ASE - Department of American Studies and Ethnicity

Follow the links below for more information on the USC College Department of American Studies and Ethnicity.

Graduate Students
Dissertation Abstracts
Graduate Handbook
Graduate Alumni

graduate students

Dissertation Abstracts for Current Graduate Students

For students who have graduated, please see the graduate placement page for further information.

Michelle Commander
Flights of the Imagination: Black American Travelers Journey toward Africa, Post-1965

Laura Fugikawa Domestic Containment: Japanese Americans, Native Americans and the Cultural Politics of Relocation
Fugikawa is currently working on her dissertation, Domestic Containment: Japanese Americans, Native Americans and the Cultural Politics of Relocation , which examines narratives of government-sponsored relocations in mid-twentieth century United States. Domestic Containment is an interdisciplinary comparative ethnic studies project that interrogates the stories told about government-encouraged migration within the nation. Fugikawa’s dissertation critically analyzes the storytelling done by the War Relocation Authority (WRA), a governmental agency created in 1943 to encourage and assist residents out of Japanese internment camps, and the Voluntary Relocation Program, an agency created in 1956, modeled after the WRA, in order to persuade Native Americans on and near reservations to move to distant cities. Domestic Containment incorporates a cultural studies analysis of creative works done by the next generation to extract how the experience of diaspora within a nation continues to matter in the histories, memories and stories told about relocation.

Jesus Hernandez Deviant Diasporas: Illegitimacy, Exile, and U.S. Cuban Cultural Politics
Deviant Diasporas: Illegitimacy, Exile, and U.S. Cuban Cultural Politics is an interdisciplinary study of the ways in which the experience and condition of U.S Cuban exile is structured by notions of abjection, disavowal, and failure through narratives of illegitimate familial relations. Because the nation is built upon the metaphor or model of the family, my project primarily asks: what forms of familial relations characterize those members that leave or are disavowed by the nation? Through an analysis of various cultural productions including literature, film, performance art, and law I interrogate the definition and limits of diaspora to productively engage the question of what happens when family members/ citizens abandon or are abandoned by the nation. This constitutive disavowal I argue not only structures particular diasporas as deviant, but also in turn marks and (re)produces the nation itself.

Nisha Kunte Narrative Incorporations: Negotiating Self, Other and Difference through the Organ Transplant
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.

Jeb Middlebrook
Challenging White Supremacy: Multiracial Alliance and Antiracist Organizing in the U.S. This comparative ethnic studies project is a cultural history of multiracial alliance and organizing against the white supremacist system in the U.S. The project examines five historical events from 1966-2008 as cultural texts to understand attempts at alliance between people-of-color grassroots member organizations and white grassroots member organizations to recruit, politicize, and mobilize their respective constituencies for coordinated antiracist action. This interdisciplinary study considers literature, art, film, interviews, and manifestos from participants in various multiracial alliances as part of its historical and cultural archive. Methodologically, the project employs historical, literary, visual, and ethnographic analysis to think uniquely about the role of relationship-building, grassroots member organizations, and community organizing in work against racism. At a time when organizing across race succeeded in electing the first black president of the United States, but fails to resolve continuing racial inequalities, this project offers an analysis of the possibilities and limitations of multiracial alliances for shifting collective consciousness and power in regards to race.

Lata Murti With and Without the White Coat: The Racial Formation of First and Second-Generation Indian Immigrant Doctors in Southern California
My dissertation is the first major study of how the occupational status of non-white immigrant professionals shapes their racial experience in the U.S. These professionals are what I call occupational citizens –socially accepted and even desired when their prestigious professional status is clearly displayed and marks them as the highest authority in a given situation. Otherwise, they are subject to racist treatment from their colleagues, staff, institutions of employment, and the general public. As occupational citizens living and working in the racially diverse region of Southern California, the 52 first and second-generation Indian immigrant doctors I interviewed find that they have full occupational citizenship only during their clinical interactions with patients. The particular forms of prejudice and discrimination they face, as well as how they interpret these instances of prejudice and discrimination in racial terms, have as much to do with their gender, their immigrant generation, and their perception of others’ race and class, as with their own professional class status.

