R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Joseph, Betty"

Browsing by Author "Joseph, Betty"

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A People Between: Servitude in Colonial Virginia, 1700-1783
(2013-09-16) Madar, Allison; Boles, John B.; Goetz, Rebecca A.; Joseph, Betty; Ekirch, A. Roger
This dissertation recasts how historians and scholars have come to understand bound labor in eighteenth-century Virginia. Servants—including indentured servants, customary servants, convicts, Virginia-born servants, and apprentices—remained a part of Virginia’s work force throughout the eighteenth century. Servants were a people between and navigated the worlds of freedom and unfreedom on a daily basis, working alongside slaves, negotiating with their masters, and attempting to make sense of their place in Virginia society as an alternative source of bound labor. Some historians, however, dismiss servants, claiming that by the end of the seventeenth century they had all but disappeared and that a general solidarity existed between all whites by the early eighteenth century. Other scholars acknowledge the presence of servants after the turn of the century, but rarely discuss their significance outside of economic analyses or migration studies. Throughout the eighteenth century Virginia masters failed to find common cause with this white labor force—despite its largely European origins and temporary bondage—and servants were constantly ensnared in the power relationships dictated by race, gender, and labor in colonial Virginia. The presence of servants throughout the eighteenth century suggests a need to reconsider colonial society not only across the lines of color but also along the lines of condition.
Allegory and the imperial imaginary: Narratives of racial, sexual and national becoming the fin-de-siecle
(2001) Roy, Brinda; Joseph, Betty
I draw upon theories of postcoloniality, narratology, and the new historicism to read turn-of-the-century British literary and cultural texts. I situate these texts in their particular moments of historical production in order to comment upon the elaborate fabrication of an "allegorical" narrative of nationhood, imperial identity and empire-building in fin-de-siecle Britain. As the British colonial theater at the turn-of-the-century is a vast one, my study for the most part concerns the allegorical legacies of fin de-siecle British metropolitan and imperial strategies of power and control in India. I argue that while the making of empire was more often than not bloody and violent, involving as it did military conquest and economic exploitation, the Janus-faced narrative of empire-building also required the enactment of idealistic "humanistic" schemes of cultural domination, such as ideas about the upliftment of "barbaric," "savage" people through conversion to Christianity and introduction to civil society. The rhetoric of social missioning served to putatively recode the violent, economistic narrative of colonialism as a redemptive allegory of empire. I explore both the intrinsically complicated nature of the allegorical and the myriad forms of imperial allegory: the national, the military, the sexual, and the domestic/familial. I bring to my understanding of the national allegory of Empire a postcolonial distrust of predetermined, symbolic narratives. Any attempt to understand imperial allegories has to take into account allegory's "other" nature---the persistent irony, endless deferral, permanent parabasis, that marks its utterances when it "speaks otherwise." By viewing the performance of turn-of-the-century British imperialism through an "allegorical" lens, and mining especially allegory's disruptive potential to "speak otherwise," I am able to pose anew questions about the status of the "other" in colonialist and nationalist discourses, the relation between narrative, history and historiography, and finally, and most crucially, the implications of political and geographical territorialization for an ethical, postcolonial aesthetics of (re)reading and (re)writing. This study will prove to be not so much a definitive view of allegory, but rather a highly selective, creative, and varied engagement with both hegemonic and anti-hegemonic, oppositional, and resistant allegories of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, sexuality, and domesticity in the fin-de-siecle.
