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Publication PARTITIONS, PALIMPSESTS, AND ASIAN-AFRICAN CONNECTIONS: TRANSGRESSIONS OF FORM AND TERRITORY IN POSTCOLONIAL URDU AND ARABIC WRITING(2024-05) Fatima, MaryamPartitions, Palimpsests, and Asian-African Connections is a comparative study of Urdu and Arabic literature of the late twentieth century, uncovering the thematic and formal overlaps between the writings of Intizar Husain (Pakistan), Qurratulain Hyder (India), Faiz Ahmad Faiz (Pakistan), Agha Shahid Ali (Kashmir/USA), Mahmoud Darwish (Palestine), and Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt). I consider the ways in which these poets and writers have crafted deeply layered and generically dissonant literary texts as a response to territorial reorganization engendered by colonial partitions. This comparison is historically anchored in analogizing the United Nations mandated partition of Palestine in 1947-8 with the partition of the south Asian subcontinent into India and Pakistan. I propose that the connections between Urdu and Arabic postcolonial literary worlds can be understood as undergirded by a “partition problematic,” which entails considering an entire constellation of related and subsequent processes of population transfers, migration, displacement, exile, and linguistic and cultural minoritization enabled by the idea of partitioning land into separate ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities. These issues, I argue, are constitutive of the shared predicaments of an Afro-Asian postcolonial modernity that continues well into the twenty first century. The first two chapters of the dissertation are an exploration of the narrative responses of Intizar Husain and Qurratulain Hyder to the South Asian partitions of 1947 and 1971. The third and fourth offer comparative readings that flow from the horizontal connections excavated by the palimpsest. In the first chapter, I look at Husain’s literary response to the idea of constructing discrete “national” literatures of India and Pakistan by crafting texts that transgress physical, cultural, and formal borders. The second chapter considers Hyder’s 1959 magnum opus Āg kā Dariyā and her self-translation of it in English as River of Fire in 1998 as a continued attempt to contend with the protracted minoritization of Muslims in a post-partition India, especially as it crystallized around the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. The third chapter brings together the poetic works of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Agha Shahid Ali, and Mahmoud Darwish on exilic and decolonial spaces of transnational solidarity for the occupied territories of Kashmir and Palestine. The fourth chapter looks at the post-1967 (the six day Israel-Palestine war) writings of Naguib Mahfouz to consider how the Naksah (mass exodus of Palestinians after the 1967 war) and a subsequent period of widespread disenchantment with Nasserism and pan-Arabism in Egypt conditioned the forms of experimental writing engaged by Mahfouz. In this chapter, Mahfouz’s works are paired with Husain’s to illuminate how they similar draw on and invert the inherited genre codes of the story-verses of the Nights, the riḥla (Arabic travel writing), and the Buddhist Jaṭākā tradition to fashion a critique of the failures of postcolonial statehood. The conclusion ruminates on the partition-problematic in order to interrogate its enduring relevance within postcolonial studies.Publication Creolizing Mestizaje: Cultural Hybridity and Nurture Kinship in Latin American Fiction(2024-05) Diteman, Jeffrey TThis research applies Martinican writer Edouard Glissant’s theories of creolization and Relation to selected works of Latin American fiction devoted to the theme of nurture kinship. While discourses of cultural hybridity in the Spanish-American sphere have been dominated by concepts of mestizaje (mixing) and transculturation, the present research argues that Glissant’s model offers unique insights for understanding key aspects of the selected works. After contrasting Glissant’s divergent, unpredictable model of mutual cultural influence with the convergent, assimilationist models associated with mestizaje, this work describes the Glissantian principles of active synthesis, rhizomatic relations, errant thinking, and opacity as illustrated in the writing of Clorinda Matto de Turner (Peru, 1852-1909), Rosario Castellanos (Mexico, 1925-1974), and Amalialú Posso Figueroa (Colombia, 1947-). The research then draws conclusions from this analysis for culturally responsive approaches to translating Posso Figueroa’s writing into English.Publication Adventures in Fictionality: Sites along the Border between Fiction and Reality(2013-05) Trauvitch, RhonaThis project is a narratological study of the border between fiction and reality, and the traversing thereof. I postulate that the permeability of this border is the consequence of textual acts: Cataloged Fabulations, Second-tier Fictionals, and Rhizomatic Fabrications. These are akin to speech acts in that fictional entities gain nonfictional status by means of an implicit contract at the heart of the textual act. Having laid out the narratological foundation of the textual acts' power, I argue that the narratological bears on the ontological through performative speech acts, as portrayed in J. L. Austin's tripartite