When Aristotle labelled rhetoric as a techne, or technical art, it was because rhetoric involved observing particular acts of persuasion, and a subsequent theorization of the means through which those acts were achieved. Subsequently, rhetorical studies has concerned itself with the latter, the instruments of persuasion, for two-plus millennia, while neglecting the former: Rhetoric as study of compelling acts of artifice. Confusing techne for technology, rhetors have considered technical innovations in media as forms (e.g., literature, film, TV), ones with specific limitations and affordances for affecting public knowledge, belief, and action. However, the digital media forms of the twenty-first century reverse this historical trajectory. In becoming the rhetorical ecology of public discourse, this epoch of ubiquitous networked computing and participatory media confronts people with the unavoidable artificiality upon which their expressions of ideas and identity depends. This dissertation reconsiders the instrumental relationship between persuasion and technology by returning to rhetoric as techne—or craft guided by knowledge of that craft. Observing individuals who achieved rhetorical success with technologies in the period during which new media become dominant (roughly 2005-2020), this dissertation theorizes persuasion beginning with the fundamental technicity or artificiality of human being.

Insofar as stand-up comedians live in a condition between natural and artificial selfhood, their practice amplifies how the everyday experience of contending with the world, or oneself, is a matter of artifice that precedes any technological instruments or media. As such, they reveal that persuasion is a matter of conviction, effected through the artful presentation of oneself in one’s world, and not by convincing others via skillful use of through argumentative media. Taking stand-up comedians as interfaces, or technical media that do not mediate, this dissertation theorizes a tripartite process through which stand-up rhetoric qua techne intervenes in the normative cultural conceptions that ground social and psychic life. Comedic discourse arrests and deviates from what counts as normal, contributing original, provisional alternatives to the cultural fund of collective ideas that audiences draw from when realizing the always partial ground of their individual and public expression. The efficacy of stand-up as a personally and politically transformative practice lies, at core, in the destabilization and restabilization of depoliticized public discourses in which shared worlds are negotiated. This is true, too, of everyday eloquence in democratic cultures—from the agora of classical Athens to today’s digital global sphere.

This study aims to trace the genealogy of consumer capitalism, public life, and urban modernity in Singapore and Manila. It examines their convergence in public spaces of commerce and leisure, such as commercial streets, department stores, amusement parks, coffee shops, night markets, movie theaters, supermarkets, and shopping malls, which have captivated the residents of these cities at important historical moments during the 1930s, 1960s, and 2000s. Instead of treating capitalism and modernity as overarching and immutable, I inquire into how their configuration and experience are contingent on the historical period and geographical location.

My starting point is the shopping mall, which, differing from its suburban isolation in North America and Western Europe, dominates the burgeoning urban centers of Southeast Asia. Contrary to critical and cultural theories of commerce and consumption, consumer spaces like the mall have served as bustling hubs of everyday life in the city, shaping the parameters and possibilities of identity, collectivity, and agency without inducing reverie or docility. Focusing on logics, functions, and processes that are said to be characteristic of the mall, such as monumentality, enclosure, prestige, modernity, and spectacle, I uncover their emergence and variation in prior consumer spaces across different periods and locations. Delving into the archive, I analyze the spatial, literary, and visual cultures of these milieus. I highlight changes in the form, meaning, and usage of significant words, images, ideas, narratives, objects, practices, and spaces commonly associated with the realities of consumer capitalism, public life, leisure time, and urban modernity.

Across the various chapters, I pursue several threads: Firstly, I explore different forms of modernity, particularly sanitary modernity, a regime of health, morality, beauty, and order, which the government applies to the cityscape and its population. As discernible in its temporality and influence, I trace how its character shifts from evangelical religion in the 1930s, to national development in the 1960s, to neoliberal cosmopolitanism in the 2000s. Secondly, I discuss the passage from a bazaar economy to a formal system, with its corresponding changes to the norms of commercial arrangement, consumer behavior, and visual perception. Thirdly, I look at shifts in the dominant basis of social value in the city from the display of material wealth, to the emulation of movie stardom, to the pursuit of an excessive lifestyle. Lastly, I examine different modes of spectacle, which commercial and leisure spaces have deployed in order to attract consumers, including those that produce absorption and immersion in spectators.