Clothed with Salvation: Pastoral Power and Eighteenth-Century Anglican Satire
(2016-06-27) Nelson, Jon Nnicholas; Ellenzweig, Sarah; Joseph, Betty
Critics who work with eighteenth-Critics who work with eighteenth-century texts have long wrestled with the place of religion in the literary archive. Clothed with Salvation: Pastoral Power and Eighteenth-Century Anglican Satire approaches this topic from two perspectives: first from the recent academic debate over postsecularism, and second through the lens of pastoral power, a transitional concept developed by Michel Foucault in his 1977-1978 lectures at the Collège de France. Eighteenth-century literary studies is an especially promising field for bringing the two together. In the last thirty years, the discipline witnessed an explosion of work arising from the adoption of powerful analytical frameworks, the culturalization of its interests, and the expansion of its traditional archives. Moreover, there is now widespread familiarity with most other aspects of Foucault’s genealogy of modernity. In bringing together the postsecular and the pastoral, I argue that literary articulations of pastoral power became particularly productive in Anglican satire when writers responded to the shift from naïve religion to reflective religion. The dissertation advances a series of arguments about the literary dimensions of pastoral power that accompanied this change. It demonstrates (1) how the post-Civil War seventeenth-century anxiety over the pastorate colored the satirical representation of naïve religious belief; (2) how shepherd-flock and citizen-state games appear in tropes and figures of sovereignty and unrest during the Restoration; (3) how the workings of pastoral power made possible a satirical critique of contesting religious belief; (4) and how the typical techniques and strategies of pastoral technology became decoupled from salvation and repurposed in the satirical novel. Individual chapters explore these themes in the work of Samuel Butler, John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, and Laurence Sterne.
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Coastal Feelings: Colonizing Affects in Nineteenth-Century Australia
(2024-06-27) McCullough, Meredith; Michie, Helena; Joseph, Betty; Wildenthal, Lora
My dissertation, “Coastal Feelings: Colonizing Affects in Nineteenth-Century Australia,” produces an affective account of settler colonialism in the context of Australia’s coastal environments. In nineteenth-century Australia, coasts were the first environments to be seen, then settled, by invading British colonists. They remained places not only of encounter but also of connections to England, and were central to the nostalgia and violence of the settler imaginary. Coasts provided settlers with a site for defining themselves against Indigenous peoples, for imagining their new home, and for mourning the home they left behind. I argue for the centrality of affect to the settler colonial project by focusing on textual and visual depictions of coastal environments in nineteenth-century Australia. I find that gender is central to many of these accounts, which coalesce around real and fictional White women. The four chapters of my dissertation take me to four places along the southern Australian coast. Each is an example of a different kind of geographically-inflected discourse. Whether about the shore, islands, a coastal classroom, or a seemingly tranquil bay, each chapter shows how literature captures and creates affective relationships with coastal environments. It is my hope that by naming and understanding the violent colonial imperatives shaping the history of literary coasts we will be able to reexamine our contemporary relationships with coastal environments and reorient them toward justice, inclusion, and ethical littoral living.
Invaginated cartographies
(2000) Roy Chowdhury, Mousumi; Joseph, Betty
This thesis concerning women's histories in the Indian sub-continent and Africa looks at the representation of native women at the intersections of colonial, nationalist, and post-colonial discourses. The histories concern raped and "abducted" women during the communal violence following the partition of India in 1947, their treatment by the law, and their representation in post-colonial literary imaginings, women caught between the "development" machine and euro-centric ecological justice in countries of the South, and the production of the domestic sphere in colonial Africa through structures of exclusion, and its representations in post-colonial novels. The central argument in this thesis is that it is through strategic uses of native women's bodies that social space was made governable during colonialism, and nationalist movements came into being through appropriation of women's bodies in representations of the nation. How those two structures of violence have passed into post-colonial imaginings, along with the legacies of the Enlightenment project that shape the policies of the post-colonial state, are read in details. Through feminist subaltern historiography, and post-colonial eco-feminism, alternate structures of narratives and representation are sought to frame resistance writings.
