When writing about Junot Díaz’s Drown (1996) Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) and This is How You Lose Her (2012), I focus on the iterations of masculinity depicted and embodied by Yunior de las Casas, the primary narrator of this collection. I explore the links between diaspora, hybridity, masculinity, and trauma, arguing that both socio-historical and personal traumatic experience reverberates through the psyches and bodies of Díaz’s characters. I demonstrate the relationship between Yunior’s navigation of the United States and the Dominican Republic and his ever-shifting sexuality, self-presentation, and gender identity. The physical and discursive spaces he must traverse contain multiple, contradictory narratives about how to be a man; within Díaz’s collection, we witness Yunior’s coming-to-terms with the way that these stories of masculinity are rendered dysfunctional and incoherent. Accordingly, Yunior uses the hegemonic discourses of masculinity as a way to cloak his own queer difference, ambivalently interacting and identifying with characters marked as Other. In this analysis, I read Yunior’s masculinity as reactionary to the expectations of Domincan society, and also explore how he shaped by migration, trauma, and unspeakable queer desire.

During the 1960s and 1970s, tribes across Indian Country struggled for tribal sovereignty against “termination” policies that aimed to disintegrate the federal government’s trust responsibilities and treaty obligations to tribes and assimilate all Indians into mainstream society. Individual tribes, pan-Indian organizations, and militant Red Power activists rose up in resistance to these policies and fought for self-determination: a preservation of Indian distinctiveness and social and political autonomy. This thesis examines a crucial, but often overlooked, element of the self-determination movement. Hundreds of tribal and national-scope activist newspapers emerged during this era and became the authentic voices of American Indians and the messengers of the movement. This thesis examines the stories of several key newspapers. By looking at the opportunities and challenges their editors faced and the different approaches they took, this thesis will assess how they succeeded and fell short in telling authentic stories from Indian Country, fighting for distinct indigenous culture and rights, and reshaping public discourse and policy on American Indian affairs.

Between 1847 and 1874 approximately 142,000 Chinese indentured laborers, commonly known as coolies, migrated to Cuba to work primarily on sugar plantations following the demise of African slavery. Comprised of 99.97% males and contracted to work for eight years or more, many of those coolies that survived the harsh conditions in Cuba formed consensual unions with freed and enslaved women of color. These intimate connections between Chinese indentures and Cubans of African descent developed not only because they shared the same living and working spaces, but also because they occupied similar sociocultural, political, and economic spheres in colonial society. This ethnography investigates the rise of a discernible Afro-Chinese religiosity that emerged from the coming together of these two diasporic groups. The Lukumi religion, often described as being a syncretism between African and European elements, contains impressive articulations of Chinese and Afro-Chinese influences, particularly in the realm of material culture. On the basis of qualitative research that I conducted among Chinese and Afro-Chinese Lukumi practitioners in Cuba, this dissertation documents the development of syncretism and discursive religious practice between African and Chinese diasporas. I conceptualize a framework of interdiasporic cross-fertilization and, in so doing, disassemble Cuba’s racial and religious categories, which support a notion of “Cubanidad” that renders Chinese subjectivity invisible. I argue that Afro-Chinese religiosity became a space for a positive association that I call “Sinalidad”. I also argue that this religiosity has been elaborated upon largely because of transformations in Cuba’s social and economic landscape that began during Cuba’s Special Period. Thus, the dissertation uses religious practice as a lens through which I shed light upon another dimension of identity making, transnationalism and the political economy of tourism on the island.

