Browsing by Author "Hardt, Michael"
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Item Open Access An Aesthetic Disposition: Art, Social Reproduction, and Feminist Critique(2020) Hayes, Shannan LeeThis project focuses on the question: how might we understand the politics of contemporary art? Grounding my research in feminist political theory, I argue that art’s most critical function—in the US-based context of neoliberalism—may be found in art’s ability to perform the work of social reproduction. I draw the concept of social reproduction from feminist and critical theory to mean two things. First, regarding social reproduction as a paradigm for social change, I ask how works of art participate in building subjects and structures that prefigure alternative, life sustaining worlds. Second, regarding social reproduction as the labor of care, I develop a theory of art as a source of critical hope and sensible rejuvenation. My work thus complicates the common belief—held for example in critical theory—that sensible stimulation obscures critical awareness and encourages apolitical escape. To the contrary, I find art to offer needed resources for critical world-building precisely through the aesthetic dispositions that artworks prompt. I build this argument through close attention to the work of three US-based women artists: Simone Leigh, Roni Horn, and Mika Rottenberg. By foregrounding the work of these artists in conversation with recent feminist thinking on affect and political economy, my research reorients the discourse on aesthetics and politics away from an emphasis on knowledge and subject representation, toward the undervalued work of somatic care and subject formation.
Item Embargo Art in the Interregnum: The Aesthetics of Transition, 1973-Present(2021) Gonzalez, JaimeArt in the Interregnum: The Aesthetics of Transition, 1973-Present adopts the interregnum, a concept imported into critical usage by Antonio Gramsci, as a periodizing framework for understanding cultural production today. While incarcerated in Turin during the early 1930s, Gramsci wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Adapting this formulation to the era of neoliberal globalization, I argue for reading contemporary works of art in relation to the long crisis of the 1970s, examining how writers, photographers and filmmakers encode the “morbid symptoms” of the contemporary, which include the erosion of liberal democracy, the rise of mass migration, and the exhaustion of modernization. I devote three chapters to the phenomena enumerated above, analyzing, respectively, Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile (2000) and Pablo Larraín’s Tony Manero (2009) as a return to the primal scene of neoliberalism—the 1973 U.S. backed Chilean coup; the photography Harry Gamboa Jr. and Anthony Hernandez as competing representations on the mobility of labor; and the recent fixation with landscape in recent photography and fiction as an aesthetic challenge to the expansive logic of economic development. What brings these works together is a commitment to what I call the “aesthetics of transition,” a mode of representation that attempts to make visible the interregnum between the failure of existing political structures and emerging social forms, bringing the post-1970s into view as an historical period.
Item Open Access Beautiful Annoyance: Reading the Subject(2011) Ozierski, Margaret AliceThis dissertation examines the pair subject-subjectivity embedded in the problematic of the end of art, as it is figured in exemplary fashion by film and literature. The analysis examines critically the problem of the subject vis-à-vis subjectivity by opening a dialogue that allows the necessary double terms of this discussion to emerge in the first place from the encounter with selected filmic and literary texts: Jacques Rivette's La belle noiseuse and Samuel Beckett's Film, The Unnamable and The Lost Ones. These texts are analyzed on an equal footing with the thought of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gianni Vattimo, Giorgio Agamben, and Gilles Deleuze who have written on both subjectivity and art. The study thus proposes a real movement - in terms and through art - that treats the metaphor of anamorphosis on the level of praxis: the image of subjectivity appears on the screen that is the filmic or literary text as the result of a passage in terms. The subject that emerges at the end of the analysis puts in perspective a certain practice of metonymic reading as renewed political potential of subjectivity.
Item Open Access Can't Go Home Again: Sovereign Entanglements and the Black Radical Tradition in the Twentieth Century(2009) Reyes, Alvaro AndresThis dissertation investigates the relation between the formation of "Blackness" and the Western tradition of sovereignty through the works of late twentieth century Black Radical theorists. I most specifically examine the work of Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka, Frantz Fanon, and Huey P. Newton in order to delineate a shift within Black Radicalism which, due to an intense de-linking of Black nationalism from the concept of territorial sovereignty throughout the 1960s and early 1970s led to the formation of a new subjectivity ("Blackness") oriented against and beyond the Western tradition of political sovereignty as a whole.
