Browsing by Subject "Cultural studies"

Dreaming Woman decenters Europeanist histories of psychoanalysis by examining the ways in which forced migration has shaped psychoanalytic theories of sexual difference and evolving modes of feminist practice in Latin America. Home to more psychoanalysts per capita than any other country, Argentina emerged as a site of political asylum during WWII and of exilic dissemination during periods of military dictatorship. Taking Argentina as an exemplary case of psychoanalytic entrenchment that disrupts neat oppositions between Europe and its others, Dreaming Woman reframes the psychoanalytic archive on sexual difference as a discourse on migration. Tracing the coincident rise of psychoanalysis and authoritarianism in Argentina, I examine the role of migrant women, and of discourses on Woman, in establishing new relationships between psychoanalysis and politics.

Through a multimedia archive that includes literature, autobiography, pop culture artifacts, transnational correspondences, clinical case studies, theoretical essays, and artwork, Dreaming Woman approaches psychoanalysis as a heterogeneous set of clinical and cultural practices through which Argentines have articulated distinctive feminist and anti-imperialist projects throughout the twentieth century. These archival materials share a concern for female sexuality as a national problem—that is, a problem tied to national identity and a problem for the nation-state to solve. They also show the transformative impact of clinical encounters with female sexuality, maternal grief, and torture on modern theories of the subject. In view of contemporary anxieties surrounding global migration, the case of Argentina shows that psychoanalysis has always been a political practice forged through exile, one that offers an indispensable conceptual framework for addressing the persistent psychic traces of displacement.

What ideological dreams does music express? And how does it do so? In listening to three paradigmatic moments in American Jazz, this dissertation attempts to answer these two problems by illustrating how the modes of our production structure the range of our interpretive possibilities, and how music responds to and overcomes these dilemmas aesthetically.

Following World War II, the network emerged as both a major material structure and one of the most ubiquitous metaphors of the globalizing world. Over subsequent decades, scientists and social scientists increasingly applied the language of interconnection to such diverse collective forms as computer webs, terrorist networks, economic systems, and disease ecologies. The prehistory of network discourse can be traced back to descriptions of cellular formations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the invention of the electrical telegraph in the nineteenth century. Even so, it was not until the 1940s that researchers and writers began to rely on a more generalized network vocabulary to reflect fledgling material modes of interlinked organization and construct a new postwar vision of the world.

Since the 1970s, the field of network science has given rise to an even wider range of research on complexity, self-organization, sustainability, group interactions, and systemic resilience. Scientists such as Albert-Laszlo Barabasi have studied network design and new media critics such as Alexander Galloway have addressed network ontology. This dissertation contends that to grasp the effects of networks on globalization, we must also look at the fears, hopes, and affects that they generate. While network scientists have been less concerned with the cultural fears, political investments, and changes in human subjectivity signaled by networks, my study of American literature focuses on writers, filmmakers, and media innovators who have captured the deep transformations of the era of interconnection. These artists have achieved insights about networks not through scientific analysis, but through aesthetic, narrative, and media-specific experimentation.

Network Aesthetics examines how contemporary American literature, film, television, and new media dramatize the affects -- alternatively terrifying and thrilling -- of interconnection. This interdisciplinary project combines numerous methodologies, including literary analysis, media studies, cultural criticism, and political theory. Given the importance of networks to representation, communication, and computing, these structures serve as an ideal hinge for operating intermedia exchanges. Using varied tools, I analyze terrorist networks (Stephen Gaghan's Syriana), financial systems (Don DeLillo's Underworld), computer webs (Marge Piercy's He, She, and It), neoimperial networks (Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow), social networks (David Simon's The Wire), and interactive game networks (Persuasive Games' Killer Flu). In the end, I argue that obsessions with abstract network threats and solutions reveal a change in the most dramatic social protocols of our connected world. Understanding how networks have formally come to evoke fear can help us grow less susceptible to an American politics of terror and more able to act justly as we negotiate our interconnected world.

Virtuality—specifically the influence of the immaterial digital world—has been identified as an accomplice of twenty-first century media driven crises. From arguments that video games cause mass shootings to the emergence of “alt-facts” in the 2016 Presidential election, our encounters with digital media have prompted questions about what is real and, more importantly, how do we know it. Split Reality explores an extended history of virtuality to argue that these challenges are new versions of old anxieties. I approach the virtual as a realm of immaterial experience different from but deeply connected to the material world. While immaterial contexts inform our experiences of the world, they have often been considered sources of illusory, counterfeit, or otherwise lesser information. This perceived illegitimacy motivates the eradication of immaterial contexts from daily experience through assertions that the material world is the only source of viable information. These attempts do not account for the importance of representation, the imagination, or the virtual to the construction of meaning and, therefore, of reality. The second half of Split Reality focuses how twentieth century shifts towards embracing virtual worlds allowed thinkers to imagine alternative realities as critical tools to change how audiences understood and acted in the material world. These writers were able to imagine media forms that maximized the potential of virtual worlds as critical tools will minimizing their tendency toward delusion by accepting, rather than ignoring, the influence of the immaterial world as a legitimate source of reality. This acceptance is sorely needed to cope with digital culture, as I demonstrate in the emergence of “alt-facts” in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election as an example of what can happen when we are inattentive to the existence and influence of the virtual worlds around us.

Social 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.

This dissertation uses Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière’s transnational trajectory as a focal point for a study of the relationship between literature, marketing, power, and creative agency. It analyzes Laferrière’s literary career over the span of thirty years (1985-2018), his portrayal in the press and his work’s packaging and reception in the three places the author has been published in the original French language: Quebec, France, and Haiti. Located at the intersection of cultural studies, literary theory, and postcolonial studies, my study explores the ways in which global migration has changed literary production and consumption, and shaped ideas about nationalism. In this analysis, I argue that Laferrière contributed to reshaping national definitions of literature in all three spaces, and that his work’s marketing and reception have revealed political, social, and cultural changes as well as manifestations of identity politics in all three contexts. Through combined analysis of Laferrière’s novels, film adaptations, interviews in the press, book covers, as well as personal interviews that I conducted with his publishers, this study offers a holistic analysis of the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of literary production and circulation in the French-speaking world and contiguous languages like Haitian Creole. Drawing from Laferrière’s packaging in Quebec and France, the study sheds a new light on the way images of Haiti are constructed in the Western imaginary and how paratext mediates discourses about Caribbean writers. Through the study of the writer’s Haitian publication and Creole translation, my work also offers critical insights into the dynamic power of the Haitian book industry, which scholars have largely overlooked. Finally, by tracing the various factors that enabled Laferrière to emerge and paying particular attention to his recent election to the French Academy, this dissertation illuminates the mechanisms of literary consecration as well as his own creative “trickster” strategy to position himself in the global marketplace. Ultimately, I argue that Laferrière’s transnational trajectory offers a unique lens into the interconnected relationships between literature, markets, postcolonial authors, and nationalism.