Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Storytelling In The Age Of Post-Socialism: Wang Xiaoshuai’S “Third Front Trilogy”, Xuesong Shao

Masters Theses

China, for the past six decades, has witnessed two massive population movements in reversed directions: the government-imposed relocation to rustic hinterlands during the Mao era, and the market-driven rural-to-urban migration in the post-socialist age. Revolving around a group of socialist workers’ relocation and homecoming, Wang Xiaoshuai’s王小帅 trilogy, comprising Shanghai Dreams (Qinghong青红, 2005), Eleven Flowers (Wo shiyi我11, 2012), and Red Amnesia (Chuangruzhe闯入者, 2014), connects the two movements through its visual representations. By examining the embedded dichotomies, namely the inland area against coastal cities, socialist remnants against post-socialist prosperity, and personal recollections against collective amnesia, I …

Trans-Gender Themes In Japanese Literature From The Medieval To Meiji Eras, Jessica Riggan

Masters Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze various texts from Japanese literary history and extract the instances of trans-gender performances from those texts. I define “trans-gender” behaviors as actions that are culturally expected of the gender opposite that of the gender assigned to the performer at birth.

In each text, I identify which character or characters perform actions that go against the expectations of the gender they were assigned at birth. I analyze how their performance is portrayed within the narrative, as well as how other characters in the narrative react to their performance. In this way, nuances are …

On The Contrary: Subverting The Canon With Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, Christina Pellegrini

Masters Theses

This written portion of my thesis is aimed at documenting and synthesizing how I, as director, staged an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler through ongoing collaboration with a creative team comprised of dramaturges, designers, and actors.

I walk the reader through my exploration of Ibsen’s life and work through travel to the International Ibsen Festival in Oslo, Norway, and describe how I endeavored to lead the production’s creative team by applying feminist theories in directing and embracing the possibility of failure as a means of discovery. I discuss the casting process and establishment of an all-women ensemble, explore the …

Springing Forth Anew: Progress, Preservation, And Park-Building At Roger Williams National Memorial, Sara E. Patton

Masters Theses

The process of local preservation, urban renewal, and national park building at Roger Williams National Memorial in Providence, Rhode Island, reveals important facets of the urban park idea. In 1958, the Providence Preservation Society and the Providence City Plan Commission jointly released the College Hill Study, which called for renewal of the College Hill neighborhood through preservation of the architecturally significant homes, selective demolition, and the creation of a new National Park Unit dedicated to Providence’s founder, Roger Williams. The new park, established in 1965, went through a lengthy planning process before opening in 1984. The planning process revealed concerns …

A Transformational Approach To Japanese Traditional Music Of The Edo Period, Kenneth J. Pasciak

Masters Theses

Analysis of sōkyoku jiuta, Japanese traditional music of the Edo period for koto and shamisen, has in the past relied primarily on static tetrachordal or hexachordal models. The present study takes a transformational approach to traditional Japanese music. Specifically, it develops a framework for six-pitch hexachordal space inspired by Steven Rings’s transformational approach to tonal music. This novel voice-leading space yields insights into intervallic structure, trichordal transposition and hexachordal voice leading and transformations of this music at both its surface and large-scale levels. A side-by-side comparison with Rings’s approach highlights differences between the hexachordal and diatonic systems.

The Unaccustomed Vanishing Point, Procheta Olson

Masters Theses

The Unaccustomed Vanishing Point is an exhibition of miniature paintings and installations that explore the irregular and fluid terrains of multicultural exchanges in India. Although drawing heavily from Mughal and Persian painting traditions, the paintings are rife with allegories of the postcolonial history, politics, and visual and material culture of contemporary India in the age of globalization. The installations, on the other hand, navigate the intersection of sensory experience and memory while simultaneously examining the dynamics of transnational experiences. Together they map the overlapping boundaries of the personal and social to probe into the complex interplay of cultural hybridity, class, …

Women On Trial: Translating Femininity Through Journalism, William B. Ollayos

Masters Theses

The focus of this thesis is on cultural translation as a means of understanding the relationship between sociocultural identity with respect to bourgeois white female sexuality and interpretations by news journalists, writers and filmmakers. The thesis brings translation scholar Lawrence Venuti’s description of foreign and domestic texts (2008) into conversation with Catherine Cole’s analysis of journalists as active interpreters of newsworthy events (2010) to support my view of the media as a translator of sociocultural identity. The thesis outlines the construction of bourgeois white femininity within the U.S. imaginary and a more detailed account of its direct impact upon journalistic …

The Loss You Feel, Andrew Napoli

Masters Theses

The Loss You Feel is an examination of my personal artistic exploration of disposable objects and everyday actions as sites of potential introspection and understanding. Through an investigation of the mundane and its capacity for transformation, this paper maintains that a more deliberate engagement with the prosaic may reveal dynamic spaces between the familiar and the strange, the inanimate and the autonomous, and that actively engaging these spaces helps to facilitate both empathy and understanding.

