Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item The Favor of Another: Labor and Precarity in Contemporary Fiction(2019) Macintosh, John A.; Ray, Sangeeta; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Favor of Another: Labor and Precarity in Contemporary Fiction examines how fiction since 1980 responds to changes to the composition of labor and of work itself. In particular, it is interested in the representation of service sector work in the novels of Stephanie Danler, Don DeLillo, Helen DeWitt, Mohsin Hamid, Jamaica Kincaid, Chang-rae Lee, Imbolo Mbue, Dinaw Mengestu, Bharati Mukherjee, Stewart O’Nan, and Merritt Tierce. The dissertation argues that these novelists develop aesthetic strategies to respond to issues including globalization, immaterial labor, entrepreneurial subjectivity, and financialization. Novels about domestic work register a push-pull dynamic of labor migration from the Global South and in doing so ascribe alternately too much or too little agency to domestic worker characters. The challenge of representing restaurant work leads to a strategy of formal and affective repetition to mimic the routine of interactive service. Novels critical of entrepreneurship either expose cliché as the underlying trope of innovation or reflect the failure of entrepreneurial discourse to account for workers at the bottom of the labor market. Although literary criticism about finance tends to insist on abstraction, reading financial novels for labor reveals the contradiction between that representation and reality. While the labor novel seems to have waned, the dissertation reconceives the genre by examining a range of formal responses to work in novels not often read together. Its analysis concludes that reading for labor not only reveals how fiction registers changes in political economy, but also revises our understanding of the contemporary novel more broadly. The novels studied also provide insight into interdisciplinary debates about social and economic precarity since the mid-1970s. Often defined in terms of degraded work and the retrenchment of the welfare state, theorists emphasize a neoliberal restructuring of the economy as the cause of precarity. The dissertation argues instead that precarity is inherent in capitalist economies and its reemergence is symptomatic of prolonged economic stagnation. Taking seriously the etymological overtones of precarious—the dependence on the favor of another—it argues that the end of precarity requires not nostalgia for a previous arrangement of labor, but a challenge to the wage system itself.Item Ukhu Mankakuna: Culinary Representations in Quechua Cultural Texts(2006-04-28) Krogel, Alison Marie; Harrison, Regina; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation explores culinary representations within colonial and contemporary Quechua texts selected from the genres of oral narrative, photography, painting, historical chronicle, song, poetry and the novel. The first chapter presents a cultural history of Andean foodstuffs, as well as an ethnographic narrative based on interviews with vendors and cooks in the Cuzco Central Market. The ensuing analysis reveals some of the conflicts and negotiations associated with the market's hierarchy of profits and prestige. Chapter two focuses on pre-colonial and colonial culinary representations as portrayed in various Incaic Quechua hymns, the Comentarios reales and religious canvases, while the third chapter explores contemporary representations of Quechua female cooks in Los ríos profundos, Asunta Quispe Huamán's Autobiografia and the photographs of Martín Chambi. Chapter four discusses the representation of the malevolent layqa wayk'uq ('witch cook') in a number of Quechua willakuy (oral narrations) which I recorded, transcribed and translated in highland villages of Southern Perú. In analyzing the nuances and levels of meaning contained within examples of Quechua expressive art, I offer semantic and syntactic readings of the texts while also considering the socio-economic, historical and political contexts in which they were created. I also explore the ways in which Quechua artists manipulate the representation of Andean foodstuffs and cooks as an oppositional tactic for evading and manipulating the repressive tendencies of powerful political, economic and social discourses. I argue that in these texts, the 'everyday practice' of cooking allows Quechua women to take an active role in shaping their society and the lives of their families and community. In addition to exploring some of the unique aspects of Quechua aesthetic expression in both colonial and contemporary texts, this dissertation concludes with a discussion of food politics and policies in contemporary Perú. Scholars studying food's role in society have long provided important insights in disciplines such as history, philosophy, anthropology, literature and sociology. By strategically crossing over these disciplinary boundaries in choosing theoretical and methodological tools, this dissertation creates a dialogue with the fields of Andean Studies, Latin American Studies, Native American Studies, Comparative Literature, Anthropology and Food Studies.