Love in the Time of Cinema: The Global Tracks of Hindi Film/Songs
(2014-04-25) Sunya, Samhita; Joseph, Betty; Ostherr, Kirsten; Kripal, Jeffrey J.; Radhakrishnan, Ratheesh
The stylized, romantic song sequence -- or the form(ula) of "song-dance-romance" -- has remained the most visible, audible, and mobile aspect of Hindi popular cinema. Studies of Hindi film songs have taken the shape of either extended ethnographies of production practices or edited collections that hold together a number of case studies of the songs' circulation through various contemporary locations (two are titled GLOBAL BOLLYWOOD, for example). My sustained analysis of the work of Hindi film songs through various periods of the post-sound era instead looks at poetic expressions of romance as arguments, within contests over national culture, (world) cinema, and the modern pleasures of the popular. My first chapter focuses on PADOSAN (1968), an exceptionally self-referential film that stages a zealous -- but easily missed -- argument upholding the romantic enchantments of Hindi popular cinema. I show that the fixity of an authorial voice is destabilized by the songs' form, as voice and body are rent asunder through the practice of playback that in turn lends itself to practices of repetition, recombination, and reimagination. My second chapter zooms out to consider a longer genealogy of the "City of Love," a trope that emerged in the radical poetry attributed to medieval saint-mystics, but very quickly became synonymous with the seductive artifices of popular cinema upon repeated invocations within film songs. I argue that the cinematic City of Love delineates what is at once a public domain as well as an intimate space of engagement with popular cinema-as-modernity. My third chapter moves from the cinematic city to world cinema in the postwar, post-independence decades. I historicize the emergence of world cinema amidst questions of cinematic form and translation, and I track the movements of romantic Hindi film/songs in projects of cinematic diplomacy through instances of Indo-Soviet and Indo-Iranian coproduction. My final chapter cuts to an analysis of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, by which I establish the stakes of my project in the discrepancy between the visibility of globalized media among Anglophone audiences, i.e., the subtexts of Bollywood in SLUMDOG, and the extent to which this visibility has necessarily driven critical, historical understandings of such forms.
Narrative States: Human Rights Discourse in Contemporary Literature
(2012) Rickel, Jennifer; Joseph, Betty
Human rights have become a dominant framework through which to narrate and read political violence in contemporary literature concerning Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian subcontinent. This dissertation argues that human rights discourse depoliticizes crises that result from histories of colonialism, inequitable development policies, and the growth of transnational capital. The testimonial narrative structure of human rights treats political violence as trauma and portrays the narrator as testifier and reader as witness. It assumes that in the exchange between these figures a cathartic process takes place and that by proxy the original political violence may be resolved. The language of human rights is thus deployed to illuminate the suffering of others without interrupting processes of global capitalism or narratives of US exceptionalism. This dissertation examines the intersection of human rights discourse and postcoloniality. It analyzes the decolonial strategies through which postcolonial texts challenge human rights discourse and shift focus from trauma and catharsis to the national and international policies, business practices, and cultural narratives that sustain inequitable power structures. This dissertation begins by critiquing the concept of literary humanitarianism, which suggests that the reader may fulfill a humanitarian act by reading a story of suffering. After showing in the introduction how this literary trend is connected to changes in the nation-state system, the first two chapters analyze the narrative mechanics of the testimonial narrative structure. As these opening essays examine depictions of apartheid in South Africa, genocide in Rwanda, and slow violence in India, they problematize the expansion of the 'universal' humanist narrative voice and critique the construction of a humanitarian reader. Chapter three then compares methodological approaches to storytelling to analyze the relationship between literature, the archive, and lived reality in post-apartheid South Africa. Moving into a discussion of the economic and cultural imperialism that characterize the postcolonial condition, the final two chapters reveal how representations of old and new diasporas across Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and the Americas resist the language of human rights. Together, these chapters argue that the political potential of literature is not in staging humanitarian resolutions but in interrogating the frameworks that sustain inequality.
Neoliberalism and Allegory
(University of Minnesota Press, 2012) Joseph, Betty
Postcolonial Satire in Cynical Times
(2016-04-25) Adkins, Alexander Bryant; Joseph, Betty
Following post-1945 decolonization, many anticolonial figures became disenchanted, for they witnessed not the birth of social revolution, but the mere transfer of power from corrupt white elites to corrupt native elites. Soon after, many postcolonial writers jettisoned the political sincerity of social realism for satire—a less naïve, more pessimistic literary genre and approach to social critique. Satires about the postcolonial condition employ a cynical idiom even as they often take political cynicism as their chief object of derision. This dissertation is among the first literary studies to discuss the use of satire in postcolonial writing, exploring how and why some major Anglophone global writers from decolonization onward use the genre to critique political cynicisms affecting the developing world. It does so by weaving together seemingly disparate novels from the 1960s until today, including Chinua Achebe’s sendup of failed idealism in Africa, Salman Rushdie’s and Hanif Kureishi’s caricatures of Margaret Thatcher’s enterprise culture, and Aravind Adiga’s and Mohsin Hamid’s parodies of self-help narratives in South Asia. Satire is an effective form of social critique for these authors because it is equal opportunity, avoiding simplistic approaches to power and oppression in the postcolonial era. Satire often blames everyone—including itself—by insisting on irony, hypocrisy, and interdependence as existential conditions. Postcolonial satires ridicule victims and victimizers alike, exchanging the politics of blame for messiness, association, and implication. The satires examined here emphasize that we are all, to different degrees, mutually implicated subjects, especially in the era of global capitalism. This dissertation thus contests critics who argue that the subgenre engages in victim blaming, indulges in colonial-era stereotypes about the developing world, and supports political nihilism. Postcolonial satirists cut a path between the optimism expected of them and the fatalism they are accused of by offering a third path between that stifling dichotomy: a mutually implicating, humorous form of social critique that nuances neocolonial forms of power—including cynicism itself.