Margaret Salazar
Representational Conquest: Tourism, Display, and Public Memory in “America’s Finest City” examines the centrality of representation in the formation of Southern California during the twentieth century. Popularly defined, conquest refers to the defeat, mastery or subjugation of peoples and territory through war, violence, and military force. While multiple historians signal the end of U.S. conquest with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, I argue that conquest has not ended—it has merely changed shape. Twentieth century tourism in San Diego features conquest of a different form. This dissertation develops an alternative way of understanding conquest that considers the terror of psychic and physical violence, and charts how material symbols and visual images in San Diego’s tourist economy operate as ongoing, continual processes of what I term representational conquest. These discursive formations continue and are mutually constitutive of earlier projects of domination and control—e.g., military invasion and the mission system. My research questions are: What is the relationship between tourism and conquest in Southern California? How do processes of conquest change over time? How do these processes influence the racial/political landscape of Southern California and the global city in the twentieth century? I approach these crucial inquiries by focusing on one geopolitical area where conquest is arguably most concentrated: the bordered space between nations. Specifically, San Diego, California serves as my case study. Self proclaimed as “America’s Finest City,” it achieved global economic prominence through its large military complex, free trade manufacturing, and international tourism industries. As a global city, San Diego provides compelling examples of military, territorial, racial, and discursive conflicts—often mediated through its tourist representations. The U.S.-Mexico border region features a plethora of representations that function as conquest. I have chosen four different examples that provide productive lenses through which to understand perspectives of representational conquest—namely: “living history interpreters” at Old Town State Historic Park who establish public memory and a certain version of San Diego’s past; post cards produced for the California Pacific International Expositions (in 1915 and 1935) through which images of the city were presented to a global audience; giant pandas at the San Diego Zoo where East meets West by way of internationally sanctioned biopower; and architecture in the city’s Balboa Park, Shelter Island, and Gaslamp District, here physical structures do the work of conquest. My methodological approach combines archival research, discourse analysis, and participant observation to reveal how these tourist sites and sights produce national and regional identities based on narratives of conquest as well as representations of whiteness cast in contrast to the ethno-racial exoticism of Latinos and Asians in the region.

Anton Smith Stepping Out on Faith: Representing Spirituality in African American Literature from the late Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement
This dissertation examines how black writers use the physical landscape in their narratives to represent spirituality in African American communities. This project will investigate how the representation of certain spaces, from the nightclub and the street corner to the porch and the courtroom, prepare black characters for ecstatic experiences. Consequently, part of this study looks at black spirituality as a set of disappearances and reappearances that reflects the discipline and comportment of the black body. Charles H. Long, Anthony B. Pinn, and James H. Evans are among the scholars who have analyzed the representation of ritualized behavior and performances that capture what African American culture considers spiritual. Moreover, this study will also discuss the ways in which a blues aesthetic work with space to facilitate the transmission of spirituality in fictional African American communities. The scope of this project also considers the relationship between black spirituality, ecstasy and testifying. Drawing upon Henri Lefevre’s notion of space as “produced and modified over time and through its use,” this dissertation will look at how certain landscapes work on the black body to produce ecstatic representations of spirituality in black fictional communities. This dissertation explores the social implications of the presence of spirituality in African American communities in the writings of such authors as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. Drawing on the linguistic theories of female development by Geneva Smitherman and Marcylena Morgan, as well as the Black Feminist discourse of Patricia Hill Collins as a framework to interpret Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, part of this study explores how black women use spaces such as the porch and the courtroom to create new spiritual constructs and alternative understandings of community through storytelling. With Ellison’s Invisible Man, I carve out a place for a spiritual approach to understanding the power of representation in black literature by examining the role of sermonic rhetoric in the Battle Royal scene and the eviction of the old couple. Lastly, I consider the street, the altar, and the storefront church in Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain as spaces where spirituality is affirmed and contested.