English Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2766
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Item Immigrant Self-representation: Chinese American Immigrant Writers Ha Jin and Yiyun Li in the International Context(2018) Liu, Shuang; Wang, Edlie; Chu, Patricia; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this thesis, I talk about how first-generation Chinese immigrant writers contribute to Chinese American literature through their unique representations of immigrant life. Due to language barriers and other historical reasons, a majority of representations of immigrant life in Chinese American literature have been written by the descendants of immigrants, second-generation writers. Now, there are more Chinese immigrant writers who write immigrant stories in America. To some extent, immigrant writers’ representation of immigrant life is a “self-representation,” since they are writing their own stories. By comparing immigrant writers’ works to those from second-generation writers, I argue that Ha Jin and Yiyun Li are immigrant writers who have contributed to Chinese American literature in three aspects: genre, theme, and language.Item From Karbala to Qādesiyyeh: the Spectacle of Arab “Other” in Persianate and Parsi Literary Traditions(2017) Jamshidi, Abbas; Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad; Richardson, Brian; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In early decades of the twentieth century, a distinct anti-Arab discourse emerged in modern Persianate literature. A complex process of identification and disidentification of self and “otherness” came to cast them as the “other” of the Persianate people who are represented as occupying a higher standing on an imaginary evolutionary scheme. While this view faced strong competing discourses in the 1960s and 1970, prior to the 1979 Islamic revolution, it did not fade completely. The present dissertation argues that the emergence of antiquarianism in Iran and its neighboring cultures in the nineteenth century, and a growing Shi’i conceptualization of “otherness,” underlined the discourse that recast the Arabs as destroyers of Iran’s antiquities. As the title of this project indicates, two traumatic moments define the range of materials examined here. “From Karbala to Qādesiyyeh” tries to demonstrate how the mutable image of the “other” in some Persianate literary environments historically has gone through certain changes where religious conceptualizations of self and “other” were displaced by ethnic ones. Examples of early Shiʿi poetry and performative practices like taʿziyeh performances and cursing rituals are sites where in Chapter One I examine the identity of this religious “other” as it ambivalently consisted of Omayyad Arabs, Ottoman Turks and Uzbeks. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, this ambivalence was reduced in favor of an ethnic “other” who was resolved to destroy not Iran’s Shiʿi faith but the Persian “nation.” This was when the emergent ideology of modern Persian nationalism replaced Shiʿi-Sunni paradigms of self and “otherness” with tropes and discourses derived from colonial sciences of archaeology and anthropology. As a result, the newly conceptualized Arab “other” no longer came from the battle of Karbala (680 CE) which is a foundational moment for the Shiʿi faith; instead, he came from the battle of Qādesiyyeh (636 CE) which marked the downfall of the Sasanian Empire and the advent of Islam in Iran. The career of renowned modern writer, Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951), tends to epitomize this epistemological shift. As a preamble to my study of Hedayat, in Chapter Two, I briefly investigate the emergence of antiquarianism in nineteenth-century Iran in the works of revolutionary poet, Mirzādeh ʿEshqi (1894-1924). I argue that ʿEshqi’s romantic reception of Iran’s antiquities, especially the Ctesiphon ruins where the remains of the Sasanian past could be seen, was a watershed moment for the formation of an antiquarian discourse in modern Persian literature. This was when ʿEshqi transplanted “footsteps of a barefooted Arab” at the Ctesiphon ruins in an effort to restore the latter’s agency as the purported destroyer of Iran’s pre-Islamic glories. As I argue in Chapter Three, Hedayat transformed ʿEshqi’s imaginary encounter with the Arab “other” into a political theatre where presumptions about the inferiority of Arab material culture, especially their uncouth appearance and humble source of subsistence, function as the armature of the evolutionary discourse he directs at them. Hedayat’s appropriation of the findings of European sciences of archaeology and anthropology –popular among elite circles in Iran in 1920s and 1930s – tends to frame his representations of Arabs as some “primitive” people attacking a superior Persian civilization. The racial anthropological underpinnings of his writings reached an unprecedented level when in one of his satirical works, he paraded the Arabs in a human zoo (ethnological exhibition) in Berlin supposedly to expose their “barbarous” deeds and creeds. By submitting the Arabs to the category of “savages,” Hedayat mobilized the pernicious tropes and discourses of certain colonial exhibitions where Africans and “Orientals” were put on display in Europe as signifiers of alterity. In Chapter Four, I argue that certain colonial elites in the Indo-Persian community of India, known as the Parsis, played a vital role in fostering the absorption of colonial sciences of archaeology and anthropology in the elite discourses of history and literature in nineteenth-century Iran. Examining the writings of Manekji Limji Hataria (1813–1890), the well-known emissary who was sent from Mumbai to Iran to improve the lives of its Zoroastrian community, can shed light on how the image of Arabs as “uncivilized” destroyers of Iran’s ancient glories was discursively manufactured by projecting onto them the very practices Hataria observed among contemporary Persians when it came to failing to protect their country’s ancient heritage. The Parsi texts examined here capture a vibrant interplay between age-old Persian concepts, and tropes and discourses they borrowed from European colonial literature. Exploring the intertextual continuities we find between the two traditions can offer fascinating comparative insight into the polyphony of voices that animates the Persianate literature in its trans-regional reach.Item REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MILITARY IN 20TH CENTURY ETHNIC AMERICAN LITERATURE(2017) Fontenot, Kara Parks; Nunes, Zita C; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In 20th century ethnic American literature, writers deploy representations of the US military to expose the operations