Peter Mack Show, Peter Mack

Masters Theses

My animations and videos are personal articulations and reflections of the roles in life I assume: father, employee and artist. I have a particular interest in the seemingly mundane interactions in life, which often becomes a starting point for me to explore larger themes of family life, failure, and happiness. I approach these themes with humor and playfulness. The “show-and-tell” manner of many of my narratives, working in tandem with humor and DIY production values, gives my work the feeling of a strange children’s educational TV show in which I play the host, while underlining the personal nature of my …

Honeymoons, Ethan Kiermaier

Masters Theses

Through investigating my installation, performance, video and collaborative practice, Honeymoons builds connections between timelessness in repetition, the sacred potentials of pop culture, the animation of matter and the relationship of the body to space. Central to these relationships are questions about the function of the erotic in a mediated world. How can a sensual experience help us to define what is real, what has value?

A Lesson In Loving The Word: Translating Clarice Lispector Into Polish, Agnieszka Gabor

Masters Theses

The goal of this thesis is to discuss Clarice Lispector in the Polish context and address the potential gaps in the reception of her oeuvre. Since the principal vehicle of popularizing her writing outside of the Portuguese-speaking world is translation, my thesis also examines the current situation of the Polish translations of Lispector’s work. Based on my research, I contend that the angle of interpretation related to Lispector’s literary awareness has not been well explored in Poland. Given that the perspective related to the creation process constitutes a recurrent characteristic of Lispector’s narrative, I provide a textual analysis of four …

Gender Ambivalence In Late-Renaissance Italy: The Career And Reception Of Tarquinia Molza, Kathryn Firth

Masters Theses

The role of women changed constantly during the Renaissance era. Especially notable was the evolution of the role of women within the arts, in which the female gender was becoming particularly sought after. One woman deserving of attention is poetess, philosopher, and musician Tarquinia Molza (1542-1617) who enjoyed notable success at the court of Ferrara. Molza by-passed gender conventions of the day by engaging in traditionally “masculine” activities like philosophy and “feminine” ones such as singing. While there is plentiful scholarship about Molza, no current scholarship has specifically considered how questions regarding the ambivalence of her gender affected Molza’s relationship …

Designing Hedda: Questioning The Canonical Play Hedda Gabler, As A Feminist Text Through Abstraction, Bethany Eddy

Masters Theses

A thorough reflection on the process of costume design for the theatrical production of Hedda. An adaptation of Hedda Gabler, by Henrik Ibsen, translated by Eva Le Gallienne, edited by Finn Lefevre and Directed by Christina Pellegrini. Performed at The Rand Theater, University of Massachusetts Amherst, February 24th to March 4th, 2017.

Ibsen is considered “The Father of Modern Drama”, with Hedda Gabler as one of his most widely performed plays. Hedda Gabler in the 1890’s was a disruptive reflection of society, and is considered by many to be a feminist work. I disagree with this assessment of …

The Economy Of Evangelism In The Colonial American South, Julia Carroll

Masters Theses

Eighteenth-century Methodist evangelism supported, perpetuated, and promoted slavery as requisite for a productive economy in the colonial American South. Religious thought of the First Great Awakening emerged alongside a colonial economy increasingly reliant on chattel slavery for its prosperity. The records of well-traveled celebrity minister and provocateur of the Anglican tradition, George Whitefield, suggest how Calvinist-Methodist evangelicals viewed slavery as necessary to supporting colonial ministerial efforts. Whitefield’s absorption of and immersion into American culture is revealed in his owning a plantation, portraying a willingness to sacrifice the mobility of the disfranchised for widespread consumption of evangelical thought. A side effect …

And Liberty For All: Geechee Culture And The Black Freedom Struggle In Liberty County, Georgia, 1752-1946, Felicia Jamison

Doctoral Dissertations

“And Liberty For All” is a case study of an African-American rural community in Georgia. It argues that to understand the manners in which Southern rural black communities fought for civil rights in the Black Freedom Struggle, one must take the longue durèe approach to researching and writing their histories. Thus, this dissertation covers the period of slavery until the modern Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s. This case study is representative of other Southern rural communities in that it highlights the nuanced ways in which they survived and persevered while facing racism, racial violence, and disenfranchisement by using grassroots …

Comunidad Y Escritura En La Temprana Edad Moderna Española Teresa De Cartagena, María De Santo Domingo Y Teresa De Ávila (1420-1582), Borja Gama De Cossio