Environmental Justice defines the environment as the spaces where we live, work, and play. The Environmental Justice (EJ) Movement has traditionally used this definition to organize against toxics in communities. However, within EJ work, prisons or policing have often not been centralized or discussed. This means that the approximately 2.2 million people in prison are excluded from the conversation and movement. Additionally, communities and activists are identifying police and prisons as toxics in their communities, but an analysis of policing and prisons is largely missing in EJ scholarship. This thesis explores the intersection between prisons, policing, and pollution. It outlines how prisons, policing, and pollution are connected and reveals why this intersection is critical to understand in Environmental Justice (EJ) scholarship and organizing. Based on interviews with formerly incarcerated individuals in San Antonio, Texas, and a case study of the Mira Loma Women’s Detention Center in the Antelope Valley of California, this thesis expands the realm of EJ work to include and center the spaces of prisons and policing and complicates the definition of toxicity as it has been traditionally used and organized against in the EJ movement. I argue that policing and imprisonment are toxic systems to our communities and contradict and prevent the development of safe and sustainable communities. Thus, understanding prisons and policing as toxic to both people and to the environment, we should move toward abolishing these toxic systems and building alternatives to them. To this end, or rather, to this new beginning, [prison-industrial-complex] abolition should be explored as a framework within EJ to push us to fundamentally reconsider our ideas of justice, to better and differently approach the practice of making environmental justice available for all because abolition is not only about dismantling, but it is largely about building more just, safer, and more sustainable communities. This thesis brings abolition and EJ discourses together to assess the potential for coalition building between abolitionists and EJ activists to work toward a common goal of building safe, sustainable, and more just communities for everybody. I conclude that abolition should be embraced as a framework within EJ to liberate our carceral landscape and to imagine, and subsequently, create a new environmental and social landscape.

A formação deste trabalho tem como horizonte a comparação entre as obras Mayombe e Predadores do autor angolano Pepetela, principalmente no tocante a perspectiva nacional que está impressa em cada texto, todavia de maneiras diversas. A possibilidade de ler as obras de maneira muito próxima aos fenômenos históricos angolanos é aquilo que faz com que se projete sob os olhos a questão nacional que é tão cara à série literária angolana, principalmente caso se tenha em mente a formação do jovem país e a necessidade de construir a identidade. As obras em questão registram, em momentos diversos, esta construção e as nuances ideológicas no processo nacional, cada qual em uma época e quando olhadas uma em relação a outra, consegue-se depreender mais, primordialmente aquilo que está no âmbito ideológico da desconstrução e da perda de paradigmas, sejam eles políticos ou culturais. É o efeito da pós-modernidade que obriga a sociedade em questão a descobrir-se sem chão e sem certeza de nada, uma vez que não mais se pode falar de estado colonial, mas sim pós-colonial e, como tal, terra aberta a possibilidades, sejam elas propositivas ou niilistas com relação à formação nacional. Dessa maneira, para depreender mais que obviedades da relação dessas obras, deve-se ter em mente que as formações híbridas desse espaço obrigam o desapego teórico, caminhando na direção da colaboração entre as disciplinas de modo a captar significativamente algo deste contato. Assim, interrogar-se sobre as obras Mayombe e Predadores tanto no que toca nos pontos de contato quanto nos de repulsão é mais que exercício teórico, é questionar-se quanto à legitimidade do processo nacional que está subentendido nas duas obras. Pepetela, como uma espécie de demiurgo, registra aquilo que está fora do lugar, destoando a análise, e que aos poucos, apresenta como um acre sabor na boca de quem lê, aquilo em que se transformou o sonho de libertação angolana, justamente o antípoda do processo que se apossa e faz com que o capitalismo mais selvagem possível arrebate o sonho comunista de princípio, e que não mais é possível crer num Estado aos moldes do Ocidente do século XIX, mas simplesmente os frangalhos do mesmo. Entretanto, não se pode ler o contexto acima verificado de modo apenas negativo, uma vez que dele pode se verificar obras literárias complexas que não só dão conta da fotografia histórica, mas também de todo um trabalho de linguagem e de sentido que, para ser de fato apreciado, demanda o trabalho técnico hermenêutico de avanço e retrocesso, do micro ao macro, para que se produza algum conhecimento satisfatório a respeito das obras. / The formation of the horizon of this work is the comparison between the literary works of the author of Predadores and Mayombe, the Angolan writer Pepetela, specially at the perspective of Nation that is founded on each text, but in differently ways. The ability to read the works in very closely way to the Angolan historical phenomena is what makes this project closed to the national question, which is so relevant to the Angolan literary series, especially if you have in mind the formation of this young country and the need to build its own identity. The narratives in question express in different times this ideological construction and the variations in the national process, each one at the time, and when they are viewed one relation to another, it can be inferred more, primarily in what this ideological deconstruction and loss of paradigms whether political or cultural. It is the effect of post-modernity which requires the concerned company to find themselves without the ground and not sure of anything, since one can no longer speak of the colonial state, but post-colonial land and as such are open to possibilities they purposeful or nihilistic related to the nationally formation. Therefore, to remove more than superficialities of the relationship of these narratives we should keep in mind that the hybrid formations of this area require the detachment theory, moving toward the collaboration between disciplines in order to capture something significantly of the Contact. So ask yourself about the books Mayombe and Predators both in terms as the contact points as the points of repulsion is more than a theoretical exercise, question itself about the legitimacy of the national process that implied in the two works, makes Pepetela a kind of demiurge, whose records what is out of right place, diverging the analysis, and gradually presents as an acrid taste in the mouth of the reader, what it became the dream of Angola freedom, in the antithesis of the process which takes places and makes the most savage capitalism that destroyed the communist dream of beginning, and that is no longer possible to believe in a state along the lines of the West of the nineteenth century, but simply whats left of it. However, you cannot read the background above only for the negative way, because it can verify the complex literary works that not only realize in the historic photograph but also the work of language and meaning that to be truly appreciated by the reader it demands technical and hermeneutical work, from microspical to the macroscopical, to its bring a satisfactory knowledge about the works.

