First formalized in Italy in the fifteenth century, linear perspective gave rise to the very idea of the “fidelity” of an image: that a two-dimensional representation could be said to correspond perfectly with an anteceding world scene—or, what’s more, that new, never-before-seen images could be endowed with such detail as to convince a viewer of their actuality. The inventions of the photograph in the 1820s, cinema in the 1880s, and the desktop graphical user interface (GUI) in the 1960s all represent a migration of the image to the forefront of our lives. Indeed, with the commercialization of “virtual reality” headsets in the 2010s, this movement has continued to the forefront of our faces themselves. According to a recent Nielsen report, the amount of time the modern subject now spends consuming visual media has expanded to over eleven hours per day. While spending well in excess of half our waking hours in front of screens, we might consider the serious ontological question: “Where are we when we are looking at images?”

The obvious answer is, of course, “at our desk,” or “in a gallery,” or “at work.” But the nearly six centuries that have unfolded following the codification of perspective in 1435 have seen the gradual emergence of the notion of “virtual space.” When our attention becomes fixated on a screen, for example, we are sometimes perceived as being “absorbed by,” “lost into,” or “taken with” the images depicted; we become “drawn in” by an image or “caught up in” a digital game. Our metaphor for attentiveness to media—especially media that generate an illusion of “depth” or “immersion”—is often explicitly spatial. When we spend more and more time “in” virtual spaces, as the trope so often goes, do we conversely spend less and less time in what we have hitherto called “the real world”? How have spatial dialectics changed to accommodate the increasing number and intricacy of virtual spaces with which, or in which, we engage each day?

This document explores some of the logics of our being “immersed” in virtual spaces. It begins by tracing the idea of a technologically-mediated “virtual space” back to one possible point of origin in Federico de Montefeltro’s studioli, two rooms constructed using systematized perspectival techniques to give the appearance of panoramic depth. Taking these ambitious art objects as a starting point, I demonstrate that the renaissance witnessed the beginning of a “stereoscopic regime” that gave the viewing subject the tools by which to interpret future perspectival images, prefiguring the flourishing of virtual spaces in the nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries.

Following this exploration of the studioli as primordial virtual spaces, chapter 2 seeks to first quantify, and then qualify, virtual spaces according to possible metrics of size and value: how does one “measure” or “map” virtual space? Encounters with Baudrillard and Benjamin in this chapter help illustrate how virtual spaces exaggerate the actual, overlaying it with the virtual, before establishing those virtual spaces as the new consensual real. Contrary to Baudrillard’s claim in Simulacra and Simulation, however, obviation of the actual does not mean obviation of the real: indeed, the real, which has by the twentieth century been resolutely subordinated to the human sensorium, simply expands to include virtual spaces as they proliferate.

Chapter 3 then looks at two case studies of the photographic image being used to generate novel virtual spaces. Part one discusses artist Taryn Simone’s 2008 photographic documentation of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, concluding that her images of families and lineages affected by the genocide reanimate the individuals and stories they depict, producing a whole spectrum of virtual realities in which the family members themselves are both restored and lost with each viewing. In this context, we understand the image, like the losses it endeavors to describe, to perforate the actual with an ever-expanding number of virtual realities, each poignant and substantive in its own right.

Part two of this chapter takes an alternate tack on the genre of the photographic portrait by examining a widely distributed ad campaign shot by Annie Leibovitz in the early 2010s, asking whether the commercial image has similar world-generating properties to the artistic or memorial image. To what extent are both photographic series “immersive” and “generative” independent of their original motives? Both studies similarly illustrate how photographs codify, masquerade as, and re-present history, producing exaggerated virtual spaces which their viewers are then compelled to inhabit. Chapter 3 ends by claiming that the very idea of postmodernity (Jamesonian), which entails “depthlessness,” mistrust of metanarrative, and recourse to irony, only goes so far in describing the commercial photographic portrait, which indeed contains elements of depth and sincerity endemic to emergent virtual spaces. Virtual space can therefore be described, rather, as a product of modernity—or, indeed, of “the early modern,” as chapter 1 has previously endeavored to show.

