Browsing by Subject "American studies"

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    The clarity of the Cold War: truth and literary communism between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. in the era of postmodern globalization.
    (2012-07) Gill, Meredith Morgan
    This dissertation examines the cultural logic of the Cold War, on both sides of the Iron Curtain, as a symptom of postmodern globalization. Following Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson's 1947 proclamation that Cold War propaganda should be crafted as "clearer than truth," this study investigates the complicated relationships among truth, production, and interpretation that emerged in similar manners between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. during the Cold War period. In particular, I consider literary, visual, and critical texts that contest a logic of truth which seeks to dissociate truth from its conditions of production. In so doing, I assert that a second Cold War took place between a global creative class, which has been termed "the multitude," and the (unwittingly) allied forces of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Accordingly, I argue that the Cold War cannot be understood simply as a battle between East and West, capitalism and communism, two world orders, or disparate modes of production. In chapter one, I explore the transition to postmodernism, as the cultural logic of late capitalism, to detail the changing conditions for aesthetic and political dissent against the neo-liberal management of American capitalism and the socialist management of Soviet state capitalism. I explore diplomatic correspondences between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. as well as a number of examples of aesthetic dissent ranging from popular magazines to Soviet subcultures to Leftist American avant-garde visual art and a ten-year old American schoolgirl's quest to discover the truth about the Cold War. In chapter two, I provide a close reading of E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, a meta-fictional, "autobiographical" novel about political life during the Cold War period. I read this text alongside Louis Althusser's autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever, to examine the complexities of locating truth that have resulted from postmodernity's complication of the distinction between subjects and objects. Chapter three presents a historical case study of how the concept of truth was contested within samizdat, the underground late-Soviet self-publishing movement. In particular, I look at Metropol, a 1979 samizdat literary anthology, which, I argue exemplifies a form of literary communism within the creative block of actually lived "communism." The fourth and final chapter explores the autobiography of Assata Shakur--communist, former Black Panther, and escaped convict who writes from socialist Cuba. I argue that the complex interplay of narrative forms in her text, as well as her use of intuition as a methodology, exposes a logic of truth that is non-representational, points to similarities between late capitalist and prison temporalities, and radically remaps the discursive parameters of the Cold War.
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    Spectacles in transit: reading cinematic productions of biopower and transgender embodiment.
    (2011-01) Franklin, Michael David
    Spectacles in Transit: Reading Cinematic Productions of Biopower and Transgender Embodiment looks at transgender cultural production on film and video in order to theorize biopower at the intersection of medicine and mass visual culture. In the decades following World War II, the development of medical technologies like reconstructive surgery increasingly allowed for the human body’s modification and enhancement, while the commercialization of communication technologies like film cameras gave middle-class consumers greater expressive autonomy. Medicine and mass visual culture have notably influenced the U.S. popular imagination about the body, social difference, aesthetics, and identity. And the role of biopower—the power to induce or administrate all aspects of human life by state and corporate entities—has intensified in everyday life in part due to these developments. This dissertation analyzes four cases from the past sixty years in which transgender individuals articulated their social, political, and economic self-determination through their self-representation onscreen. These cases are selected from four different cinematic genres: the transatlantic travel films of Christine Jorgensen from 1953; mondo films from the 1970s that graphically document genital reconstruction surgery; transsexual pornography from the early 1980s that probes the politics of heteronormative fantasy; and experimental video art from a post-9/11 feminist DIY media conference. This dissertation illuminates how biopower shapes and inflects self-representation of transgender embodiment in each instance and argues that every cultural producer responds with a cinematic assertion of social belonging. Thus, it explains how each cinematic production engages affect, values, aesthetics, and fantasy in relation to embodied intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality. Spectacles in Transit shifts conversations about biopower away from the biopolitics of medical research, warfare, and population management and toward the cultural work of a social group defined by a medicalized mode of difference, a group that historically has signaled the sensational and the spectacular in the U.S. popular imagination.