The social sciences have developed robust bodies of scholarship on expertise and professionalism, yet literary analyses of the two remain comparatively sparse. I address this gap in Boundaries of Knowledge by examining recent Anglophone fiction and showing that expertise and professionalism are central concerns of contemporary authors, both as subject matter in fiction and in their public identities. I argue that the novelists studied use and abuse expertise and professionalism: they critique professions as participant observers, and also borrow the mantle of expert credibility to bolster their own cultural capital while documenting the pitfalls of expertise in their fiction. My first chapter shows how acquired technical knowledge and professionalism are the central concerns of Ian McEwan’s Saturday. In the novel, Henry Perowne’s professionalism is the site from which various ethical and political debates radiate. Perowne—depicted as a rather heroic expert in comparison to the other novels studied in the dissertation—is disturbed by a total outsider in the form of Baxter, a man with no prospects or future, professional or otherwise. McEwan aligns himself more closely with Perowne: in part through extensive research for Saturday, he has developed a reputation as a public figure who straddles the “two cultures” of the sciences and humanities, a reputation that exists in a synergistic relationship with his particular brand of realist fiction, which emphasizes hard work and professional credibility. Next, I demonstrate how Zadie Smith’s On Beauty reveals a deep suspicion of academia, which in the novel serves to cut disciplinary experts off both from the world outside campus and from an appreciation of the subjects they study. Smith’s academic professionals are well-intentioned but unable to look beyond field-specific boundaries to appreciate their objects of study (and unintentionally harm outsiders along the way). Larger issues such as race are always present but at the margins of the interpersonal drama that plays out between the novel’s numerous characters. I read Smith herself as reluctantly accepting academic life, teaching at New York University while maintaining a qualified distance from American academia in articles and interviews. Chapters one and two are broadly about the advantages and drawbacks of expert knowledge, respectively. In my third chapter, Abdulrazak Gurnah offers the most circumspect view of experts yet with a fear of a “summarizing” expert or colonizer of knowledge that is only resolved by the arrival of a more authentic Zanzibari expert. In an analysis of Gurnah’s By the Sea, I show how professional networks--the United Kingdom’s immigration and refugee system, the colonial education system in Zanzibar, and the professoriate--raise questions about who is entitled to and capable of narrating people’s lives. These questions dovetail both with the novel’s shifting narrative form and with the concerns of Gurnah’s own work as a scholar of literature. Beginning with McEwan and ending with Gurnah, Boundaries of Knowledge travels from the most socially and economically secure, elite experts to those left behind by contemporary professionalism. My title reflects this troubled landscape of expert knowledge and professionalism: who knows what, the benefits and drawbacks of the accompanying cultural capital, and the barriers between various fields, sets of knowledge, and finally people.

