This dissertation examines combat trauma under U.S. militarism, tracking its psychosomatic effects and aesthetic responses within U.S. veteran communities. It centers the concept of “moral injury,” psychiatrist Jonathan Shay’s term for the moment of psychic, ethical, and sociopolitical disturbance that often leads to PTSD. This dissertation reads moral injury through the lenses of critical race theory and U.S. imperial culture, examining the racial and imperial logics at work in the phenomenon of veteran self-destruction. It argues that the national crisis of veteran suicide exposes the limits of U.S. imperial reach and the ways race, gender, and religion coalesce to both form and undermine the military subject. This dissertation’s analysis of how white masculinity interweaves with the function and effects of moral injury offers insight to discourses on psychosocial wellness as well as disability studies, which often fail to adequately address questions of race and gender. Bringing disability studies into conversation with recent work on militarization, race, and religion offers the insight that moral injury destabilizes U.S. militarism.

This dissertation suggests that discourses on race and war must contend with combat-related moral injury, psychosomatic ability, and veteran self destruction. While the accounts explored are primarily from the post-9/11 Iraq and Afghanistan wars, this dissertation traces the notion of moral injury to the Vietnam war, connecting escalating veteran self-destruction to the emergence of endless militarism as “counterinsurgency” warfare. It reads domestic and overseas militarism as resulting from increased U.S. bureaucratization and socioeconomic demand for security. It contends that any analysis of the ways race interweaves with the contemporary phenomenon of endless war or relations between extraterritorial combat and domestic militarism must consider the nexus between whiteness, masculinity, and ability that produces the citizen subject on which U.S. imperialism depends.

This dissertation also brings moral injury to ongoing discourses on historical trauma in relation to U.S. racial formations. Through a comparative analysis between combat and “inner-city” PTSD, it tracks the racialized notions of moral authority and psychic invulnerability as well as individual, military, and state dominion inherent to moral injury and thus veteran trauma. It pushes psychoanalytic discourse to reflect on the ways trauma cannot be comprehended without attention to how the state deploys it through U.S. imperial culture, and to how it undermines that instrumental process. Through an examination of Operation Homecoming, this dissertation reads state desperation to salvage veteran behavior as an investment in the white, Christian, masculine citizen, or keystone of U.S. militarism. Its homogenizing therapeutic practices reintegrate affected veterans into the patriotic, heroic subject of martial might and sacrifice. Through analyses of the Combat Paper Project and Philip Metres’s abu ghraib arias, this dissertation then considers the abilities of art practice and poetics to produce an affective and psychosomatic realm through which engagements with trauma open the affected self to relational, collective vulnerability, memory, and experience, past and present. This collective self of historical trauma works to undo the bound, invulnerable, coherent individuality of the military subject. This dissertation concludes with a gesture toward decolonial feminist practices that illuminate a collective way forward.

Living Laboratories traces the gendered racialization of U.S. empire’s colonial expansion from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, as well as women of color feminist texts of the late-twentieth century that reframe these legacies for our present. Each chapter focuses on what I call a “living laboratory,” a transnational site of state-sanctioned medical experimentation on populations regarded as bearers of disease. By examining the laws that precede invasive public health measures, I show how these living laboratories within and beyond the United States' national territorial borders circulate interconnected regimes of control. Central to my genealogical remapping of experiments in American empire are the narrated experiences of those not fully recognizable in the annals of history. By reading multi-genre literary works in relation to the juridical and scientific archive, Living Laboratories recovers agential subjects through an alternative grid of intelligibility. In doing so, I emphasize the distinctly embodied subjectivities that emerge from wounded flesh, pursuing a critique of what it means to be human from the literally and figuratively dismembered perspectives of writers Gayl Jones, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Aurora Levíns Morales.

From roughly the early 1940s to the early 1970s, the United States led a set of international capital-intensive agricultural research, technology, and education transfer initiatives. These initiatives were designed to facilitate a more expansive market agrarianism, increase agricultural yields, and combat hunger amidst concerns of a rapidly growing population. Yet, named the “Green Revolution,” these initiatives, in their push for the development of industrial agriculture oriented to the global market, ultimately preempted peasant unrest and undermined larger revolutionary action as they reconstituted states as guarantors of agricultural markets in service of U.S. state power and transnational capitalism.

This dissertation, Race, Containment, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of the Green Revolution, recognizes the Green Revolution as an exercise in the risk management of racial capitalism during a period of great social upheaval: when overlapping, internationalized anticolonial and civil rights movements named the limits of racial democracy and risked undercutting postwar U.S. state power and transnational capitalism. Race, Containment, and the Settler-Imperial Politics of the Green Revolution argues that the mid-twentieth century technical, scientific, and education cooperation efforts, and paired innovations in governance and administration, elaborated upon U.S. state-led and capital-intensive efforts to cultivate forms of Native and Black market agrarianisms developed in the early-twentieth century.

Operating in service of the accumulation of wealth and the exercise of geopolitical power, the Green Revolution remade peoples and places in accordance with the anti-Black and settler colonial logics of the plantation and reservation. Additionally, the transit of the plantation and the reservation toward such ends was based upon domestic innovations in U.S. slave and settler capitalisms. The framework of agricultural technical and scientific cooperation and paired innovations in governance and administration during the mid-twentieth crystallized the emergent trope of “development.” Yet, problematizations of the plantation and reservation in the early twentieth century prefigured such developments globally.

