American Studies
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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 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.Item "Unfit for Family Life": How Regimes of Accumulation, Sexuality, and Antiblackness Have Built (and Rebuilt) West Baltimore(2020) Choflet, Robert Thomas; Sies, Mary Corbin; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“'Unfit for Family Life': How Regimes of Accumulation, Sexuality, and Antiblackness Built (and Rebuilt) West Baltimore,” is an historical study of West Baltimore housing transformation in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. Derived from in-depth oral histories conducted over a number of years with fifty-three Baltimore residents who have lived in (or currently live in) public housing, this project drew from resident reflections and rigorous archival work, in order to investigate the demolition campaigns that reduced Baltimore's public housing stock by almost half and the privatization campaigns that have rebuilt these once public spaces. Policy makers, housing reformers, planners, and real estate interests constructed a shared cultural politics that imagined black women as imperiled actors, public housing as destabilizing to black family life, and demolition and privatization as a necessary, even moral, intervention. This process ignored black women's organizing efforts and specific political demands, while isolating them from one another and disrupting established political coalitions. In spite of this, oral histories reveal continued efforts by residents to organize for democratic redistribution of housing resources.Item Collossus of Rutgers: The Visual and Print Media Legacy of Paul Leroy Robeson(2019) walsh, shane bolles; Williams-Forson, Psyche; Corbin- Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)One of the most celebrated African American figures known worldwide, Paul Leroy Robeson was primarily erased from history books for almost a decade after he began speaking out about injustices stemming from the second Red Scare. Fewer still know of his formative years and early influences. This erasure can only be counteracted with targeted scholarship. As a project of reclamation, this American Studies dissertation joins scholarship in other fields that aim to restore Paul Robeson to his proper place in history with the hope of prompting a new wave of research on the subject. The youth and early career of Robeson is the targeted era (before his matriculation at the University of London in 1934) of this work. The central question around which this dissertation is organized is this: Through a close examination of the role that the skin and masculinity of Paul Robeson played in his early life and career, how can we come to understand the ways that the resulting gaze was imposed on his body, and how did Robeson himself cultivate the gaze of his own public image and cultural representation as a performance icon and “race man,” launching him on his way to becoming an advocate for rights of black people worldwide? To engage this research question, the methodologies of textual critical discourse analysis, Mora Beauchamp- Byrd's exhibition categorization and methodology, and Frederick Douglass's lectures on visual theories are utilized. All of these have directly assisted in the interpolation of the printed and photographic legacy of Robeson. Given the early career focus of this dissertation, archival materials from the following institutions provided the primary sources for this work: the Rutgers University libraries Special Collection and Archives, Temple University's Charles L. Blockson Afro-American collection, and the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. With Robeson as an example of a multi-talented black cultural icon, textual discourse analysis demonstrates how to construct specific views of the social world that Paul Robeson inhabited in the early phase of his public life and how his career developments were portrayed in both the Black American and majority print media outlets of the era.Item Emancipatory Hope: Reclaiming Black Social Movement Continuity(2019) Winstead, Kevin C; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)From the Freedom Songs to the Pullman Porters, African Americans have had to find ways to make collective use of the available means of communication for resistance, survival, and political organizing. The Movement for Black Lives carries on this tradition by using social media platforms, specifically Twitter. Accordingly, I asked: How do Black activists use Twitter to communicate ideas of hope and survival? Applying an adaption of Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis, I examined Black activists’ constructions and utilization of hope for political action through shared artifacts of engagement across Twitter. By engaging both the interface of Twitter, its uses, and significant cultural practices along with a content analysis of Black activists’ online discussion, I identified the technocultural political framing of the current movement for Black lives. I argued that hope becomes a vehicle by which African Americans pass along strategies and tactics for liberation through technocultural practice. I conceptualized these findings as emancipatory hope, a utopian expectation of the collective capacity for dismantling race, class, and gender dominance. This research has implications for how we understand social movement theorizing by including a technoculture lens to the abeyance formation of social movement continuity theory.Item TRANSATLANTIC DISBELONGINGS: LOCATING LIBERATORY WORLDMAKING PRACTICES IN NIGERIAN DIASPORIC WOMEN’S ART(2018) Akinbola, Patricia; Sies, Mary Cobin; Ater, Renée; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Transatlantic Disbelongings: Locating Liberatory Worldmaking Practices in Nigerian Diasporic Women’s Art” examines how women artists of the Nigerian diaspora use contemporary visual art, performance, film, and literature to contest and redefine their familial, cultural, and national belonging in Nigeria and its diasporas. Foregrounding the work of five women artists: Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Zina Saro-Wiwa, ruby onyinyechi amanze, and Nnedi Okorafor, who straddle multiple geographies, identities, and allegiances, this project analyzes how they resist popular understandings of what has been deemed proper conduct for women in Nigeria and its diaspora—a process I call “disbelonging.” My use of disbelonging refers to the process by which female diasporic artists embrace and employ anti-respectability and queerness to recode, remix, and resist oppressive colonial legacies surrounding gender, sexuality, and national belonging in a Nigerian context. Their works depict visual and literary landscapes where women move freely through time and space, engage playfully with one another, prioritize their own desires, and unapologetically embody contradiction and taboo. This dissertation argues that their artmaking is worldmaking, which creates opportunities to reconfigure understandings of transnational flows and unsettles oppressive conceptualizations of community and family to embrace a range of affiliational tensions.Item 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.Item The Only Woman In The Courtroom Dismantled Jim Crow: Constance Baker Motley(2013) Ford, Gary L.; Struna, Nancy; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Bold Words The Only WOman In The Courtroom Dismantled Jim Crow: Constance Baker Motley