Silence, Sentimentalism, and the British Romantic Novel, 1789–1824
(2015-04-24) Saikin, Anna Dodson; Regier, Alexander; Joseph, Betty; Costello, Leo
My dissertation argues that silence provides a lens through which we can trace the development of the Romantic novel from the eighteenth century novel. In the eighteenth century, anxieties about female selfhood and identity become linked to proper modes of communication that reveal class and/or gender differences that could threaten the social order they were meant to uphold. If performed correctly, it was thought, expressions of sympathy would contribute to the development of sociability by establishing a prescriptive narrative to teach readers how to respond to suffering bodies. The sentimental novel silences female experience and rewrites it into a teleology that can be used for an observer’s emotional and moral advancement. I argue that Romantic novelists including Ann Radcliffe, Walter Scott, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen adapt situations and themes from the sentimental novel to reframe silence as an empowering form of expression that mitigates social and historical anxieties about female selfhood and individuality. As representative authors of the gothic, historical, and domestic novels, Radcliffe, Scott, Burney, and Austen rework silence into a positive exploration of the social implications of sympathy. My dissertation advances a theory of the novel’s development that addresses the conflict between appropriate means of communication and women’s disappearance from the publishing marketplace by reframing silence not as a symptom of female vulnerability but a communication strategy that emerged as a way to overcome repressive market forces. Following an introduction that situates the popularity of the sentimental novel between the moral ethos set by Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748) and the critical uncertainty faced by women writers, my first chapter investigates settings in Radcliffe’s gothic novels where silence proliferates to show how her heroines overcome their inability to protest their suffering by escaping to sublime landscapes. My second chapter develops the gothic’s critique of sympathy as a social phenomenon through an investigation of visual scenes and moments of aphasia in Scott’s Bride of Lammermoor (1819). Building on Scott’s development of the historical novel, my third chapter examines the limitations of class-based sympathetic responses in Burney’s last novel, The Wanderer (1814), to show how the protagonist’s refusal to speak about her identity limits her mobility. My fourth chapter concludes my dissertation by examining the impact of Austen’s development of free indirect discourse on the novel’s ability to represent female interiority. Beginning with an investigation of conduct books that advocated reticence as the proper means for women to communicate, I argue that Austen’s development of free indirect discourse permits the reader to see through the artificiality of society’s mannerisms and conversation. When read as a group, these four novelists show the variety of means by which the Romantic novel recuperates silence as a positive form of female self-expression.
The closet in the colony: British colonialism, Indian nationalism and (re)definitions of gender and sexuality
(2007) Joshi, Shubha; Joseph, Betty
My thesis challenges the influential theory that the formation of a nation is conditional on its ability to marshal normative sexual/gendered citizens: I argue that nation-formation (and the end of the British rule) in India was contingent to a large degree upon mobilizing and resignifying non-normative sexual/gender subjectivity. I begin by suggesting that accusations of "going native" and of having interracial homoerotic intimacies were related concerns, both seen as perversions of upright British masculinity. Further, I suggest that the anxiety about racial purity and miscegenation that fed into the heterosexual narrative of rape is also attendant upon the unease surrounding same-sex intimacy between an English and a native male. With this critical lens in mind, I provide a new reading of two canonical texts, A Passage to India and Burmese Days. Next, I navigate the link between Indian independence and queerness, rereading key colonial moments (like the incorporation of the anti-sodomy statute in the Indian penal code, the bowdlerization of native literature, the Hindu reformist movement), texts (such as Anandamath and Gora) and personages (M. K. Gandhi) within this new interpretive schema. I seek to fill a critical interstice in the work on Gandhi: there is, I suggest, an enormous potential for a new queer perspective in understanding Gandhi, and---because his politics and life informed each other---also Gandhian nationalism. In arguing the importance of homoerotic narratives as sites where powerful directing influences on native social reform movements, political mobilizations, and nationalist ideologies are located, I also emphasize the need to understand India's colonial history in order to fully comprehend literary, political, and religious discourses in contemporary India. I thus demonstrate how negotiations staged around definitions of gender and sexuality continue to inform current socio-political practices (such as the rise of masculine Hindu nationalism) and literary (con)texts (I examine Nine Hours to Rama and Midnight's Children) in India.