model. I use two lenses in my analysis: the work of Jorge Luis Borges and the Hebrew Bible and its commentaries. The Borgesian trifecta is encyclopedia, mirror, and labyrinth, referents that are synonymous with the three textual acts noted above. In terms of the biblical lens, my analysis focuses on a metaphor family in Jewish mysticism. This family includes the World as Book, The Torah as Blueprint, God as Author, and Letters as Building Blocks. The resulting conceptual system is narratological in nature. Consequently it is useful to draw on this system so as to elucidate the field of narratology. The binoculars offer a parallax view, which provides a unique perspective on narratology: the combination of modernist/postmodernist fantasy and the urtext of the Western literary canon.Publication Translation in Vietnam and Vietnam in Translation: Language, Culture, and Identity(2011-09) Pham, Loc QuocThis project engages a cultural studies approach to translation. I investigate different thematic issues, each of which underscores the underpinning force of cultural translation. Chapter 1 serves as a theoretical background to the entire work, in which I review the development of translation studies in the Anglo-American world and attempt to connect it to subject theory, cultural theory, and social critical theory. The main aim is to show how translation constitutes and mediates subject (re)formation and social justice. From the view of translation as constitutive of political and cultural processes, Chapter 2 tells the history of translation in Vietnam while critiquing Homi Bhabha's notions of cultural translation, hybridity, and ambivalence. I argue that the Vietnamese, as historical colonized subjects, have always been hybrid and ambivalent in regard to their language, culture, and identity. The specific acts of translation that the Vietnamese engaged in throughout their history show that Vietnam during French rule was a site of cultural translation in which both the colonized and the colonizer participated in the mediation and negotiation of their identities. Chapter 3 presents a shift in focus, from cultural translation in the colonial context to the postcolonial resignifications of femininity. In a culture of perpetual translation, the Vietnamese woman is constantly resignified to suite emerging political conditions. In this chapter, I examine an array of texts from different genres - poetry, fiction, and film - to criticize Judith Bulter's notion of gender performativity. A feminist politics that aims to counter the regulatory discourse of femininity, I argue, needs to attend to the powerful mechanism of resignification, not as a basis of resistance, but as a form of suppression. The traditional binary of power as essentializing and resistance as de-essentializing does not work in the Vietnamese context. Continuing the line of gender studies, Chapter 4 enunciates a specific strategy for translating Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain into contemporary Vietnamese culture. Based on my cultural analysis of the discursive displacement of translation and homosexuality, I propose to use domesticating translation, against Lawrence Venuti's politics of foreignizing, as a way to counter the displacement and reinstate both homosexuality and translation itself.Publication Con-Scripting the Masses: False Documents and Historical Revisionism in the Americas(2011-02) Weiser, FransDominick LaCapra argues that historians continue to interpret legal documents in a hierarchical fashion that marginalizes intellectual history, as fiction is perceived to be less viable. This dissertation analyzes contemporary literary texts in the Americas that exploit such a narrow reading of documents in order to interrogate the way official history is constructed by introducing false forms of documents into their narratives. These literary texts, or what I label "con-script," are not only historical fiction, but also historicized fiction that problematize their own historical construction. Many critics propose that the new historical novel revises historical interpretation, but there exists a gap between theory and textual practice. Adapted from E.L. Doctorow's notion of "false documents," the con-script acts as an alternative that purposefully confuses fiction and nonfiction, providing tools to critically examine the authority maintained by official narratives. By revealing the fictive nature of these constructions, the con-script alerts readers to the manipulation of documents to maintain political authority and misrepresent or silence marginalized groups. The recent revision of American Studies to include a hemispheric or Inter-American scope provides a context for applying such political claims within a transcultural framework. I compare texts from English-, Spanish-, and Portuguese America in order to identify shared strategies. After a survey of the historical novel's development across the Americas and a critical theory overview, I analyze three types of con-script. "The Art of Con-Fessing" juxtaposes texts from the three languages via Jay Cantor's The Death of Che Guevara, Augusto Roa Basto's Yo el Supremo, and Silviano Santiago's Em Liberdade. These false documents present themselves as apocryphal diaries supposedly written by revolutionary leaders or activists. The authors demythologize untouchable public figures through