Abstract

Refugees in a World on Fire: Dispossession, Diaspora and

the Possibilities of Queer Resistance

by

Kim Thien Tran

Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Keith P. Feldman, Chair

On August 9th, 2014, Michael Brown was killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Afterward, Brown’s 18-year old body lay in the sweltering sun for four hours; uncovered and defaced even in mourning. The death of Michael Brown—a Black teenager—at the hands of a white police officer catapulted national racial tensions, drew protests and created #BlackLivesMatter. Across the country, #BlackLivesMatter issued clarion calls for solidarity in action and creed. My dissertation explores how Asian American activists responded by marshaling relational and affective frameworks in order to forge coalitions with the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Between 2014-2016, I argue Asian Americans pursued solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter through a framework of mediated advantage which disavowed the model minority myth and relied upon histories of Asian exclusion to build bridges across diverging iterations of white supremacy. Moreover, through interviews with Vietnamese American community activists, I find that solidarity between these two communities depends upon nebulous yet powerful affective linkages, the “impossible psychic attachments” of what I term a queer diasporic praxis.

The first chapter provides a theoretical framework and historical context for diaspora and dispossession. Chapter one establishes the political and economic structure specific to Vietnamese diaspora and dispossession in order to argue for indeterminancy between the two. I engage seminal political and economic theory and to tease out the common veins of violence and disenfranchisement endemic to diaspora and capitalism that make solidarity possible.

2

In this chapter, I perform a close reading of solidarity statements from various sources including #Asians4BlackLives, CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, The National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC), 18 Million Rising, SAALT: South Asian Americans Leading Together, and the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans (NCAPA), Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) and Bay Area Solidarity. I contend Asian American solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter functions through a technology of mediated advantage that simultaneously disavows the model minority myth and prioritizes anti-black racism in an attempt to think race relationally.

In chapter three I reimagine cross-racial coalition in the Vietnamese diaspora through Women of Color Feminism and Queer of Color Critique. I introduce the framework of a queer diasporic praxis as the analytic through which solidarity can be understood as affective and queer. Using participant observation, I locate affect and emotion as the engine and facilitating mechanism for coalition-making. I assert Vietnamese American activists employ rubrics of alternative kinship and a “common context of struggle” in their efforts to end anti-Black racism alongside Black Lives Matter.

In chapter four, I challenge popular narratives of social death that would render efforts to foment racial justice meaningless. Taking Asian and Vietnamese American organizing as a point of departure, I re-read afro and queer pessimism through Black Feminism. Foregrounding life-affirming acts of activism and simply living on the margins of social and political existence, I queery pessmisitic frameworks through the spaces of possibility created by coalition-making. I conclude the dissertation by making explicit why Ethnic Studies scholars must be more than “academic coroners” of our own communities.

Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has served as a major platform for political performance, social justice activism, and large-scale public debates over race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality. It has empowered minoritarian groups to organize protests, articulate often-underrepresented perspectives, and form community. It has also spread hashtags that have been used to bully and silence women, people of color, and LGBTQ people.

#identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world. Hailing from diverse scholarly fields, all contributors are affiliated with The Color of New Media, a scholarly collective based at the University of California, Berkeley. The Color of New Media explores the intersections of new media studies, critical race theory, gender and women's studies, and postcolonial studies. The essays in #identity consider topics such as the social justice movements organized through #BlackLivesMatter, #Ferguson, and #SayHerName; the controversies around #WhyIStayed and #CancelColbert; Twitter use in India and Africa; the integration of hashtags such as #nohomo and #onfleek that have become part of everyday online vernacular; and other ways in which Twitter has been used by, for, and against women, people of color, LGBTQ, and Global South communities. Collectively, the essays in this volume offer a critically interdisciplinary view of how and why social media has been at the heart of US and global political discourse for over a decade.

This project undertakes a comparative analysis of literatures written by Afro- Latin@ and Afro-Hispanic diasporic and exilic writers in the post-1960's/post- independence period. Through decolonial analyses this project examines how these texts create new discursive spaces for engaging critical concepts found in Afro-diasporic and exilic global literatures. I propose that these literatures produced in exile and diaspora show how postcolonial literature engages in a (re)telling of history, interrogates foundational narratives of the nation(s), and articulates critical positions that elucidate decolonial discourses.

I examine the decolonial possibilities of global Afro-diasporic and exilic literature and as such, I propose the use of the theory of the decolonial attitude as a way to read these texts as literary palimpsests. The chapters engage critical topics in decolonial thought including: faithful witnessing and theories of representation, the reimagining of reparations and futurities through decolonial love, and the impossibilities of home and exile.

The goal of this project is to aid in the mapping of the diasporic and exilic global Afro-Latin@ Caribbean and Equatoguinean archipelago. This dissertation re- conceptualizes the fields of Latin@ Studies, Afro-diaspora Studies, and the study of literature in light of theories of decoloniality. Thinking about these nations -- Equatorial Guinea, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic -- and literatures in the context of the long-durée of colonial and postcolonial histories and migrations makes it possible to begin mapping the dialogue between Equatoguinean and Afro-Latin@ diasporic and exilic populations.