Finally, chapter 4 arrives at digital environments of the computing era, suggesting that there is no longer any “outside of the image.” In an effort to understand what this means for the embodied human subject, part one begins by describing how the history of computing has long conflated the human with the technological, especially across lines of race and gender. The chapter then advances to suggest how this conflation situates our implicit point of view to “within” the digital interfaces with which we engage, represented most conspicuously by the figure of the cyborg. It is therefore no surprise that one of the defining commercial imperatives of the 2010s for digital media has been the movement of the screen onto the human face. In 2019, dozens of companies are competing to market virtual-, augmented-, and mixed-reality apparatuses as both enterprise and consumer-oriented “solutions” for the failures of the human body. These failures include the body’s lack of data awareness, network connectivity, and, most importantly for this document, lack of natural visual apparatus capable of integrating the diverse and expanding array of virtual spaces that parade just beyond our field of view.

The document concludes that the slow progression of the stereoscopic regime, which begins with the perspectival image and extends to the head-mounted display, has not yet, contrary to the opinions of twentieth-century media theorists, obviated the actual, but rather granted us privileged access to the many “other” possible worlds first described by Leibniz.

In Black and Blur, Fred Moten asks, “what if we start acting like whiteness is not the surround?” This dissertation takes up this question, exploring practices and possibilities for decentering Modernity’s pervasive white subject. Through various modes of reading, writing, feeling, and relating, I describe a listening practice that could disorient and destabilize my own white subjecthood. When I say listening in this project, I am really thinking about a kind of embodied sensibility or attunement, a way of relating that is multisensory and not based purely on “hearing.” A listening that attempts to decenter white subjecthood requires a radical reframing where we move away from the conception of listening as silent attention, attending instead to forms of what Sadiya Hartman describes as “the shrieks, the moans, the nonsense, and the opacity” of “black noise.” This is where an engagement with the color blue becomes integral to this listening practice. Blue is important here for its role in Black studies, its theological history, its proximity to darkness, and its potential for destabilizing the subject. While I attend to sonic and vocal evocations, resonances, and rhythms in the texts I read, I consider blue as a figure that pushes against the edges of language, sight, and sound. In the texts, blue is never purely visual, it is full of noise and frequency. Blue is constantly falling into darkness, into sound or music, into void, indeterminacy, and infinity. Attending to blue alongside sound allows me to meditate at sensory edges, looking to places where those edges dissolve into echoic atmospheres and darkness.

The texts I engage in this dissertation might all loosely be called “autotheory.” A perpetually inchoate genre that resists stable classification, autotheory might be best described as a kind of writing, thinking, theorizing, and feeling that engages, disrupts, and distorts the coherent self. By investigating forms of selfhood that are de-articulated and deformed, I am pointed toward a disoriented, multi-sensuous practice that destabilizes and challenges my own white subject position and embodiment. Because the listening practice I describe moves toward disorientation, it must be approached diagonally and indirectly. So, I lean heavily on association throughout the chapters, jumping around and leaving connections open-ended.

My first chapter takes up Fred Moten’s essay “Blue Vespers” from his 2017 book, Black and Blur, in which he explores the artist Chris Ofili’s series of blue paintings. Weaving Ofili’s work into his own, Moten gives us a radical, persistent blue seriality that works through prayer and devotion rather than address. Moten’s writing makes possible alternate formations of sociality, unraveling the seemingly discrete bounds of Modern white subjecthood and enacting a radically entangled “we.” My second chapter takes up two of Maggie Nelson’s experimental texts, 2009’s Bluets and 2015’s The Argonauts. Bringing Nelson into the conversation allows for a shift in my exploration of unraveled whiteness. Here, I attend to the ways in which Nelson undoes her own selfhood in forms of writing that linger in impossibility, unwritability, and plurality. My final chapter offers an initial attempt at this listening practice through extended readings of Claudia Rankine’s 2015 book, Citizen: An American Lyric. Rather than assume that Rankine’s engagement with the second person “you” is an invocation that allows for white understanding, I explore instead what kind of listening can or must occur when there is no mutual, stable, intimate ground on which to communicate.