This dissertation begins by outlining the parameters of the concept of sovereignty as well as its relation to conquest, coloniality, and racialization more generally. I then examine the formation of Black Power as an expression of anti-colonial sentiments present within the United States and uncover there the influence of W.E.B. DuBois' concept of double-consciousness. I then further examine the concept of Black Power through the work of Amiri Baraka and his notion of "Blackness" as the proximity to "home." Each of these expositions of Black Power are undertaken in order to better understand the era of Black Power and its relation to both Black nationalism and the Western tradition of sovereignty.
Next, I turn to the work of Frantz Fanon, whom I claim prepares the way for the idea of "Blackness" as an ontological resistance beyond, not only the territorial imperative, but also the logic of sovereignty more generally. This notion of "Blackness" as an antidote to sovereign logic present within the work of Fanon allows me to turn to the work of Huey P. Newton in order to demonstrate his conceptualization of "Blackness" as an antagonistic subjectivity within a fully globalized society whose onset he had theorized and which he termed "empire." I conclude by drawing on each of the above theorists as well as the work of Angela Davis in order to build a retrospective summary of this alternative lineage of the Black Radical Tradition and its importance for the conceptualization of resistances to and life beyond our contemporary society.
Item Open Access Citizens of a Genre: Forms, Fields and Practices of Twentieth-Century French and Francophone Ethnographic Fiction(2011) Izzo, JustinThis dissertation examines French and Francophone texts, contexts and thematic problems that comprise a genre I call "ethnographic fiction," whose development we can trace throughout the twentieth century in several geographic locations and in distinct historical moments. During the twentieth century in France, anthropology as an institutionalized discipline and "literature" (writ large) were in constant communication with one another. On the one hand, many French anthropologists produced stylized works demonstrating aesthetic sensibilities that were increasingly difficult to classify. On the other hand, though, poets, philosophers and other literary intellectuals read, absorbed, commented on and attacked texts from anthropology. This century-long conversation produced an interdisciplinary conceptual field allowing French anthropology to borrow from and adapt models from literature at the same time as literature asserted itself as more than just an artistic enterprise and, indeed, as one whose epistemological prerogative was to contribute to and enrich the understanding of humankind and its cultural processes. In this dissertation I argue that fiction can be seen to travel in multiple directions within France's twentieth-century conversation between literature and anthropology such that we can observe the formation of a new genre, one comprised of texts that either explicitly or more implicitly fuse fictional forms and contents together with the methodological and representational imperatives of anthropology and ethnographic fieldwork. Additionally, I argue that fiction moves geographically as well, notably from the metropole to Francophone West Africa which became an anthropological hotspot in the twentieth century once extended field research was legitimated in France and armchair anthropology was thoroughly discredited. By investigating ethnographies, novels, memoirs and films produced both in metropolitan France, Francophone West Africa, and the French Caribbean (including texts by Michel Leiris, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, Jean Rouch, Jean-Claude Izzo and Raphaël Confiant), I aim to shed light on the kinds of work that elements of fiction perform in ethnographic texts and, by contrast, on how ethnographic concepts, strategies and fieldwork methods are implicitly or explicitly adopted and reformulated in more literarily oriented works of fiction. Ethnographic fiction as a genre, then, was born not only from the epistemological rapprochement of anthropology and literature in metropolitan France, but from complex and often fraught encounters with the very locations where anthropological praxis was carried out.
Item Open Access Climate Impasse, Fossil Hegemony, and the Modern Crisis of Imagination(2022) Williams, Casey AI argue in this dissertation that “climate impasse” — knowing much and doing little about climate change — has become a defining political, social, and cultural problem of the contemporary period (1980s to the present). Supposing that representations of impasse reveal something about the origins, features, and trajectories of U.S. climate politics, I perform close readings and historical analyses of exemplary texts across a range of media (novels, feature films, eco-political manifestos) to consider how the gap between knowing about climate change and doing something about it has been narrated in four U.S. environmental discourses: an “ecocritical” discourse that narrates impasse in terms of representational failure; an “ecofascist” discourse that closes the gap between knowing and doing by vowing to defend Northern borders against rising seas and migrant tides; an “ecofugitive” discourse that holds out the possibility of escape from the dangers of the present; and an “ecosocialist” discourse that resolves impasse by imagining decommodified forms of “social reproduction” that decouple life from fossil fuels. I find, first, that the material and epistemological dimensions of impasse arise from the ownership structure of “fossil capitalism” in the neoliberal period, which not only yokes the reproduction of waged/salaried life to the combustion of fossil fuels, but also profoundly shapes how climate change passes into the cultural imagination. I observe, second, that climate impasse calls into question the political imaginary of U.S. liberalism, which understands social progress to be driven by cycles of revelation and reform. Finally, I conclude that the imagination has a crucial role to play in moving beyond impasse — not by making the effects of climate change more visible, immediate, or dramatic, but by illuminating concrete strategies for abolishing the political economic structures that give rise to impasse in the first place.