Doctoral Dissertations

My research focuses on the literary production of women in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. My dissertation studies the life and works of three religious women in their respective communities: Teresa de Cartagena, Sor María de Santo Domingo, and Santa Teresa de Ávila. I examine how these women interact with other members of their orders, thus creating symbolic, intellectual, and emotional communities. I argue that their contact with friends and enemies inside and outside of their order and the church displays a variety of empowerment strategies. To deploy these series of strategies, religious women fashioned images of themselves …

Verbal -S Productions In The Structured Writing Samples Of Variable Aae-Speaking Fourth-Grade Students With And Without Language Impairment, Jacklyn High Felton

Doctoral Dissertations

Researchers in speech-language pathology and ethnolinguistics have worked to gain knowledge about typical and atypical language patterns of African American children who are identified as African American English (AAE) dialect speakers. Much progress had been made, but limitations in this field of knowledge have persisted, especially for AA children who demonstrate variable use of AAE, presumably through the process of assimilation in the school setting. Therefore, more information is needed to provide diagnostic markers for deviations in typical language development for variable AAE-MAE speakers. Prior empirical research has found that third- and fourth-grade AAE-speaking children with typical language development overtly …

The Drama Of Race: Contemporary Afro-German Theater, Jamele Watkins

Doctoral Dissertations

The first investigation of Afro-German theater my dissertation, “The Drama of Race,” argues that Afro-German theater empowers as Black actors take ownership of a German stage, a white German space. My dissertation highlights four crucial Afro-German plays: real life: Germany (2008), Heimat, bittersüße Heimat [Home, bittersweet Home] (2010), Also by Mail (2013), and Mais in Deutschland und anderen Galaxien [Corn in Germany and Other Galaxies] (2015). In Chapter I, I discuss the cultural conditions in which Afro-German theater emerged—after an established literary corpus by Afro-German authors. Chapter II introduces the first Afro-German play and its improvisational methods as empowering for …

Representation, Reflection, And Reconciliation: The Evolving Depiction Of Violence In The Committed Literature Of Manlio Argueta, Gladys E. Vasquez

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the life and works of the committed Salvadoran author Manlio Argueta. It traces pertinent themes in four of his novels, El valle de las hamacas (1969), Caperucita en la zona roja (1978), Milagro de La Paz (1994), and Siglo de O(g)ro (1997). This project traces how Argueta's representation of violence markedly transitions from a mimetic representation of violence that appeals to the senses and raises awareness of the exacerbating circumstances to a subdued and psychological representation of the consequences of the violence in the face of new violence and changing panoramas. It highlights three major moments …

Stories Written On Concrete: Understanding And (Re)Imagining Street Lit And Culture, 1990-2007, Jacinta Saffold

Doctoral Dissertations

“Stories Written on Concrete: Understanding and Re-imagining Street Lit and Culture, 1990-2007,” coalesces around stories of urbanity and coming of age at the turn of the twenty-first century. As the Hip Hop generation reflected on the social, economic, and cultural shifts of the 1980s and 1990s, they took up paper and pen to immortalize the conflicting duality of the gritty and glamorous experience of growing up on a concrete cityscape in America. I interrogate how street lit disrupts normative literary representations of black life in print. Specifically, I consider how urban fiction writes against the African American literary canon in …

Roughly Speaking: A Performance Autoethnography Of Occupation, Aesthetics, And Epistemology, Tyler Boudreau

Doctoral Dissertations

Roughly Speaking is a performance autoethnography that explores both conditions of storytelling and narrative strategies for producing alternative interpretations and representations of experience, in particular, the occupation of space and subjectivities. Through creative manipulations of voice and style, this narrative performance attempts to challenge dominant notions of authorship, identity, and epistemology, especially those that mask the situatedness of knowledge production and reproduce systemic marginalization of non-normative bodies, voices, and perspectives. Taking as a starting point the narrative form of identity and building upon the mutually constitutive character of social and personal narratives, with an emphasis on embodiment, performativity, and the …

Catch Feelings: Class Affect And Performativity In Teaching Associates' Narratives, Anna Rita Napoleone

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I argue that a better understanding of class affectations in teacher identity and the social space of academia may lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the way class manifests itself in academic spaces. Previous research in Composition and Rhetoric has shown that social class, specifically working-class literacy practices, frequently challenges or is in direct opposition to academic literacy practices, and that teachers respond to such class interference negatively. Little research has been done on how teachers' attachments to certain class norms and/or backgrounds affects how they interact with academic literacy and/or how they respond to students. …

From Householder To War-Lord To Heavenly Hero: Naming God In The Early Continental Germanic Languages, Michael Moynihan