Each chapter is its own encounter, in which I get caught up in an indeterminate milieu of fascination, resonance, and sensation, and where my selfhood gets bent alongside the various selves made by the texts. Each of these texts offers what I see as a spiritual experiment in writing the self, whether through experiences of art, color, collectivity, love, pain, history, or violence. I read through a sort of skewed phenomenology, where I am led by embodied, sensuous experience but not quite from a coherent first-person perspective. While I attempt to linger in a disorienting blue fog throughout this dissertation, this practice must also repeatedly reflect upon itself. The self-reflexivity required for a listening that decenters whiteness must never cohere or congeal, for it would merely reinscribe whiteness as the methodological focus. There is thus an inherent tension to this practice, for it must be self-reflexive and self-critical, while simultaneously shifting focus away from my white self. It is a listening that can never be finished, that will always have to begin again.

This dissertation combines literary study, cultural history, and critical bibliography to examine the development of a specific literary genre in the early United States, from the Federalist era to just prior to the onset of the Civil War. I argue that the social and cultural impact of biography occurs not solely through literary narrative but also through the materiality of the printed book. Ideology, in other words, is transmitted through literary artifacts via what we traditionally define as the "text," but textual meanings are mediated through paratexts, book bindings, paper, typography, presswork, page design, and illustration. Using archives, documents, financial records, and correspondence related to the early U.S. book trade, I recover the social thought of printers and booksellers as they understood the role of the printed book in fostering cultural nationalism. Combining the methods of book history and bibliography with conceptual frameworks developed by Benedict Anderson and Pierre Bourdieu--on the imagined political community and the field of cultural production, respectively--the dissertation focuses throughout on the specificities of primary source materials to make a methodological contribution to literary and cultural history.

From 1800 onwards the printed book was a media technology that could unify Americans through the collective reading of national biography, even as the specificities of book formats and the range of printed materials subtly reinforced class divisions within American society. With the rise of urban environments and the penny press in the 1840s, I further demonstrate that biographical pamphlets tied to P.T. Barnum's American Museum helped foster a critical discourse within U.S. print culture about the rise of a culture industry. Furthermore, by 1848 many biographical texts combined narrative with illustration to shape public perception regarding the U.S.-Mexican War. Using publisher's records along with evidence of the subscription book trade, I argue that texts about the Mexican War linked the sites of combat and military life in Mexico with American cities, small towns, and the private domain of the bourgeois home. I conclude with two investigations of how biography helped structure modalities of literary authorship in the mid-nineteenth-century. In Israel Potter (1855), Herman Melville wrote a literary biography that was both a meditation on the challenges and failures faced by authors in a depersonalized publishing environment as well as a coded reflection on how his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne used the genre of biography to secure political and financial success through writing the Life of Franklin Pierce. My second investigation of authorship involves the publication history of Evert A. and George Duyckinck's Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855), a literary anthology that offered authoritative capsule biographies of writers in the American tradition.

Exposing Abjection: Racial Violence in 19th and 20th Century Photography examines photographs of racial violence and interrogates Western subjecthood’s reliance on representations of the racial other as abject. Photographs from the Holocaust, American lynchings, the Ku Klux Klan, and anthropological portraits comprise the chapters of this dissertation and their analyses. These images are traditionally seen as displays of otherness and I propose a revised spectatorship that instead asks what kind of self is being developed through the act of looking at these photographic documents. In doing so, this dissertation moves away from the hypervisuality of racialized bodies and works toward decentering spectacle for the purposes of exposing the visual and cultural rhetoric that has been utilized in developing the narrative of a racialized humanity.

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary engagement with the fields of visual studies, psychoanalytic theory, and cultural studies that specifically addresses the role of photography in the development of a racialized humanity. In particular, the psychoanalytical concepts of abjection, whole body-image, and coherent bodily ego facilitate my examination of the photographs’ function as both historical documents and personal mementos. By considering both the historical significances and personal meanings that the images document, I ultimately argue that the symbolic language of the visual rhetoric has the capacity to enact and lead to actual acts of racial violence. As such, examining the visual rhetoric in 19th and 20th century photographs of racial violence makes possible alternative interpretations that do not rely on the overdetermination of harmed, racialized bodies. Through a study of the photographs, I examine how our viewing of them can disrupt rather than maintain notions of humanity that require the abjection of the racial other.