the gaps in their "own" personal writing. "Mediations of Media" features Ivan Ângelo's A Festa, Tomás Eloy Martínez's La novela de Perón, and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. These journalists interrogate the role of media and political corruption within the construction of national identity; the false documents appear as newspaper clippings, magazine articles and media images. Finally, the subjective process of archiving is examined in "Con-Centering the Archive" via Aguinaldo Silva's No País das Sombras, Francisco Simón's El informe Mancini, and Susan Daitch's L.C.Publication A Poetics of Subtraction: The Autobiographical Films of Frampton, Tarkovsky, and Álvarez(2017) Joy, Alexander BContemporary critical discussions of autobiographical cinema have linked the theory, practice, and poetics of autobiographical filmmaking to those of self-portraiture. A Poetics of Subtraction complicates the dominant theoretical framework by advocating for the relevance of sculpture and its attendant poetics in the interpretation of autobiographical films. Through a thorough examination of Hollis Frampton's (nostalgia) (1971), Andrei Tarkovsky's Зеркало (Mirror, 1975) and Tempo di viaggio (1983), and Mercedes Álvarez's El cielo gira (2004), this dissertation argues that an understanding of sculpture's processes and poetics is essential for grasping the methods, materials, and meanings of autobiographical films. In particular, the sculptural approach to autobiographical cinema reveals new ways to represent memory, history, identity, and time through film.Publication Deconstruction of the Sacred, Ontologies of Monstrosity: Apophatic Approaches in Late Modernist Cinema(2016-05) vangel, scott dIn this dissertation I compare apophatic[i] approaches including those associated with Christian mysticism, early postmodern thought and the literature of Gothic monstrosity through their collective emergence in late-twentieth century modernist cinema. I identify confluences between these and related theoretical strains with regard to metaphysics, ontology, ethics and mimesis. The dissertation is structured around concepts relative to limit-experience including death’s impossibility, the gift and phenomenological excess culled from texts such as Jacques Derrida’s Donner la mort (1999), Emmanuel Levinas’ Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l'extériorité (1961), Maurice Blanchot’s L’écriture du désastre (1980), and Jean-Luc Marion’s De Surcroît: Études sur les phénomènes saturés (2001). After establishing connections between these texts and earlier works, including Denys’[ii] “Mystical Theology” (circa Fifth Century) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus (1818, revised in 1831), I provide close readings of late modernist films illustrative of this inheritance. I compare the manner in which films such as Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage (1959), Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (1952), Carl Dreyer’s Ordet (1956), Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962), Robert Bresson’s Le diable, probablement (1978) and R.W. Fassbinder’s Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (1982) utilize singular formal strategies influenced by or reminiscent of those of the aforementioned sources to flout reductive tendencies inherent in representation, semiotics and visual reception. [i] William Franke, in his book Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014) describes the apophatic and negative theology as “a kind of perennial counter-philosophy to the philosophy of Logos” emphasizing “that what is not and even cannot be said is actually the basis for all that is said” (Franke, 1). “Negative theology is not so much a theology or a philosophy as a dimension inherent to thought – precisely what escapes it in all its forms, hence its formless, unformulatable ground” (296). [ii] While the primary figure associated with negative theology is often referred to as Denys in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, he is more commonly known in the West as Dionysius the Areopagite or Pseudo-Dionysius, for having appropriated the nom de plume of a judge reputedly converted by Paul in “Acts of the Apostles.” In this dissertation I compare apophatic[i] approaches including those associated with Christian mysticism, early postmodern thought and the literature of Gothic monstrosity through their collective emergence in late-twentieth century modernist cinema. I identify confluences between these and related theoretical strains with regard to metaphysics, ontology, ethics and mimesis. The dissertation is structured around concepts relative to limit-experience including death’s impossibility, the gift and phenomenological excess culled from texts such as Jacques Derrida’s Donner la mort (1999), Emmanuel Levinas’ Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l'extériorité (1961), Maurice Blanchot’s L’écriture du désastre (1980), and Jean-Luc Marion’s De Surcroît: Études sur les phénomènes saturés (2001). After establishing connections between these texts and earlier works, including Denys’[ii] “Mystical Theology” (circa Fifth Century) and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus (1818, revised in 1831), I provide close readings of late modernist films illustrative of this inheritance. I compare the manner in which films such as Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage (1959), Roberto Rossellini’s Europa ’51 (1952), Carl Dreyer’s Ordet (1956), Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962), Robert Bresson’s Le diable, probablement (1978) and R.W. Fassbinder’s Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (1982) utilize singular formal strategies influenced by or reminiscent of those of the aforementioned sources to flout reductive tendencies inherent in representation, semiotics and visual reception. [i] William Franke, in his book Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014) describes the apophatic and negative theology as “a kind of perennial counter-philosophy to the philosophy of Logos” emphasizing “that what is not and even cannot be said is actually the basis for all that is said” (Franke, 1). “Negative theology is not so much a theology or a philosophy as a dimension inherent to thought – precisely what escapes it in all its forms, hence its formless, unformulatable ground” (296). [ii] While the primary figure associated with negative theology is often referred to as Denys in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, he is more commonly known in the West as Dionysius the Areopagite or Pseudo-Dionysius, for having appropriated the nom de plume of a judge reputedly converted by Paul in “Acts of the Apostles.”Publication Writing Resistance and the Question of Gender: Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion(2016) Curtis, Lara RIn this dissertation I profile and compare the lives and works of Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion, who were of the same generation and who actively participated in the French Resistance during the Holocaust. I discuss ways in which these writers frequently infuse modes of art and frequently theater into their works, in literary characters, situations, imagery, and gendered subjectivity. I introduce my notion of “writing resistance,” by which I mean not only these writers’ eye witness accounts and representations of the historical events of WW II, but especially their subjective, often quite intimate reflections on their own personal engagements in initiatives aimed at resisting the devastating onslaught of Nazi power. “Writing resistance” thus examines how these writers’ works and experiences foreground their respective roles as résistantes.Publication Rumi, the Poet of Universal Love: The Politics of Rumi's Appropriation in the West(2016) Cihan-Artun, Fatma B.This project---taking the polyvalence of Rumi as a religious figure and the discursive nature of Western approach to Sufism as its premises---interrogates the ways in which Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273), a thirteenth-century Sufi poet/scholar, has been appropriated in the West. In the valorization of Rumi, the engagement of distinct discourses that emerged out of complex histories stand out. This study, accordingly, seeks to contextualize the ways in which Sufism, as well as Rumi's works and thoughts, are being read and discussed in relation to discourses on Islam, religion, and spirituality so as to explore the "politics of representation" that is embedded in those refractions. The dissertation analyzes the representations of Sufis, Sufism, and consequentially Rumi in a wide variety of texts, from pre-modern proto-ethnographic works to contemporary translations and novels, so as to trace the construction and engagement of discourses that engender the most significant readings of Rumi. The representation of Rumi's "Muslimhood" constitutes the focus of analysis. For several decades, and due to a variety of reasons that are discussed in this study, Rumi was imagined merely as an incidental Muslim in the West, where the spiritual currents of the second half of the twentieth century cast him as a New Age guru with romantic sensibilities. It was only in the early twenty-first century, with the events of 9/11 and the consequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Rumi's Muslim identity has come to be acknowledged on a popular level. The dissertation interrogates the discursive course of the assessment of Rumi as an extra-Islamic figure and the contemporary re-evaluation as an Islamic one, and thereby sheds light on the post-9/11 discourses on Islam in the West, within which Rumi in particular has been cast as an ideal(ized) representative of "good Muslims." It is argued that that Rumi's "ideality" is largely an effect of the New Age reading of Rumi, which underlines, among other things, the compatibility of Rumi's spirituality with Western values.Publication THE SUBJECTS OF FATİH AKIN'S MELODRAMAS: A GENEALOGICAL READING THROUGH THE FILMS OF R.W. FASSBINDER, YILMAZ GÜNEY AND ATIF YILMAZ(2016) Benli, Emir OFatih Akın's feature films Head-On (2004) and The Edge of Heaven (2007) resonated strongly with Turkish, German and Turkish German communities, albeit for diverse reasons, opening spaces for debate with regard to subjectivites that foreground their alterity and redefine readings of national identity. This dissertation addresses ways in which the melodramatic modality of Akın's films partake in such debates by presenting a dialogic genealogy of melodramas from Turkish, German and Turkish German contexts. An analysis of Fontane's novel "Effi Briest" and of R.W Fassbinder's Fontane Effi Briest and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul; Atıf