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"Pledging Transnational Allegiances: Nationhood, Selfhood, and Belonging in Asian American and Jewish American Narratives," represents a comparative study of immigrant fiction that traces its development over the course of the twentieth century. The use of Jewish American and Asian American writers occurs because of past and contemporary scholarly connections made between the two groups, which include their respective status as model minority subjects within the larger U.S. body politic. Moreover, with regard to immigration legislation and dominant-held ideas about the immigrant body, the two groups share histories of exclusion and inclusion. The narratives examined in "Pledging Transnational Allegiances" are inflected with global sensibilities that traverse both countries of origin and countries of settlement. Thematically speaking, what links authors as diverse as Abraham Cahan, Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton), Israel Zangwill, C.Y. Lee, Mary Antin, Gish Jen, Nechama Tee and Luong Ung to one another is that each writer examines the ways in which citizenship is not necessarily the product of assimilation but rather the unstable outcome that occurs through the constant re-imagining of transnational affiliations vis-à-vis dominant-held notions of nationhood and selfhood. Concomitantly, these authors negotiate the complicated matrix of sociopolitical belonging through a particular trope of naturalization (the public process by which an immigrant obtains citizenship in the country of settlement). "Pledging Transnational Allegiances" moves the scholarly consideration of immigrant narratives from static and unilateral classifications (e.g. as stories of exodus and deliverance, narratives of rebirth, tales of melting-pot assimilation, and dramas of generational conflict) to a more politicized and multisided discussion of diaspora and ideological border crossings.

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President Roosevelt created the Office of War Information (OWI) in June 1942 to coordinate efforts to mobilize Americans and improve relations among the Allies. Photography was one of the OWI's important tools of persuasion, and this is the first study to isolate and analyze the three distinct but intersecting branches of OWI photographic activity. This dissertation examines key debates over the agency's activities and argues that the aesthetic variations in OWI photography are integrally related to ideological differences and institutional disputes within the agency. All OWI photography was shaped in part by the dominant aesthetic conventions of modernism, especially those of "glamour aesthetics." But OWI publications and exhibitions also reveal that the agency's work evolved considerably during the war; as a result of the delicate collaboration between various OWI policy makers, editors, designers, writers, technicians, photographers, their subjects and audiences, the purport of the work was repeatedly tested and renegotiated. The three OWI photo units operated by the OWI were: the Stryker unit, formerly with the Farm Security Administration (FSA), and housed in the OWI Domestic Branch publications unit; the Domestic Branch News Bureau photo unit; and the OWI Overseas Branch unit. Two significant photographers from competing OWI photo units receive special attention: Marjory Collins (Stryker unit) and Alfred Palmer (News Bureau unit). Their work is compared to that of contract photographers hired by the Overseas Branch, particularly after the Spring of 1943. Collins's photography, like that of her Stryker unit colleagues, originated in the social reform atmosphere of the 1930s. Although her OWI work followed the agency mandate on celebrating American virtues, her photographs also display her earlier critical attitude. Palmer, by contrast, focused on the immediate objective of winning the war, producing uniformly inspirational imagery. Contract photographers, meanwhile, followed the lead of Palmer's News Bureau unit, but their affirmative photography was designed to shape long-term world opinion, not to mobilize a population for the war effort. Analysis of Collins, Palmer, and the contract photographers makes clear that understanding the photographic images they produced requires close attention to their political, bureaucratic, and cultural background.

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<p>This dissertation examines the way in which funk music, in the context of twentieth century African American literature, operates as a means of stimulating the sensorium. Funk, narrowly defined as a musical form, once carried negative connotations. Whether understood as depression, a genre of popular music, an odor, or as a euphemism for sex, the genre is concerned with attitude and visible emotions. Much work has been done in the field of African American literature regarding jazz and blues, and studies of hip-hop are gaining traction. Funk, however, has not fulfilled its potential for investigating its affect of musical performance or its connection to narratives. This project is an examination of the aesthetics of this musical form, which will generate more nuanced readings of musical and literary narratives of the 1960s and 1970s through an analysis of sound and its sensorial variants. I examine the function of music in a literary text as opposed to how it is described.</p><p>Funk operates as a link between the jazz- and blues-inspired poetry and novels of the early twentieth century on the one hand and the emergence of "urban," "street," or "hip-hop" narratives on the other. Its artistic intervention in social relationships brings the aesthetic and political into conversation. I argue against the binary differentiating "serious" and "popular" musical forms; funk bridges the gap between these two designations in an important context, which creates a sonic and social space to examine the idea of difference both in terms of the general and the specific. A misconception of "sameness" is the site of theoretical and ontological difference or disruption.</p><p> Funk's ability to disrupt resides in its paradoxical nature. Rhythmically, the musical genre departs from soul of the 1960s and is fundamental to the development of hip-hop in the late-1970s and early 1980s. Though rooted in distinct rhythmic patterns, Funk seeks to dismantle conceptions of rhythmic expectation and production common in popular music by pushing back against previously popular forms. Prior to Funk's popularity, most musical forms ranging from jazz to rock and roll emphasized the second and fourth beats in a measure. Funk compositions typically emphasize the first and third beats, which changes the momentum of the music. Though it is a genre geared towards dance and therefore rooted in the body and movement, Funk gravitates towards transcending the physical limits of the body by addressing discourses of sensorial perception. Funk (both as a musical genre and an aesthetic) is something of sensory ensemble--each sense a part of the whole, complex experience. The five senses are brought together in an all-out attack on what hegemony comes to represent. Each chapter presents a different mode of assault on the body's ability to process the sensorium. I demonstrate the way Funk disrupts through a fusion of ethnomusicology, socio-cultural analysis, and literary criticism in the act of reading, hearing, watching, smelling, and tasting musical performances, cultural events, and works of literature.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Texas at Arlington, 2009.

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.