Item Embargo Disintegration Narratives: Crisis and Transition in the Literary 1970s(2024) Crais, BenjaminThis dissertation considers the crisis of industrial manufacturing and onset of protracted economic stagnation in the 1970s as a problem of political and narrative form. The onset of what economic historian Robert Brenner calls “the long downturn” in 1973 marks the end of modern economic growth and the closure of political horizons premised on the expansion of industrial capital. Drawing on social movement history and recent developments in Marxist literary theory, I consider a series of novels by politically committed U.S. authors who return to the epochal break of the 1970s to narrate the emergence of our historical present. Examining novels by Leslie Feinberg, John Edgar Wideman, and Rachel Kushner alongside other novels and cultural artifacts of the long 1970s, I find that they delimit the terrain of the present by staging the onset of deindustrialization as the exhaustion of earlier genres of political literature and modes of organization.
Item Open Access Feedback Exhaust: Money and the Novel at the End of the Contemporary(2019) Huber, NicholasIn the contemporary context of global financialization, the distance between the categories of money and fiction has been theorized as narrowing. This dissertation uses a Marxist analytic to argue that financialized money and fiction, as two modes of accounting, should be approached as competing forms of what Marx and Engels described as “world literature” and, therefore, as sites of ideological and material contestations understood as a manifestation of class struggle. Financial and monetary accounting functions are found to be used by contemporary novels to reconstitute the form’s traditional modes of expression in accordance with the historical changes in global economic structures. At the same time, contemporary approaches to money, debt, and accounting are found to exploit tropes and functions familiar to scholars of literary fiction. This dissertation attempts to sketch the stakes of a contest over narrative possibility in a period in which historical narratives tend toward the catastrophic, apocalyptic, and dystopian.
Item Open Access From Crisis to Restoration: Technical Intellectuals and the Politics of Italy's Post-war Development(2021) Shareef, Shahrazad AliyahDevelopment has been studied as a project pursued by imperialist nations to strengthen the social and economic order of empire and to curb communism. It was deployed just as frequently, however, in sovereign spaces. This project examines the efforts of the Italian intellectuals who led the Svimez thinktank to organize the economic development of southern Italy in the post-war era. I draw upon materials from Italy’s national archive and those published by Svimez between 1968 and 1988. Whereas imperial development sought to strengthen empire, Italian development sought to strengthen the nation. To understand the intellectual origins of post-war Italian development I turn to events that rocked the nation during the interwar period and appeared to many as a national crisis. That included labor uprisings in response to rising prices beginning in 1919 and the financial crisis of the 1930s. These events oriented technical intellectuals within Milan’s Catholic and socialist milieu to social issues and the wholeness of the nation. After the war, Svimez leaders continued to focus on such questions. They deployed statistical and economic techniques to show southern stagnation was also a crisis that threatened the nation’s integrity.
To address it, they turned to capital. Industrial capital would extend the nation’s economic fabric to the places where it was most irrational and produce the homogeneity believed to be a defining characteristic of a nation. Christian Democracy, experiencing its own electoral crisis, supported the calls for a regional development agency but reframed it as a project of social justice. This language derived from documents they drafted while organizing their party in 1942, which imagined catholic social doctrine as the foundation of the post-fascist state. Italian development became part of the post-fascist project to renew the state’s moral authority and its role as a mediator between capital and labor. I conclude Italian development was response to a national crisis that envisioned a restoration and expansion of the conditions of Italian capitalism.
