Browsing by Author "Waligora-Davis, Nicole"
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Item Detrás de Cada Letra: Trauma and Healing in Chicana/o Literature(2015-10-30) Ellis, Amanda V.; Aranda, José F; Waligora-Davis, Nicole; Duno-Gottberg, LuisThis dissertation seeks to substantively place Chicana/o literary studies in dialogue with the field of trauma studies, a field in which the robustness of minority letters remain under-theorized. The legacies of British and Iberian colonization, the ongoing racialized abuses of communities, the Mexican cession of 1848, the continued struggle for civil rights, the recent censure of Ethnic Studies, are all events marked by systematic racial wounding. For this reason in order to understand trauma more comprehensively, I look to Chicana/o literature to analyze how trauma and healing continue to be theorized, and aesthetized within American writing. Tracing an aesthetic of trauma and healing throughout the Chicana/o literary corpus, this dissertation explores in detail a poetics that I insist reflects the relationship between trauma, colonial wounding, and the palliative function of Curanderismo. Opening in the sixteenth century in order to explore the relationship between coloniality, Americanity, and racial wounding, the project then turns to the twentieth and twenty-first century. Divided into five chapters, which define narrative broadly, I read closely to extract a cluster of ideas that comment on trauma and healing. Chapter I, examines the geopolitics of knowledge and Mesoamerican colonial writing. Chapter II, contemplates Curanderismo and the key concept figure of the Curandera across the archive by analyzing texts from disparate historical sections within the Chicana/o literary canon. Chapter III explores Américo Paredes’ novel, George Washington Gómez as trauma fiction. Chapter IV, places Gloria Anzaldúa’s writing in conversation with Manuel Muñoz’s texts. Chapter V, considers post-Movement writing and alternative understandings of trauma and healing circulating within Chicana/o literature and their relationship to decolonialtyItem Echoes of the Future-Past: Slavery and Sonic Testimony in African American and Diasporic Literature 1845-Present(2016-04-21) Yates-Richard, Meina; Waligora-Davis, NicoleThis dissertation theorizes sound in the form of cries, echoes, screams, and music as a mode of traumatic testimony unique to black diasporic populations by interrogating the relationship between the sounds blacks produce, the expression of traumatic experience, the mediation of American civic identity, and the production of black liberation ideology. The dissertation’s construct of diasporic testimony reveals the use of these sounds within diasporic literature and culture as a means to express that which has been deemed ineffable about the historical experience of bondage, and as the theoretical ground of black liberation ideologies. The project’s critical attention to sound reveals diasporic testimony as a heretofore-undiscovered aspect of African diasporic textual practice that forces an expansion of literary trauma studies’ narrow understanding of testimony. Echoes marks how the West’s histories of enslavement come to bear upon its contemporary affective and institutional relations, which I argue are arbitrated through the production and reception of black sound(s). Echoes accounts for over 150 years of black sonic testimonial practice, beginning with Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative and culminating in an examination of contemporary instances of extrajudicial violence against blacks as well as liberation activism. Echoes moves through representations of sound in African American and diasporic literatures, recorded sounds, and historical events, calling attention to the echoes of the sounds of bondage in the Western subconscious. Organized into four chapters, Echoes considers the ways in which these testimonial soundings exceed commonly understood frameworks of testimony, recognition, and redress. Chapter One theorizes “diasporic testimony” as a distinctly Black Atlantic sonic model of testimony. Chapter Two juxtaposes texts from the antebellum period to the 20th Century to reveal the role of black maternal soundings in the formulation of black nationalist ideologies, and the manner in which these sounds are sublimated in masculinist expressions of black nationalism. Chapter Three tracks the circulation of a Jamaican marketwomen’s song in diaspora to argue that the economic logics of enslavement are reproduced by divesting these women of their cultural productions. Chapter Four examines the ways in which the black male body is consumed by and through sound in the Western imagination—a politics of hearing that mediates whites’ civic identities. The Coda suggests new modes of black liberation praxis that are based in acoustic and affective relationships as opposed to recognition and redress-based frameworks.Item 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.Item Sacred Dominion: Anti-Catholicism and the Romance of U.S. Imperialism, 1820-1900(2015-04-23) Seglie, AnaMaria T.; Levander, Caroline; Waligora-Davis, Nicole; Kripal, Jeffrey“Sacred Dominion” argues that anti-Catholicism fundamentally shaped the development of U.S. imperialism. While current scholarship