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.

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“Like a Mask Dancing: Visuospatial Geographies in Nigerian and Afro-Diasporic Literature” employs African masquerade dance as an analytic category for investigating questions of space, subjectivity, epistemology, and related geographies of meaning in contemporary Nigerian and Afro-Diasporic literature. This project critiques the aesthetics of immobilization prominent in the representation of African peoples’ knowledge ecologies, histories, spaces, cultures and identities as static, archaic and primitive, by asking one central question: how can a shift in our approach to analyzing literary spatiality illuminate the dynamic aesthetic, textual, material, historical and political concerns of writers within this literary archive?

The study develops Chinua Achebe’s configuration of the Igbo proverb and worldview: “The world is like a mask dancing; to see it well one cannot stand in one place” into a critical reading method that decenters Western theoretical discourse on spatiality and privileges spatial networks rooted in African indigenous life worlds and cultural imaginaries. I argue that this proverb points to a relational aesthetics of movement that construct places and subjectivity in motion and via motion in ways analogous to the performance of dancing masquerades in African performance settings. Expanding on the ways that this episteme intertwines ideas of movement, spatial traversal, rhythm, embodiment, fluidity, call-and response, and perspective change, I formulate a reading methodology – visuospatiality – that traces the fusion of visual and spatial signifiers as a creative idiom.

Using this theoretical schema, I map how indigenous African thought and worldviews inform the production of literary spatiality in narrative texts such as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters, Teju Cole’s Open City, and Chimamanda Adiche’s The Thing Around Your Neck. Through analysis animated by language, environment, and the body, “Like a Mask Dancing” draws insights from performance practices, philosophy, visual art, and literature propose critical mask poetics as a formal principle for theorizing questions of space, history, migration, and identity within Nigerian and Afro-diasporic cultural imaginaries and to make the case for centering African epistemologies as the theoretical basis for reading African literature.

“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.

This study argues that the rhetoric of improvement constituted a significant justification and motivation for British imperialism from the time of its early colonial projects, particularly those undertaken in Ireland. As the first chapter discusses, British interest in husbandry and agricultural science was spurred on not only by the profit-potential of its colonial acquisitions but also by the potent conviction in British cultural superiority. Jethro Tull's husbandry manuals, amongst others, demonstrate that agriculture and the attendant logic of rationalized economics encapsulated British beliefs in specific modes of labor and socialization. Plantation, in Ireland and elsewhere, was simply the physical manifestation of the ideology of improvement while efforts to "rationalize" native cultures and economies, as with Ireland's clachan system, served as its civilizational counterparts. The remainder of the dissertation looks closely at the role of improvement in Anglo-Irish relations with the Catholic Irish peasantry. The early part of the eighteenth century witnesses the rise of Anglo-Irish "patriotism" whose espousers were conflicted, on the one hand, by their growing awareness of their own subordination to British colonial policies and, on the other, by the prevailing belief in the inferiority of Gaelic culture. Anglo-Irish patriots like Jonathan Swift were forced to confront the violence of colonialism and the failure of improvement in Ireland in the form of recurrent famine. Their often ambivalent responses to such crises witness the complex relationship between the emergent theories of political economy and identity constitution. At the close of the century, Maria Edgeworth's writings and those of her father's illustrate the troubling extent to which British colonialism linked improvement and civility; as liberal advocates of the British Empire, the Edgeworths perceived it as the conveyor of an enlightened capitalized sensibility. Yet, their writings also evince concern about the refusal or failure of the peasantry to improve, presaging the concretization of identity occasioned by the increasingly transparent rhetoric of political economy coupled with the biologicization of difference in the form of racial theories. In tracing the genealogies of improvement rhetoric and political economy, Cultivating Civilized Subjects locates British imperialism's attempts to naturalize difference within the discourse of capitalist development.

Before the New Sky: Protracted Struggle and Possibilities of the Beyond for Palestine's New Youth Movement is a transnational ethnographic account of Palestinian youth movements before and after the 2011 Arab uprisings. Situated in the context of the post-1993 Oslo Accords—or negotiations and peace process paradigm—this work investigates some of the challenges and opportunities posited on Palestinian youth through this period and in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab uprisings. I have compiled my ethnographic archive through attending forty-six Palestinian youth convenings between 2006 and 2017 as a founder, member and leader within the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM). I also conducted interviews with forty-five Palestinian youth from Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Greece, Sweden, Denmark, France, Italy, Turkey and the United States from 2016 and 2018. Building upon the Palestinian literary tradition, I refer to sites of exhausted paradigms and regimes as "the last sky"—that which the Palestinian intellectual and political tradition warned of and attempted to halt its arrival. I argue that the Palestinians have endured three last skies: the first, resultant of an enclosure of land, sea and skies due to colonial occupation, siege and dispossession marked by the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, onward; the second, caused by persistent annihilation of Palestinian narrative and testimony in the historic record; and the last arriving with the 1993 Oslo Accords, which foreclosed upon political genealogies of struggle for the new generation and fractured their relationships to history, land and Palestinian peoplehood across ideological and geographic dispersions. I argue that these three last skies constitute a Palestinian ontology of Nakba, whereby Palestinian life, knowledge and movements endure constant catastrophe, forcing new generations to build anew each time. This dissertation thus examines how youth have come to articulate, practice and theorize politics despite, and perhaps because of, this ontology of Nakba, including in everyday forms of resistance and in organized movement-building attempts. My dissertation draws from and contributes to theories on Palestine and the Palestinians, transnational movements, youth resistance, critical knowledge production, and anti/de-colonial political and intellectual methodologies.

“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.

My dissertation engages with the problem of how authors and literary theorists who experience marginality, migration, diaspora, and sexual and social non-normativity can articulate forms of political engagement without a grounding in stable representations. To do this, I focus on récit, a mode of writing that includes multiple interlocking strands of narrative and reflection within the same work that allow for digression, detours, splitting, and even a certain degree of non-coherence rather than building toward a common conclusion. Récit, by employing methods such as suspending personal, temporal, and spatial deixis, text-metatext, and polyvocality, enables those people who are outside society’s norms to create new forms of experimental writing that function as a political means to resist the dominant narratives around gender, sexuality, religion, and colonial identities. The significance of récit is differential rather than comparative or categorical: it emerges from spaces of difference that know no convergence and therefore signifies difference. In order to describe the genre and its characteristics more clearly, I have drawn on My Walk With Bob by American New Narrative writer Bruce Boone, The Blind Owl by Sadeq Hedayat, a modern Iranian writer, and Fantasia, An Algerian Cavalcade by Assia Djebar, an Algerian writer to show how the very resistance to definition, in place of fixed meanings and expectations, allows these authors to seek and create flexible new ways of relating to the social and political context in and against which they write. My dissertation brings these authors writing in English, Persian, and French together to illustrate how their use of the formal affordances of récit converts their marginality into a creative site of cultural production and transforms their experiences from personal concerns into potential sources of social knowledge. Their chosen form’s inventiveness enables them to bring into focus multiple simultaneous dimensions of embodied (inter) subjectivity in an effort to keep their representations mobile, exploratory, and engaged with social realities.