Item Open Access Modernist Form: On the Problem of Fragmentation(2018) Swacha, Michael GabryelThis dissertation explores formal fragmentation in the modernist novel. It shows that such fragmentation not only represents the historical conditions of modernism, but also posits the potential for new forms of human relation. Each chapter explores test cases of this potential through a close analysis of a novel and argues that in order to understand such literary structure one must look beyond literature to the wider episteme of modernism. Each chapter therefore positions literature alongside a related field, where the affinities are shown to be found not in a shared content but in a shared form. The chapters include explorations of: the problem of language in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying read alongside advertising; the problem of continuity and fragmentation in Ford’s Parade’s End read alongside security and administrative governance; and the problem of perception in Woolf’s The Waves read alongside physics. As the discussion of these pairings proceeds from chapter to chapter, it is shown that the fragmentation of each respective novel reveals an increasingly successful utopian experiment in alternative forms of human relationality. At an additional register, this dissertation also shows that such experimentation requires a redefined role for the critic, for the novels each draw the reader into their texts by not only representing but enacting fragmentation in a way that requires the reader to participate in the utopian experiment. Through the practice of criticism, the critic is therefore implicated in the modernist project, and complicit in all of the political and ethical concerns the project carries.
Item Open Access Our Ice Age: The Geohistorical Imagination in the Northern Hemisphere(2020) Gaffney, Michael Thomas“Our Ice Age: The Geohistorical Imagination in the Northern Hemisphere” contributes to discussions in the environmental humanities about the historical and narrative significance of climate change by examining representations of the ice age, a relatively recent geological moment that began 2.5 million years ago and continues, according to climatologists, into our own “interglacial” time. Linking scientific and literary narratives of our warming interglacial world with those of the last glacial epoch, this dissertation analyzes the imagination of climate change when planetary forces, rather than humans, serve as the primary drivers, and theorizes this discourse’s continuing relevance for understanding anthropogenic global warming.
Across a variety of texts, this research traces the persistence of two forms of storytelling—“gradualist” narratives of slow change and “catastrophist” plots of rapid transformation—that define representations of both the last glacial period and contemporary global warming. Observing this continuity, this project argues that current responses to global warming are not composed solely of modern reactions to a genuinely new situation; they are sedimented stories formed from climate change’s past as a long-standing social, political, scientific, and environmental problem. The four chapters of “Our Ice Age” traverse the Northern Hemisphere and range from the nineteenth century to the present. Chapter one analyzes two major works of ice age geology, Louis Agassiz’s Studies on Glaciers (1840) and James Croll’s Climate and Time (1875). Concentrating on the narrative form of these books, this chapter observes how Croll’s gradualist story of the ice age, in which climate change occurred slowly over time, came to supplant Agassiz’s initial catastrophic vision. Chapter two explores two novels, Johannes Jensen’s The Long Journey (1922) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Shaman (2013), in order to demonstrate how our fascination with human survival during the glacial epoch prompted both catastrophist and gradualist forms of climate fiction. Moving to the interglacial present, chapter three discusses the scientific, political, and cultural significance of the melting Arctic for researchers and indigenous communities; this chapter draws from a range of nonfiction about the “New Arctic,” including William Glassley’s A Wilder Time (2018) and Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s The Right to Be Cold (2015). Chapter four explores the politics of Pleistocene Park, a wildlife reserve in Siberia created to mitigate catastrophic global warming by reviving its ice-age ecosystem. Embracing both of the philosophically-opposed practices of “rewilding” and geoengineering, the park represents an ambiguous response to the conditions of the Anthropocene. Theorizing the “geohistorical imagination” that threads through these texts, this research shows how representations of the ice age perpetually shape our collective understanding of climate change.
This dissertation encourages the environmental humanities to serve as a more spacious venue for interdisciplinary conversations about the environment. This work draws inspiration from across disciplinary boundaries, not only using the tools of literary criticism to reflect on geology, ecology, environmental history, but also wielding insights from those fields in narrative analysis. Just as Hayden White read nineteenth- century historians for how they “emplot” history, this research reads geological and ecological treatises as a form of storytelling. At the same time, this research widens literary interpretation: where most humanist studies of the relationship between culture and environment focus exclusively on ecological transformations that have occurred since the industrial revolution or the post-WWII “great acceleration,” this work digs into evolutionary and geological history. This project interprets cultural products against the backdrop of geological time and human evolution. “Our Ice Age” thereby establishes a conceptual framework in which literary and scientific discourses meet productively to shed light on the consequences of climate change.
