From the Soil, to the People shows how representations of rural society and the rural environment in Chinese literature from the 1940s to the present illuminate changing attitudes towards community, land, and modern life. It spans the explicitly political and state-regulated literature of the 1950s-1970s, literature produced under the relaxed guidelines of the 1980s, and literature written amid the increased commercialization of the 1990s and early 2000s. Conventional scholarship often separates these periods to examine them in isolation or focuses on pre- and post-socialist literature while ignoring the socialist period in between. In contrast, From the Soil, to the People uses “the rural question” to bring these disparate periods together, examining a persistent sociopolitical challenge through vastly different literary contexts.From the Soil, To the People examines the relationship between formal shifts in the literary portrayal of rural society with changes in the social, economic, and political conditions for both rural society and literary production. Close readings of 2-3 canonical novels from each era serve as vantage points, revealing signs of shifting ideologies of the rural that allow a longer timeline to emerge. Examining traditional literary categories including characterization and description across an 80-year period of monumental change, From the Soil, To the People argues that the relationship between literary production and historical change was not simply a matter of the representation of reality or a blueprint for an ideal society. From the Soil, To the People breaks down monolithic, timeless approaches to thinking about rural life through its historicization of particular moments in literary production across place and time in an environment of constant, yet not linear, change. Tracing the fluctuations of rural ideologies across these changes shows moments of both forward movement and circular return. Questioning linear narratives of rural modernity and progress that persist in the present day, From the Soil, To the People opens up space to imagine new forms for “modern” life amid increasing skepticism that urban modernization is the only future for the human species.

"Freedom and Form: Marxist Hermeneutics and the Spinozist Turn"

Marxist cultural and literary criticism has long been preoccupied with determining the position and relative power of cultural production within the base/superstructure analogy. Beginning with the Second International, a particular brand of orthodox Marxism relegated the artifacts of cultural production to the superstructure, thereby considering cultural modes of production impotent in effecting any practical, material and political change. While this debate was largely put to rest by the Marxist cultural criticism of the Frankfurt School and beyond, a legacy of this problematic remains. It is arguably an implicit limit obtaining in even the greatest examples of contemporary Marxist literary theory, specifically playing out with regard to the fundamental representational issue of form and content. Several Marxist theorists have looked to the practical philosophy of the 17th century Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, in an effort to resolve the contradictions of the base/superstructure analogy, particularly as they occur within the socio-political register. In light of the considerable theoretical power tapped by this return to Spinoza, his influence on Marxist literary theory is conspicuously absent. Thus, the headway made in resolving antinomies that obtain in the encounter of Marxism with political life remain at an impasse with regard to Marxist cultural criticism, especially with regards to the purchase and power of literary production over and within political life. This paper puts several major figures of Marxist political and literary theory, including Louis Althusser, Antonio Negri and Fredric Jameson respectively, into conversation with one another. I gauge what benefit may be had from synthesizing Spinoza's practical philosophy, including his revolutionary hermeneutics as developed in the Theologico-Political Treatise, with a contemporary understanding of Marxist hermeneutics, as developed primarily by Fredric Jameson.

This paper treats the connections between contemporary popular music and neoliberal ideology through a historical analysis and critique of digital music platforms, lo-fi, and EDM. Following the work of Byung-Chul Han and Philip Mirowski, I explore how the transformation of the disciplinary liberal state into a permissive, post-disciplinary society based on a new subjectivity of “auto-exploitation” intersects with digital music. This disciplinary shift corresponds with the emergence of a new form of entrepreneurial labor, which entails a new form of subjectivity under neoliberalism. As neoliberalism becomes dominant in the political economic sphere, its effects are felt across the social scape. To analyze these effects, I focus on lo-fi and EDM, two musical genres that develop within a hegemonic neoliberalism. My central claim is that under neoliberalism these digital musical forms take on a double character; specifically, they might be understood as countercultures expressing a desire for freedom, and simultaneously, they depend on and at certain moments reinforce the dominant socio-economic code. Mapping out the mediating antagonisms between neoliberal subjectivity and digital music leads me to the construction of a schematic framework for the listening practices of the neoliberal subject.

This dissertation considers anew questions of identity, belonging, governance, and nationalism within the context of displacement. While post-colonial approaches to these issues presuppose a nation-state, my project, by contrast, casts critical light on Tibetan nationalism and the future nation as it is articulated and practiced by a refugee and diasporic peoples. My research does this by juxtaposing the external struggle for international recognition by the Tibetan Government-in-Exile¬¬–– a territory-less entity that behaves like a state––with the less examined internal struggle to command loyalty within the Tibetan diaspora.

I analyze documents produced in the mid-1960s by Tibetan exiles to suggest they were seminal to preparing a disciplined and loyal body of the newly displaced Tibetans coming from myriad traditions of religious faith and regional loyalties to be beholden to one policy: that of the democratic politico-religious system furnished by the Tibetan Government-in-Exile under the Dalai Lama. And it is in this context that the particularly valenced concepts of “unity” and “democracy” gained as their preeminent values the fulfillment of the wishes of the exile government, protest against the Chinese colonization of Tibet, securing the national goal of Tibetan independence, and marking a crossing to a particular kind of modernity. I argue that unity was an exclusionary discourse. It was presented simultaneously as the moral and political responsibility of the modern Tibetan “refugee-citizen” as well as the traditional duty of a Tibetan Buddhist. Thus, unity became the dominant framework of governance for thinking about the boundaries of belonging, citizenship in exile, political obligation, and the values of the Tibetan people.