Uses of hauntology within academic scholarship are peculiarly metaphorical and British. This project aims to combat the overabundance of such readings to create more breadth in academic discourse on the spectral. This project does not seek to replace metaphorical or British renderings of hauntology, but to exist alongside it as overreliance on a particular formulation creates detrimental limits and barriers to scholastic innovation. The first essay examines the ghosts of Theodore “Wes” Wesley and Samuel Isaac Bailey within Unwell: A Midwestern Gothic Mystery (2018-2023) and The Sheridan Tapes (2020-present). Examining these category-defying ghosts which exhibit mass, warmth, and breath through Rosi Braidotti’s sustainable nomadic ethics, monster theory, and biopolitical theories of sovereignty and community/immunity, this work offers five theses for a newer and more expansive vision of spectrality inclusive of metaphorical and non-metaphorical readings. The second essay examines the peculiarly British nature of hauntological horror scholarship, attributing it largely to the influence of Mark Fisher’s white and European renderings of haunting and cultural time in the twenty-first century. This project reviews Fisherian hauntology to ultimately conclude that a fixation on British public media and shallow engagements of ghosts drives Fisher’s white and English universalism. Reversing this formulation and borrowing from other areas of Fisher’s work this project offers a rendering of an American hauntology attuned to racial history, landscape, and folk culture to encourage the emergence of other national hauntologies. The project concludes by applying the theses to three folktales featuring a Cap Haitian Zombie, a blood-red river in southwestern Virginia, and black devil dogs.

This thesis is a portfolio which contains two essays. The first essay, “Reclaiming Wakanda,” is a character biography of the Black Panther comic character from his inception in 1966 until 2016. The work historicizes and politicizes a character written as apolotical by his creators while also placing him firmly within a legacy of Black Power, Civil Rights and other Black freedom movements of the second half of the 20th century. The second essay, “Incogengro: The Creation and Destruction of Black Identity in the ‘Safety’ of Harlem” considers how images and representations race and racial violence are constructed in graphic novel form when color is literally no longer present and within the confines of Harlem.

Over the past several decades, service-learning programs have proliferated at colleges and universities, gaining broad support for their incorporation of critical reflection, academic learning, and volunteer work. The stated objective of these programs is transformation, both for students personally and for the communities with which they engage in terms of resources and justice. Through a case study of Fordham University's Global Outreach program, though, I demonstrate that, by positing the emotion empathy as the most productive mechanism through which to radically transform oneself and set off a ripple of social change, university administrators and educators avoid actual structural transformation and instead obscure how service-learning often reaffirms hierarchical and postcolonial relations. I argue that by historicizing the concept of empathy by identifying similar rhetorical devices deployed within service-learning programs in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, colonial legacies of Christian missionary work across time, and the nineteenth-century movement for the abolition of slavery we can better understand the rise of service-learning programs, especially within Jesuit universities, and their promotion of direct encounters with racialized others as the premier mode of gathering authentic and real knowledge that can lead to change. The focus on affective relations between individuals within service learning, I argue, carries forward dynamics that obscure rather than elucidate and attempt to change relations of power that depend on the continuation of systemic, racialized inequities.

The racist rhetoric that correlates certain humans with nonhumans has re-entered popular discourse in light of recent rat infestations in Baltimore and the immigration crisis. Scholars have long studied human relationships to nonhuman nature. Other scholars have brought to light the role of power in shaping identity. However, they have often failed to connect these histories without reinforcing dehumanization among marginalized communities. Feminist new materialists have looked at the enmeshment of humans within gendered nonhuman environments; posthumanists have shown that humans are made up of more-than-human assemblages; and queer theorists have emphasized the ways in which normative conceptions of the human fail to recognize the diversity of human expression. To contend with challenges facing non-normative people who are forced to endure harmful human-animal entanglements today, I use the figure of the pest to disassociate these racist discourses while also re-imagining how we see these much-hated animals. This dissertation examines human-pest relations as they play out materially, in actual infestations, rhetorically, across the political stage, and affectively, through paranoia. Using a visual studies methodology, I detangle the structural reasons for why infestations are more likely to persist among people with multiply marginal identities. Additionally, I look to art that resists such constructions. My project analyzes an assortment of varied archives from a 19th century rat nest to documentaries that feature the subculture of so-called bug chasing during the AIDS epidemic. Theoretically, this project juxtaposes feminist new materialist inquiry with Black, Latinx, and queer studies in order to study the work that objects can do to dismantle human-nonhuman value systems. "The Multi-Species Entanglements of Blackness: Infestations from the Coasts of West Africa to the American City" follows rat infestations from the slave ship to present-day poor, black neighborhoods in order to show how material infestation develops as a form of racism built into the structures of slavery and segregation. I highlight how these interspecies intimacies assisted in telling stories about enslaved life that would otherwise be lost to archival bias. "No Cockroaches at the U.S.-Mexico Border: Resisting Rhetoric in Queer Latinx Performance" reveals the ways in which human-pest comparison through immigration rhetoric has a long history stemming from early 20th century immigration reform and the rise of the eugenics movement. Even so, artists Xandra Ibarra and Carmelita Tropicana have used performing as a cockroach to surmount xenophobia. "Deviant Bed Bug Performances: Paranoia as Queer Affect," demonstrates how affect, specifically paranoia, can be queered through humorous bed bug-themed musicals to create equity among species. The last chapter, "A How-To Guide for Making Pest-humanist Art," looks to four living, female artists who use their work to develop alternative modes of responding to nonhuman life. Together, these chapters establish "pest-humanism," an analytic that critiques the structural histories of violence exposed by examining human-pest relationships and enables the development of social justice art which pays heed to the nonhuman in a responsible way.

In 2019, Game of Thrones aired its final episode, The Iron Throne. This episode enjoyed enormous viewership, and culminated in the death of Daenerys Targaryen, a fan favorite, whose storyline saw her conquer diverse cultures and declare rulership over the continents of Essos and Westeros. Her character is unique for being one of the most famous female protagonists in the fantasy genre, as well as a builder of empires. As evidenced by the hundreds of children named both ‘Khaleesi’ and ‘Daenerys’ after her, she was a hero to many. However, much of her storyline was occupied with the subjugation of black and brown people- sometimes in the name of liberation, but always with the goal of validating Daenerys’s claim to rulership. This thesis aims to uncover the developments in the fantasy genre that led to the depiction of Daenerys Targaryen as a white conqueror of non-white subjects, and the ways that Game of Thrones valorized her attempts at leadership. Primarily using the work of Helen Young and Jamie Williamson, I will demonstrate the longstanding tradition of white imperialism established in the fantasy genre, and incorporate Anne McClintock’s framework of race and gender from her seminal work Imperial Leather to examine how Daenerys both subverts and upholds the expectations of imperialism as a matriarchal conqueror in Game of Thrones.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.