Communication
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Item A BLACK NATIONALIST WORLD: THE RHETORIC OF LEADERS OF THE UNIVERSAL NEGRO IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATION FROM 1914 TO 1925(2022) Carroll, Darrian Robert; Parry-Giles, Shawn; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Black people continue to struggle for freedom. This project examines the way that leaders of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) fought for the freedom of Black people from 1914 to 1925. UNIA leaders rhetorically fought for Black people’s freedom by building on their belief in Black self-determination to practice world-making and envision a public. Turning back to UNIA leaders’ espousal of evaluations of the present and expectations for the future illustrates how UNIA leaders developed a view of a public capable of including all Black people and left behind a roadmap for how to make a more equitable world now. Chapter One investigates Marcus Garvey’s “Address to the 2nd Universal Negro Improvement Association Convention.” Garvey’s evaluations and expectations, his world-making, and his freedom dream, provided the foundation for UNIA leaders’ view of their public as one that included all Black people. Chapter Two examines the rhetoric of UNIA leaders Henrietta Vinton Davis, William Ferris, and Marcus Garvey during the “Africa for the Africans” campaign. The second chapter reveals how leaders’ world-making rhetoric provided them with the opportunity to envision a parallel public—a public inclusive of all Black people and insulated from the negative views of the “dominant” public. The third chapter examines how leaders articulated evaluations of the past and present and expectations for the future to develop a view of their public as one still capable of supporting Black self-determination despite the imprisoning of Marcus Garvey. UNIA leaders like Henrietta Vinton Davis, William Ferris, Amy Jacques Garvey, William Sherrill, T. Thomas Fortune, and Marcus Garvey exemplified a rhetoric of champions as they predicted the future success of their public. The fourth chapter investigates how the most indispensable women leaders of the UNIA reflected on the UNIA’s successes from 1914 to 1925 after the UNIA had passed its prime. Chapter Four turns to Amy Ashwood Garvey’s and Amy Jacques Garvey’s reminisces of Marcus Garvey in their interviews for “The Ghost of Garvey” conducted by Lerone Bennett Jr. In their interviews, Ashwood Garvey and Jacques Garvey produced a rhetoric of falling forward by evaluating the UNIA’s past and expecting that the efforts of the UNIA leaders would have purchase for Black people fighting for freedom in the future. Ashwood Garvey’s and Jacques Garvey’s rhetoric pushed a view of leaders’ public as strong and supportive of Black self-determination into perpetuity. This project concludes by reflecting on what UNIA leaders’ world-making and envisioning of a public illuminate about Black Nationalism in the 1960s and world-making now. Leaders did not get to see their Black Nationalist world come to fruition, but UNIA leaders did bring millions of Black people together around the idea that if they believed in self-determination, the future was theirs for the making. Turning back to UNIA leaders’ rhetoric from 1914 to 1925 evinces how by believing in Black self-determination and articulating their own evaluations of the present and expectations for the future, UNIA leaders charted a path to a different world.Item The Black Body in Political Photography, 1990-2020(2021) Sharma, Artesha Chardonnay; Parry-Giles, Dr. Shawn; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Black political art has been an important element of Black liberation efforts in the 20th and 21st centuries. Black artist-activists of the past and present have demonstrated a concern with systems of oppression that perpetuate multiple forms of racial trauma in the lives of Black people. This project examines the various strategies deployed by artist-activists between 1990-2020 to re-instantiate political trauma in U.S. collective memory. In the process, the project spotlights continued oppression by visually connecting past atrocities with current forms of physical, emotional, and representational violence and examines artists’ depictions of the Black body to remember racial trauma and visualize Black agency. In Chapter One, I examine Carla Williams’s How to Read Character (1990-1991) and the ways she revisits the history of scientific racism to expose strategies used to predetermine character based on race. Williams uses her nude body as a means to critique by positioning her self-portraits next to early scientific documents to evoke Black agency and to subvert the dominant gaze that has contributed to Black subjugation of the past and present. In Chapter Two, I examine how the photo-text installation series by Carrie Mae Weems, From Here I Saw What Happened and Then I Cried (1995-1996), intervenes in the circulation of archival images of the Black body to contemplate and challenge past and current notions of Black embodiment across race, gender, class, and sexuality. In the process, Weems re-politicizes historical and contemporary representations of Blackness and collective remembrances of Black trauma to call for retribution and healing. In Chapter Three, I interpret how Julian Plowden’s Project #Shootback (2014-2020), offers a haunting reminder of the continued racial inequalities through political street photography of the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing from collective memories of earlier Black liberation movements, the collection situates Black Lives Matter within a legacy of Black activism committed to ending inequalities faced by Black people. Plowden ultimately re-politicizes Black emotion and Black embodiment as a means to resist racial oppression, survive racial trauma, and expose ongoing atrocities. In the Conclusion, I analyze LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographic exposé on the life and memory of Breonna Taylor featured in Vanity Fair’s, “A Beautiful Life.” I argue that the emotional photography of Taylor’s loved ones pushes back against negative stereotypes about Taylor and Black women to assert Black worth and visualize the suffering that police brutality causes to the Black community. Situated within the context of continued racial tension, the images in this project demonstrate the multiple strategies of resistance and empowerment used by contemporary artist-activists in the U.S. to expose and end racial injustice. Overall, the images highlight the continued importance of photography in the current fight for Black liberation.Item CONSTRUCTING A LEGACY: THE ROLE OF ANNIVERSARY COMMEMORATIONS IN REMEMBERING BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION(2019) Bruner, Jaclyn Leigh; Pfister, Damien S.