My dissertation is focused on one question from different cultural and historical sites: what is a perpetual state of emergency and how is it used to enact state violence? Generally, I hope for this dissertation to stage an intervention in, and to open questions and investigations around, violence, condemnation, ethics, and the law. More specifically, through this project I seek to read explicit legal state violence in post-Revolutionary Iran to elucidate more implicit legal state violence in the contemporary U.S. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the state does not conceal that it functions as what Édouard Glissant calls a “root model” with hierarchical and fixed moral parameters determining the laws of the country; in fact, the government publicly touts its widespread deployment of violence in order to deter individuals—condemned as enemies—who may try to deviate from, or challenge, the laws. In the U.S., the state rhetorically reinvents seemingly new crises—such as the War on Drugs—to sustain the notion of an enemy warranting the state’s use of violence. While I investigate published texts that pertain to the U.S. system, I have chosen to examine Iranian cinema—rather than published texts—as a venue for critical discourse addressing the issue of state violence. Ultimately, this project proposes the following inquiries: how can a reading of state violence—legal, juridical, rhetorical, and physical—in post-Revolutionary Iran elucidate concealed state violence in the contemporary U.S.? What is at stake when one compares U.S. legal and juridical systems with those of the Islamic Republic of Iran? How can our relation to law be critically and creatively re-imagined?

Through the cultural lens of California’s Inland Empire, India, and Italy, this dissertation explores how creditor-debtor relationships translate into literature, film, media, and space. Raising key questions about the moral and monetary values that shape creditor-debtor relationships, I discuss in detail the histories and processes that shape and inform both creditors and debtors. I argue that from the emphasis on the debtor’s guilt and punishment in previous scholarly investigations of the creditor-debtor relationship, debtors have taken on the burden of unethical credit schemes manufactured on behalf of the free market’s health. Divided into five chapters, this project addresses different aspects of the creditor-debtor relationship. With an analysis of student debt the preface and the introduction illustrate how the creditor-debtor relationship is shaped by the sovereignty of the economy such that the health of the economy becomes more significant than the well-being of people and the environment. The introduction also exposes the creditor’s fear of the potential capitalist and the limitations that the industrial-complex imposes on the creditor-debtor relationship. ‘Geographies of Debt’ focuses on California’s prison industrial complex in order to examine how the capitalist’s debt that develops from surplus-value is negated through prison labor and the southern trope. “Dancing to Debt” investigates how Bollywood’s investment in making Pakistanis the guilty and punishable subject has developed alongside various modes of accumulation by dispossession that seemingly favor a Hindu nationalist political agenda, but have, in turn, made all brown bodies vulnerable to the terrorist trope and the military industrial complex. “Protesting Moral Debt” illustrates how the farmer suicides that have plagued India’s agrarian community for the last two decades are indicative of their moral debts to the land, the perennial creditor, and not, as popular media suggests, their monetary debts to various moneylenders, which debunks the authority of market fundamentalist discourse. Lastly, through an analysis of Italian neorealist cinema, “The Pleasure of Debt” reveals the effects of the pleasure creditor’s take in imposing suffering on the debtor and, likewise, the pleasure poor communities take in witnessing the decadence of elite culture.