Browsing by Subject "biopolitics"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Chance of a Life: A New Materialist Comparative Study on Biopoiesis
    (2020-01) Butler, Justin
    The Chance of a Life: A New Materialist Comparative Study on Biopoiesis analyzes works of fiction, film, and poetry in order to develop a notion of biopoiesis. The dissertation grounds its analytic methodology in the writings of the French biochemist Jacques Monod, the French post-structuralist philosopher Louis Althusser, and the dissertation of Karl Marx. In so doing, the methodology consciously joins humanistic and scientific modes of thinking in order to articulate a concept of biopoetics that, in dialogue with biopolitics, diverges from the latter’s efforts to administer or control life. The role of the aleatory is explored as a material substrate for thinking the emergence of life that, in a new materialist spirit, challenges notions of teleology and dialectics. Insights from this discussion are then deployed in analyses of the novel Truismes, by the French author Marie Darrieussecq; the film La caza, by the Spanish director Carlos Saura; and selected poetry by the Spanish poets José Angel Valente and Fernando Merlo. Chapter 1 contemplates the figure of flesh Truismes in order to develop a bioepoetic understanding of the role of flight in a deterritorializing dynamic. Chapter 2 examines how, in La caza, the matter of biological disease bears on the questions of biopolitics and democracy. Chapter 3 analyzes poetic iterations of corporeality by Valente and Merlo in order to reveal an ethics of supplementarity in new materialism. The conclusion of the dissertation situates the chapters’ findings within received understandings of historical or vulgar materialism so that the dissertation’s own intervention can be contextualized.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Lifemaking alongside Death: Violence, Care and the Everyday in Trans communities in India
    (2022-06) Bhattacharya, Sayan
    How do transgender communities disrupt and exceed the overdeterminations of their lives by structural oppression and death? My research investigates this question through a granular attention to the everyday of transgender life worlds in India. Despite the decriminalization of homosexuality and state recognition of the right to gender expression, transphobia, medical negligence, murders and suicides are still the daily realities that trans communities are forced to confront. My dissertation project, Lifemaking alongside Death: Violence, Care and the Everyday in Trans Communities in India, argues that trans communities devise various improvisatory and innovative strategies to make life in an environment signified by violence. I stage conversations between anthropologies of the everyday, trans and queer literatures on care and anti-caste scholarship to study the efforts needed to reproduce an everyday that can be inhabited. These effortful strategies range from gestures that seek pleasure, negotiations with the nation state on demands of welfare to the performance of care labor for each other and devising dark humour on death that help trans people not only endure violence but also to refuse its overdeterminations of trans life.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Living Enfleshment Otherwise:" Articulating Embodiment Across Transatlantic Modernisms"
    (2021-06) Rodine, Zoe
    This dissertation traces the language authors employ to describe visceral experience in the literature of the past century and asks: how does the way we articulate embodiment reveal the ways we push against our received notions about the body, and how does our language in turn shape the reality of the human body and even shift our definitions of the human? Through an examination of a variety of interdisciplinary texts—novels, poetry, songs, film, live performance, archival documents—I discover a particular resonance between Afrofuturist and modernist models for embodiment that suggest an alternate genealogy of modernist authorship based on a shared aesthetic and ethical project of revisioning the human. The texts this project examines reveal the degree to which the concept of the human body is in no way essentially or naturally true, and has historically been a racializing, exclusionary construct; this dissertation does the essential work of teasing out just how bodies are constructed, identifying three structures that materialize modernist bodies anew. The first chapter describes the undulatory body, tracing the way that waves structure embodiment in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Sun Ra’s music and poetry. The second chapter, which links Mina Loy’s poetry, Janelle Monáe’s music videos, and Douglas Kearney’s verse and nonfiction, focuses on the possibilities and limitations of our increasing enmeshment with machines. The final chapter theorizes the horrified body through Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood and Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, positing that horror has the potential to productively erode boundaries between bodies. Re-centering the body as a foundational critical concern for modernism and literary studies more broadly reveals the sinews that animate texts by Black and white authors alike, illuminates the long history of resistance to the hegemonic constructions of the body, and provides building blocks for negotiating a twenty-first century subjectivity that goes beyond the previously established boundaries of the human.