Follow the links below for more
information on the USC College Department of American Studies and
Ethnicity.
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graduate students
Dissertation Abstracts for Current Graduate Students
For students who have graduated, please see the graduate placement page for further information.
Deborah Al-Najjar
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| “Around 199l: Performing Iraq and Militarized Masculinities” stares at artists (performers, novelists, filmmakers) who imagine militarized masculine subjects within a racial triangulation framework. I dissect that paradigm by demonstrating how this triangulation is a national trauma; it functions as sexual/racial terror. My project understands the current 2003-2010 ongoing war against Iraq by looking backward to the 1991 Gulf War, then further back to the pre Baathist Coup of the 1950s and U.S. institutional and structural operations (covert and overt). By examining what some academics, artists, and activists might perceive as benign institutions (the Peace Corps, Foreign Service, & the academy), the reader, citizen, activist, or artist would find herself as a relational, imbricated, and responsible, active participant in these institutions. The artists in this dissertation put themselves and us in positions of vulnerability and culpability.
My dissertation maps onto Claire Jeane Kim’s “Racial Triangulation” a paradigm shift. If Arabs are Asians (Model Minorities and perpetual foreigners) in her formulation of Asian, Black, White, how does this formation work for textual readings? Racial triangulation as sexual/racial trauma operates through white militarized masculine subjectivity and is a sexualized/gendered violence. I couple the terms racial triangulation and militarized masculinities in order to get at the nexus that is a heterosexualized violence of empire’s formation. These artists are not collaborators with the state but art, especially art that speaks against the grain, will collide and collude with those structures. M y theoretical engagements and stakes in various fields of studies triangulate one another: African American, Arab American, Asian American studies. These fields of knowledge intersect and crosscut queer/feminist theory as I meditate on empire, occupation, and knowledge production in the academic landscape, the other “cultural imaginary” of this dissertation.
My primary archive consists of art that I read as racial engagements with triangulation: performance artists Timz, Narcicyst, Paul Mooney, and Tania Hammidi; Alan Ball’s cinematic rendition of Alica Erian’s novel Towelhead (2007); Sam Greenlee’s novel Baghdad Blues (1976); Sinan Antoon’s novella I’Jaam (2007); Rajiv Joseph’s play The Bengali Tiger in the Baghdad Zoo (2010); Edward Zwick’s film The Seige (1998). |
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Genevieve Carpio
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| Organizing Empire contends that racial and regional formation are constitutive practices. I tell this story through the gateway region of the California Inland Empire and its relationship to nearby cities, the U.S., and Latin America by tracing both the history of regional formation and resource distribution, as well as the history of racial formation and Latino (im)mobility. I trace the roots of regional formation to industrial agriculture and the New Deal, when a racial geography centered on the reproduction of American capitalism was formed and stabilized with concrete. I show that racial inequality formed through these forces precipitated struggles over racial equality, public space, and heritage in postwar development. Central to my argument is that the history of racial identity formation in California did not solely follow a place-based model, but instead represents a long-term struggle over the physical mobility of Latinos. That is, those who controlled mobility in the gateway region of the Inland Empire become key actors in the maintenance of place and ethnic meaning.