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was the landmark Supreme Court decision that outlawed legal segregation in the United States. This project engages with three commemorative events that mark the anniversary of the decision--the 25th, 50th, and 64th anniversaries--to investigate how public memory of Brown v. Board of Education is constructed and how the legacy of the decision is remembered. Anniversaries, as moments where kairotic and chronotic conceptions of time come together, offer an opportunity to (re)define the past through the work of public memory. Although Brown’s memory at the “monumental” 25th anniversary featured coordinated regional commemorations, Brown’s legacy of race and memory is nationalized and largely sanitized by the 50th anniversary. In contrast to these momentous anniversaries, the non-monumental 64th anniversary articulated a counter-regional identity for Topeka, Kansas. By tracing the public memory of Brown across a 60-year period, this dissertation extends James Boyd White’s theory of justice-as-translation, asserting that the critical, rhetorical attention to the public memory of the Brown decision enacts a form of narrative justice and, consequently, advances a new way of conceptualizing persistent, de facto segregation and racial injustice in our contemporary world.Item COMMEMORATIVE ACTIVISM: TRACING BLACK NATIONALISM THROUGH CONTEMPORARY CAMPAIGNS TO MEMORIALIZE U.S. SLAVERY, 1991-2017(2018) Fitzmaurice, Megan Irene; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While much of current public discourse focuses on the ways that black activists are working to desecrate or destroy racist memorials, there has been less discussion about the ways that lobbying to produce antiracist memorials can also serve as a form of protest. This study engages three case studies wherein black activist groups fought for the construction of slavery memorials in New York City, Philadelphia, and Richmond. These instances of commemorative activism are the focus of this study, wherein activists challenge existing commemorative culture by engaging alternative memorial practices. The underlying premise of this study is that these slavery memorials and the activists’ rhetoric resisted absent and/or distorted memories of slavery in their communities. This study analyzes the debates surrounding these memorials to demonstrate ways that the activists recirculated historical ideologies of black nationalism in their protest rhetoric. Specifically, the activists engaged themes of self-determination, black liberation, black power, and Pan-Africanism as they sought to challenge a commemorative culture rooted in white supremacy. This study accordingly situates commemorative activism as a contemporary strategy of resistance in the ongoing black freedom struggle. The black activists in this study fought to determine the commemorative landscape, liberate their ancestors’ memories from post-slavery containment, recover memories of black resistance from selective amnesia, and advance global solidarity surrounding memories of the slave trade and ongoing anti-black racism. This study also examines ways that the subsequent commemorations represent enduring repositories of black nationalist ideologies, challenging racist cultural attitudes embedded in the memorials’ environment. Through their form and function, these commemorations visualize the continued relevance of self-determination, black liberation, black power, and Pan-Africanism within post-slavery communities. These memorials ultimately reflect the beliefs of the activists who fought for their construction, revealing the radical potential of commemorative activism to challenge racist attitudes, structures, and landscapes.Item Reckoning with Freedom: Legacies of Exclusion, Dehumanization, and Black Resistance in the Rhetoric of the Freedmen's Bureau(2017) Lu, Jessica H.; Parry-Giles, Shawn J; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Charged with facilitating the transition of former slaves from bondage to freedom, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (known colloquially as the Freedmen’s Bureau) played a crucial role in shaping the experiences of black and African Americans in the years following the Civil War. Many historians have explored the agency’s administrative policies and assessed its pragmatic effectiveness within the social, political, and economic milieu of the emancipation era. However, scholars have not adequately grappled with the lasting implications of its arguments and professed efforts to support freedmen. Therefore, this dissertation seeks to analyze and unpack the rhetorical textures of the Bureau’s early discourse and, in particular, its negotiation of freedom as an exclusionary, rather than inclusionary, idea. By closely examining a wealth of archival documents— including letters, memos, circular announcements, receipts, congressional proceedings, and newspaper articles—I interrogate how the Bureau extended antebellum freedom legacies to not merely explain but police the boundaries of American belonging and black inclusion. Ultimately, I contend that arguments by and about the Bureau contributed significantly to the reconstruction of a post-bellum racial order that affirmed the racist underpinnings of the social contract, further contributed to the dehumanization of former slaves, and prompted black people to resist the ongoing assault on their freedom. This project thus provides a compelling case study that underscores how rhetorical analysis can help us better understand the ways in which seemingly progressive ideas can be used to justify exercises of power and domination. Additionally, this interpretation of the Bureau’s primary role as a mechanism of supervision, rather than support, sheds light on the history of unjust practices that persist today in American race relations. Finally, this study affirms how black people have persevered in inventive and innovative ways to disrupt the pervasive discourse that seeks to destroy them.