Tarot is an oracular and speaking literature, embedded in magical divination practices, and as such, has an inherently strange and irrational relationship to history and even time itself. This work applies the oracular tarot to a number of situations and contexts, all of which will illuminate some facet of magic and narrative as being living, affective agents in the world. I explore the intersections of psychoanalysis and literary theory and the ways that these disciplines prepare a reader for the irrational practices and results of engaging oracular texts. I allow tarot to introduce itself through an auto-ethnographic and phenomenological description of a reading encounter and present a literary analysis of its results. From there, I extend the texts, practices and results of reading oracles outward, toward the texts, practices and results of reading more broadly within a narratively-constructed world.

I present tarot as a pedagogical tool that allows students to physically explore and examine semiotics and embodied reading practices through two classroom case studies. In the first lesson plan, signification systems and reading practices are examined in a Communication course through the restaging of a 16th century narrative parlor game and oracular group readings. In the second, after interpreting and physically embodying individual tarot cards in a Theatre & Dance course, students develop contextually dynamic choreography within living tarot spreads.

Further, I examine the ways that tarot has replicated and renewed itself through history as a facet of its aliveness and the biography of tarot in the hands of Stuart R. Kaplan, founder of US Games Systems, Inc. I present a dialectic of demystification and remystification in which the occult object is stripped of its enchantments in order to be turned into a commodity, which is then remystified by the logics of fetishism, commerce and narrative industries. This remystification then opens up the magical object to mass-distribution and reach while generating forms of magical practice that were not imagined by the commodity producer, thereby demonstrating how a rational and disenchanted age provides the tools and technologies necessary to re-enchant the world. Throughout this dissertation, I present a number of challenges and meaningful alternatives to rationality. By divining literature, I mean to re-enchant our understanding of narrative. By a history of tarot, I mean to demonstrate how tarot is alive and detail something about how it has lived.

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 examines how different perspectives on apocalypse and catastrophe allow for alternative understandings of the formation and importance of community through an examination of intersections among race, religion, culture, and politics in apocalyptic texts and rhetoric in late 20th- and early 21st-century United States literature. Using texts such as Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkin’s Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, and Matthew Mather’s Cyberstorm, I analyze how apocalypse narratives serve a myriad of functions that center around contradictory understandings of the function of community. An understanding of apocalypse as a deserved and inevitable consequence of bad, individual human behavior is one persistent definition, from U.S. Puritan days to the present. Although it is important to see how this definition continues to have power in contemporary culture, I also analyze apocalypse as an ongoing process shaped by racism, genocide, and violence firmly rooted in a settler colonialist and imperialist system that depends on structures of inequality. This is ultimately important because ideas about apocalypse impact the way U.S. empire is understood: either as a naturalized structure that rewards those who recognize and change their behavior, or alternatively, as a structure that people have created, and that people can change, which stigmatizes and punishes those on the outside of U.S. empire. By reframing apocalypse in this manner, I transform it into a generative category of analysis for understanding the U.S. empire as well as anti-imperialist writers and movements. A deeper re-consideration of the apocalypse genre, with special attention to intersections among race, religion, and gender, can help us understand how theorizing and practicing community is key to survival and a hopeful, more equitable future.

This dissertation reads articulations of caste across cultural texts, focusing on 20th -21st c. South Asia and Brazil. As a Native American Indigenous Studies inquiry, this project considers how caste nuances notions of indigeneity and de/coloniality, and as a relational inquiry, this project traces caste across period and place towards complicating hegemonic U.S. formulations of race and inequity. Reading methodologies vary per chapter (organized by films, feminist texts, abolitionist writings, and mixed-genre race/caste literatures) but generally draw upon frames in Native American Indigenous Studies, Subaltern Studies, New Materialisms, and women of color feminisms. The dissertation hypothesizes caste as culture of im/material stigma as well as ontoepistemology for understanding contemporary global inequity. And it argues that the natureculture re/production of caste relies on material-discursive notions of “blood” effectively partitioning Non/Life hunger vs. commensalities along biopolitical lines of difference.

"Property in Modern Aesthetics," grapples with how discourses of race, gender and class affected US literary and visual modernist forms. I examine art objects ranging from Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917) and Noah Purifoy's White/Colored (2001) to texts such as Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson (1985) and Don Mee Choi's The Morning News Is Exciting (2010). Utilizing critical gender, race and legal scholarship, I trace how legal notions of exclusionary properties situate the politics of modern abstract forms. Modernist artistic and literary productions were the historical manifestations of US racial and gender formations, and I argue that the abstract forms of modernist art and literature were politically consistent with early 20th-century property laws. The modernist found-object form can be understood as the aestheticization of property. Inspecting the aestheticization of property as a formal imperative allows for analyses of historical and political strictures, and for the production of diverse cultural narratives to converge.

In order to investigate visual and literary production that expounds colonial and legal understandings of property, I contrast canonical, modernist approaches with Black and Asian American cultural producers whose bodies of work interrogate the very premise of property, by re-imaging provenance beyond its current origin/financial narrative. In my project, Black and Asian American cultural producers, though marginalized by current canonical constructs, are poets and artists currently offering modes of expression outside systems of the colonial imaginary. I contextualize the interactions of individual poets and artistic movements with and against the social movements of their time, offering a broader view of US visual cultures and poetics.