American diaspora. The study begins in South Korea following the Armistice on July 27, 1953 and follows the movement of Korean people, foods, and ideas to the United States in the decades after the war to the present day with a specific focus on three dishes: Budae jjigae (Army Base Stew), kimchi (traditional fermented vegetable), and rice. This dissertation unpacks the recipes and some of the meanings of these dishes to understand and contextualize their importance in Korean and Korean American foodways historically and into the present moment. Central to this project is the material “afterlife” of these ingredients and dishes- some introduced by foreign powers, while others are the most Korean of dishes- the lingering impact on how Korean and Korean Americans create place and meaning from these dishes. How do these dishes come to be? How do they come together to become symbolic of the Korean diasporic experience? In answering these questions, I hope to document and interrogate the range of emotional, cultural, and material responses that budae jjigae, kimchi, and rice have engendered from artists, chefs, mothers, and everyday Koreans and Korean Americans. With the increase in visibility and popularity of Korean foods in the American food lexicon, the aim of this study is to help historicize and contextualize this rise through exploring the complex relationship between Korea and the United States through foodways. In doing so it will interrogate and analyze the “entanglements” of transpacific power and political economies through foodways to understand the dialectic between state power and community resilience and resistance.Item Paradise Remixed: The Queer Politics of Tourism in Jamaica(2023) Abdullah-Smith, Hazim Karim; Mirabal, Nancy R; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Employing an interdisciplinary approach, “Paradise Remixed: The Queer Politics of Tourism in Jamaica” examines the dominant historical, literary and ideological narratives of tourism in Jamaica. At the same time, it examines the intersection of tourism and sexuality through an analysis of media representations of homophobia and queer Jamaican discussions of progress. Noting that tourism is a privileged form of mobility, this dissertation uses tourism to interrogate the array of historical and contemporary tensions of class, race, sexuality and how such tensions are negotiated through Black diasporic and queer Jamaican ways of knowing. This dissertation begins by tracing how the promotion of Jamaica as an ideal tourist destination, since the early 1900s, heavily shaped politics and culture on the island and abroad. Jamaica’s reputation as a tourist paradise was manufactured and depended on a continual rearticulation of what Jamaica is and who Jamaicans are. Drawing on a range of media archives from Jamaican newspapers to African American lifestyle publications, this dissertation argues that the success of Jamaica’s paradisical tourist image comes after difficult debates about how Jamaica should be represented. Interestingly, the successful touristic representations would greatly impact how African Americans would imagine Jamaica as a tourist destination. By the late 20th century, tourism again becomes a site of fracture and precarity. The calls to end homophobic music and a proposed boycott threatened Jamaica’s image as a welcoming paradise. The leaders of these campaigns, primarily North Americans, deployed a global strategy that brought attention to homophobia in Jamaica. However, these same leaders failed to amplify the nuanced voices of queer Jamaican activists who were progressively gaining visibility, strengthening their own organizations and articulating for themselves what it means to be queer and Jamaican. In recent years, some have even established their own tourism businesses. For example, initiatives like Connek create safe spaces for queer people, spark genuine transnational connections and transform perceptions of queer life in Jamaica. In centering queer Jamaican experiences, this dissertation highlights the nuanced voices, artistic expressions and activism of queer Jamaicans, and acknowledges the safe spaces they have and continue to create through tourism and beyond.Item Counter-Capital: Black Power, The New Left, and the Struggle to Remake Washington, D.C. From Below, 1964-1994(2023) Kumfer, Timothy Daniel; Hanhardt, Christina B; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"Counter-Capital: Black Power, the New Left, and the Struggle to Remake Washington, D.C. From Below, 1964-1994” traces how grassroots organizers in the nation’s capital fought for greater control over the city and its future between the War on Poverty and rise of neoliberal austerity, helping to shape its recent past and present. Comprising a set of linked case studies, it explores how a generation of activists forged in the crucibles of the Black freedom struggle and resistance to the Vietnam war responded locally to redevelopment schemes, planned inner-city freeways, nascent gentrification, and an exponential rise in homelessness from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. The campaigns they waged brought them into confrontation with federal administrators, legislators, mayors, and even the president. They also led to moments of collaboration with the state, altering the course of urban and social policy locally and nationally and contributing to the growth of community development and direct service approaches. Going beyond the boundaries of policymaking, the radicals it follows fostered emancipatory and participatory visions for the District and urban life more generally rooted in their movement ideals, ones which remain instructive even as they encountered obstacles to their full realization. Drawing on a diverse array of archival materials including organizational newsletters, meeting minutes, event flyers, campaign brochures, and correspondence; underground press and community papers alongside mainstream news outlets; documentary film and preserved footage; and oral histories and personal interviews, “Counter-Capital” contributes