Motions of Search: A Korean/American Epistemology is a transdisciplinary and transmedia project that presents a kinetic exploration and application of visual documentary practices through a synthetic model of critical theory, creative writing, (auto)ethnography, and film production. Motions interrogates the visual, historical, and epistemological contexts and structures of the documentary work of three filmmakers – Charles Burnett, Jean-Pierre Gorin, and Jy-Ah Min. While emerging from discrepant histories and geographies, academic pathways and artistic traditions, this trio share a political and aesthetic orientation with narratives that exist outside the realm of official documentations of history, culture, and society. I am particularly interested in how they appropriate and intervene on documentary not as a stable genre and tradition but as a contingent form and practice that constantly evolves in response to historical moments of crisis and transformation. Turning away from the mass-produced and state-sanctioned spectacles designed by and for “the technologies of hypervisibility… [that posit] that everything is available and accessible for consumption,” these filmmakers turn into the forgotten, maligned, or trivialized scenes and subjects of everyday life from the 1970s to the contemporary moment.

My chapters look at the filmmakers and their work, examining documentary in three registers: (1) the narrative form and the aesthetics of sur-realism in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977); (2) the essay form and the aesthetics of improvisation in Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Letter to Jane (1972) and Ici et Ailleurs (1972), as well as his solo My Crasy Life (1992); and (3) the experimental form and the aesthetics of remix in Jy-Ah Min’s M/F Remix (2010). My conclusion then offers an assemblage of critical and creative reflections on making my documentary film-in-progress about my mother and her difficult recovery from battling multiple cancers. These sections can be read as a series of case studies or dispatches that build in succession, both in terms of my discussion of specific documentary film texts and contexts, material practices and aesthetic ideologies, as well as my implementation of hybrid, shifting modes of formal address and techniques.

This thesis examines the literary works of Fausto Reinaga and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, two prominent Indigenous writers, intellectuals and political activists from Bolivia, and their critiques of Bolivia’s 1952 National Revolution. Reinaga and Rivera Cusicanqui argue that the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR) political party, which held office during the Bolivian post-revolutionary era, sought to assimilate Bolivia’s mostly Indigenous population in order to create a new, homogeneous Bolivia of campesinos estranged from their cultural Indigenous identities. Based on Reinaga and Rivera Cusicanqui’s findings, I argue that the 1952 revolution extended Bolivia’s colonial legacy through new codes that marketed the revolution as a “radical” break from the previous political order and as “liberatory” for the exploited Bolivian working-class. I identify three of these codes as the following government-led policies: the universal suffrage reform, agrarian reform and unionization. Ultimately, these three policies formed a part of the Bolivian state’s attempt to campesinizar and de-indigenize Indigenous groups. Through my discursive analysis, I find that Reinaga and Rivera Cusicanqui differ in their theorization of the racialization processes that occurred after the 1952 revolution. Nonetheless, Reinaga’s framework of indianismo and Rivera Cusicanqui’s conceptualization of the ch’ixi provide a critical analysis on the implementation of what they both interpret as a Westernizing political agenda in Bolivia following the 1952 revolution.

This dissertation traces how state-sanctioned violence in the Southern Cone traumatically re-signified common objects (dwellings, food, clothing), such in a way that continues to reverberate following the region’s democratic transition. I refashion and extend works from memory and trauma studies and queer phenomenology to argue that these memory objects are a key anchor for producing counter-histories and fomenting memory groups amidst dominant pressures from early democratic governments to forget the dictatorial past. Literature, as it were, offered and continues to offer such groups and victims a potent space to highlight the invisible production of memory through interaction with the object world. As such, these reminders offer mnemonic guideposts for reestablishing historical continuity and demanding justice. Throughout the chapters of the dissertation, I work with three primary categories of memory objects: objects of pain, transitional objects, and testimonial objects. These three categories relate to the weaponization of common objects against so-called subversives, as well as how victims and their affiliations utilized these objects to both conjure resiliency in moments of suffering and contend with widespread amnesia in the years following the democratic transition. I read three types of objects across these categories: housing, food, and clothing. These three objects represent the fundamental pillars of a safe and thriving populace, and each were weaponized by dictatorial regimes to maximize suffering in victims.