The wave of gurus in America brought with them cultural transformations particularly in how they interpret Hinduism, how their teachings have adapted in engaging a Western audience, and the sustainability of their religious communities, thus changing the landscape of contemporary Hindu spirituality. The traditional model of the guru and disciple relationship according to Yoga and Vedanta is undergoing a transformation allowing for greater autonomy of the disciple to make decisions in how they appropriate the authority of the guru. This thesis examines the guru and disciple relationship within the institutional organization of the Yoga Research Foundation, founded by the contemporary guru, Swami Jyotirmayananda. Research of Jyotirmayananda’s unique following of Western disciples illuminates the nature of his authority through the establishment of his order and methods by which disciples navigate identity formation and experience religious transmission.

This thesis investigates the nature of environmental racism, a by-product of “slow violence” under capitalism, from the perspective of Jain philosophy. By observing slow violence through the lens of Jain doctrine and ethics, I investigate whether the central tenets of ahimsa and karma are philosophically anti-capitalist, and if there are facets within Jain ethics supporting slow violence. By analyzing the ascetic and lay ethical models, I conclude that the maximization of profit and private acquisition of lands/resources are capitalist attributes that cannot thrive efficiently under a proper Jain ethical model centered on ahimsa (non-harm, non-violence) and world-denying/world-renouncing practices. Conversely, karma and Jain cosmology has the potential to support slow violence when considering their philosophical and fatalistic implications. Furthermore, by connecting the theory of slow violence with the theory of microaggressions, I assert that, while resolving microaggressions, Jainism’s highly individualistic ethical system can hinder confronting slow violence.

This dissertation addresses racism in contemporary Curaçao—a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean that remains a component of the Kingdom of The Netherlands. The dissertation theorizes racism as a partially hidden constituent of the island’s ideology of national identity, which throughout its history has emulated hybridity before being influenced, more recently, by multiculturalism. The research’s main objective is to uncover the ways race and racism have been entangled with Curaçao’s hegemonic ideology of national identity, a reality too often omitted and always under-theorized in Dutch and Dutch Caribbean scholarship. Using historical, ethnographic, statistic, and discourse analysis data, the dissertation reveals how profound the operations of race have been on Curaçaoan society, and on all Curaçaoans on the island and in the diaspora. It discusses the historical formation of ideologies of race and national identity in Curaçao, to contribute to the explanation of the current state of race relations on the island. It exposes the silencing impacts that the hegemonic ideology of national identity has had on individual Curaçaoans’ understanding of self through the reflexive presentation of an intergenerational family history. The dissertation ends with ethnographic analytic descriptions of five neighborhoods differently located in Curaçao’s racial/spatial order, which reveal the mechanizations of multiculturalism and the prevalence of racism.

The purpose of my thesis seeks to uncover the constructed nature of the Anglo-Saxon ethnicity within two works of fiction. My thesis utilizes London’s The Valley of the Moon (1913) and Norris’s McTeague (1899) because they were published in a similar era. Both authors lived and wrote in the Bay Area during the Progressive Era of American politics. Therefore, there is political, stylistic, and regional proximity. Although Anglo-Saxonism has always been present in the United States, the construction of race was changing in the 1900s. The Valley of the Moon and McTeague both contain intriguing (and antiquated) notions of whiteness that further exacerbate the class struggle in California. This thesis describes the convergence of Progressive politics, eugenics, and Marxism within a unique chapter of American history. Through an exploration of Anglo-Saxonism, this examination of racial classifications is an attempt to reveal the inner workings of oppression in America.