Doctoral Dissertations

Using an interdisciplinary approach and building upon earlier work by Northcott, Green, Eggers, Schirokauer, and others, the present study presents a reappraisal of the development of the Germanic vocabulary adopted to designate the divine Lord (God or Christ) in the early stages of Christianization on the continent during the first millennium. The words used to translate Greek kyrios and Latin dominus were drawn from the sphere of Germanic social institutions and thus their adoption was influenced—and to some extent determined—by external conditions and values. In Wulfila’s fourth-century translation of the Bible into an East Germanic dialect of Gothic, the word …

A Papered Freedom: Self-Purchase And Compensated Manumission In The Antebellum United States, Julia Bernier

Doctoral Dissertations

“A Papered Freedom” is a systematic study of how enslaved and self-emancipated African Americans engaged with compensated manumission to become legally free. To do this, I address fundamental issues related to compensated manumission within the United States from the founding era to the fugitive slave crisis of the 1850s. The project works to give voice to the concerns and problems that African Americans faced in their attempts to buy freedom by analyzing how they interacted with different kinds of networks, both social and economic, in the interest of liberation. By accruing different kinds of capital within these networks, African Americans …

The Afroethnic Impulse And Renewal: African American Transculturations In Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 To 2013, Trent Masiki

Doctoral Dissertations

Until now, there has been little sustained critical attention to the way African American literature, history, culture, and politics influence transculturation and ethnoracial identity formation in Afro-Latino bildung narratives. This dissertation addresses that oversight. The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal: African American Transculturations in Afro-Latino Bildung Narratives, 1961 to 2013, examines a long, but often neglected, history of intercultural affinities and literary encounters between African Americans and Afro-Latinos from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. In The Afroethnic Impulse and Renewal, I explore African American literary and cultural influences in the personal essays, memoirs, and autobiographically inspired fiction of …

Moving Against Clothespins:The Poli(Poe)Tics Of Embodiment In The Poetry Of Miriam Alves And Audre Lorde, Flávia Santos De Araújo

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines literary representations of the black female body in selected poetry by U.S. African American writer Audre Lorde and Afro-Brazilian writer Miriam Alves, focusing on how their literary projects construct and defy notions of black womanhood and black female sexualities in dialogue with national narratives and contexts. Within an historical, intersectional and transnational theoretical framework, this study analyses how the racial, gender and sexual politics of representation are articulated and negotiated within and outside the political and literary movements in the U.S. and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. As a theoretical framework, this research elaborates and uses …

Latina Identities, Critical Literacies, And Academic Achievement In Community College, Morgan Lynn

Doctoral Dissertations

This qualitative case study research looks at the intersections of identity, literacy, and achievement for Latina community college students in the East Bay Area of California. The women that I center in this dissertation show how Latinas are multiply positioned within their communities, families, and schools, and how they negotiate damaging and reductive language and literacy ideologies in order to achieve their academic dreams. Following critical sociocultural theories on literacy, Critical Race Theory, and Latina Feminism, I emphasize a strengths-based, affirmation approach that positions the women as theorizers of their own lived experiences and highlights their resiliency. The data in …

Waiting For Now: Postcolonial Fiction And Colonial Time, Amanda Ruth Waugh Lagji

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the temporalities of waiting in global Anglophone fiction, reinvigorating waiting as a modality that can be at turns debilitating, strategic, calculating, and meditative. By arguing for the centrality of waiting to the experience of postcoloniality, my dissertation challenges the dominant narrative of the twentieth century as a time only of acceleration and movement.
In the introduction, I draw from social scientific studies of waiting, as well as philosophies of time, mobility studies, and history, to create a robust framework of waiting as a cultural practice and privileged analytical concept for scrutinizing colonial and postcolonial regimes of time. …

The South African War: Implications And Convictions Of Postwar Politics And Policy, Jaffar Shiek

University of Massachusetts Undergraduate History Journal

Apartheid in South Africa is a widely known tragedy in the realm of history and political science. In order to understand the racism and prejudice that served as the framework of apartheid, it is important to understand it’s inception and the ripe settings for its implementation. The aim of this paper is to trace and depict the events leading up to apartheid, including the Boer Wars and the consequences of Britain’s Scorched Earth policy. Using works such as Professor Higginson’s “Hell in Small Place: Agrarian Elites and Collective Violence in the Western Transvaal, 1900-1907,” and primary documents from Jan Smuts, …

From Hellenism To Hitlerism: The Use Of Sport As An Ethnic And Cultural Identifier, Ethan Schwartz

University of Massachusetts Undergraduate History Journal

From antiquity onwards, sports and competitive athletic events have been used as an area to implement othering strategies. Othering is the attempt to differentiate a societal group by some determining factor. Evidence of athletics being used as an othering medium, is prevalent throughout ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and early 20th century Britain.