Vision in Ruins explores the practice of art, video, and visuality in an era of globalization. In contrast to past writings on video beholden to its mechanisms and the legacy of western modernism, my inquiry approaches video from a philosophical, postcolonial, and feminist perspective. Sourced to its Latin root, the word video translates as "I see," a statement that illuminates how video encloses a sense of vision that is not only solely bound with the eyes, but is more broadly entwined with the transparency of a subject, its sight, and its presence. Video (I see) is the understanding of vision as an open field, one that is coupled with power and that I relate to both the visualities of modern warfare and liberal thought as it pervades the discourses of art and human rights. Against such understanding of vision as an open field, my dissertation approaches vision as a restricted site. With each assertion of video, I suggest that a boundary is drawn. My dissertation approaches video from the other side of this boundary, from the position of subjects displaced by the political histories of global war, migration and exile, and describes their attempt to rework the field of vision. Rather than treat video as an object, I treat video is as a lens onto the themes of vision, aperture, passage, opacity, disappearance, calling, and ruins. Vision in Ruins problematizes the openness of vision and seeks to write a different story of video. It reworks the visual as one attuned to the conditions of invisibility and unspeakability that often become elided in favor of 'appearance' in the forms of liberal thought. It suggests that when one works from the ruins, one invites a renewal of politicized practice, where appearance is not an object but a modality and where each appearance is also, always, a disappearance. The orientation is not to the 'appearance' of alterity but rather, but to the invisible, the unspeakable, and to the temporality of other life worlds. In order to rethink visuality in an era of globalization, I suggest we must learn to work in a gap between visuality and alterity. It is a gap that shifts art's relation to the cinematic, to war, to human rights, and to conceptions of the global-- all of which I reconsider in light of a visuality of relation that works in a space where what remains invisible and unspeakable might direct us toward a different sense of world and how we see it.

Abstract

Apparatuses, Globalities, Assemblages:

Third Cinema, Now

by

Dalida Maria Benfield

Doctor of Philosophy in Ethnic Studies

and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha, Chair

Colonial wounds endure but are refigured in 21st century cinematic landscapes. These are spaces of memory and mourning, as well as sites of creativity and transformation. New assemblages of power emerge along with equally complex amalgams of resistance, producing multiple and competing cinematic regimes. Third Cinema, the cinematic movement that emerged alongside "Third World" struggles for decolonization in the late 1960s, laid claim to a global space of cinematic production outside existing geo-political relations of power, hierarchies of communication flows, and towards the liberation of the "Third World" and its cinemas. But while Third Cinema has ample genealogies and global sites of production, its critical tools have not been sufficiently engaged in an analysis of contemporary cinematic production, including digital video, interactive video installations, Internet art, and film, in the contemporary context of globalization, the transnationalization of capital with information technology at its core. Third Cinema offers the opportunity for understanding and developing generative intersections between the cinematic decolonization movements of the "Third World" and the present context of cinematic praxis of the "Global South."

This dissertation engages the cinematic texts of Cao Fei, the Raqs Media Collective, Michelle Dizon, Cecilia Cornejo, and Fanta Régina Nacro in a conversation with Third Cinema. The texts selected for study include video, video installation, Internet art, and film. This selection highlights the diversity of contemporary cinematic practices and expands the definition of the cinematic. The process and conditions of production are analyzed, and key examples of each artists' cinematic texts are given a close reading. This conversation is anchored by three critical terms: apparatus, globality, and assemblage. Each of these draws upon genealogies that both productively resonate with historical notions of Third Cinema while also transposing it across theoretical scales. The notion of the cinematic apparatus has been key to previous theorizations of relations of power and knowledge production in cinema. It is used here as a technic for mapping the re-arrangements of power and the attendant epistemic interventions evidenced in the cinematic praxis of these artists. The inquiry is centered on the question of how each artist produces a novel assemblage of the cinematic apparatus, understood as a relationship of author, cinematic text, and spectator, and how, in turn, this produces forms of globality, epistemes that are contentious responses to particular geo-political spaces of knowledge production. The inquiry proceeds through a series of close engagements with the artists' cinematic texts, discussing the transformation of the artist/author from individual to multiple, the redefinition of the "cinema" as a series of assemblages of screen and non-screen based practices, the constitution of the spectator as a site of spectral ephemerality, and the relationship of these transformations to the epistemic and geo-political sites of cinematic praxis. The study combines this textual analysis of the artists' work with a socio-historical analysis of information communication technologies on global and local scales. An interdisciplinary set of theoretical frameworks are mobilized, including post- and decolonial theory, philosophy, media studies, transnational feminism, and Third Cinema.