Yılmaz's O Beautiful Istanbul; and Yılmaz Güney's The Herd suggests ways in which these texts and films inscribe different aspects of alterity, situating the subjects of these narratives in disruptive relationships with national and transnational identitarian discourses. I examine these melodramatic narratives and the impasses they constructfor their subjects together with the relationship of the films' uses of mise-en-scène to further complicate notions of ethnic and other modes of belonging. Divergent modes of distanciation and identification from different filmic traditions in Turkey and in Germany constitute a multivalent nexus through which I approach Akın's films. The ambivalence of the protagonists' affective states sets up another point of critical inquiry from which I utilize notions of performativity to critique interiorized and exteriorized readings of affect. I trace articulations of the realistic registers in these works, seeking the fissures where the melodramatic modality reveals itself to allow the directors to leave open the subjects' alterity. Finally, I link certain plot-lines to the "stranded objects" of Turkish and German national histories, including histories pertaining to the Nazi past in Germany, the erasure of the Ottoman cosmopolitan cultural nexus and the nomadic modes of existence of the Kurdish population in Turkey. I then posit ways in which these objects come to interact with transnationally determined subjectivities in the films of Akın. The dialogic genealogy I propose intervenes in current critical debates on melodrama as a trans-generic mode and on transnationality in cinema that look beyond paradigms of nationalism(s) towards a diverse articulation of subjectivities that resist reification by dominant identitarian discourses.Publication Documenting the (Un)Documented: Diasporic Ecuadorian Narratives in Southern/Mediterranean Europe(2015) Cuesta, Esther AFor several decades, Ecuadorian, U.S. American, and European social scientists have studied Ecuadorian migration to the European Union. Yet little academic research has been devoted to the comparative study of literary and filmic representations of diasporic Ecuadorians. This disparity between social science and literary studies research is especially evident in scholarship published in English, a gap this dissertation proposes to fill. I investigate the discourses, cultural production, representations, and self-representations of diasporic Ecuadorians in Southern/Mediterranean Europe, specifically in Spain and Italy, where the largest diasporic communities of Ecuadorians in the European Union reside. I focus on a selection of works of fiction, poetry, and films, with particular attention given to texts by diasporic Ecuadorians. I argue that some of these recent texts point to a shift in epistemological standpoints, self-representational strategies, and political coalitional projects that differ from previous understandings and representations of the Ecuadorian migrant. I suggest that they gesture toward the narrative of a subject who not only exposes her subjectivities and experiences, but also connects these within larger translocal histories, revealing the global subalternization of migrants and critiquing dominant systems of power. Since the mid-1990s, approximately 1.5 million Ecuadorian women and men from diverse geographical, social, and ethnoracial backgrounds (roughly 10 percent of the total population) have migrated to the European Union, particularly to Southern/Mediterranean Europe. Ecuadorian women often work as caretakers of the elderly, disabled, or the ill, while men work in construction and other manual labor. Unlike previous Ecuadorian migrations to the U.S., this migration was predominantly female and with a higher formal education than that of the average Ecuadorian population. As subalternized, ethnicized, and racialized migrants, Ecuadorians are seldom viewed by mainstream European societies as narrators and inscribers of their own experiences and subjectivities, or as agents of knowledge production and self-representation. I suggest that intercultural projects such as poetry contests, developed by diasporic Ecuadorians in Genoa, have countered certain discursive formations regarding Ecuadorian youth in Italy by fostering their self-presentation as creators and producers of knowledge and culture. The texts analyzed advance the documentation of translocal Ecuadorian narratives in Southern/Mediterranean Europe.Publication EMBODIMENT AND GENDERED SUBJECTIVITY IN UKRAINIAN WOMEN’S FILM, POETRY, AND PROSE DURING PERESTROIKA (1985-1991)(2022-09) Russell, Sandra JIn this dissertation, I look to Ukrainian women’s literary and filmic contributions in the final Soviet years of perestroika to recontextualize and reconsider feminist and gendered epistemologies in Eastern Europe. I view the last Soviet Ukrainian filmmakers, writers, and artists as groundbreaking in their conceptualization a new, more “liberal” vision of nation, especially through their increasingly open and subversive critiques of the Soviet state. I locate perestroika as a powerful moment in Ukraine’s histories of resistance to the weaponization of colonialist and imperialist mythologies, past and present. For women in particular, the stakes of this shifting articulation of nation became part of a bolder and more visible feminist