American Studies
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Item 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.Item "Tell Me Your Diamonds" Story Bearing in African American Women's Life History Narratives(2014) Smith, Shanna Louise; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 1994, a week prior to the release of her family memoir The Sweeter the Juice, African American writer, Shirley Haizlip was a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show. The episode, "Denying my Race," unveiled the ways some members of Haizlip's bi-racial family sought to pass for white, while others lived successful lives as African Americans. During the publicized reunion, members of both sides of the racial coin worked toward coming to terms with their identities. In telling this story, Haizlip took on the role of the female story bearer, the writer of the family narrative who is positioned two or more generations beyond the story she tells. What does it mean to be a living archive, a black woman who carries the mantle of an uneasy familial past and makes it her body of work? What does it mean to investigate a wound in the family that is representative of larger cultural injuries that occurred during pivotal moments in black history? How can deeply entrenched cultural wounds open dialogue, establish common ground, and create spaces for empathy and understanding across race, gender, sexuality, and class? Each of the women, about whom I am writing in this dissertation, helps to address these questions. A'Lelia Bundles, Shirlee Haizlip, and (Carole) Ione have all been afforded the opportunity to labor with their fingers to corroborate the oral narratives handed to them. The fruit of their labor are their life histories: On Her Own Ground, The Sweeter the Juice, and Pride of Family, respectively. The titles signal familial pasts that intersect with the complexities of gender and labor, race and racial passing, class and privilege. Using personal life histories like that of Haizlip, Bundles, Ione and others I seek to better understand the ways in which women writers can foster more generative understandings of African American life histories and the ways in which they are situated as sites for social change.Item Place as Common and Un-Common Wealth: A Relational Ethnographic Analysis of the Conceptual Landscapes of Place Amidst the Shifting and Marginalized Grounds of Letcher County, Kentucky and Southeast Washington, D.C.(2014) Crase, Kirsten Lee; Caughey, John L.; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation presents a relational ethnographic analysis of how people in two marginalized places that are undergoing significant disruptive change understand the idea of place. The rural eastern Kentucky coalfields community of Letcher County and the urban neighborhood of Southeast Washington, D.C. share in having been structurally and discursively marginalized, both historically and in the present; they also share in having residents who are disadvantaged through the interplay of race, class, geography, and other factors. Both places currently face significant shifts in their social, economic, and structural landscapes. The disruptive shift facing Letcher County is the intensification of mountaintop removal coal mining methods that threaten ecological well-being and inflame longstanding local tensions over livelihood, identity, and the future of the community. The disruptive shift facing Southeast D.C. is increasing levels of redevelopment, as associated with the beginnings of gentrification in the community, and the heightening of longstanding tendencies toward displacement among the community's most marginalized residents. This study uses interviewing and participant observation to bring the flexibility of ethnography to bear on the complexities and subtleties of how people understand place. The focus of my study is a series of in-depth interviews with four key research participant residents in each community, interpreting their articulations in terms of the relationship between place, marginalization, and change. This study also makes use of a relational approach, juxtaposing and interlacing explorations of both places. There are many differences in the disruptive changes facing these places and in their general characteristics as communities--Letcher County is a rural, overwhelmingly white community and Southeast D.C. is an urban, overwhelmingly African American community. I argue, however, that broad and foundational resemblances exist between how residents of the two communities think and feel about place in relation to marginalization and change. I conclude that my research participants in Letcher County and Southeast D.C. share broadly similar understandings of what constitutes local well-being, or common wealth, and I demonstrate those parallels by elucidating my participants' conceptual landscapes of place.Item "Pushed Out" and Pulled In: Girls of Color, the Criminal Justice System, and Neoliberalism's Double-Bind(2013) White, Elise M.; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This ethnography of court-involved girls in New York City argues that the last three decades have been a period of accelerating transformation of the juvenile and criminal justice systems, and of their encroachment into the lives of urban, low-income girls of color. These processes are inextricably related to a broader set of economic and cultural changes referred to as neoliberalism. Shifts in the material conditions in these girls' communities, largely through the withdrawal of public interest in favor of competition and efficiency, have been accompanied by an ideological framework that instructs girls to be "independent," entrepreneurial, and individually accountable. This discourse of "empowerment" masks important unexamined assumptions imported from previous juridical, sociological, and criminological constructions of girls as deviant: first, that the appropriate epistemological foundations for the study of girls lie outside them; and second, that girls are discrete variables--sites of pathology or victimization, but not of agency or critical capacity. Rather than reduce these girls to a set of pathologies or present them as individual actors making "bad choices," I ground my analysis in girls' narratives and analytic frameworks, tracing the cultural and economic inflections of neoliberalization in their family, community, and institutional lives. I explore the physical and psychic violence being perpetrated against court-involved girls on a daily basis. For these young women of color, the net result of neoliberalization in New York City is a series of double-binds: pairings of violent or threatening message and context that directly contradict one another, and where to acknowledge the disjunction itself provokes further, punitive violence. These double-binds underlie and perpetuate the system of penality and punishment. While a discursive legacy of individual pathology still colors the construction of these girls in the cultural dreamwork, I argue that it is the system itself that has become pathological, contributing in essential ways to the production of girls as delinquent and deviant. This dissertation explores this production, alongside girls' methods of coping, resisting, and sometimes perpetuating, neoliberal narratives. It concludes with recommendations arising from the dramatic re-envisioning of urban girls of color as civic actors and central members of our communities.Item Imagined Pasts, Imagined Futures: Race, Politics, Memory, and the Revitalization of Downtown Silver Spring, Maryland(2005-12-05) Johansen, Bruce Richard; Caughey, John L.; Corbin Sies, Mary; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Title of dissertation: IMAGINED PASTS, IMAGINED FUTURES: RACE, POLITICS, MEMORY, AND THE REVITALIZATION OF DOWNTOWN SILVER SPRING, MARYLAND Bruce Richard Johansen, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 Dissertation directed by: Professor John L. Caughey Professor Mary Corbin Sies Department of American Studies Through ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and archival research, this study explores differences in people's perceptions of an aging, inner-ring suburb, during a period in which revitalization has transformed its built environment, and its population has become more diverse. To examine how three sets of active residents have thought about and acted in response to transpiring material, social, and cultural changes, my interdisciplinary research draws on methodologies and literatures from anthropology, geography, urban and suburban history, cultural criticism, sociology, and political science. Subjects featured identify as historic preservationists, civil rights activists, and/or through affiliations with an organization devoted to making leadership and civic participation more representative of a multicultural community. I demonstrate that there are significant differences in perception among members of these three sets, and that these variations stem from divergent individual and collective constructions of reality that are rooted in a range of histories, cultures, values, imaginings, and needs. I show that these different orientations affect how individuals relate to their surroundings, which is then reflected in public discourse. I investigate how these differences are exacerbated by internal group dynamics and external political structures that have kept segments of the community divided during the twenty years that revitalization plans have been debated. I illustrate that a reliance on public hearings as the main form of public discourse deepens adversarial relations by inhibiting dialogue and consequently an understanding of the diverse array of perspectives on the commercial built environment that exist. I convey how internal group dynamics that exclude community members with contrary points of view mirrors what occurs in public hearings, further diminishing the effectiveness of civic groups. Finally, this dissertation argues that new processes must be designed to assist oversight of revitalization in multicultural communities like Silver Spring, Maryland, a subject that to date has been insufficiently investigated. I contend that unifying diverse segments of such communities is possible if areas of common concern are identified and new forms of cooperative dialogue and practices of leadership pursued.