Browsing by Subject "American literature"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Conceiving pregnancy as narrative(s): transgressive maternities and disability in American reproductive politics
    (2014-06) McWhorter, Rachel Joyce
    "Conceptions of Pregnancy" explores narratives that articulate pregnancy beyond the bounds of "normative," American reproductive politics. By enlisting these narratives, and focusing on the narrative substance of pregnancy itself, I argue that pregnancy can be refigured as a significantly critical position by which to critique lingering ideas of the Enlightenment subject and embodiment. This dissertation covers select literary texts from the antebellum era through the 21st century that encounter significant historical contexts and, in response, re-shape pregnancy and maternity toward this radical end: slave women and transgressive motherhood in the wake of the Civil War; the "gaps in people's lacks" or marginalized "pregnancies of the southern US, spanning the years of the Great Depression through the Civil Rights era, with the particular regional and national strain of eugenic classism and racism that directed women's reproductive choices; and the Second Wave and Third Wave feminists' intersections with Critical Disability Studies in the late 20th and early 21st centuries at the site of pregnancy.
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    A desire called America: biopolitics and utopian forms of Life in American literature
    (2012-12) Haines, Christian P.
    "A Desire Called America: Biopolitics and Utopian Forms of Life in American Literature" analyzes two periods of American literature - the American Renaissance and American literature following the 1960s - in terms of how specific literary texts return to and revise the founding of the U.S. as a political experiment. Historically speaking, these two periods stand at opposite ends of the arc of U.S. global hegemony: the American Renaissance as the U.S. rises to the status of global hegemon, and American literature after the 1960s in the midst of that hegemony's unraveling. I argue that the precarious position of the U.S. in these two periods enables American literature to reactivate the utopian promise of the American Revolution. The texts I analyze treat the revolution as an archive of futures past, that is, they imagine futures that might have taken place but never did because of the betrayal of the revolutionary experiment. Put differently, my dissertation focuses on the tensions and contradictions between the U.S. - understood as a geographical and political entity - and America - understood as a utopian political desire. I show that one of the most important ways in which the reactivation of utopian political potential occurs is through figurations of the human body.
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    Exceptional Empire and Exceptional Subjects: Biopolitics and the Transnational Making of the Korean/Asian/American through the Cold War
    (2016-12) Kim, Seonna
    This dissertation explores how the contemporary Korean American and Korean diasporic literary productions imagine and respond to the nexus between the “exceptional” American empire and the exceptional juridico-political subjects it produced and managed in South Korea and across the Pacific through the prolonged Cold War. Drawing on critical biopolitical studies, this project frames the Cold War U.S. military and humanitarian interventions in Asia as neoimperialist governmentality, which not only created excessive, doubled sovereignty and states of exception but also produced and displaced exceptional subjects in the areas affected. My research on the historical, political, legal, and cultural discourses on these displaced subjects evinces that they were not simply excluded as a demographic exception to the Korean and American nation-states, but included in their Cold War geopolitics and biopolitics. This dissertation proposes that the transnational making of the exceptional Korean, Asian, or Asian American subjects through the Cold War provides key sites for understanding the transnational history and dimensions of the post-World War II formation of Asian America as it illuminates the links between U.S. foreign policy in Asia and domestic racial liberalism during the Cold War. Tracing the origin of the transpacific exceptional subjects and their transpacific links, the project also draws a genealogy of a forgotten Korean diaspora that still haunts the modernity of Korean and American nation-states. I argue that the selected cultural memories and imaginaries produced by Nora Okja Keller, Heinz Insu Fenkl, Jane Jeong Trenka, and Chang-rae Lee expose and intervene in the complex operations and technologies of U.S. sovereign biopower and governance within and across its national border and its logics of exclusion and inclusion by verbally enacting scenes of multiple subjectifications of the exceptional figures in Asia and America. Chapter by chapter, the dissertation attends to the particular conjunctures of local and global biopolitics in which the exceptional subjects emerged and were subjectified. It also demonstrates how each of these texts in a unique and experimental way disrupts the normative codifications and configurations of the exceptional empire as a global peacekeeper or humanitarian force and of the exceptional(ized) subjects as undeserving racial aliens or exceptionally deserving model citizens. Collectively, these literary texts create an aesthetics of the stateless that imagines alternative models of politics, subjectivity, and cross-national and interracial community to move beyond biopolitics and towards a decolonized future.