Browsing by Author "Aranda, José F."

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    Hidden in Plain Sight: Nordic Colonialism in American Literature from Reconstruction to the Immigration Act of 1924
    (2022-08-24) Sigurdardottir, Solveig Asta; Waligora-Davis, Nicole; Aranda, José F.
    On January 6th, 2021, a large crowd stormed the capitol of the United States adorned in Nordic symbols to claim ownership of the land. Supported by then president of the United States, the attackers mobilized a contemporary economy of historical Nordic imaginaries that ground whiteness as property-holding and brought into sharp focus the history of Nordic colonialism in the United States. Hidden in Plain Sight: Nordic Colonialism in American Literature from Reconstruction to the Immigration Act of 1924 excavates Nordic colonialism, Nordic immigration, and settler histories as part of the development of legal frameworks of citizenship in the United States. I center Nordic settlement in the United States, meaning the Nordic people’s legal and political claim of American land as an ongoing structure that aids and abets broader project of European settler colonialism in the United States. My analysis is anchored in the print texts and culture of the period to highlight authors connected to the former Danish Virgin Islands, the Nordic region and the United States. From Reconstruction and into the early 20th century authors and educators, such as Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes and Anna Julia Cooper used literature to analyze and provoke readers to recognize the cultural and sociopolitical impact of an evolving Nordic settler imaginary in the U.S. These writers showed how during, and in the wake of Reconstruction, white landowners and politicians deployed Nordic imaginaries to mobilize white populations to protect their claim to the land, the legal protections of citizenship and ownership of labor. Relatedly, in 1917 Denmark’s rule in the Virgin Islands shifted from colonial power to domination via global capitalism. My literary analysis of Nordic imaginaries across the Atlantic shows the long, intertwined Nordic history of colonialism that underwrites U.S. cultural associations of “innocence” with whiteness— an “innocence” that has long built and justified acts of white supremacy. Hidden in Plain Sight demonstrates how Nordic colonialism in the Americas trafficked in, and reproduced ideas about whiteness and legitimacy, as inheritance, and as ownership that served as the bedrock for settler colonial practices in the United States, U.S imperialism abroad, and shaped U.S. immigration and citizenship policy and law.
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    Of Ghosts and Justice: Spectral Politics in 20th-Century U.S. Literature
    (2023-04-19) Stoeltje, Sam; Aranda, José F.
    “Of Ghosts and Justice: Spectral Politics in 20th-Century U.S. Literature” attends to the representation of the spectral in transgeneric literary works, at the same time resignifying and retheorizing the term “spectral” to include its ostensive “literal” referent, that is, the ontologically and epistemologically and ontically impossible within modern and post-modern discursive cultures. Following but departing from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, this dissertation locates moments of non-dominant and abject(ed) metaphysics as they emerge in generically uncertain texts, and seeks to understand these moments in relation to struggles for justice at personal, institutional, and geopolitical scales: struggles against capitalism, colonialism and white supremacy, cis/hetero/patriarchy, ecological violence, as well as the more abstract violence of epistemological genre-making. Bringing Derridean deconstruction together with decolonial theories, specifically theories of genre by Jodi Byrd and cosmogonic intellectual history from Sylvia Wynter, I attempt through my readings to “let the spirit speak” and to listen from a position of genuine onto/epistemological openness. The primary texts include Black Elk and John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks, literary-ethnographic writing by Carlos Castaneda and Zora Neale Hurston, the autotheory-practice of Gloria Anzaldúa, and an unknown work of channeled literature from the 1970s, The Great Adventure: A Handbook for Living in this World and on the Other Side, written by and through my departed friend Alice Neihardt Thompson. Through reading these texts, some of the complex mythopoetics underpinning U.S. literature come into focus, including interrelations between the Frontier and Spiritualism, coloniality and anthropology, appropriation, queer feminism, psychedelic countercultures, as well as Indigenous and African-diasporic cultures of belief. Interweaving autoethnography and other transgeneric praxes, the dissertation arrives at a conviction of the importance of onto/epistemological openness in reading U.S. literature. Encountering these strange, metaphysically abject and uncanny texts, I note that spectral literatures are a practice of myth-making and re-making, and that such makings are full of political potential and peril. Given that myth is defined by its claim to sacredness, transcendence, and a position of being beyond critique, I close with a meditation on the (im)possible necessity of cultivating a mythocritique and its relation to academic writing.