UC Santa Barbara

My dissertation, "Visual Poetics, Racial Politics: Seeing Citizenship in Multiethnic US Literatures," develops an emerging and significant nexus of literary and visual studies to examine the relationship between and among visuality, racialization, and national belonging. In the United States, racist and colonialist visual tropes and caricatures continue to shape who is seen as a citizen in ways that have profound material consequences. While these representations have been widely discussed within visual studies, literary scholars have yet to engage in detail the ways that authors deploy visual aesthetics in their work to represent, reframe, and resist these controlling images. This project excavates a tradition of visual poetics within a unique archive of contemporary Black, Indigenous, and Latinx multimedia literature that collages word and image to critique the category of citizen while envisioning belonging beyond citizenship’s purview. Reading multimedia literature alongside contemporaneous visual archives and critical race histories, my work creates a lexicon for analyzing literature’s visual imagination and the dynamic ways that multiethnic authors hack into it to redraw the boundaries of belonging. Visual citations, such as the iconic empty hoodie that appears on the cover of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) or the Bureau of Indian Affairs blood quantum charts that Deborah Miranda remixes into satirical art in her Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013), not only speak to the way that racialized visual discourses surveil and circumscribe who is included within the category of citizen but also rearticulate the cultural work of these images. These visual poetics are not mere mimetic portrayals of normative national frameworks of inclusion: they precipitate new routes of seeing and reading belonging by variously envisioning alternative networks of recognition, care, coalition, and community.