Item Open Access Police is Dead: On the Birth of Economism(2016) BurnsideOxendine, KristinaPolice is Dead is an historiographic analysis whose objective is to change the terms by which contemporary humanist scholarship assesses the phenomenon currently termed neoliberalism. It proceeds by building an archeology of legal thought in the United States that spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My approach assumes that the decline of certain paradigms of political consciousness set historical conditions that enable the emergence of what is to follow. The particular historical form of political consciousness I seek to reintroduce to the present is what I call “police:” a counter-liberal way of understanding social relations that I claim has particular visibility within a legal archive, but that has been largely ignored by humanist theory on account of two tendencies: first, an over-valuation of liberalism as Western history’s master signifier; and second, inconsistent and selective attention to law as a cultural artifact. The first part of my dissertation reconstructs an anatomy of police through close studies of court opinions, legal treatises, and legal scholarship. I focus in particular on juridical descriptions of intimate relationality—which police configured as a public phenomenon—and slave society apologetics, which projected the notion of community as an affective and embodied structure. The second part of this dissertation demonstrates that the dissolution of police was critical to emergence of a paradigm I call economism: an originally progressive economic framework for understanding social relations that I argue developed at the nexus of law and economics at the turn of the twentieth century. Economism is a way of understanding sociality that collapses ontological distinctions between formally distinct political subjects—i.e., the state, the individual, the collective—by reducing them to the perspective of economic force. Insofar as it was taken up and reoriented by neoliberal theory, this paradigm has become a hegemonic form of political consciousness. This project concludes by encouraging a disarticulation of economism—insofar as it is a form of knowledge—from neoliberalism as its contemporary doctrinal manifestation. I suggest that this is one way progressive scholarship can think about moving forward in the development of economic knowledge, rather than desiring to move backwards to a time before the rise of neoliberalism. Disciplinarily, I aim to show that understanding the legal historiography informing our present moment is crucial to this task.
Item Embargo Regeneration Through Laughter: The American Comedic National Fantasy After 9/11(2024) Pebesma, EvanRegeneration Through Laughter critically examines narratives about the power of US comedy to act as an antidote to the nation’s political problems. The project explores how post-9/11 film and television comedy develops a comedic utopianism, rooted in the notion of a distinctly national comedic spirit, which is then positioned as a tool to respond to major contemporary political issues, such as the degradation of democratic discourse, national polarization, and the War on Terror. Reading this comedic utopianism alongside political theory, national fantasy discourse, and scholarly commentary on US humor, this work evaluates the political efficacy of comedy in forwarding a vision for redeemed US nationhood. The analysis of comedic utopianism’s efficacy centers on the relationship between culture and politics, as this utopianism recasts political problems in culturalist terms and appeals to cultural forces (i.e., the aesthetic, the affective, civil society) to propose solutions to these problems. Regeneration Through Laughter argues that the culturalization of political problems ultimately undercuts comedic utopianism’s political potential by producing a bind in which the activation of cultural energies is only possible at the expense of depoliticizing the social issues this utopianism hoped to address.
Item Open Access Show Me What Democracy Looks Like: Articulating political possibility in Durham, North Carolina(2018-04-27) Nuckols, AshlynAs in most U.S. cities, municipal voter turnout in Durham, North Carolina is stratified by race and income level. Local politicians win elections by catering to the predominately white and middle-class bloc categorized as "likely voters." In the face of this self-reinforcing, systematic political bias, a Durham coalition is attempting to construct a progressive voting bloc led by working-class people of color. Among other challenges, Justice For All members are consistently faced with the assumption that they are investing in the impossible. Drawing on participant observation conducted in the months preceding Durham’s 2017 municipal election, this thesis asks: 1) how does the construction of “reasonable,” and “radical” in political discourse work to privilege certain political formations while undermining others? 2) How do social actors articulate the legitimacy of political formations and strategies that have yet to be constructed? I analyze Justice For All’s formal communications strategies as well as countless conversations held in a variety of public and private spaces. I argue that, in each of these spaces, group members engage in a form of discursive theorizing that works to overcome the limits of hegemonic discourse and speak (as well as organize) new political formations into existence.Item Embargo The Biopower of the Oldest Mafia: Economics, Biopolitics, and Ecology in Mediterranean Society(2024) Incoronato, CiroThis dissertation, The Biopower of the Oldest Mafia: Economics, Biopolitics, and Ecology in Mediterranean Society, tracks the evolution of the Camorra criminal organization through a literary and cinematic study of its representations. I propose that we understand the Camorra not only as a global economic force but also as a modern technology of power that affects biological life of a vast population. Drawing on Fredric Jameson’s work on postmodernism and his notion of pastiche, merged with a