The Political Economy of the English Rogue
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) Joseph, Betty
Rogue narratives represent figures who are, on the one hand, economically and political dispossessed, and on the other, free from constrains of religious morality, social mores and the law. Social marginality allows these figures in texts like The English Rogue (1665), to transform their rootlessness into instantiations of political economy, especially the notion of a market which scripts and codes value onto contentless things through exchange and circulation. As a figure that has no private property to speak of, the rogue?s use of his own body in acts of consumption and exchange reveals a complex early-modern understanding of the links between the sex-gender economy and political economy.
"The voice of reason": Rational feminism in eighteenth-century literature
(2000) White, Carolyn Dorow; Joseph, Betty
This dissertation discusses rational feminism as part of the eighteenth century's call for the improvement of the condition of women. Rational feminism is based on a belief in the rational capacity of women and the necessity of developing it. Criticism of the eighteenth century has often associated rational feminism with two key figures, Mary Astell (A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, 1694) and Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792), whose works form bookends enclosing the century. Other texts by Eliza Haywood, Sarah Fielding, and Charlotte Lennox demonstrate that rational feminism appears variously in the middle of the century. These novelistic forms suggest that as an expression of feminism, reason becomes separated from publicity and politics, and united with domesticity and marriage in the midcentury years. Chapter one provides a critical, historical, and intellectual background for rational feminism as well as distinguishing between its manifestations in Astell and Wollstonecraft. Chapter two examines Haywood's Adventures of Eovaai, Princess of Ijaveo (1736), which portrays reason in a dichotomous relationship with the body and identifies this dichotomy as an artificial choice imposed by patriarchy whereby private and public roles for women become mutually exclusive. Chapter three argues that in Fielding's Governess: or, The Little Female Academy (1749), the body and publicity are dissociated from women. Reason comes into the home to produce rational motherhood as well as pleasure, which Haywood linked to the body. In chapter four's The Female Quixote (1752), Lennox makes reason a source of male heterosexual desire and the very basis of the companionate marriage. Lennox questions the terms of such marriage, which demands a specifically female form of rationality, just before Wollstonecraft embraces it as a locus of female rational fulfillment. The conclusion defines the project's intervention in the use of reason as a concept and the historiography of feminism in the eighteenth century.
Unsettling Artifacts: Biopolitics, Cultural Memory, and the Public Sphere in a (Post)Settler Colony
(2013-06-05) Griffiths, Michael; Wolfe, Cary; Joseph, Betty; Faubion, James D.
My dissertation employed intellectual historian Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics—which can be most broadly parsed as the political organization of life—to examine the way the lives of Aboriginal people were regulated and surveilled in relation to settler European norms. The study is a focused investigation into a topic with global ramifications: the governance of race and sexuality and the effect of such governance on the production of apparently inclusive cultural productions within the public spheres. I argue that the way in which subaltern peoples have been governed in the past and the way their cultures have been appropriated continue to be in the present is not extraneous to but rather formative of what is often misleadingly called “the” public sphere of dominant societies. In the second part, I analyze the legacies of this biopolitical moment and emphasize, particularly, the cultural politics of affect and trauma in relation to this (not quite) past. Authors addressed include: Xavier Herbert, P. R. Stephensen, Rex Ingamells, Kim Scott, Alexis Wright, and others. I also examine Australian Aboriginal policy texts througout the twentieth century up to the "Bringing Them Home" Report (1997).

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