This dissertation investigates how discourses and practices of political spirituality contributed to forming an idea of México as a national entity in the early nineteenth century. During the struggles for Novohispanic Independence from 1810 to 1821, there was little consensus on what the new nation would be named. Writers, historians, and political figures used names such as “Anáhuac,” “América,” “la América Mexicana,” and “El Imperio Mexicano,” each conveying different political ambitions. The dissertation tracks the emergence of the idea of ‘México’ in texts produced during the era of the Bourbon Reforms in New Spain and the period of the Novohispanic insurgency. Against the analysis of the prominent symbols and cultural tropes pertaining to México as mythical or ideological construct, I argue instead for the centrality of political spirituality, which in my account designates the means of finding novel ways of governing oneself and others and discerning different ways of articulating what is true or false. Political spirituality, I argue further, enabled the emergence of new subject formations such as the ‘Americano’ insurgent and of the independent ‘Mexicano.’ Along with forming subjects, political spiritualities subtended the transformations of concepts that would allow those subjects to recognize and affirm the idea of México.

This interdisciplinary inquiry brings together studies of political history, religion, the history of ideas, and philosophical anthropology. Approaching the emergence of the idea of Mexico through the lens of political spirituality allows me to draw on contemporary theories of the proper name and the concept as a way to tie spiritual practices to material conditions, discursive frameworks, and practical exigencies. This project contributes to a body of historical scholarship on the role of religion and religious discourse in the emergence of the Mexican nation and state. By exploring spirituality as a practice that is not intrinsically religious, this project seeks to shed light on different ways in which spiritual discourses and practices produce material effects. The dissertation represents an initial step toward a fuller genealogy of the idea of Mexico, its potentialities, promises, and limitations.

My dissertation, The construction of the Colombian territory: Images of the Colombian Armed Conflict 2002-2010, critically analyzes the Colombian internal conflict and its relationship with the narrative of the nation in a global theater of operations of war in its different forms of visualization. Through a detail textual analysis of documentaries, films, recorded military operations, media military operations, and proof of life videos, I examine the effect moving images have had as part of configuring the battlefield. My research proceeds from the premise that there is a visual culture of warfare - grammars, imaginaries, and technologies – that has organized the global space of security and has brought new forms of territory that paradoxically exceed the idea of the sovereign nation and at the same time confirm it. In other words, I examine the creation and exercise of national security in a globalized world and its effects on the concept of the nation and national territory through the concept of politics of the visual. Colombia is considered a successful example for nation building, counterinsurgency tactics and U.S. intervention. As my case of study, I analyze the epistemological assumptions that emerge in the global war on terror, specifically how they reflect in the construction of the idea of Colombia as a unified image, one sovereign nation, and one territory through the production of different visual narratives.

My dissertation project studies the practice of force-feeding at Guantánamo Bay detention camp and how incarcerated individuals mobilize their bodies against indefinite confinement. Using the critical-analytical methods of feminist science and visual cultures studies, I examine force-feeding within longer histories of racially gendered subjection such as vivisection and behavior modification in order to consider how the feeding tube came to be used as an instrument of punishment on the orientalized body of Muslim men perceived to be terrorists. Through empirical research, textual interpretation, and aesthetic analysis, my dissertation intervenes in the fields of critical prison studies, and science and technology studies by foregrounding genealogies of biomedicalization and how those incarcerated reclaim corporeal agency through practices such as hunger striking. Ultimately, I argue that force-feeding is commensurate with other interrogation techniques that have become more mainstream since the Cold War, emphasizing the medicalization of war tactics and punishment.

Chapter one, “Vivisectional Mandate: Behavioral Science and Torture from the Cold War to the War on Terror,” follows the ways that the Cold War’s experimentation sets the stage for the war on terror. In particular, I situate the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques of the war on terror within Cold War behavioral science in order to track the role psychology has played in the progression of biopolitical torture techniques that aim to discipline racialized bodies. The second chapter, “From Cracking the Mind to Bodily Abjection: Situating Force-Feeding in the Torture Archive,” considers how force-feeding transforms the medical clinic into a site of punitive suffering. How is this transformation linked to the emergence of biotechnologies geared towards the optimization of life in the early part of the 20th century? These questions expand outward to be considerations of patient and prisoner autonomy in the wake of right-to-die litigation and the use of the feeding tube in US domestic prisons. My third chapter, “Suspended Animation: Force-Feeding and the Visuality of Pain,” analyzes a policy manual on techniques for managing hunger striking at Guantánamo Bay detention camp alongside the visual testimonies of prisoner Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel and activist Yasiin Bey. This chapter investigates how the state frames medical ethics inside of the camps and how the emphasis placed on care obfuscates not only the demands of the prisoners but also the feeding tube as carceral technology. The fourth chapter, “Staging Incapacitation: Hunger Striking in the Wake of Force-Feeding,” considers the practice of hunger striking and self-harm at Guantánamo Bay. Here I examine prisoner’s testimonials of hunger striking and how such resistance to policies of corporeal wholeness functions as a viable form of political self-expression.

By situating force-feeding practices at Guantánamo Bay into a history of medical experimentation, I reveal the inadequacies of prevailing theories of biopower, theories that are not capacious enough to account for how state sponsored torture is underwritten by the operation of Islamophobia and institutionalized racism. Tracing out an archaeology of state torture with the tools of critical prison studies and science and technology studies reveals Guantánamo Bay as neither a space of life nor death, but rather of what I refer to as suspended animation, a pointedly medicalized mode of living death.

This dissertation demonstrates how the neoliberal state marshals public finance and public memory to incorporate itself into the contemporary urban landscape. It investigates sites in the built environment where the state deploys public funds to subsidize private construction projects that are fiscally unsound, using the institutional form of the public authority to covertly mediate between itself and the private sector. Combining discursive analysis of news media, funding allocation records, and the sites themselves, it looks at the World Trade Center reconstruction, a bus depot in Harlem, and Freshkills Park in Staten Island, a former landfill, and examines the effects of these projects both on urban space and public memory itself. The dissertation argues that the state uses public funds to inaugurate sites of memory in the city's cultural and political landscape in order to assert its ethical and political legitimacy in a moment when that legitimacy is bound up in its relationship to private capital. This is an unexpected manifestation of what Marx and Schumpeter describe as "creative destruction" - the destruction of capital necessary to the continuation of capitalism - but what the dissertation shows is that this process not only sustains capitalist economy, but also removes democratic participation from planning the built environment while regenerating the state's failing legitimacy in times of fiscal crisis. The dissertation employs historical and archival research on public authorities, including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and qualitative research, such as personal interviews with project planners, neighborhood residents, tourists, state officials, and activists. By showing that state projects of memorialization are central to mediating between private interests and the capitalist state, it contributes to scholarship in state theory, urban planning, and material culture.