biopolitical framework, I deconstruct a genre of popular movies known as “Neapolitan Westerns,” as well as literary texts such as Giuseppe Marrazzo’s Il camorrista (1984), Nanni Balestrini’s Sandokan (2004), and Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra (2006). Through the lens of these cultural products, my work shows how the Camorra created a totalitarian society, based on the ghettoization of migrants from different African countries, notably Nigeria. My research also draws a parallel between the Camorra and the French criminal organization, known as the milieu marseillais, operating in Southern France. Through the analysis of TV shows, movies, and novels, I demonstrate how over the last century the Marseille Mafia has shaped the geopolitics of the Mediterranean by exploiting the strategic position of the port of Marseille. In this way, the Marseille Mafia has exercised a pervasive power over North African migrants and controlled the flow of people and capital from former French colonies. The Biopower of the Oldest Mafia moves away from the long-standing literary, anthropological, and historical paradigm which considers the Camorra, and other Italian Mafias, either as the result of the backwardness of Southern Italian society or as a pathological articulation of the economic system. By using the notion of biopower, I demonstrate that the Camorra is a dynamic social system. I reveal its role as a transnational criminal organization affecting the biological life of millions of people by imposing precise sexual behaviors, regulating race relations, and systematically devastating the Mediterranean habitat in the name of profit. Finally, my analysis of the biopower exercised by the Camorra provides essential clues about the operating procedures of Mafia-like criminal organizations throughout the world.
Item Open Access The City Novel After the City: Planetary Metropolis, World Literature(2019) Soule, Jacob Guion WadeLiterary scholars have long identified a formal correspondence between city and novel. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the city became embedded in the narrative forms of fiction as the latter attempted to map the coordinates of the rapidly expanding and increasingly complex social formations the former produced. In our moment, the older idea of the “city” as a discrete, identifiable form of human settlement is almost universally theorized as having been displaced by what is variously called “the metropolis”, “city everywhere”, or “planetary urbanization”. Without any outside to its parameters, how can the idea of the city still have meaning? This dissertation explores how the contemporary city novel can illuminate the bewildering new spaces in which we live and the seemingly inevitable "becoming-planetary" of the urban.
Item Open Access The Cuban Diaspora and the Question of Nostalgia(2017) Tuma, Virginia CamilaThe Cuban Diaspora and the Question of Nostalgia explores the dominant nostalgic politics of memory prevalent in post-Revolutionary Cuban-American cultural production. Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, the question of longing has weighed heavily on the hearts and minds of Cuban and Cuban-American exiles and immigrants living in the United States. Drawing on theories of nostalgia, literary criticism, and postmodern theory, this study argues that there exists an alternative narrative to the discourse of nostalgia in Cuban-American texts. Offering readings of works by five prominent Cuban-American authors, all born in Havana between 1949 and 1958 and who emigrated to the United States in the early 1960s, I begin my dissertation by interpreting the autobiographies of Carlos Eire and Gustavo Pérez Firmat as exemplary of Cuban-American nostalgic reconstructions of Havana; I then offer a reading of Achy Obejas’s early corpus as a critique of the nostalgia paradigm that nonetheless reveals its enduring power and the impossibility of reaching into the past other than through commodities and simulacra; finally, I delineate alternative discourses of memory that allow for a radical rethinking of the nostalgic impasse present in Cuban-American cultural production in the works of Cristina García and Alina Troyano.
Item Open Access The Logistical Mode of Production: Logistics as a Total Way of Life(2020) Rubinstein, YairSocial and cultural form is being reshaped by the increasing centrality of logistical science to everyday lived experience. Formerly confined to the governance of commodity chains, logistics’ influence has grown into a pervasive social rationality that promotes endless circulation and perpetual uncertainty as inextricable realities of contemporary life. Its ubiquity, I argue, is creating an altogether new global economic system which I call the logistical mode of production. As a planetary system of governance and control, the logistical mode of production operates on many geographical and temporal registers at once. My project thus employs a multi-scalar approach to capture the diversity of spaces and speeds that simultaneously converge to form our new logistical reality. I begin with the largest scale, i.e. the planetary logistical infrastructure that has historically been defined by the global supply chain. Its most significant actor, Amazon.com, has radically restructured commodity chains to service its worldwide retail network and fulfill its promise of rapid on-demand consumption. Beneath Amazon’s reconfiguration of the global supply chain exists what I call the social supply chain. It is defined by on-demand service apps like Uber and Deliveroo, whose platforms redirect logistical media’s governance of commodity circulation to control and coordinate human movement through urban space. As significant conductors of human circulation, mobile platforms not only reshape physical geographies, but restructure individual subjectivity along logistical lines. I therefore conclude my project by analyzing how the logistical mode of production creates individual subjects that embody its ideals of ceaseless circulation, infinite flexibility, and ruthless efficiency.
