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.