to debates in the fields of African American, social movement, and urban history. The project is further animated by and participates in discussions taking place across the correlating interdisciplinary fields of African American studies, American studies, and urban studies, bringing aspects of these fields that don’t always speak to one another into closer conversation. Laboring at these intersections, it shows how sustained attention to space—and specific places—can reframe the historiography of Black Power and the New Left and how centering activists and their campaigns expands the literature on Washington while troubling conventions in the composite portrait of late 20th C. US cities.Item IN THE PURSUIT: BLACK WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES IN PWI DOCTORAL PROGRAMS & THE USAGE OF BLACK JOY AS PERSISTENCE(2022) Sessoms, Christina Simone; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Out of 104,953 doctoral degrees earned by women within the United States in 2019-2020, Black women obtained 10,576 PhDs across the span of academic disciplines, equating to 11.1%, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (2021). However, research has not done its due diligence of parsing through the data to understand the stories of the women who make up those 10,576 PhDs granted. This dissertation study explores the lived experiences of Black women who specifically transitioned from their undergraduate institutions into doctoral programs at predominately white institutions (PWIs) and how Black joy may be employed as a persistence mechanism toward degree completion. Because no literature exists to understand this community of doctoral students, this groundbreaking study begins with the question of what are the lived experiences of Black women who transition directly from their undergraduate to doctorate at PWIs? The dissertation continues to push further to then question how Black women in doctoral programs understand, experience, and sustain their joy and in what ways does joy inform persistence and resistance amongst these sista scholars. Utilizing Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) Black Feminist Thought as a theoretical foundation and Black feminist-womanist storytelling as the chosen methodology, I argue that this specific transition is one that must be deeply explored because of unique components and that Black joy does, in fact, serve as a positive mechanism for persistence. Life stories were collected through two interlocking methods of semi-structured interviews and focus groups amongst 14 Black women spanning 12 different academic fields in PhD programs across the United States. By sharing life narratives of Black women in doctoral programs, in-depth insight is gathered concerning reasons for going to graduate school, academic and socialization transitions, three primary barriers to success - age being a salient identity, mental health challenges, and perceived & real pressure, and, lastly, understanding and experiencing joy through self, community, and work. Through this research project, Black women in doctoral programs created space to critique and disrupt the Ivory Tower while producing joy amongst each other.Item 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.Item "Lovers on a Mission": Black Intimacies in Popular Culture and Digital Social Media Fandom(2022) Adams, Brienne Amaris; Lothian, Alexis; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Social media provides a way to study Black people’s relationship to the raced and gendered ways that they contend with their intimate lives with friends, family, and their romantic partners through studying their relationship to contemporary cultural productions. Digital Black fandoms constitute Black digital intimacies through affective fandom engagements on social media. Guiding this dissertation are two research questions: How do Black fans grapple with the intimate aspects of their friendships, family, and romantic lives by engaging their fandom objects on social media? How does social media provide a platform to build community through creating new discourse about the romantic and intimate lives of Black people? Utilizing theories from Black Studies, Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Fan Studies, and Digital Studies, this dissertation analyses web series, television, film, and music. Autoethnography, close reading, and participant observation guide the methods and methodologies for the dissertation. First, the fandom of the queer web series Between Women (2011-2017), which depicts Black lesbians in Atlanta and their romantic, friendship, and family relationships. Next, this dissertation chronicles the journey of the web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl (2011- 2013) to Insecure (2016-2021), which features two Black women best friends and their rollercoaster romantic relationships in Los Angeles. Finally, Beyoncé’s album Lemonade (2016), her husband JAY-Z’s album 4:44 (2017), and her sister Solange’s album A Seat at the Table (2016) as they each explore themes of racial injustice, love, and family. Through this process, “affirmative transformative” fandom demonstrates how digital Black fandom works of Black cultural productions affirm and transform the interior ways Black fans reflect on their interpersonal relationships. “Affirmative transformative” fandom is an amalgamation of traditional definitions of affirmative fandom, where fans affirm that they like a cultural production, and transformative fandom when fans create a new work inspired by their fandom object. The combination of “affirmative transformative” fandom intervenes in how Black fans affirm their fandom objects and themselves while simultaneously creating new fandom works and explaining the ways their interpersonal lives are transformed. The artists’ production and fans’ relationship to these cultural productions demonstrate that the quotidian aspects of the intimate are necessary to keep in conversation with other forms of resistance to self and world-make for themselves as an act of agential labor for and by Black fans.