consciousness, although not necessarily named as such. I contribute critical insight to the ways in which gender operated in dialogue with the idea of Ukrainian nationhood during perestroika and glasnost, while at the same time, considering how the works under examination have contributed to contemporary discourses of gender, violence, and nation within and beyond Ukraine. By giving new attention to Ukrainian feminist engagement with queer and transnational feminisms, I challenge narrow and incomplete, and thus colonialist, narratives about gender and sexuality in Ukraine and Eastern Europe more broadly, bringing visibility to feminism’s development not as a corollary of or in relation to Western discourses, but as a product of its own cultural, political, and ideological conditions. In so doing, I situate Ukrainian feminist critiques within broader transnational feminist discourses, especially regarding women’s ties to the idea of the nation, both materially, through their bodies, and psychically, as an imagined intimacy, constituted through a sense of belonging.Publication The Moral Frame: Adab and Ottoman Literary Modernity(2022-09) Ozdemir, Mehtap“The Moral Frame: Adab and Ottoman Literary Modernity” documents the links between conceptual history, modernity, and translation in Ottoman/Turkish letters in the nineteenth century. Informed by the centrality of translation to the making, legitimation, and universalization of modern literary epistemology across languages, this dissertation addresses the potentials of conceptual translation, by way of specific attention to its temporal politics, for theorizing Persianate literary modernities in more historicized terms. Placing the concept of literature at its center, this study on the one hand builds on a growing scholarship that reconceptualizes literature as a modern discipline that emerged in the wake of colonial modernity. On the other hand, in order to trace the grounds of literary knowledge and hermeneutics in late Ottoman theoretical and creative writing, this dissertation considers the relevance of the Persianate adab culture for theorizing Ottoman literary modernity. In their engagement with the civilizational idea of world literature, which posited a progressive temporality, my case studies show, late Ottoman writers invoked adab in a variety of literary forms and functions such as advice literature, romance narratives, religious travelogues, poetics, debate etiquette, and Sufi hermeneutics. Taking it as neither timeless tradition nor an alternative modernity, this dissertation defines adab as a moral praxis that blends aesthetic, epistemological, and ethical considerations, and argues that adab thus inflects the progressive temporality of modern literature with the mark of ethical time. In the two conceptual trajectories of adab and world literature, which diffused into each other in the making of Ottoman literature as a moral praxis, “The Moral Frame” not only reconfigures Ottoman modernity in terms of modern epistemology, but also shows that literary modernity was less about nationalized spaces than the ethics of literary knowledge. In so doing, it revises the Eurocentric account of the late Ottoman literary “renaissance” and advances translational temporality as an effective framework for comparative modernity studies.Publication Redressing History: Texts and Textiles in Counternarratives of Slavery(2022-09) Mei, Siobhan M“Redressing History” explores how twentieth- and twenty-first century Black women authors tell the story of slavery in the Americas. This study asks: given the limited number of archival records authored by enslaved and free women of color, what other materials can we consider in order to access and share women’s stories and experiences of slavery worlds? “Redressing History” suggests that the significant, though understudied, role of clothes and textiles in the construction of Atlantic World identities and diasporic communities makes fashion a powerful narrative mode in history. Comparing representations of textiles, textile practices, and clothing in historical counternarratives from Haiti, Jamaica, Guadeloupe, and the United States, “Redressing History” foregrounds the intimacies of cloth and storytelling to understand the role of fiction in addressing/redressing the marginalization of Black women’s voices and actions within colonial archives. By examining textile arts and dress practices as powerful strategies of authorial possibility in novels by Toni Morrison, Marie Chauvet, Simone Schwarz-Bart, and Andrea Levy, “Redressing History” offers a transhistorical account of the variety of ways in which Black women claim—and have been claiming—agency over the fashioning of their own bodies and stories in both colonial history and the contemporary global literary market.Publication DIRTY MINDS & FAILED ENDINGS: USES OF THE BAWDY IN JEWISH COMEDY, AMERICAN AND ISRAELI PERSPECTIVES(2021-09) Tamir, EyalThe connection between Jews, Jewish culture, and comedy in the twentieth century has long been established. The dissertation looks at Jewish comedy, comedians, and comediennes who have made the bawdy a central feature of their work. Moreover, it argues that the bawdy and the lewd have played an important role in the history of Jewish comedy and humor in the United States and in Israel. Aside from simply documenting various uses and occurrences