After a record-breaking swell in global displacement marking recent years up to 2016-2017, questions surrounding refugees and forced migration, displacement and exile, home and host, have reached new levels of popularity and timeliness. For all the high-stakes discussion, though, there remains a problem, in the tendency of the predominant discourse to eclipse and essentialize, staticize and passivize the Refugee and Forced Migration subject. It is a predilection reproduced in the dynamically growing corresponding surge of interest in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies as well, its own multi- and inter-disciplinary field: one which has been answered by a call from the literary-aesthetic domain. As championed by the Oxford Journal in the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), the advancement of a new sub-field with Literary Refugee and Forced Migration Studies offers an exciting opportunity to, as asked in its 2016 Special Issue, seek narratives reimagining those subjects of Refugee and Forced Migration experience “as active participants that use rhetorical and aesthetic means to inform, push against, and redefine the mechanisms that construct them as subjects.” In other words, in delineating Refugee and Forced Migration Literature as its own genre, replete with formal as well as thematic elements, as a critical intervention adding nuance, complexity and multi-directional agency; a chance to render visible what it called a “discrete field from which to develop new theoretical paradigms and methods of inquiry.”

My dissertation takes this project further still by advancing what I argue is an especially productive and revelatory sub-genre in the coining of the Refugee and Forced Migration Bildungsroman. The utilization of the Bildungsroman as a literary coming-of-age form offers unique capacities for the narrating character-protagonist as Refugee and Forced Migration subject here, providing a non-traditional kind of lesson in the coming together of education (bildung) with the novel (roman). In a progressive critical reading of narratological techniques employed across three such literary works, I build the Refugee and Forced Migration Bildungsroman as a sub-genre which allows the release(1), expression(2), and connection(3) for the subject of those pieces rendered inside(1-i), outside(2-ii), and in-between(3-iii) by the experience. It is through the narrating character-protagonists building themselves into-being through these stages of discourse, that the broken and fragmentary become pieces of a mosaic, material for the story being told and the subject being built. In so doing, this study determines what the text, as-text, does for both narrator and narratee, its openings and possibilities, insights and intricacies. In bringing the possibilities of the literary-fictional form to its utmost, this Bildungsroman allows for, indeed constructs and demands, an embrace of a different kind of engagement, in feeling, thinking and valuing what traditional forms and dominant systems would fail to include, cannot encompass, or would not recognize (as is critiqued within). The Refugee and Forced Migration Bildungsroman as literary sub-genre, and its unique mosaic-experiential aesthetic therein, becomes one answer to the problem: reading narrative as a precondition to making possible more complex and inclusive modes of discourse.

My dissertation project studies the practice of force-feeding at Guantánamo Bay detention camp and how incarcerated individuals mobilize their bodies against indefinite confinement. Using the critical-analytical methods of feminist science and visual cultures studies, I examine force-feeding within longer histories of racially gendered subjection such as vivisection and behavior modification in order to consider how the feeding tube came to be used as an instrument of punishment on the orientalized body of Muslim men perceived to be terrorists. Through empirical research, textual interpretation, and aesthetic analysis, my dissertation intervenes in the fields of critical prison studies, and science and technology studies by foregrounding genealogies of biomedicalization and how those incarcerated reclaim corporeal agency through practices such as hunger striking. Ultimately, I argue that force-feeding is commensurate with other interrogation techniques that have become more mainstream since the Cold War, emphasizing the medicalization of war tactics and punishment.

Chapter one, “Vivisectional Mandate: Behavioral Science and Torture from the Cold War to the War on Terror,” follows the ways that the Cold War’s experimentation sets the stage for the war on terror. In particular, I situate the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques of the war on terror within Cold War behavioral science in order to track the role psychology has played in the progression of biopolitical torture techniques that aim to discipline racialized bodies. The second chapter, “From Cracking the Mind to Bodily Abjection: Situating Force-Feeding in the Torture Archive,” considers how force-feeding transforms the medical clinic into a site of punitive suffering. How is this transformation linked to the emergence of biotechnologies geared towards the optimization of life in the early part of the 20th century? These questions expand outward to be considerations of patient and prisoner autonomy in the wake of right-to-die litigation and the use of the feeding tube in US domestic prisons. My third chapter, “Suspended Animation: Force-Feeding and the Visuality of Pain,” analyzes a policy manual on techniques for managing hunger striking at Guantánamo Bay detention camp alongside the visual testimonies of prisoner Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel and activist Yasiin Bey. This chapter investigates how the state frames medical ethics inside of the camps and how the emphasis placed on care obfuscates not only the demands of the prisoners but also the feeding tube as carceral technology. The fourth chapter, “Staging Incapacitation: Hunger Striking in the Wake of Force-Feeding,” considers the practice of hunger striking and self-harm at Guantánamo Bay. Here I examine prisoner’s testimonials of hunger striking and how such resistance to policies of corporeal wholeness functions as a viable form of political self-expression.

