American Studies
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2209
Browse
12 results
Search Results
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.Item RUBIES IN THEIR CROWNS:AN EXAMINATION OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCH WOMEN AND HEAD FASHION(2021) Malone, Shoji Von; Williams Forson, Psyche A; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Church hats and other head adornments are a major component of Sunday morning worship for many Black Christian women. Wearing a hat, also known as a crown, is a part of the Sunday ritual and culture of Black churches. This dissertation, Rubies in Their Crowns: An Examination of African American Church Women and Head Fashion, explores the ways in which Black women’s clothing, especially head adornment, aid in revealing how they self-define, self-actualize, and perform self-awarenesss. I argue that Black church women have used and continue to use head adornment to express themselves socially, culturally, and politically. Through head adornment these women begin to create, define, and express Black womanhood differently throughout time. Methodologies in material culture studies, visual culture studies, cultural studies, and ethnography using intersectionality are employed to conduct close readings of primary sources—images, newspaper articles, catalogues, and church manuals. Additionally, I conducted life history interviews with eleven hat-wearing Black church women. These participants from the Mid-Atlantic to the Midwest, illuminate the ways that head adornments tell stories of access, creativity, and entrepreneurship. In revealing Black women’s role as cultural producers their words also unveil how their hats become decorated crowns.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 Designing the Sick Body: Structuring Illness in the Techno-Material Age(2016) Moesch, Jarah; King, Katie; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)How might we pivot and turn towards outsider bodily knowledges to learn how bodies come to matter within and through the extended medical industrial complex? Using the concept of the embodied constellation, I examine what it means to know as and through our sick bodies -- in relationship to data, information, knowledge -- and what it means to claim that these kinds of knowing matter. Embodied constellations enable us to recognize that what we perceive as flattened constructs and single systems are instead a multiplicity of pathways and systems that may or may not interact with each other, thus knowing them in one way rather than another. Using a methodology I call AutoEthnoGraphics I put the researcher’s embodiment at the center of the research as analysis itself. Such analysis demonstrates the chemical, biological, and organic processes of the sick body, and includes poetry, images, and drawings from 30 years of my personal graphic journal. AutoEthnoGraphics thus draws our attention to just how we are implicated in the thinking, molding, structuring of end results. I speak to and share methods from ranging forms of trans-disciplinary scholarship. Grounded in my own work as an artist, I add American studies methods of ethnography and discourse analysis, mix in women of color feminisms' narrative storytelling; queer theory's analysis of outsider status, time, and failure; critical race theory's unpacking of institutionalized structures; science and technology studies' questioning of categories and their risks and credibility; and finally, media studies' deconstruction of images and sound. These tools, methods, and concerns come together in Queer Justice Design, my set of counter-practices for pivoting towards the outsider while making these embodied knowledges central to communities of care. The central tenets and values inform how we move through and co-create these practices with others to shape more livable lives. Those who would benefit from a practice of Queer Justice Design are those scholars and community organizers working towards universal or participatory design, and towards feminist and queer justice. Those I invite into these conversations work in such fields as disability studies, digital humanities, queer theory, feminist praxis, and cultural studies.Item Nervous Kitchens: Critical Readings of Black Women's Food Practices in The Soul Food Imaginary(2016) Walker, Jessica; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Nervous Kitchens intervenes in the story of soul food by treating the kitchen as a central site of instability. These kitchens reveal and critique their importance to constructions of Black womanhood. Utilizing close readings of Black women’s culinary practices in popular televisual kitchens and archival analysis of USDA domestic reforms, the project locates sites that challenge how we oversimplify soul food as a Black cultural product. These oversimplifications come through what I term the soul food imaginary. This term underscores how the cuisine is tangible (i.e., how dishes are made) but also the ways that histories of enslavement, migration, and domesticity are disseminated through fictionalized representations of Black women in the kitchen offering comfort through food. The project explores how images of these kitchens adhere to and diverge from the imaginary's four conventions: (1) Soul food originates in enslavement where master’s scraps became mama’s meal time; (2) Soul food is not healthy food; (3) Soul food moves South to North uninterrupted during the Great Migration and is evidence of and fuel for struggle, survival, and transformation; and 4) Black women cook it the best, naturally, and alone in the kitchen.Item Forensic Injustice: Human Rights, Archival Science and Racialized Feminicide in Guatemala(2016) Vargas, Maria Elena; Struna, Nancy; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The call to access and preserve the state records that document crimes committed by the state during Guatemala’s civil war has become an archival imperative entangled with neoliberal human rights discourses of “truth, justice, and memory.” 