of the bawdy in Jewish comedy, the dissertation seeks out some symptoms, as well as some underlying causes for the proclivity for such material in the work of Jewish producers of comedy by looking at historical, cultural, and personal contexts.Publication Never-lasting Effects: John Williams, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bruno Jasieński, and Non-redemptive Failure(2021-09) Rowinski, Krzysztof WMy dissertation examines literary accounts of failure and failed performance largely in the context of the advent of modernity. I read the works of John Williams, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Bruno Jasieński as case studies to discuss a non-redemptive kind of failure, one where the narrative does not suggest failing as a step to eventual success. Never-lasting Effectsis an attempt to delineate the productive side of failure within a non-future-oriented approach. In parallel with a reading of the above authors, I review the existing narratives about failure, in the main offered by scholars and critics who see it either as a nihilist, apolitical approach or, in a more hopeful way, as a tool of subversion and revolutionary practice under the conditions of late capitalism. My dissertation carves out a theoretical position outside of either of these opposed camps in what appears to be a nascent field of failure studies. Taking my methodology from performance studies and its emphasis on ephemerality, I examine failure synchronically, as it happens in its present. As I argue, there are important political effects produced by failure that cannot continue into the utopian future. My discussions of Williams, Pasolini, and Jasieński offer a new methodology of reading failure that helps us examine and understand those effects better.Publication BETWEEN THE VISUAL AND THE VERBAL: AN AESTHETIC OF OPEN WOUNDS IN POST-TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCE OF THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR (1980-1988)(2021-09) Ghodrati, MaryamTrauma theory of the 1990s pioneered by Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Geoffrey Hartman has been criticized by postcolonial scholars such as Irene Visser, Michael Balaev, and Stef Craps for being neglectful of the trauma of the colonial world in adopting a deconstructivist approach and psychologization of experiences of trauma. This antagonism between the traditional and postcolonial trauma theory has resulted in even deeper isolation of the human subject at the center of this argument. In my research, I highlight the reality and materiality of traumatic suffering in the shared realm of the human body to suggest a need for a more universal approach that places the emphasis on the significance of the suffering body in its social relations. I argue that a commixture of a pluralist/postcolonialist critique and deconstructivist psychoanalysis is exactly what is needed in non-Western theorizations and practices of representation, on the one hand, in order to address non-Western authoritarian regimes and incompetent governing systems, and, on the other, to recognize the compliance of Western and European colonial or imperial powers in perpetuating suffering. In the first chapter, my analysis of visual representations of the Iran-Iraq war interrogates the transition from complete ideological and revolutionary thought in Iranian Sacred Defense art toward the more troubled self in photography and film. The second chapter, which focuses on the novel Gunǧiškʹhā bihišt Rā mīfahmand [Sparrows Understand Heaven], exemplifies an era of transition, lingering between the romanticized narratives of war and its brutal reality, in those who have not experienced brutalities of war first-hand and struggle to find a balance between the concept of martyrdom and death. In Bagh-e-Boloor (Crystal Garden), examined in the third chapter, both the physical and psychological pressures of war time remain incommunicable by the characters and are thus narrated through a psychoanalytic social realist form in order to highlight the anxieties of the suffocating conditions for women and children at the home front when men die in the battle. In the fourth and last chapter, Ahmad Dehghan’s Man Ghatel-e-Pesaretan Hastam, (A Vital Killing) takes the reader to a whole new level of post-traumatic madness, a state of being where the body itself doesn’t remain immune from the ravages of psychic breakdown, nor does the psyche remain intact from the extremes of bodily wounds.Publication NEW HORIZONS IN TRANSLATION THEORY: CHINESE CLASSICS AND THE DAO OVER TIME(2021-09) Bai, XuefeiIn the West, many modern translation theories, based, as most Western languages are, on the use of alphabetic writing systems, have seen dramatic changes in their evolution and differ from Chinese translation theories, which are based on the Chinese ideographic writing system, and whose characters have remained largely unchanged for over two millennia. In this dissertation, I explore those differences between the writing systems and suggest how they might affect modes and conceptualization of translation. The goal and intention of the research is to then try to tease out larger implications of such different conceptualizations and to see how they may impact wider definitions for the field of translation studies. With regard to the Chinese language, my research demonstrates, on the