By situating force-feeding practices at Guantánamo Bay into a history of medical experimentation, I reveal the inadequacies of prevailing theories of biopower, theories that are not capacious enough to account for how state sponsored torture is underwritten by the operation of Islamophobia and institutionalized racism. Tracing out an archaeology of state torture with the tools of critical prison studies and science and technology studies reveals Guantánamo Bay as neither a space of life nor death, but rather of what I refer to as suspended animation, a pointedly medicalized mode of living death.

Lyric and the Rhetoric of the Serial Mode in Twentieth Century American Poetry: Figuring Voice in the Work of Spicer, Berrigan, and Ashbery

Serial poetry has been recognized as an important formal category and writing practice in postwar experimental poetry, but the vital relationship between seriality and conventional aspects of the lyric genre has been obscure. After critiques of "lyric" that argue the term is politically suspect because it is linked to Romantic ideologies of the subject, new, historicized models of lyric emphasizing the functions and effects of voice have returned in recent criticism of Modernist and postwar experimental writing. Building on this recent criticism, this dissertation proposes that lyric rhetoric informs the turn towards the serial mode in poems by Jack Spicer, John Ashbery and Ted Berrigan. The serial poetry of these postwar writers makes lyric poetry function contextually, reviving the notion of voice. Seriality is best understood as a mode, not a form, that decontextualizes and re-contextualizes prior lyric fragments and allows poets to think about social relationships in terms of poetic ones, and vice versa.

Seriality has been discussed in criticism of Spicer, but has not been a key term in appraisals of book-length poems by Berrigan and Ashbery. Therefore my research offers seriality as a new perspective to understand these poets' practices of citation, appropriation and generic mixing: methods of constructing their own poetic voices out of existing textual materials from traditions that they write themselves into. I argue that these practices of textual rearrangement and revision offer a model of historically responsive lyric that challenges assumptions about how postwar poets read lyric and imagine more engaged audiences for their own writing. Through analysis of the serial mode in poems by Spicer, Berrigan, and Ashbery, I trace the outline of a common poetic voice in different series constructed from diverse materials: an epistolary exchange, a recursive sequence of sonnets transformed by scissors and scotch tape, and a meditation about lyric that is written in diaristic prose. I frame my analysis with a critical discussion of "The New Lyric Studies" and modern histories of lyric genre by Marjorie Perloff, Mark Jeffreys, Virginia Jackson, Mutlu Konuk Blasing, and others. Lyric rhetoric and voice in the serial mode matters, I propose, to scholars of 20th century American experimental literature seeking to move beyond reductive conceptual oppositions that divide the field.

The birth of modernist art in South America is largely attributed to the Uruguayan artist, Joaquín Torres-García. Born in Montevideo, Torres-García spent forty years living abroad in Europe and the United States, before returning home. Because his life was divided between Europe and the Americas, his artwork and legacy are discussed as exemplars of art as mestizaje, but to label him thusly performs an erasure of both the Indigenous influence on his aesthetic and his commitment to establish a truly Latin American art. His homecoming was not heralded by a desire to impose an imperialist aesthetic on Uruguay but inspired him to establish an autochthonous art, first through the Asociación de Arte Constructivo (1935-39) and then through the Taller Torres-García (1942-62), which outlived him by over a decade.

In this dissertation, I interpret both his artwork and his literature as philosophical texts, as such, I examine the Indoamerican roots in his thinking and art practice and seek to reorient the assumed direction of influence on South American modernism away from Europe and back to American soil. I then place Torres-García and his body of work within the Chickasaw academic, Jodi Byrd’s, theory of cacophony. If one of the failures of postcolonial theory is that it flattens relations into a binary, cacophony, a concept Byrd builds from the Chickasaw-Choctaw notion of haksuba, seeks to nuance this. Reading Torres-García within this framework, I argue, allows me to simultaneously critique him and his indigenismo ideology, while also analyzing his Indigenous modernism and its attempt to create community within and across the Americas.