In the cinematic praxis of these artists, I find productive resonances and dissonances with the critical tools of Third Cinema. Along the variegated routes of "information society," these artists create new forms of cinematic praxis and knowledge production. They significantly destabilize global constructions of race and gender, which they encounter in the contexts of factory workers in China, discourses of information technology and development in India, and global warfare as experienced in the U.S., France, Chile, and Burkina Faso. When thought together as a field, these artists constitute related sites of aesthetic, political, and economic arrangements of cinematic forms. These cinemas reconstruct relations of power and refigure global discourses that produce temporary workers, the "Global South," and permanent war. The tracing of the remnants, refusals and re-compositions of the cinematic apparatus, and, in tandem, Third Cinema, reveals the consequences of colonial conditions for global cinemascapes, and creates a platform for present and future emancipatory cinematic praxis.

Archipelago of Resettlement charts the routes and roots of postwar Vietnamese refugees to two understudied sites of diasporic resettlement. From April to November 1975, the U.S. military processed over 112,000 Vietnamese refugees on Guam; from 1977 to 1979, Israel granted asylum and citizenship to 366 non-Jewish Vietnamese refugees. Theorizing the figure of the archipelago, this dissertation charts connections between non-contiguous, seemingly disparate sites of analysis. Despite important differences between these two case studies, Guam and Israel-Palestine are connected via two interrelated nodes of political violence. First, both are strategic sites of U.S. military empire. Second, both are spaces of settler colonialism. Vietnamese refugees absorbed into these spaces must grapple with what this dissertation calls the “refugee settler condition”: the vexed positionality of subjects whose very condition of political legibility via citizenship is predicated upon the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population.

Organized into three sections of two chapters each, Archipelago of Resettlement reconfigures understandings of both space and time. “Part I: Uncovering Sourcings” focuses on the pre-1975 period prior to Vietnamese refugee resettlement, offering an alternative genealogy of Asian American politics and a diasporic history of Third World Liberation. Chapter one re-remembers an occluded genealogy of Asian American political subjectivity. Rather than accept Guam and Israel-Palestine as relatively recent concerns for the field of Asian American studies, this chapter insists on the foundational influence of U.S. settler militarism in Guam, and American support of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine, in shaping the emergence of an Asian American racial politics in the late 1960s. Chapter two theorizes and exemplifies a method of diasporic history: one that traces connections between seemingly unrelated spaces and times in order to illuminate contours of power—in this case, U.S. military empire—and articulate points of coalition between differentially-situated struggles against this structure of power—such as the contemporaneous decolonial movements in Vietnam, Palestine, and Guam.

“Part II: Tracing Passages” analyzes the passage of Vietnamese refugees to Guam in 1975 and to Israel in 1977 and 1979, mapping archipelagoes of settler colonialism and U.S. empire. Drawing heavily from original archival research conducted at the Micronesian Area Research Center (MARC) and the Israel State Archives (ISA), this section critiques the settler colonial institutions’ moral cooptation of the Vietnamese refugee crisis, identifying how such institutions—the U.S. military on Guam and the Israeli government in Israel—used humanitarian rhetoric in order to direct attention away from ongoing Indigenous dispossession. Such humanitarian rhetoric positioned Vietnamese refugees in an antagonistic relationship to Indigenous struggles for decolonization, since the refugee figure was coopted to re-justify the benevolent power of the military and the state. Both chapter three, which focuses on Guam, and chapter four, which focuses on Israel-Palestine, end with instances of refugee refusal: that is, the refusal to conform to the script of the “good refugee” and to ventriloquize state narratives of military and governmental benevolence, in the face of ongoing settler colonial violence.

