ASE - Department of American Studies and Ethnicity

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Dissertation Abstracts

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.

Emily Hobson Imagining Alliance: Queer Anti-Imperialism & Race in California, 1966-1989
My dissertation analyzes the meanings of anti-imperialist politics for queer activism in California from 1966 to 1989. I examine how lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender radicals adapted anti-imperialist thought to transform the meanings of sexual difference, construct activist campaigns and coalitions, and build queer community. I historicize my study between the founding of the Black Panther Party (1966) and the defeat of the Nicaraguan Revolution at the close of the Cold War (1989). Through these unexpected markers, I reveal the importance of racial militancy, internationalism, and national liberation for U.S. sexual politics in the late Cold War. Queer radicals drew concepts from multiple sources, particularly the Third World Left, women of color feminism, and socialist feminism; through anti-imperialism they constructed a politics of alliance and a discourse of lesbian and gay space. Yet queer anti-imperialism held contradictions and challenges. Alliance became expressed, in significant part, through solidarity with national liberation projects many of which rejected LGBT identities. Meanwhile, queer space carried implicit ties to the privileges of the U.S. nation and whiteness. I examine activists’ responses to these problems, and I locate the central role of lesbian feminists of color in critiquing both gay and straight nationalisms and sustaining anti-imperialist commitment.

Nicole Hodges Sampling Blackness: Peforming African Americaness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance
“Sampling Blackness: Performing African Americanness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance” uses a comparative approach to ethnic studies to examine how the global circulation of African American articulations of blackness in Hip-hop music impacts the performance practice of non-African American artists. This dissertation imagines sampling as an improvisational process of meaning making that has the capacity to challenge dominant narratives about racial difference as it creates new possibilities to envision bodies and the cultural products they engender as public texts available for appropriation and re-articulation. This dissertation contains five chapters which address notions of embodied transnational subjectivity and are all situated in relation to critical debates on the viability of notions of authenticity, essentialism, cultural particularism and the capacity of performance to circulate new imaginings of subjectivity. Chapter One, Sampling Blackness, presents my theorization of sampling as a process of cross-racial, ethnic and cultural performance. Chapter Two, entitled Actin’ and Talkin’ Black: White Bodies Re-articulating Blackness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance uses the work of Hip-hop Theater artist Danny Hoch as an entrée to explore the sampling of black vernacular, hip-hop narratives and stereotypes by white performers inspired by Hip-hop. Chapter Three, Re-Performing African American Female Identities in Hip-hop explores the photographed performances of artist Nikki S. Lee’s ‘Hip-hop Project’ and her employment of African American female stereotypes, fashions and rituals of self-adornment. Chapter Four, Re-Membering Hip-hop: Dancing the African Diaspora explores African American dance moves in Hip-hop as quotable gestures sampled by Black British choreographer Jonzi D. Chapter Five, Re-Imagining Hip-hop Theater and Performance, gestures towards new types of performance and art inspired by Hip-hop and engages the performances of Israeli violinist Miri Ben Ari and African American violinists Kev Marcus and Wil-B of Black Violin who by playing Hip-hop music using classical instruments, "blacken" the normatively white classical music genre. I explore how these performances suggest the impact of African American cultural production on the “blackening” of global popular culture.

Imani Johnson Dark Matter in B-Boying Cyphers: Hip Hop Dance Circles as a Model of Cross-Racial Collaboration
“Dark Matter in B-Boying Cyphers: Hip Hop Dance Circles as a Model of Cross-Racial Collaboration” is a multi-sited, inter-disciplinary project analyzes a ubiquitous practice within “breakdancing” (called breaking or b-boying) culture known as cyphering—improvisational and competitive dancing in circle formation to music. Cyphering, as a transformative space, is a performative framework for the examination of cross-racial cultural belonging through b-boying and the symbolics of the culture. The methodological focus combines interviews with over fifty dancers and research sites in a dozen cities including Los Angeles, Boston, New York, London, and Braunschweig from 2005 to 2008. This project demonstrates how American Studies can employ anthropological methods to expand the discourse on race, blackness, and transnational identifications enabled by performance practices. This project’s analysis centers on the force that momentarily holds dance circles together. Described by interviewees as an “energy exchange,” it is generated by a dynamic between dancers and surrounding spectator-dancers that produce a tangible and even material force. Dark matter (a Physics concept describing the non-luminous matter that holds galaxies together) is an apt metaphor for the non-empirical materiality that sustains cyphers at multiple scales—e.g. the dancers in immediate circles, shared practices in the African diaspora, and b-boying identifications worldwide. Because breaking is entrenched in matrices of racial and gender politics dancers seek to both navigate and transcend through dance, cyphers are extended as models for cross-racial and transnational connection, using dark matter to describe blackness as both unmarked and influential in performances of b-boying identification. Thus cyphers are a model for the political potentiality of contingent cross-racial and transnational cultural co-productions within and beyond the African diaspora. The project also examines the South Bronx roots to breaking and the marks this history has left on the culture and the moves. It features profiles of three breakers and ends with close analyses of three distinct circles to enrich the theoretical scope of the model of cyphering. From this study emerges a new model to theorize transnational social interaction through dance. This dissertation distinctively centers street dance, adding a vital and often overlooked form of meaning making and community building to studies of performance, Africana cultural production, and Hip Hop.