In Organizing Empire, I ask, how are regionalization and racialization related? What racial, spatial, and economic projects are required to reproduce racial and regional formation? And, how have residents reproduced or challenged regional formation or the manner in which resources are distributed? Furthermore, through an approach that is sensitive to the mobile practices of Latinos, I ask, how might place-based identities have been expanded and challenged by regional networks of mobile people, communication networks, and problems? Ultimately, I argue that the processes that produce regions simultaneously produce race. Far from provincial, historical analysis of regional (and racial) formation in Inland Southern California and other gateway regions can help identify patterns that repeat throughout the nation allowing us to better understand the whole. |
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Jesus Hernandez
Deviant Diasporas: Illegitimacy, Exile, and U.S. Cuban Cultural Politics
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| Bastard Diasporas: Illegitimacy, Exile, and U.S. Cultural Politics, mines a broad range of cultural productions for insights into how U.S. Cubans conceptualize and relate to the nation-state. Analyzing contemporary literature, film, radio, performance art, and law from the mid-1990s to the present, my chapters evidence the variegated ways that U.S. Cuban cultural productions allow us to theorize the diaspora, family, nation, and illegitimacy. Diasporas, I argue, are the bastards of the nation-state. Foregrounding the articulations of family and nation, my project shows how diasporic communities are figured as the illegitimate kin of the proper citizen subject; they are simultaneously part of the national family yet outside the purview of full belonging and heritage or inheritance. The metaphor of the broken home structures and figures the diaspora as a contiguous metaphorical broken homeland. My project contributes to two particular strands of research in diaspora studies, the first critiques the heteronormativity embedded within the language of diaspora and the second interrogates the complicit or conflictive relationship between the diaspora and the nation-state. Building upon these theories, I position diasporic communities as the errant seeds of the nation-state. Dispersed and disintegrated, the diasporan longs for the fictitious sense of wholeness or incorporation that is attributed to the modern subject of/ through the family and the nation. |
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Nisha Kunte
Narrative Incorporations: Negotiating Self, Other and Difference through the Organ Transplant
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| Narrative Incorporations examines the narrativizing of organ transplantation, arguing that the stories we tell about the transfer of human body parts pose fundamental questions about our conceptions of self, other and the negotiation of difference across material and theoretical boundaries. The surgical removal of an organ from one person that is then inserted into the body of another constitutes a fundamental breach, which, I argue, must be sutured through the process of narrativization of the body. However, stories produced under the dire necessity to reconstitute and reincorporate these failing bodies draw our attention to the continual and, ultimately, failing process of narrative incorporation in the face of bodies whose boundaries are always under assault. Narratives of organ transplantation force us to attend to both the literal and figurative incorporation of the boundary between self and nonself and ask questions about the very possibility for ethical engagement with the other across time and space. What are the types of narratives that circulate around transplanted bodies and what work do they do upon the bodies they represent and the bodies they engage as readers or viewers? What does the narrativization of the transplant and a consideration of transplanted embodiment contribute to a reckoning with difference? How do self and other as constructed and contested by the transplanted body inform or interrogate questions around the politics of possibility and futurity? Narrative Incorporations aims to investigate these stories of organ transfer and their attendant (im)possibilities and productivities for answering such ethical questions through a critical reading of transplant narratives in television medical dramas, novels, performance pieces and other cultural productions. |
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Anthony Rodriguez
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| In the early twenty-first century increasing attention has been brought to the critical thought of contemporary cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter. My dissertation constructs an intellectual history of Wynter's early critical intellectual life in the Caribbean and United States between 1962 and 1977 - a period that coincides with the emergence of unprecedented Black social movements across the diaspora that collectively and collaboratively struggled for antiracist, anticapitalist, and anticolonial social transformation. Drawing from historian J. G. Pocock's contention that political discourse may be considered “the intellect's attempt to construct an intelligible world out of political experience,” I situate Wynter's early writings within the context of critical intellectual cultures that emerged in the wake of West Indian national independence struggles and the Black Power movement.1 As scholarly engagement with Wynter's critical thought continues to grow throughout the humanities and social sciences, so too will the need to engage those social movements that she witnessed and directly participated in during her early intellectual life. My dissertation aims to contribute to present and future scholarship on Wynter's work by interfacing her critical thought and philosophies on human freedom with these social movements, which themselves demand further study with regard to their impact on contemporary social theory. |
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Micaela Smith
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| Pelourinho-Maciel is the colonial center of the old city of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, and consists of the largest and most important collection of baroque and rococo architecture in the Americas. As the oldest Brazilian city, and one that for two hundred and fourteen years was the seat of the Portuguese empire (1549-1763), Pelourinho-Maciel is synonymous with times of colonial splendor and the labor of enslaved Africans. The campaign to restore Pelourinho-Maciel for tourism development began in earnest during the late 1960s, as local urban developers and state managers began the extensive process of petitioning the United Nations Educational, Science, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to make Pelourinho-Maciel an UNESCO World Heritage Site. Yet setting the conditions and priorities for how Pelourinho-Maciel should be restored was no easy task. While UNESCO recommendations mandated that the original community benefit from tourism development, the local elite contested these recommendations within the press, describing UNESCO officials as foreigners intervening with no sense of the local issues. The “local issues,” decried the critics, were the increasing numbers of Black prostitutes and thieves living within the abandoned colonial mansions. Yet as many sociological surveys contested, prostitution was already in decline, based on a policy of residents moving out “of their own accord”.