“Part III: Unsettling Resettlements” examines cultural texts depicting the refugee settler condition in Guam and Israel-Palestine. How was the late 1970s moment of archipelagic Vietnamese refugee resettlement remembered, represented, and reconfigured? How do Vietnamese refugee settlers relate to ongoing Chamorro efforts for decolonization and Palestinian struggles for liberation? Chapter five reads three quotidian texts—a Chamorro high school student’s article, a Vietnamese refugee repatriate’s memoir, and a mixed Chamorro-and-Vietnamese college student’s blog—to query the temporality of settler militarism on Guam. Unlike other forms of settler colonialism, in which the settler articulates an affective permanent attachment to the land, settler militarism on Guam is marked by the transient nature of militarized bodies that circulate between U.S. bases, eluding traditional forms of settlement. The politics of staying, of (re)settling, then, resonates very differently on Guam than in other settler colonial contexts. Chapter six grapples with the overlapping temporalities of multiple claims to the land of Israel-Palestine. Both Jewish Zionists and displaced Palestinians claim nativity to the land of historic Palestine. Thrust into this conflict, Vietnamese refugees, who were absorbed by the State of Israel in the late 1970s, were forced to navigate the conflicting temporal claims of these two populations. In order to navigate these temporal entanglements, this chapter draws from Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti’s assertion that “Our homeland is the shape of the time we spent in it.” This chapter concludes by examining the archipelagic movement of the refugee settler condition, from Israel-Palestine back to Vietnam. What happens when Vietnamese Israelis, whose lands were confiscated and redistributed by the post-1975 Communist government of Vietnam when they left as refugees, return to reclaim their lands? This chapter analyzes the film The Journey of Vaan Nguyen to argue that another way that Vietnamese Israelis and Palestinians can begin to articulate an emergent vocabulary of potential parallels across the impasses of settler colonialism is by juxtaposing the uneven similarities between their two populations’ respective histories of land dispossession.

Archipelago of Resettlement concludes with a gesture towards futurities. An afterword discusses works of Vietnamese diasporic speculative fiction to query how an archipelagic Vietnamese refugee sensibility can point us towards an ethical response to the contemporary Syrian refugee crisis, and how the refugee histories analyzed in this dissertation promise to haunt and shape our futures.

Abstract

Combat in a “World Not for Us:” Revolutionary Writing in Aimé Césaire and Ghassan Kanafani

By

Amirah Mohammad Silmi

Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Trinh, T. Minh-ha, Chair

This dissertation explores how the writings of two colonized writers, Aimé Césaire and Ghassan Kanafani, constitute in themselves acts of freedom by combatting a rationalized knowledge that determines what is to be known and what is to be unknown. The dissertation underlines how an act of freedom, as exemplified by the texts of both writers, entails courage in confronting the cruel in a colonized life, as it entails the bravery of taking the risk of tearing open shields of concealment and denial.

The dissertation is not an investigation of the similarities and/or differences between the two writers. It is rather an “excavation” of their texts for points where there remain fragments hidden in margins or buried in gaps that point to other lives, other modes of being, in which the colonized share more than their colonized being. The dissertation is thus a relating of their writings, it is a linking, beyond classificatory categories, of the spaces where their writings mobilize and evoke each other, a search for spaces where they resonate.

In both writers’ texts, the word (poetic image) is a material object, which carries with it the load of the life that gave birth to it. In its materiality, the word carries a force that allows it to mobilize another. This study is thus not an attempt to extract the reality of the colonized from Kanafani’s and Césaire’s texts, but rather the focus here is on the latter’s creative ability, their moving force, their effects as acts of combat.