on nineteenth-century U.S. geopolitics tends to examine imperialism in terms of race, class, and gender, “Sacred Dominion” is among the first literary studies to take seriously religion’s crucial impact on U.S. empire-building. It argues that U.S. romance writers played a pivotal role in forging the alliance between anti-Catholicism and U.S. empire. Their works position westward and overseas expansion as safeguards against Catholic tyranny and anarchy. From the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne to the regional writing of George Washington Cable, this project demonstrates how romance writing constructed a dynamic partnership between Protestantism and U.S. geopolitics that continues to drive American foreign policy today. “Sacred Dominion” examines subgenres of romance to show how American writers relied on anti-Catholicism to imagine, justify, and contest U.S. imperialism. Beginning with those years long associated with the rise of Manifest Destiny and American Romanticism, this project illustrates how the alliance between anti-Catholicism and expansion underwrites antebellum works of romance such as George Lippard’s serials, Washington Irving’s histories, and even the novels of Hawthorne, an author whose obsession with Catholicism left an imprint on romances like The Scarlet Letter, not to mention his daughter Rose – a Catholic convert and nun. “Sacred Dominion” then charts the persistence of this romance tradition in the postbellum era. Turning to the work of a writer who made Mark Twain hate “all religions,” I examine George Washington Cable’s regional writing to demonstrate how anti-Catholicism mediated anxieties about the integration of religious and racial difference both at home and from abroad. The manuscript ends at the turn of the twentieth century with the work of Henry James and José Martí, illustrating how the early geopolitical foundations established through nineteenth-century romance set the tone for twentieth-century conceptions of U.S. internationalism. Tracing this romantic tradition across the eighty-year period when American literature emerged as a national canon and the U.S. emerged as an imperial nation, “Sacred Dominion” demonstrates how U.S. geopolitics and American romance were mutually invested in the nation’s Protestant origins and global future.Item The Dialectics of Form: Reification and Genre in Early Twentieth-Century American Literature(2016-02-29) Macellaro, Kimberly Ann; Hennessy, Rosemary; Waligora-Davis, Nicole; Derrick, Scott; Yarbrough, FayThis dissertation foregrounds genre as a politically-charged modality in early twentieth-century American literature, specifically the entangled relations between realism, romance, and naturalism through which the shifting formations of race and gender reproduce or challenge transnational capitalism’s reifying processes. My readings of articulations of racialized and gendered subjectivity during two pivotal periods in US history offers a new way of understanding the historical conditions underlying the emergence and circulation of reified identities and addresses many puzzling textual ambiguities as the cultural effects of the reified abstraction of labor. Reification’s relation to labor frames the dissertation’s four chapters, appearing in the opening chapter as unconscious forgetting and in the final chapter as deliberate remembering. In the dissertation’s first part I devote attention to under-theorized representations of white heteronormative masculinity. I situate the emerging configurations of racialized heterosexuality at the interface of consumer culture’s social engineering of subjects of desire. In the dissertation’s second part, I turn to two narrative experiments that more strategically and dialectically manipulate conventions of romance and naturalism to recast reified racial and gendered subjects as they emerge out of histories of transnational capital’s hyper-extraction of value from the colonial body. I draw out the narratives’ romantic utopian aspirations for overcoming racialized divisions between agency and structure, culture and labor. Chapter one on Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie foregrounds memory as a mediatory code for analyzing how reification relates to capitalism’s mechanization of labor and its effects on new white feminine and masculine disembodied consumer subjects. Chapter four on W.E.B. Du Bois’s novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece reads the epic memory of the slave’s labor congealed in the commodity cotton as crucial to the black utopian socialist project of de-reifying the racialized division between labor and culture. Chapter two on the stories of Sui Sin Far and Chapter three on the novel Cogewea by Mourning Dove theorize reification as a process through the splitting and doubling of racialized subjects to manage white anxieties about miscegenation. These chapters examine how texts featuring mixed-race heroines work with and against romance and naturalist conventions to re-narrate histories of colonial capitalism and overcome experiential disconnections imposed upon self and community. Reading form dialectically draws out the intensely cathected constellations of relations as they open up vantages for understanding totality, all be it ones that hover in the margins.