Item Open Access The Modernist Will to Totality: Dream Aesthetics and National Allegory(2017) Uyurkulak, SerhatThis dissertation argues that one of the distinguishing characteristics of modernist literature is its desire to represent the social totality and that some of the significant modernist narrative-formal experiments can be read as attempts to respond to the complex phenomenon of fragmentation witnessed in modernity. The crisis in the representation of totality is presented as a general framework within which different national situations and their literary works can communicate with each other, and the conventional definition of modernism can be broadened accordingly. This study focuses on the formal solutions offered to the mentioned problem in James Joyce’s Ulysses, A.H. Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace, and Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. The forms it analyzes extensively are Tanpınar’s dream aesthetics and Hedayat’s allegorical and non-oriented narrative resembling a Möbius band.
Item Open Access The Nouvelle Cuisine Revolution: Expressions of National Anxieties and Aspirations in French Culinary Discourse 1969 - 1996(2011) Mallory, Heather AlisonThis dissertation posits that Nouvelle Cuisine brings together two of the most powerful cultural forces involved in constituting French national identity: food and revolution. As a result of this privileged position, Nouvelle Cuisine offers scholars a particularly rich object of study that can be related to larger issues at play in the formation and performance of national identity. In this work, I will argue that the revolutionary rhetoric used in the articulation of Nouvelle Cuisine serves several distinct and, at times, oppositional purposes. On the one hand, the revolutionary rhetoric is intended to create a break with a tumultuous and painful past, while asserting a new paradigm of national strength. On the other hand, however, the revolutionary rhetoric of equality and freedom also somewhat paradoxically participates in and supports the dark side of democracy, which includes but is not limited to behind-the-scenes jockeying for power and the elimination of groups that threaten or curtail either the power at the top or the legitimacy of the revolution itself.
This work will also argue that because of the very malleability of the revolutionary rhetoric and because French cuisine is considered such an important expression of the French nation, Nouvelle Cuisine and the contemporaneous culinary discourse transforms France's fine dining domain into a sort of theatre where national attitudes are not only represented to a socially diverse French public, but where the public itself is invited to participate in this performance of the nation: rehearsing, refining, and rejecting what it means to be French and, as a result, projecting both aspirations and anxieties of nationhood through this culinary landscape.
In writing this dissertation, I have drawn heavily on my training in literary studies, but have tried as much as possible to allow the subject matter to dictate an inclusive and interdisciplinary approach. I engage frequently with a wide variety of scholars such as Homi Bhabha, Roland Barthes, Michel Winock, Jean-Robert Pitte, Claude Fischler, and Stephen Mennell. Consequently, my argument places the classic literary tools of linguistic and semiotic methods alongside investigations that call on cultural studies, history, anthropology, sociology, political philosophy, and of course food studies. I use cookbooks, guidebooks, newspapers, magazines, menus, interviews, and multiple editions of the Larousse Gastronomique to provide first and foremost the context but also the evidence for this dissertation. I concentrate the bulk of my critical energies on the food and leisure magazine Le Nouveau Guide (founded by food critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau) and the cookbook series entitled "Les Recettes Originales de...", paying particular attention to Nouvelle Cuisine foundational chefs Paul Bocuse and Michel Guérard.
The narrative of Nouvelle Cuisine is equivocal, but it does not defy conclusions. My final analysis in this dissertation is that in the production and articulation of Nouvelle Cuisine, we see how food and revolution are used to reorganize the hierarchies and composition of a society. We see a reorganization that restores bourgeois, patriarchal values and clings to a hexagonal interpretation of France that prioritizes resistance over incorporation. We see a revolution that is perhaps less the French Revolution than the July Revolution. We see a revolution that is an alibi for restoration.