The dissertation demonstrates how it is in the realm of passions that both writers’ texts operate to allow for a non-rationalized knowledge. To be colonized is to live a degenerate, stagnant, and dead life. The mobilization of passions become not only a mobilization of other sources and ways of knowing, but more importantly a mobilization of the forces of life. The combat in both writers is not against an external entity, but it takes the form of a series of battles through which the colonized seeks to rid himself of his colonized being, to shed it off, to allow for the possibility of another life. Their texts are, therefore, not revolutionary in the sense that they call for action, but rather in that they do not allow for an anesthetized being.

A free practice does not allow for a confined being, including imprisonment in an identity or within an already defined historical trajectory. The writings of Aimé Césaire and Ghassan Kanafani refuse to position the colonized as the Other, who seeks the position of the Same. Entailed in this refusal, their defiance of existing discourses on the colonized. Their combat is not one of a politics of identity. Their writings dismantle any established identity while blocking the possibility of establishing one. Moreover, part of their defiance to colonial as well as anti-colonial discourses is their rejection of a historical discourse of the Revolution that leaves the colonized as the Other and past of the colonizer. This refusal takes the form of maintaining that freedom is a practice not an end to be achieved. Acting outside the mode of being of exchange values, the fidai/rebel, in both writers, is not to be asked why he is willing to sacrifice his life for a dignified life. For a free act cannot be confined by questions of utility or return.

My dissertation project, Disappear, Disappearing: Perceptibilities of Erasure in the Works of Ana Mendieta and Cecilia Vicuña, begins with experiences of disappearing and feeling disappeared that draw together near-silences and ephemeral marks produced in the experience of layered, (neo)colonial forms of perceptual and social effacement. Disappear, Disappearing inquires into how the disappearing lines, ephemeral gestures, and precarious marks made by Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta, and Chilean artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s act as apertures into these interstices of gendered, racialized and ecological forms of violence. Yet I attend here not to the spectacular or visible registers of violence, but rather those registers that form the silent prerequisites to dominant modes of visibility, operating through discursive and epistemic erasure and negation. These “disappearing” zones are not readily apparent or “perceptible” within dominant regimes of visibility, even as such experiences of violence are palpably embodied, felt, sensed and recalled.

Spending time with Mendieta’s dissolving Silueta series and Cecilia Vicuña’s early arte precario of the 1970’s and early 1980’s, this project brings forward a layered experiential and perceptual field that an otherwise pervasive (neo)colonial gaze persistently projects into nothingness, non-existence, silence, and irrelevance. Working across experiences of exile and displacement across the hemispheric Americas, both Mendieta and Vicuña worked closely and with ternura (tenderness) toward the sites of their temporary installations. The fragmented, vital field of near silences and layered forms of disappearing, brought into contact here by two artists’ careful practices of receptivity with place, site, and minor ephemeral materials, substantializes varied forms of disappearing as durational, textured, lived sites/states to which aesthetic attentiveness can and ought to continually return its attentions in order to register both tactics of vibrant survival and embedded discursive violence. By dilating the experiences of these near-silent erasure-zones, I argue that Mendieta and Vicuña both reveal and theorize neglected perceptual landscapes upon which dominant orders of “visibility” depend in order for “something” to be brought into perception.

As these artists spend time with near silences—and as I spend time with their works—I seek to bring forward the notion that erasure and imperceptibility—when understood as affecting those marked-and-effaced by racialized, gendered and ecological forms of precarity and erasure— far from marking an absence or limit of perception, open sites where entire universes of lives and communities take place.

Offering a critical theoretical account of Mendieta and Vicuña’s works that treats their work as a form of intellectual research, this project contributes to the nascent fields of Latinx, Latin American and Hemispheric Visual Studies, particularly attending to the decolonial and feminist energies and interventions emanating from Mendieta and Vicuña’s practices and writings. At the same time, the project attends not only to the huecos or holes in the study of feminist and radical women in Latinx and Latin American arts as critical to studies of arts and aesthetic theory more broadly, but also—inverting the order of compartmentalized knowledge—suggests that Mendieta and Vicuña, as artists-theorists, make palpable far more vast, forceful erasures at work that implicate entire epistemological and socio-political fabrics of negation.