“Settler Dreams and Affective Warfare: The Communications Campaign that Formatted the United States of America” proposes a methodology of analysis which considers consideration of culture products as intentional war messaging, or what is commonly referred to in military circles, as psychological operations (PSYOPS). By conducting a close reading of Indigenous representation, and the rhetoric that surrounded its production in the films, mascots, and comic books of the 20th century, this dissertation argues that the purpose of what we think of as Indian tropes was to further a wartime message of national identity creation and further that culture products are the best strategic weapon available to minoritarian subjects in the present for altering national identity formation.

Inspired by my family’s history as Polish survivors of Soviet deportations during World War II, this dissertation investigates the multifaceted role of performance in transmitting and preserving memory across various affective mediums such as theatre, graphic novels, comics, museums, and memorial spaces. By examining how the burden of remembrance passes through intergenerational performances of memory at personal and communal levels, this research contributes to the interdisciplinary nature of performance studies and its intersection with applied theatre, critical museum studies, and memory studies—using an autoethnographic lens to explore specific frameworks of memory, including collective, prosthetic, postmemory, and what I am describing as (post)postmemory. This dissertation engages with the under-theorized diaspora, commonly referred to as ‘Sybiracy,’ whose exile to Siberia had been publicly unacknowledged until the fall of communism and still generally remains unknown. As a departure point for inquiry, this emphasis offers a broader reflection on how intergenerational performances of remembrance can be employed in the face of national and generational erasure. For the Sybiracy, familial and communal acts of remembrance remained a way to ensure their survival in forced labor camps was not forgotten. My research surveys familial performances of memory, how it impacts generations over time, and how it models a shift from the personal to the public sphere, providing insight into how descendants of historical trauma reckon with the future embodied archive, offering a profound insight into how audiences interact with past events through modes of performance. The dissertation explores in detail the newly opened Muzeum Pamięci Sybiru (Sybir Memorial Museum) in Białystok, Poland, and its potential as a surrogate site of historical memory and remembrance for a diasporic community that, until now, lacked a specific place of memory. The research includes a discussion of the role objects and recovered personal belongings play in the performativity of the museum sites to inspire active visitor engagement. In a more contemporary turn, I examine the popular Broadway musical “Come From Away” as a performance site that facilitates audience co-witnessing. As a performance of narrative recollections, "Come From Away" constructs a frame for prosthetic memory engagement that complements the established national 9/11 narrative by including a Canadian experience. Lastly, this dissertation highlights the contribution of Art Spiegelman’s graphic narrative “Maus” to the foundational study of postmemory, inspiring third-generation author-illustrators such as Amy Kurzweil, whose visual narrative “Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir” serves as a source of analysis, providing a unique perspective into the transmission of intergenerational trauma and remembrance. The research further highlights the role of gender, particularly the maternal line, in memory transmission, suggesting that these processes can contribute to forming familial and individual identities. In analyzing these specific points of intervention, the research emphasizes the capacity of performance to extend beyond traditional performance spaces to facilitate the understanding of historical pasts and inspire ethical, action-oriented behaviors in response to past traumas. These constructs provide the lens for understanding how performance mediums promote the interchangeability, exchangeability, and commodification of memories, how memories are transmitted from survivors to their descendants, and how third-generation descendants engage with traumatic historical events, respectively. The dissertation concludes by suggesting that the use of memory theory as a framing device for performance in alternative settings can emphasize its potential to stimulate social resistance against forgetting and encourage dialogue about shared pasts.

This dissertation interrogates the utopian performatives of objects at the blurred intersection of materiality, tactility, and time, exploring spaces of resistance grounded in the deferred audiencehood embedded within the seemingly static nature of materiality. By examining the material afterlives of bodies as objects, it investigates how body-objects continue to engage with their environments and retain agency beyond death or physical absence. Through case studies of bodily resistance in Taiwan, the dissertation illuminates how material resistance sustains a revolutionary futurity. This persistence of resistance, anchored in the physical and sensory dimensions of objects and bodies, challenges conventional notions of temporality and agency, inviting a reconsideration of material entities’ potential to carry forward the fight for justice and liberation.Chapter 1 examines the execution photography of political prisoners from Taiwan’s authoritarian regime in the 1950s. Grounded in the optical mechanisms of analogue photography, this chapter explores how the interplay of light and shadow preserves traces of the body, conveying desires for survival and resistance that challenge erasure beyond the photographed subject’s spatiotemporal boundaries. Chapter 2 focuses on Lin Yi-han’s novel Fang Siqi's First Love Paradise and considers literature as an act of seeking justice when formal redress remains unattainable. Through an analysis of the novel’s possible encoded messages, this chapter argues that the veiled testimonies of sexual violence survivors extend beyond the author’s mortality, summoning an unspecified, unknown readership to forge solidarity. Chapter 3 analyzes Paiwan singer-songwriter Aljenljeng Tjaluvie’s pop music as a site of Indigenous cultural resurgence within Taiwan’s contemporary music scene. The sonic dimensions of Indigenous pop music construct a sensorial sound stage that carries the potential to revitalize oral traditions and reclaim Indigenous musical spaces. By examining how sound structures both memory and cultural continuity, this chapter considers music’s role in resisting cultural erasure and asserting Indigenous presence. Together, these case studies demonstrate that bodies possess a political resilience rooted in their material presence. This resilience sustains the potential for the dead to “wait” for encounters with future audiences, allowing hope for survival and redress to endure amid atrocity and censorship while anticipating future possibilities of reemergence and reinterpretation.

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

W/riting Indigeneity; Circularities through the Codices of the Native Body by Sam Aros Mitchell

Doctor of Philosophy in Drama and Theatre

University of California San Diego, 2021 University of California Irvine, 2021

Professor Julie Burelle, Chair

This dissertation interweaves plays, performances, writings and dances created by Native artists and scholars within the context of Indigenous sovereignty, Indigenous practices and Indigenous relationships. As these works circulate through actual and (textual) bodies, I attend to the necessary act of (re)-writing/(re)-rite-ing Native histories and memories from an Indigenous perspective.

I draw inspiration and am informed by the process extended by the founders of Spiderwoman Theater known as “storyweaving”. Founded in 1976, the group was started by Muriel Miguel, Gloria Miguel (sisters) and Lisa Mayo. Drawing their name from the Hopi creation story known as Spider Grandmother, (Phoebe 93), Spiderwoman Theater emerged as one of the first as an Indigenous contemporary women's theater group. According to the Hopi creation story, Spider Grandmother, or "Gogyeng Sowuhti" was the guide for all the creatures, who moved through several worlds, learning more and more about those worlds until they could eventually move to the highest realm, the fourth world (Courlander 32). By writing from the center to the edge, this dissertation weaves and connects the legibility of the Native body between land and constellations, between story and body. Despite settler colonialism’s multiple attempts to extrapolate the intellectual and spiritual resources of the Indigenous, we stand steadfast in our sovereignty and our right to refuse those extractions. The model for outlining this project is based on the Native American Medicine Wheel, which serves as my guide rather than the commonly formal outline model dictated by the Western academy.