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Item TRANS WORLDING WITHIN: DECOLONIAL EXAMINATIONS OF TRANS OF COLOR INTERIORITY(2021) Aftab, Aqdas; Avilez, GerShun; Lothian, Alexis; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation argues for the importance of reading for interiority in trans of color cultural productions. With so many representations of racialized trans people foregrounding the violated body, the cultural imaginary around trans of color life is saturated with notions of corporeality. In this context, I develop a transworld hermeneutic that refuses an emphasis on the racialized and colonized trans body, which is fetishized by the medical industrial complex and by cultural productions, and instead, turns towards the interior. Examining Black and Dalit diasporic texts, from postcolonial classics such as Nuruddin Farah’s Maps to contemporary novels like Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater to Mimi Mondal’s speculative short stories, I argue that while the corporeal is surveilled by the cis colonial gaze, the interior shows glimpses of world-making practices that are protected from the pornotropic violence of spectacle. While Western epistemologies define trans identity through the lens of Enlightenment-based models of science that focus on the sexed body’s transitions, my emphasis on interiority reconceptualizes trans of color life as intuitive, ecstatic, speculative and spiritual. Using the affective interior as a central framework, my transworld reading strategy offers a departure from essentialist as well as performative understandings of gender: informed by the theories of the spirit, the interior strives to remain opaque to the external gaze, hence guarded from performative effects. Overall, my research reveals how Black and Dalit exclusions from the colonial Human create the possibility of trans becoming; in other words, colonial and racist violence forcibly constructs transness, an experience that is utilized strategically by Black and Dalit writers as a decolonial tool for challenging, dismantling, and rewriting scripts of humanness.Item TRANSNATIONAL JAZZ AND BLUES: AURAL AESTHETICS AND AFRICAN DIASPORIC FICTION(2010) Hartley, Daniel LeClair; Washington, Mary Helen; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the influence of jazz and blues on African Diasporic fiction. While the influences of jazz and blues on African American cultural production have received critical attention for many decades, I contend that literary criticism neglects to recognize that jazz and blues are more than just national forms. They are international forms that have influenced a diverse group of writers and their novels. My work fills gaps in current scholarship by examining well-known and lesser-known novels that depict jazz and blues both within and without American contexts. This international approach is crucial to any examination of jazz, blues, and fiction because it expands our understanding of how authors aim to represent the experiences of African Diasporic people throughout the world. Building on the work in African American literary criticism and jazz studies, this dissertation examines the varying elements of jazz and blues -- what I refer to as "aural aesthetics" -- that writers incorporate into fiction in order to understand the continued influence of music on African Diasporic fiction. In Chapter One, I contend that Langston Hughes uses the blues as a form of protest in his first published novel Not Without Laughter (1930) to advance critiques of racism and African American involvement in World War I. In Chapter Two, I argue that Ann Petry fills her first novel The Street (1946) with a blues aesthetic that not only undergirds her representations of protest but also responds to the call for the use of vernacular forms in literature. In Chapter Three, I argue that Jackie Kay in Trumpet (1999) and Paule Marshall in The Fisher King (2000) represent the jazz-inflected solo as a means through which their characters build individual identities that challenge notions of an undifferentiated, monolithic African Diaspora. In Chapter Four, I contend that John A. Williams in Clifford's Blues (1999) and Xam Wilson Cartiér in Muse-Echo Blues (1991) present protagonists as composers that use jazz and blues as methods to assert individual African Diasporic identities and to express communal histories that are not present elsewhere in literature. By providing a critical framework for understanding the influence of jazz and blues in African Diasporic fiction, this project responds directly to criticism that limits the study of jazz and blues to American texts and contexts, calls for a reconsideration of those nationalistic tendencies, and argues for the critical engagement of jazz and blues as forms international in scope.