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1	Storytelling and the National Security of America: Korean War Stories from the Cold War to Post-9/11 Era Jingyi Liu (7901657) 21 November 2019 (has links) <p>My dissertation is an interdisciplinary study of the Korean War stories in America in relation to the history of the national security state of America from the Cold War to post-911 era. Categorizing the Korean War stories in three phases in parallel with three dramatic episodes in the national security of America, including the institutionalization of national security in the early Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the bipolar Cold War system in the 1990s, and the institutionalization of homeland security after the 9/11 attacks, I argue that storytelling of the Korean War morphs with the changes of national security politics in America. Reading James Michener’s Korean War stories, <i>Invasion of the Body Snatchers</i> (1956), and <i>The Manchurian Candidate</i> (1962) in the 1950s and early 1960s, I argue that the first-phase Korean War stories cooperated with the state, translating and popularizing key themes in the national security policies through racial and gender tropes. Focusing on Helie Lee’s <i>Still Life with Rice</i> (1996), Susan Choi’s <i>The Foreign Student</i> (1998), and Heinz Insu Fenkl’s <i>Memories of My Ghost Brother</i> (1996) in the 1990s, I maintain that the second-phase Korean War stories by Korean American writers form a narrative resistance against the ideology of national security and provide alternative histories of racial and gender violence in America’s national security programs. Further reading post-911 Korean War novels such as Toni Morrison’s <i>Home</i> (2012), Ha Jin’s <i>War Trash</i> (2005), and Chang-Rae Lee’s <i>The Surrendered</i> (2010), I contend that in the third-phase Korean War stories, the Korean War is deployed as a historical analogy to understand the War on Terror and diverse writers’ revisiting the war offers alternative perspectives on healing and understanding “homeland” for a traumatized American society. Taken together, these Korean War stories exemplify the politics of storytelling that engages with the national security state and the complex ways individual narratives interact with national narratives. Moreover, the continued morphing of the Korean War in literary representation demonstrates the vitality of the “forgotten war” and constantly reminds us the war’s legacy.</p> Literature History North American Literature American literature The Korean War the National Security State of America the Cold War post-9/11 America Asian American literature literature and national policies
2	“DOUBLE REFRACTION”: IMAGE PROJECTION AND PERCEPTION IN SAUDI-AMERICAN CONTEXTS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY Ghaleb Alomaish (8850251) 18 May 2020 (has links) <p>This dissertation aims to create a scholarly space where a seventy-five-year-old “special relationship” (1945-2020) between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States is examined from an interdisciplinary comparativist perspective. I posit that a comparative study of Saudi and American fiction goes beyond the limitedness of global geopolitics and proves to uncover some new literary, sociocultural, and historical dimensions of this long history, while shedding some light on others. Saudi writers creatively challenge the inherently static and monolithic image of Saudi Arabia, its culture and people in the West. They also simultaneously unsettle the notion of homogeneity and enable us to gain new insight into self-perception within the local Saudi context by offering a wide scope of genuine engagements with distinctive themes ranging from spatiality, identity, ethnicity, and gender to slavery, religiosity and (post)modernity. On the other side, American authors still show some signs of ambivalence towards the depiction of the Saudi (Muslim/Arab) Other, but they nonetheless also demonstrate serious effort to emancipate their representations from the confining legacy of (neo)Orientalist discourse and oil politics by tackling the concepts of race, alterity, hegemony, radicalism, nomadism and (un)belonging.</p> Art Literature History Disability Studies Gender studies Language North American Literature Other Literatures in English Middle Eastern Literature Comparative Literature Studies Literary Theory Aesthetics Epistemology Feminist Theory Hermeneutic and Critical Theory Comparative Religious Studies Islamic Studies Gender, Sexuality and Education British History Saudi culture American Saudi-American Orientalism Orientalism in art neo-Orientalsim Desert oil Cultural studies Arabian Gulf migration Diaspora Studies blackness slavery literature Mormonism Mormon biblical studies disability studies geopolitics 9/11 post-9/11 post-9/11 America Post-9/11, fiction terrorism extremism radicalism visual studies orientalist painting postcolonial Postcolonial Discourse Otherness Alterity munif cities of salt urbanism Modernity tradition Islamic feminism Islam whiteness studies

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Storytelling and the National Security of America: Korean War Stories from the Cold War to Post-9/11 Era

“DOUBLE REFRACTION”: IMAGE PROJECTION AND PERCEPTION IN SAUDI-AMERICAN CONTEXTS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY