Browsing by Author "Aranda, Jose F., Jr."
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Item Heaven and hell on earth: Flux and stasis in literary utopianism and naturalism(1998) Hunter, David Earl, III; Aranda, Jose F., Jr.Literary utopianism and naturalism present apparently polar views regarding the possibilities and limitations of human agency: the former portrays humanity as having created a communal society based upon rationality, while the latter argues that people are victims consumed by their desires. This comparative study of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), Frank Norris' McTeague (1899), Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), and Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz (1900), postulates these fictions as examinations of whether life in America at the end of the nineteenth-century is inevitably caught in state of flux or whether it is possible to attain stability. Yet these works are less interesting for their ostensibly dominant perspectives on the human condition, than for their complicating elements which elevate the works above their prevailing philosophies and prevent them from remaining mere manifestos.Item Making racial subjects: Indigeneity and the politics of Chicano/a cultural production(2008) Alberto, Lourdes; Aranda, Jose F., Jr.Representations of indigeneity abound in late-twentieth-century Chicano/a cultural productions, occupying genres as diverse as the political treatise, novel, poem, and news report. The work that follows traces the construction and ideological implications of indigenous Mexican culture, or 'Indian' signifiers in Chicano/a cultural production, a fundamental but often overlooked feature of Chicano/a subject formation. I bring Chicano/a indigenism into conversation with two historical and social phenomenon, Mexican indigenous migrants in the US and post-Revolutionary Mexican national discourse, to explore their influences and challenges to notions of authenticity and nationalism. "Mestizaje," a product of Mexican post-Revolutionary national discourse, subsumes the "Indian" within the Chicano/a and ultimately within the Chicano/a political imaginary. I argue that Mexican indigenous migrants in the U.S. constitute a new critical mass that contests mestizaje and Chicano/a as potential decolonial constructs. Such socio-political projects, I argue, forces us to rethink the uses of indigenism in the production of racialized Chicano/a political identities such as "la raza cosmica" and radical epistemological frameworks such as Anzaldua's "mestiza consciousness." While, the mythologization of the Mexican Indian is a strategy that initiates counter-hegemonic discourse it also simultaneously undercuts the emancipatory objectives of its authors. I employ a comparative framework to conduct an analysis of Chicano/a and indigenous cultural productions and reveal the multifaceted positionings of ethnic subjects in the U.S. For example, the affiliations and divisions between Oaxacan indigenous migrant and Chicano/a strategies of decolonization bring to light the complex and contradictory impulses embedded in the relationship between first world and third world marginalized subjects who, while occupying vastly different subject positions, are bound together by negotiations of citizenship and language, as well as formations of nation, race, class, and ethnicity.Item Multiple choice: Literary racial formations of mixed race Americans of Asian descent(2001) Leonard, Shannon T.; Aranda, Jose F., Jr.This dissertation reassesses key paradigms of Asian American literary studies in the interest of critically accounting for the cultural productions of mixed race Asian Americans. Over the last twenty years, Asian American literary criticism has focused narrowly on a small body of writers, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang, and Amy Tan, who achieved mainstream popularity with U.S. feminists and/or multiculturalists, or focused on authors like Frank Chin and John Okada whose literary personas and works lend themselves to overt appropriations for civil rights causes and/or identity politics. "Multiple Choice" participates in a renewed interest in the expansion of Asian American literary boundaries and critical inquiry. "Multiple Choice" addresses the complex racial formations of select mixed race Asian American authors and subjects from the turn of the century to the present. My study situates, both theoretically and historically, the diverse ways in which mixed race peoples variously represent themselves. As the dissertation's metaphorical title suggests, self-representations, or an individual's ethnic choices, especially in the case of mixed race Americans, are constantly adjudicated by others (e.g. cultural critics, the media, or U.S. census designers and evaluators). Notwithstanding the omnipresence of these external forces, "Multiple Choice" also engages the complex sets of choices made from within specific Asian American communities, particularly those choices that come in conflict with other Asian American identities. The dissertation looks at writers both well-known and virtually unknown: Edith Eaton, Winnifred Eaton, Sadakichi Hartmann, Aimee Liu, Chang-rae Lee, Amy Tan, Shawn Wong, Jessica Hagedorn, Peter Bacho, Thaddeus Rutkowski, and Paisley Rekdal.Item The Religious Community and Latinos in Alabama: Two Steps Forward(2013-12-06) Davis, Christopher; Boles, John B.; Cox, Edward; Aranda, Jose F., Jr.This dissertation explores the nuances of how the religious community of Alabama responded to the development of a Latino population in the state, beginning in the mid-1980s, as well as how Latinos found a place among the preexisting religious institutions. Much of the academic focus on Latinos in the South has explored the topic from the perspectives of labor, politics, housing, and other lenses that typically revealed negative interactions between Latinos and the long-term population. Also, studies of religious matters generally focus on the Catholic Church, which included the majority of the Latino population but left out much of the interaction with the mostly Protestant majority. Through interviews with congregation leaders, this study shows that the incorporation of Latinos was a complex process based in a history and experience of missions work. Beginning in the 1950s, the understanding of missions began to change from long-term missions undertaken by few Christians to mostly short-term missions experienced by many. That missions background made the possibility of ministering to Latinos in Alabama much more plausible and led to the partnerships discussed in the rest of the dissertation. The part of the state to first receive Latinos was the northeast corner where the religious community initially responded to migrant Latinos beginning in the 1950s and then to a permanent Latino population in the 1980s. The study also focuses on the city of Birmingham and finds that strong leaders were the crucial element in developing Latino ministries. Such partnerships resulted in great variety among the structures of ministries based on the abilities and desires of the individual churches. The relationships formed in the church environment served as a counter to the state and national vitriol concerning illegal immigration and produced a state population with mixed feelings about its Latino component. Those relations also provided hope for the eventual partnership of all races.Item Walden Pond in Aztlan? A literary history of Chicana/o environmental writing since 1848(2007) Ybarra, Priscilla Solis; Aranda, Jose F., Jr.This dissertation responds to a lacuna in both ecocriticism and Chicana/o literary history. The former lacks input from ethnic American literatures, while the latter offers very little commentary on environmental aspects of Chicana/o writing. Why have these two fields remained separate despite often overlapping institutional histories? My study points to their common roots in activist movements, and how this early period critically preconditioned a disengagement with Chicanas/os as environmentalists. I engage these two fields to get at a literary history that is only weakly understood at the moment. What emerges is a greater understanding of the ways that the social construction of nature has operated to reinforce the oppression of people of color, as well as the ways that Chicana/o writing has transcended this subjugation. Environmental literary study has privileged introspective nature writing and individual exploration of nature. While this perspective is understood in certain Anglo American contexts, it is becoming increasingly obvious that it is insufficient as a paradigm for the study of other environmental literatures. More particularly, it cannot account for non-Anglo American mediations of nature. Chicana and Chicano writers, with their concern for social justice and community, nonetheless take up their pens to reflect on the natural environment, albeit differently than conventional ecocriticism expects. Curiously, Chicana/o literary study has been complicit with overlooking Chicana/o writers' environmental insights, largely because the environment has been perceived to be a lesser priority than the seemingly more immediate needs of social equity. However, broadening the category of nature writing to environmental writing, and considering the close ties between social justice and environmental issues reveals the ways that Chicana/o writers demonstrate how human interaction with the environment differs along lines of ethnicity and class. This study investigates what's behind these differences. Specifically, I explore the writings of four Chicana/o environmental writers: Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Jovita Gonzalez, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Cherrie Moraga. Their environmental writing provides valuable insights about how Chicanas/os maintain a sustainable relationship with the environment.Item Women and revolution: Race, violence, and the family romance literature of the Southwest(2001) Tinnemeyer, Andrea Jill; Aranda, Jose F., Jr.As a significant act of U.S. imperialism, the Mexican War doubled the territory, erected an international border between the two nations, and significantly complicated nineteenth- and early twentieth-century notions of race and gender relations. The Southwest territory, old Spanish borderlands, was the site of the first foreign war for the United States and it witnessed the most nationally-informing debates regarding the Indian question, the woman question, and how citizenship could be imagined and transformed in the age of Manifest Destiny. This dissertation interrogates the mimetic link between nation and the domestic through a reconfiguration of the republican family romance and its monomaniacal preoccupation with gatekeeping whiteness as the sole signifier of political privilege and power. I examine Manifest Destiny in the context of U.S./Mexico relations framed by the Mexican War (1846--8) and the Mexican Revolution (1910). I look specifically at how Mexican and Anglo-American women in the Southwest forge relationships between and among familial, cultural, and national spheres. Chapter one examines the role of Enlightenment ideology and the captivity narrative in post-Mexican War interracial marriages. Chapter two probes the legal and racial consequences of Manifest Destiny expressed in interracial adoption plots. The third chapter investigates female travel narratives in the Southwest. Women soldiers and spies during the Mexican War, Civil War, and Mexican Revolution (1910) comprise the fourth chapter. The final chapter looks at women's fight for suffrage during the Mexican Revolution. Among the authors and historical figures featured in this study are recovered authors Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Jovita Gonzalez, and Maria Cristina Mena. Also featured are the personal narratives of Eliza Allen, Loreta Janeta Velazquez and the newspaper articles of Jane McManus Storms (Cora Montgomery).