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 Radical Whiteness: Antiracist Organizing and the Transformation of White Identity
Radical Whiteness: Antiracist Organizing and the Transformation of White Identity examines the grassroots organization, the Alliance of White Antiracists Everywhere – Los Angeles (AWARE-LA), in an ethnographic and historical study of white people transforming what it means to be white by organizing against individual and institutional racism. Following cues from the work of AWARE-LA, the project explores the limits and possibilities of redefining whiteness as radically anti-racist and of transforming white people's fundamental relationship to race. The primary methods for this investigation include participant observation and ethnographic interviews from AWARE-LA participants; as well as historical analysis of white anti-racist organizations including the Weather Underground, the Young Patriots, the White Panthers, and Anti-Racist Action. The aim of the project is to investigate the implications of white anti-racist organizing for studies of racial identity, radical community, and multiracial movements to end white supremacy. The project contributes to the disciplines of Ethnic Studies, Social Movement History, and Cultural Anthropology, and provides insight into what white people can become when they organize for racial justice.

Lata Murti With and Without the White Coat: The Racial Formation of First and Second-Generation Indian Immigrant Doctors in Southern California
Based on fifty two interviews, my dissertation is the first major study of how the specific occupational status of a South Asian immigrant group shapes the group’s ethnic-racial identity. This group is first and second-generation Indian immigrant doctors in Southern California. As non-white immigrant professionals living and working among diverse populations, these doctors find that their occupational status and class privilege provide only partial, situational protection from racism. The first three chapters, or Part I, of my dissertation shows that outside of their clinical interactions with patients, who respect them as culturally endowed healers, Indian immigrant doctors in Southern California are subject to racist treatment from colleagues, staff, health care institutions, and the general public. In Part II, or the last three chapters, I explain that 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 immigrant generation, their gender, and their experiences outside of the U.S., as with their professional class status. My dissertation, therefore, complicates the implicit claims of several Asian Americanists (such as Koshy, 2001) that professional Asian immigrants’ class status and occupations in the sciences tend to shield them from racist harm and preclude their engagement in racial politics.

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.

Camnhung Vu Vietnam Affects: Postwar Narratives in Transit
Cam Vu's dissertation examines Vietnamese cultural production in the postwar period. Using a comparative analysis, the dissertation examines U.S. diasporic cultural forms alongside a consideration of Vietnamese national artistic and cultural efforts. The appeal to affect in these mediums is considered central to an analysis of the dynamic and enduring legacies of colonialism and war. Utilizing film, literature, and performance studies this project seeks to examine how the arts have provided a language that at once conditions and expresses what official discourse cannot about what it means to be modern and global subjects of the colonial and imperial past.

Karen Yonemoto Sacred Changes: Multiracial Alliances and Community Transformation among Evangelical Churches in the U.S.
At the turn of the 21st century, a growing number of multiracial religious institutions have been emerging across the United States. (DeYoung, Emerson, Yancey and Kim, 2003; Emerson, 2000 and 2006; Garces-Foley, 2006; Marti, 2005). While studies have addressed bi-racial churches and church mergers among black and white congregations, my project, "Sacred Changes: Multiracial Alliances and Community Transformation among Evangelical Churches in the U.S." analyses the process of multiracial transformation and brings an often overlooked community, Asian American evangelicals, into the center of intellectual analysis. I investigate the ways in which race and religion work together to bring about social change in urban areas asking: Why are Asian American churches becoming multiracial? How does this racial identity inform the social politics of the church and the ways in which they engage in American civic life? And how do intersections of race, religion and politics inform social change in local and global spaces? The project is based on ethnographic research of multiracial Asian American churches in five major metorpolitan cities: Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Seattle.