of American hegemony, articulate relations of power, reveal how they are maintained, identify contradictions in the rhetoric of American nationalism and imagine not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic, and national lines. As a national institution controlled by the US government and consuming labor in the form of military service from citizens of all classes, races and ethnicities in ways that reflect existing relations of power in American society at large, the US military presents a unique and powerful site for articulation of relationships between nation, race, and class. As evidence, this dissertation explores six American novels, all published in the 20th century and taking as their subject matter US military involvement in declared and undeclared military conflicts of that era. Close readings of these novels bring our attention to three specific examples of political projects for which representations of the US military in literature have been deployed: to question constructions of American nationalism by highlighting contradictions and inconsistencies, to consider the military’s institutionalized labor practices in order to explore relationships between race and class as well as imagine means of struggling for social justice, and to critique US foreign policy and military operations overseas. These writers individually and collectively refuse to examine race and/or ethnicity in isolation but instead consider these aspects of subjectivity in the context of national identity, class relations, immigration, globalization, and other social forces. While the relationship between ethnicity and military service has been addressed in other disciplines, such as history, political science, and social science, I argue that literature is a medium especially well-suited for this exploration as it not only allows for the articulation of existing social relations but also for the imagination of not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic, and national lines.Item The U.S. Latina Boom: The Formation of a Feminist Literary Movement, 1984-2000(2017) Morillo, Kara Ann; Ontiveros, Randy J; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The time period that spanned the late 1980s through the early 1990s saw an increase in production of U.S. Latina literature by women. Their production was so prolific it generated a Boom—a renaissance of Latina writing into the marketplace. This dissertation revisits what we may think of as a watershed moment in literary history and popular culture. I examine the impact of the Latina Boom on American literature writ large and on the U.S. publishing industry. Reading against arguments about the mere mainstreaming of ethnic voices, I contend that Latina Boom writers strategically used their respective positions to initiate progressive cultural change within and by way of the literary mainstream. Further, I argue that the Boom spans a wider timeframe than usually acknowledged, extending from 1984 to 2000. What’s more, this extended Boom represents an ongoing a composite of multiple literary, social, and cultural movements that exceeds the bounds of the Boom as an ongoing process of revision, inspiration, and change. When viewed as a collective, intentional effort within the mainstream rather than as individual accomplishment before the masses, the Latina Boom can be better appreciated by scholars and readers for its impact on American publishing and literature. I argue that writers Sandra Cisneros, Cristina García, Julia Alvarez, and Ana Castillo utilized the publishing market’s interest in them to make visible and marketable a feminist literary movement. The biggest outcome of the Boom has been the expansion of the American canon and mainstream marketplace to include more diverse voices in American literature, most notably by a younger generation of writers who found their inspiration in their groundbreaking predecessors. I conclude with a discussion on the Latina Boom’s beneficiaries, which includes authors Cristina Henriquez, Jennine Capó Crucet, Patricia Engel, and Kirsten Valdez Quade.Item Inappropriate(d) Literatures of the United States: Hegemonic Propriety and Postracial Racialization(2014) Dykema, Amanda; Chuh, Kandice; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The rise of multiculturalism and its impact on the U.S. academy reached its peak at the end of the twentieth century. Since then the rhetoric of liberal multiculturalism that valorized diversity has largely given way to a neoliberal multiculturalism that celebrates postracialism as a means to dismantle the institutional programs and critical discourses that took racial difference as their starting point. Yet the racially inflected demarcations between positions of privilege and positions of stigma that have historically characterized the U.S. nation-state remain intact. In this context, how do we read race in contemporary literature by U.S. ethnic writers when celebrations of colorblindness dominate public discourse? As a repository for what Foucault has called subjugated knowledges, minoritized literatures hold the potential to de-naturalize the neoliberal status quo, critique the academic discourse that surrounds it, and engage with the political economy within which it is produced. This project argues that the institutional work of disciplining minority subjects--once openly performed by racialization in a way no longer possible under neoliberal multiculturalism--has been continued in part by political, social, and economic forces I group under the umbrella term propriety. I expose how the designation "appropriate" becomes a prerequisite for political recognition and representation, analyzing representative political texts that are fundamental to contemporary definitions of minority subjects alongside national and literary-critical genealogies of discourses of difference. I argue that attachments to values and forms explicitly identified as "appropriate" conceal and maintain race-based hierarchies characteristic of U.S. national identity formation. In response, I theorize inappropriateness as a category of political and literary representation for exploring questions of visibility and enfranchisement central to the national narrative of the United States. Inappropriateness is a political and aesthetic movement that deploys subjects and forms often denounced as improper to the contemporary era. Inappropriate aesthetic works are those which attempt to distinguish difference from "diversity," influence minority subject formation, and shape knowledge production in ways that are counter to the objectives of neoliberal multiculturalism. Four chapters establish a taxonomy of the ways inappropriateness operates: formally, corporeally, nationally, and historically.