As a result of the elite moving out of Pelourinho-Maciel since the 1930s, coupled with the abandonment by the state, a growing number of poor Afro-Brazilians had taken up residence, subdividing the colonial mansions into small partitioned rooms. Local residents worked in the city center as well as in the nearby areas as shoemakers, book-binders, laundry washers, street vendors, domestics, laundresses, seamstresses, hair stylists (Espinheira 1971, 57). Thirteen percent of the Maciel population had lived in the area for more than twenty years and in the same building. 27.5% in the same category had lived there for eight to twenty years (Espinheira 1988, 9). These numbers demonstrate the sense of permanency residents felt living in their homes and of the duration of their relationship as renters to their landlords. Throughout the 1970s, a debate ensued among journalists, UNESCO officials and sociologists as to whether, and if so, how, living and working conditions should be improved for the local poor as a result of the restoration process.
The recent history of Pelourinho-Maciel as a history of the neighborhood’s long-time residents provides us a rich site to explore the ideology of development as its practices and logics were being imagined and implemented across and within multiple scales throughout the 1970s. The constantly shifting relationships between local, state, and international technicians demonstrates that the development of Pelourinho-Maciel was a multiscalar project with a particular focus on fixing one place: to make a colonial “living museum” and produce both the material and symbolic narratives to define Pelourinho-Maciel as a “living” historical monument (Azevedo 1994; Romo 2010). A focus on the residents, and how they were described and discussed in the debates surrounding their status as valid residents of Pelourinho-Maciel, brings to the fore issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the history of Pelourinho-Maciel’s urban renewal and state development strategies. Yet the logic of development in the making of Pelourinho-Maciel does not follow one continuous single narrative. Rather, the logic of development, as employed by the various city, state, and international actors, relied on multiple narratives, sometimes overlapping and sometimes bafflingly contradictory. By focusing on the development of Pelourinho-Maciel from 1965-1985, Conditions of Belonging argues that the making of Pelourinho-Maciel, and the particular rationale market development discourse produced by the city, state, and international elite, relied on the symbolic presence of the longtime residents in the beginning just as much as it required their structured absence in the end. |
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Gretel Vera Rosas
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| My dissertation examines what I call “illicit economies of being” to explore how cinematic representations of sex work, undocumented migration and trafficking construct Latin/a American women, especially transnational single mothers, in ways that reinscribe, disrupt, or complicate normative notions of gender, family and mothering. I begin by analyzing the deportation case of Elvira Arellano, a single mother and undocumented Mexican immigrant, in order to trace how certain forms of labor and ways of being have been historically constructed as always already criminal and always already existing outside the protection of the law. Subsequently, I turn to post 1980’s independent films with limited circulation and contend that through some of these visual texts, one can see the structural changes introduced by globalization, as well as the ways in which cultural production provides us with means to imagine spaces for becoming, undecidability and difference where Latin/a American women’s desires and dreams can potentially generate identities/spaces that are not necessarily determined by sex, patriarchy and/or capital.
Methodologically, I combine film critique, textual and discursive analysis of post 1980’s economic, anti-drug and anti-immigrant state policies, legal cases and news reports, and autoethnography. Central to my project is a critical examination of the ways in which liberal models of citizenship and agency have historically required particular forms of manhood or masculinity while rendering—through the systemic policing, repression and hyper-productive surplus extraction of the feminized body—women of color more vulnerable and exposed to premature death. Through the study of film, "Illicit Economies of Being" mobilizes the notion of illegality to interrogate intersections between racialized maternity, political economy and the illicit beyond the obvious reference to undocumented immigrant status. I call for the critical querying/queering of the maternal to theorize the overlapping(s) of motherhood and illegality as contradictory site(s) of subjection and possibility that can challenge traditional logics of mothering therefore normative frameworks of being, temporality and space. I posit illegality as an analytical category to examine the discursive-material dynamics of global capitalism while delving into the various ways in which female affect and sociality is performed and realized under coercive conditions of labor and abjection across the Americas. |
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