The politics of nostalgia, exploiting fears of multi-culturalism and immigration, has come to dominate populist rhetoric of the last 15 years, both in the United States and abroad. The rise of restorative nostalgia is even found in societies that present as culturally diverse and progressive. To understand how such a politics of emotion gains traction, especially in diverse societies, it is important to unpack how people come to understand themselves as natural national subjects. Switzerland provides an excellent case study both in its long history of constitutional nationalism and its multi-cultural nation-state structure. Studies on nationalism rarely account for how people personalize national identity, but this dissertation explores ways that familiar objects of everyday life convey collective sentiments of nationalism and national belonging, and how interactions of individuals with these objects reinforce personal and collective attachment to the modern nation-state.

The dissertation is about power and the landscape that power produces. It explicates a paradox of modernity, which is this: how one of the most vulnerable places to sea-level rise organizes its economy and culture around extractive thinking and the production of fossil fuels. To do that, it tracks how power produces its own conditions of possibility through crises and responses to such crises that guarantee future action. The dissertation likewise interrogates structures of discourse, science, and common sense. It analyzes and problematizes the state of Louisiana’s historic responses to various environmental crises of flooding, storms, and, starting in the late 20th century, its disappearing coastal wetlands. It frames the state’s efforts to restore its coast as part of a complex but ongoing continuum that began three centuries ago with the 1718 colonial settlement of New Orleans and recently made visible by Hurricane Katrina. I argue that the state’s political economy organizes itself as the solution to the environmental crisis of its own making. The dissertation relies on mixed methods of archival research, interviews and discourse analysis from a variety of texts, policy position papers, historic newspaper articles, scientific studies, and transcripts of public meetings and court cases. It gestures to traditional and emerging critical fields in the Humanities and Social Sciences such as political geography and political ecology, cultural studies, environmental humanities, science studies, and cultural history. The dissertation is conceptionally grounded and organized around a material component of Mississippi Delta Mud. Through mud, it explicates a cultural and environmental history of New Orleans and Lower Mississippi River Delta region. This is a story of both the natural environment and the social conditions and histories entangled within it. Far from being a passive object that has meandered through the backdrop of national identity and struggle, the Mississippi River and its mud functions as agents in the production of difference – racial and ethnic, colonizer and colonized. This dissertation attends to stories as they have been told and uses these moments to provoke a discussion of the way in which natural history becomes a venue for violence.

Situated within the interrelated fields of critical race theory and ethnic studies and the emergent field of creative writing studies, this dissertation interrogates the ways in which racist state violence is researched, historicized, and reimagined. Specifically, I focus on U.S. v. Narciso and Perez (1977), a court case in which two Filipina migrant nurses, Filipina Narciso and my mother, Leonora Perez, were criminalized and framed by the FBI for poisoning and murdering patients at the Ann Arbor VA Hospital in Michigan. Focusing on this case, I pursue two critical impulses: I blend narrative interventions in critical race theory with contemporary practices in documentary poetics in order to conceptualize, propose, and perform what I call critical race poetics; and, in turn, I perform critical race poetics as an alternative mode for understanding U.S. v. Narciso and Perez in particular and theorizing racist state violence in general. Guided by my mother's insight that "there is no American justice," I begin with an analysis of historical productions about U.S. v. Narciso and Perez, my own previous body of work included. Then, I perform critical race poetics—in the form of a poem cycle—as a way of rearticulating the cultural and historical significances of U.S. v. Narciso and Perez. I argue that critical race poetics is a generative methodology through which archives of racist state violence are critically reassembled, reprocessed, and reanimated. And ultimately, through critical race poetics, I carry out my mother's theoretical insight that for her, for Filipina Narciso, and for other targets of racist state violence, American justice remains elusive, if not impossible.

In this dissertation, I put disability studies scholarship in conversation with black studies scholarship to read for the ways that medicine, law, and popular culture grapple with, create, and contest the boundaries of an acceptable range of white difference and diversity of embodiment and ability, and for the ways this negotiation takes place against an always already present “contempt for the categorized difference of the Other,” particularly the black Other. I situate this inquiry within several key debates in disability studies, most notably the debate between the “medical” and “social” models of disability, as well as what I will call the “discursive” extension of the social model of disability. To this end, this dissertation examines a set of laws, films, and historical documents through the combined frameworks of black studies, disability studies, and film and media studies to ask how racial ideologies and practices have constructed disability as a social and medical category in law, scientific inquiry, and cultural production since the mid-twentieth century. My methodology is insistently interdisciplinary, including archival research, legal analysis, the collection of original social science data from public databases, and film and literary analysis. I have organized the main chapters of this dissertation to explore four key developments over the last half century that address my central questions: post- World War II rehabilitation efforts and their relationship to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study; the War on Drugs of the 1980s and its relationship to the “special needs” category in adoption law; contestation over the “companionship services” exemption to the Federal Labor Standards Act; and the contemporary Transhumanist movement. Disability studies raises important questions about inclusion, access, representation, embodiment, space, and reproduction. By incorporating black studies and critical race scholarship, I analyze the way extant racial categories shape most profoundly: 1) what conditions qualify as a recognized disability, 2) who counts as a legible and legitimate disabled subject, and 3) how legal and labor practices govern and respond to disability so defined.

This dissertation analyzes the intersections of US incarceration and medical science during the post-war period, examining how interlocking carceral and medical regimes of controlling the body together form a race-making technology and racialized geography reconfiguring the nation's history of captivity from slavery to mass imprisonment, and how they may signal the possibility of a bioethics in line with prison abolition. The dissertation focuses on the notorious dermatological experiments conducted between 1952 and 1974 at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia. Led by University of Pennsylvania doctor and professor Albert Kligman, experiments at Holmesburg were carried out in the service of U.S. war efforts, pharmaceutical ventures, and the field of dermatological practice more broadly, composing one of the largest prison experimental programs of its time. Revisiting Kligman's medical experiments at Holmesburg Prison, this dissertation takes up "skin" in three principal ways: (1) skin as an instrument or apparatus interfacing with test agents and mediating their effects, forming a screen through which the visualization of pain becomes inextricable from the construction of racial difference; (2) skin as the discourse or textual membrane of bioethics, forming a protective envelope of words and statements shaping its imagined subject of vulnerability and abuse; and finally, (3) skin as the space or surface of architecture, where intersecting geographies of the prison and the laboratory reveal how complex relations of power/knowledge are encoded in the built environment. The project brings to bear theories and methods from visual culture studies, science and technology studies (STS), and African American studies in its engagements with the visual and literary culture of racialized captivity, with the deep intertwining of bioethical discourse and mass media, and with the range of difficult materials found between university archives and the hard site of the prison.