200,000 people were killed and disappeared in Guatemala’s civil war including acts of genocide in which 85% of massacres involved sexual violence committed against Mayan women. This dissertation argues that in an attempt to tell the official story of the civil war, American Human Rights organizations and academic institutions have constructed a normative identity whose humanity is attached to a scientific and evidentiary value as well as an archival status representing the materiality and institutionality of the record. Consequently, Human Rights discourses grounded in Western knowledges, in particular archival science and law, which prioritize the appearance of truth erase the material and epistemological experience of indigenous women during wartimes. As a result, the subjectivity that has surfaced on the record as most legible has mostly pertained to non-indigenous, middle class, urban, leftist men who were victims of enforced disappearance not genocide. This dissertation investigates this conflicting narrative that remembers a non-indigenous revolutionary masculine hero and grants him justice in human rights courtrooms simply because of a document attesting to his death. A main research question addressed in this project is why the promise of "truth and justice" under the name of human rights becomes a contentious site for gendered indigenous bodies? I conduct a discursive and rhetorical analysis of documentary film, declassified Guatemalan police and military records such as Operation Sofia, a military log known for “documenting the genocide” during rural counterinsurgencies executed by the military. I interrogate the ways in which racialized feminicides or the hyper-sexualized racial violence that has historically dehumanized indigenous women falls outside of discourses of vision constructed by Western positivist knowledges to reinscribe the ideal human right subject. I argue for alternative epistemological frames that recognize genocide as sexualized and gendered structures that have simultaneously produced racialized feminicides in order to disrupt the colonial structures of capitalism, patriarchy and heterosexuality. Ironically, these structures of power remain untouched by the dominant human rights discourse and its academic, NGO, and state collaborators that seek "truth and justice" in post-conflict Guatemala.Item 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.Item Reclaiming Black Beledi: Race, Wellness, And Online Community(2015) Velazquez, Maria Inez; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I analyze love, affect, and embodiment online. I specifically focus on belly dance because of its history as a kind of conscious and public laboring on the self. By situating belly dance as an imperial legacy of U.S. military engagement in the Middle East, I unveil its critical utility to bloggers’ discussion of wellness, self-care, and the affective consequences of living within imperialist and racist societies. I conclude by introducing the concept of a digital praxis of love, paying particular attention to digital black feminisms, wellness blogging, and dance. This project draws its exegesis from current scholarship on corporeal, physical feminisms, and digital feminisms in order to point towards a definition of praxis online as incorporating critical reflection, critical action, and everyday public life. This exploratory dissertation incorporates a variety of methodologies in order to investigate the movement of wellness, self-care, and critique as these concepts move through overlapping knowledge worlds, spaces, and sites of consumption. By doing so, this dissertation highlights the connections between conversations about wellness and conversations about politics. Analyzing these connections offers an important intervention in wellness studies, the digital humanities, and American studies by illustrating the role wellness (and its digital objects) plays in performing citizenship, group membership, and social justice activism.Item BROWNGIRL NARRATIVES: EXPLORING COMING OF AGE IN THE GOLDEN ERA OF HIP HOP (1986-1996)(2012) Chae Reddy, Melissa Kim; Williams-Forson, Psyche; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)&ldquoBrowngirl Narratives&rdquo seeks to gain a clearer understanding of what we can learn from textual evidence about experiences of browngirls coming of age during the post-civil rights Golden Age of Hip Hop (1986-1996) by examining contemporary literature, film, social media and music produced by and about these black women. It is an inquiry into the ways in which browngirls coming of age in the United States negotiated the dominant scripts existing in their lives to craft their own stories. The aim is to utilize an interdisciplinary, black female-centered framework to fully problematize phenomena such as self-creation, empowerment, and sexual exploration in the lives of black women coming of age during 1986-1996. This study is an examination of black female bidungsromane&mdash black female cultural texts illustrating the coming of age/development processes. Additionally, it is an investigation into what we can learn about the ongoing individuation processes for post-civil rights browngirls by engaging various texts. This project shows pieces of their narrative by examining hidden scripts amongst Ntozake Shange's choreopoem, for colored girls who have considered suicide| when the rainbow is enuf; Tyler Perry's feature film adaptation, For Colored Girls and the dialogue which surfaced as a result; the life, work and politics of artist Erykah Badu, and; social media texts such as blogs. The selected narrative texts can be unpacked and analyzed using the bildungsroman as a lens to view concepts of self-discovery--&ldquotracing the development of complex and multidimensional&rdquo browngirls, exploring &ldquowho she is and how she became that way.&rdquo What do these stories reveal about the journey toward a self-defined identity for browngirls marginalized by race, gender, class and sexuality coming of age in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s? What can the cultural texts tell us about how their experiences growing up during this particular period shape their sense of love relationships, family, community, and the self? The research discloses important overlooked narratives&mdash &ldquomeaningful and endearing stories about their experiences that are not solely focused on heterosexual romance&rdquo&mdashalong with hidden transcripts or subtexts that reveal important phenomena for this particular group of women regarding identity construction, black female representation and sexuality.