This dissertation, examines how rhizomatic cultural production in late twentieth-century Tijuana-San Diego responded to processes of deterritorialization from the two nations that struggled to consolidate their shared border. It investigates how the region’s Mexican, Mexican-American and Chicano writers and artists from the 1950s to the 1990s constructed their aesthetic projects and social subjectivities by engaging multidirectional nationalistic forces from both sides of the border. Specifically, this community spread aesthetic and discursive rhizomes in a line of flight from a post-revolutionary centralist Mexico and across a settler-colonialist United States that had increasingly criminalized immigration. In the process, these artists and writers engaged countercultural movements; so doing, I conclude, they nurtured the artistic and political ties required to resist state violence at and across the U.S.-Mexico border.

My chapters focus on art and literature produced by these artists, but also concerns the politics that shaped the region’s culture-producing landscapes and institutions. The first chapter traces a move away from early twentieth century perception of the borderlands as dominated by cultural emptiness. As the chapter shows, Fernando Jordán’s El otro México; biografía de la Baja California (1951) counters this belief as he shapes an early approach of Baja California as an alter-nation. The second chapter probes the region’s emergency poetics from the first know poetic text produced in and about California in 1740s to the early 1980s. The third chapter analyzes visual art production from the 1950s to the 90s as a fronterhizomatic art practice particular to the border shaped by institutional processes of modernization. The forth chapter restages the vertiginous theoretical shift in the 1990’s from postmodernism to necropolitics. Ultimately, this project represents an alternative history of the Tijuana-San Diego border region. It attends to nationalist arborescent politics at both sides of the border but digs deeper to confirm the artistic rhizomes that continue to flourish across the divided land.

The dissertation looks beyond the dominant frames of Western epistemology and philosophy that largely determine the ways revolution and revolutionaries are conceptualized and remembered in modern society. Rather than focusing on historically grounded political projects that conform to a particular revolutionary doctrine, our focus will be on common people whose praxis posed, and still poses, an alternative to a social order premised on the separation and stratification of the commons and its people. The revolutionaries we will meet in these pages see through what we will unravel as the myth of separateness. They see through a mythic reality that veils people’s interconnections with each other, with the commons, and with the cosmos from which all life emerges. Their praxis touches this deeper reality. To ground our discussion, we will look deeply at three flashpoints of revolt against the myth as it manifested itself in the liberal capitalist regimes of the 19th and 20th centuries: The Paris Commune of 1871, the student protests of 1968 in Paris and Mexico, and a self-immolation in protest of the Vietnam War that occurred in 1970. We will thread these flashpoints together to see how, despite the distance that separates these revolts in time and space, they illuminate an alternative way of being that stands in contrast to the atomized, competitive, and militant existence that is formed in the crucible of liberal capitalist empire. Threading these flashpoints together, we will begin to reconceptualize what is meant by success and failure, beginnings and endings. Though these revolts may end with defeat and death, the way of being that they touched continues on past their historical or biographical endpoint. Like the light from a dead star or from an extinguished candle, their revolution travels across space and across time waiting for the right conditions to manifest itself again in renewed praxis. Cultural production, particularly art and literature, will serve as our vehicle for illuminating this revolution and its continuations.

This dissertation explores how Mexican efforts to construct a national identity shape representation of identity at home, and how, in turn, domestic cinema is forged in the context of foreign relations and nation-building. I argue that the idea of nation as home in cinema is inextricable from political, economic, and cultural movements that construct and unsettle borders between domestic and foreign spaces. I study six cases where cinema registers rhetorical enactments of bordering in moments of democratic transition. These efforts are visualized through the psychological effects and limits represented through the characters’ traumas and interactions with domestic spaces.

The Moroccan-descended Jewish community of Iquitos, Perú has engaged in large-scale migration to Israel since the early 2000s. Despite strong self-identification as Jews, Israel’s immigration regime requires “conversion” practices that privilege Ashkenazi-normative Jewish identifications and customs and help integrate Iquiteño migrants into Israel’s racial hierarchy. In two sets of in-depth interviews in 2016 and 2019, Iquiteño Jews explained their reasons for migrating, changes to their modes of identification, and their understanding of their future place in Israel. Their explanations reveal the tension between sociological theories of diaspora and transnationalism. After applying interview data to these theories, this thesis finds that the Iquiteño case is one example of how interested actors, including states, use the rhetoric of diaspora to stimulate transnational activity, such as philanthropy and migration, among otherwise-localized communities, thereby introducing and reinforcing external racial hierarchies among the far-flung nodes of diasporic networks. Broadly, the rhetoric of diaspora serves interested actors’ transnational political aims, which often homogenize diasporas even as they activate them.