one hand, how the consistent usage of characters has enabled a rich history and vocabulary of terms for translating and interpreting that far exceed what the contemporary term fanyi (translation)implies; and, on the other hand, as a result of the complexity of the characters and the writing system, how the act of commentating/interpreting/translating is not only necessary but has turned into a critical vehicle for learning, change, creativity, and growth.Publication Salvage Media: A Materialist Inquiry into the Limits of Visual, Aural, and Textual Clarity(2021-05) Ponomareff, Alexander SSalvage Media, reads the oeuvre of the Afrofuturist graffiti writer RAMM:∑LL:Z∑∑ as a theoretical framework for resisting normativizing, authorized, and white-washed forms of communication. It salvages an archive of creators who appropriate technologies to transgress the formal and legal boundaries used to control aural and visual landscapes. Popular culture artists, such as graffiti writers, hip hop groups, such as De La Soul, and comics creators, including Rob Liefeld, expose and undermine the typically unspoken demand to be clear for white audiences. In so doing, they demonstrate the powerful role that ubiquitous commercial objects play in manufacturing our political imaginaries. Further, the demand for clear and direct communication is hardwired into the design and manufacturing of the production technologies that these “techno rebels,” to borrow a term from the futurist Alvin Toffler, tactically misuse. These techno rebels resist the legacy of cybernetics discourse and its influence over technological innovation into the present day. The study of cybernetics was premised on the promise of a communicative utopia in which humans, machines, and animals could freely communicate without latency, feedback, or lag. Over time, this dream transformed into the utopian promise of the total control of information and communication that defines the Information Age and the Information Society. By the mid-1970s, the field was declared dead, and cybernetic discourse has largely been written off as dated research and a failed project. However, the legacy of cybernetics is alive and well in the dream of total control of information. Central to the technocractic desire for such control is the demand for clarity, because the more legible, understandable, and digestible information is, the easier it is to control. This project concludes by connecting the importance of collective action with a discussion of the of the tactical, which grasps hold of momentary opportunities within shifting political, cultural, and social terrains. To the extent that the constellation of techno rebels who are the focus of this dissertation can serve as models for future acts of resistance, it remains necessary to better understand the means and the ways by which they were able to produce such resistance.Publication PROSTITUTES, TEMPORARY WIVES, AND MOTREBS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SEX WORK IN IRANIAN FILM AND FICTION FROM THE CONSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTION (1906-1911) TO THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION (1979)(2021-02) zehtabi sabeti moqaddam, maryamThis dissertation titled “Prostitutes, Temporary Wives, and Motrebs: A Comparative Study of Sex Work in Iranian Film and Fiction from Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911) to the Islamic Revolution (1979)” brings together the web of images and narratives in sociocultural and historical texts and films that create and maintain the identity of sex workers as articles of mass consumption and sustain dominant practices and policies. By studying how these women, their body, and their sexuality are perceived, shown, and regulated in art and literature—which are ciphers of the society at large—my research exposes the tightly knit relationship between patriarchy, capitalism, and morality, sheds light on the ideological formations of gender and sexuality, problematizes the facile demarcations of illegitimate and legitimate avenues of sexual gratification, and destabilizes the official Islamic discourse on the issue. The first chapter discusses liberal and radical feminist discourses on sex work and creates the broader framework for my arguments regarding Iran. Chapter two focuses on the birth of the prostitute as a prominent literary trope in Iranian fiction and explains the sociocultural and political factors contributing to it. Drawing on works such as The Sexual Contract (1988) by Carole Pateman and The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade (2008) by Sheila Jeffreys which blur the boundaries between servile marriage and prostitution, my third chapter contends that temporary marriage is a form of sex work endemic to Iran as it embodies the patriarchal ideal of the unchecked recourse of men to women’s sexuality sanctioned by law and religion. Chapter four examines sex workers’ self-perception as expressed in non-fiction and documentary works from the second Pahlavi Era (1941-1979). Finally, chapter five analyzes the voyeuristic representations of female sex workers and Motrebs (entertainers) in Iranian commercial cinema which reenact the worn-out Madonna/whore dichotomy that seeks to polarize women as either asexual and chaste or sexually active and monstrous.
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