Working-Class Heroics: The Intersection of Class and Space in British Post-War Writing explores the influence of the built environment on class consciousness as represented in the British kitchen sink realism movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. As a movement that used gritty, documentary-style depictions of space to highlight complexities of working-class life, the period’s texts chronicled shifts in the social and topographic landscape while advancing new articulations of citizenship in response to the failures of post-war reconstruction. I refer to such articulations as the “working-class imaginary”—a stance identifiable across kitchen sink texts in which spaces that prescribe social limitation are remapped as sites of plenitude and potency. This stance, I argue, mirrors incipient youth subculture, situating working-class identities as dynamic and contingent yet susceptible to commodification. In considering the impact of space on class, I address Nigel Thrift and Peter Williams’ contention that academic discourse has overlooked the way the built environment informs class identity. Recent analysis in the social sciences has opened the door to such debates, but literary scholarship has yet to fully embrace this juncture, rendering it as a particularly rich site of inquiry. The result is a project that highlights the settings of a variety of novels, plays, and films, offering a fresh outlook on the way spatial representation in cultural production sustains or intervenes in the process of social stratification. In doing so, the project advances formal methods by which to assess representations of working-class culture in terms of ethical and aesthetic objectives. Given the wave of political unrest breaking across the Western world, Working-Class Heroics: The Intersection of Class and Space in British Post-War Writing offers a timely study of the influence of the environment on class identity, looking to cultural production as both a barometer and an engine of contemporary citizenship.

This dissertation investigates the experiences of prominent, minority intellectuals in American culture. To add nuance to critical accounts of American intellectuals that define that subject as universal and autonomous, this project introduces the race and gender into those discussions while acknowledging to the role the modern university has had in maintaining that position. Rather than argue that the university is no longer conducive to intellectual life, this project suggests that such stances negate the struggles for access to and representation in the academy on behalf of minority intellectuals. Moreover, this project questions the timeliness of such views, as they arise precisely at the moments when minority intellectuals begin to initiate structural change to the American university.

This project begins by setting the historical and theoretical foundations for how the intellectual has normally been understood by combining the work of Richard Hofstadter and Russell Jacoby with the theories of intellectualism described by writers like Edward Said and Antonio Gramsci. The introduction then turns to a case study of William Faulkner to argue that his work questions the class and regional biases that underlie intellectualism at an historical moment when the intellectual was undergoing a radical revision.

The chapters that follow more thoroughly consider the categories of race and gender in the making of intellectuals and turns to the lives and work of Ralph Ellison, Mary McCarthy, Américo Paredes, and Tomás Rivera. The first chapter argues that Ellison used Invisible Man to work through the crisis of the black intellectual later discussed by theorists like Harold Cruse. The second chapter on Mary McCarthy shows how even non-academic, progressive spheres like the New York intellectual circle rely on a normative conception of intellectualism that performs a hegemonic function counter to the aims of women intellectuals. My closing chapter on Paredes and Rivera theorizes the condition of the Chicano intellectual in light of the development of Chicano studies more broadly by contextualizing the communal, educational efforts of El Movimiento of the 1960s. Read together, these sections illustrate the sociohistorical and theoretical impasses that make minority intellectualism a condition worthy of more critical consideration.

“Blackness and the Queer Epistemes of White Sexual Economies” argues that the interplay between performances of mastery and the enjoyment of property under slavery installed a paradigm within white homosocial discourses that derive pleasure from the proprietary conditions of enslavement. Put simply, I identify the sexual abuses of white, queer, slaveholding men as often-overlooked contributions to gay male social and sexual formations in the United States. To bear out this claim, my project traces an evidentiary archive of white queer sexual abuse from nineteenth-century literary and legal materials to twentieth-century memoirs, novels, and court cases, analyzing texts. I’m developing a theory to make legible the existence of Black enslaved people whose lives are obscured to protect queer American life from knowledge of its genealogy in the practices of antebellum slavery. The proprietorial bindings of enslavement contribute to the petri dish of queer sexual discourse the necessary ideological fragments needed to buttress functioning economies that hold stock in clandestine racialized corporeal markets. I use “clandestine” to note the illegibility of existing archival materials holding these non-normative sexual economies in the 19th and 20th century, and to highlight ways in which failing to identify these moments plainly undermines efforts to fully understand the history of contemporary queer sexual discourses.

“Let Me LOOK at You:” The Post-9/11 Representational Imperative & Muslim* Refusal argues that the War on Terror produces hegemonic notions of Muslim American identity in order to contain anti-imperialist critique. My dissertation makes an intervention in Critical Muslim Studies by articulating how gendered racialization works to depoliticize “the Muslim” within US imperial ideology. In addition to demonstrating how the post-9/11 representational imperative functions, I consider how Muslim women and queer Muslim poets and performance artists mobilize form to reject recognition by the settler-imperialist state. By looking at the work of poets and performance artists Naomi Shihab-Nye, Solmaz Sharif, Safia Elhillo, Fatimah Asghar, Andrea Abi-Karam, Arshia Fatima Haq, and more, my project asks: what kind of ethics of care emerges when Muslim poets and performance artists betray the impulse for representation? Post-9/11 Representational Imperative & Muslim* Refusal works alongside the poetry and performance of women and queer people caught under the post-9/11 spotlight of “the Muslim” to understand how they language a world beyond coloniality and the US imperial project it engenders.

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