<p> Current scholarship in food studies generally, and literary food studies in particular, has overlooked important assumptions about the act of eating and its implications for subjectivity, embodiment, and agency. The field has taken up the idea of &ldquo;eating&rdquo; as a natural and universal physical process, immune to discourse. I argue that in so doing, the field has missed important opportunities to examine how our beliefs about what eating is and why are discursively informed. And, further, I argue that the discourses of eating play a role in regulating subjectivity, the material body, and its access to agency. Chapter 1 explores two well-known texts within literary food studies, <i>The Edible Woman</i> and <i>Like Water for Chocolate,</i> and is critical of aspects of each text that have been thus far neglected in the food studies critical conversation. By examining these overlooked pieces, I discuss how the eating discourses in both texts inform the characters&rsquo; subjectivities, their embodiment, and their agency within the novels. Chapter 2 examines two texts infrequently discussed in literary food studies, <i>My Year of Meats</i> and <i>Xenogenesis, </i> in order to illustrate the limits of the field&rsquo;s scholarship so far and to explore how a discursive analysis of eating can provide new insight into how the subject, the body, and its agency can be conceptualized. Chapter 3 looks to contemporary cookery texts for clues about how we talk about eating outside a strictly academic purview and ways that a discursive analysis of the genre can demonstrate how eating shapes our everyday perceptions of subjectivity, embodiment, and agency.</p>

<p> USonian identity has been defined controversially since its inception. Its representatives have largely been independent, white, wealthy, male, and heterosexual. However, the actual population of the US is more diverse and possesses much more complex identities. Some of the identifying factors of USonians derive from the US tradition of self-making. Traditional US self-made narratives, as with larger definitions of US identity, lack a full inclusivity and nationally representative characters, as scholars such as Mary Carden explain. However, rather than simply disappearing, traits of the US self-made man, as part of a larger national identity, continue to exist but in ways more suitable to the US nationality that has developed. For example, some of the newer versions of US self-makers include women, ethnic minorities, and homosexuals. </p><p> The more important elements of the changing definitions of US identity and self-making, community building and belonging, arises when more diverse representatives appear in texts ranging from Susan Sontag&rsquo;s <i> In America</i> to works like Lin-Manuel Miranda&rsquo;s <i> Hamilton.</i> This dissertation studies more communal self-making models as well as US representatives who are recognized within texts and by readers in works by authors such as Philip Roth. The modeling of these characters results in the opportunity for readers to identify with them and/or some of their contexts. Such a relationship sets the foundation for what I have termed &ldquo;fabulous ordinariness.&rdquo; This means that despite possessing some fabulous or extraordinary storylines or characteristics, there are daily events, interactions, or traits that readers can empathize with, connect with, or feel represents them. Such experiences with the characters and texts provide the space for a representative relationship to be established and articulated as such. </p><p> The redefinitions of self-making and US identity, along with the enactment of fabulous ordinariness, ask readers to consider how culture, identities, and nationalities are preserved, challenged, and protected. Scholarship addressing traditional US role-models, along with works that support and challenge those representatives and roles, examines contemporary US identities and their connection to the past. This dissertation asks questions concerning the boundaries between fiction and history, culture and its artifacts, as well as readers and their texts.</p>

Thesis (PH.D.) -- Syracuse University, 2006 / "Publication number AAT 3251820."

The aim of this dissertation is to explore how and why Toni Morrison employs biblical allusion, biblical names and entire books of the Bible both directly and ironically in order to emphasize the importance of ancestry and community in the lives of African-Americans. Morrison begins in Sula emphasizing the idea that communities that are not cohesive cannot survive. She challenges her readers to question how The Bottom community could have thrived if the people thought of it as more than just a place, but as a group of neighbors who help each other to live and grow. She continues in Song of Solomon with the emphasis not only on community but also on ancestry as identity. When Jake agrees to give up his name, he prevents his descendants from knowing or understanding from where they came. In not knowing their past, they are empty. She culminates her argument in Beloved where she fully emphasizes both community and ancestry with the incarnation of Beloved as the community of all slaves that have gone before. All three novels are heavily laden with biblical allusion that culminate in Morrison’s challenge for all not to forget and to let their history lead to a reclamation of ancestry and community.

"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.

This project examines the presence of African-derived spiritual ideals within the black literary tradition as a means of highlighting the fundamental influence of spirituality on communities of the modern black diaspora. I begin the discussion with an examination of traditional African spirituality, focusing on Nigerian author Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958). This discussion identifies four core principles of traditional African spirituality that resonate most thoroughly in diasporan communities: the interconnection of sacred and secular spheres, the concept of cyclical rather than linear time, the emphasis on a communal ethos, and the necessity for balance and reconciliation. I then examine the development of what I define as "Black Diasporan Spirituality," considering how these principles, resonating to varying degrees, constitute the basis for a philosophical system defining the universe and the place and role of mankind within it, as understood by African-descended peoples throughout the diaspora. Subsequently, I discuss the ways in which core elements of black spirituality at once inform and are represented in literature produced in Africa and the diaspora. Beginning with an analysis of James Weldon Johnson's God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse (1927) and Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), I examine "Black Diasporan Spirituality" as a defining influence on the black oral tradition, centering my discussion on the cultural articulation of the African American song sermon. Using James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and The Amen Corner (1954), I then examine the consequences of religious practice in the absence of black spiritual ideals. Focusing on the presence of spirituality in spaces which are not formally designated as religious, I then consider Gloria Naylor's Mama Day (1988) as a narrative that positions "Black Diasporan Spirituality" as vital to the healing processes of black communities, addressing both the trauma and the reconciliation inherent in the construction of diaspora. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that a clear understanding of the nature and character of black spirituality is essential to understanding not only the literature, but also the many circumstances—historical, social and cultural—of the communities out of which each text emerges.

<p> This dissertation explores the unhomely nature of the slave system as experienced by fugitive and captive slaves within slave and neo-slave narratives. The purpose of this project is to broaden the discourse of migration narratives set during the antebellum period. I argue that the unhomely manifests through corporeal, psychological, historical, and geographical descriptions found within each narrative and it is through these manifestations that a broader discourse of identity can be generated. I turn to four slave and neo-slave narratives for this dissertation: Solomon Northup&rsquo;s <i>Twelve Years a Slave</i> (1853), Frederick Douglass&rsquo;s <i>My Bondage and My Freedom</i> (1855), Octavia Butler&rsquo;s <i>Kindred </i> (1979), and Toni Morrison&rsquo;s <i>Beloved</i> (1987). </p>

<p> Writing about food and eating food are both environmental acts. The ways in which humans conceive of edible material&mdash;by speaking about it and growing it in the ground&mdash;are reflections of their view of the natural world. </p><p> Ecological fiction like Karen Tei Yamashita&rsquo;s <i>Through the Arc of the Rain Forest</i> connects imagined visions of food with the current reality of our agricultural system in the United States. In both the fictitious narratives and lived experience, synthetic polymers overtake almost every aspect of life, including edible matter. The ubiquitous <i> plasticization</i> of food is one of the main causes of the current global environmental crisis. </p><p> Ultimately, the treatment of food in ecological fiction and in practice reveals our mistreatment of the environment and of our own bodies. Employing a systems-based way of thinking ecologically make visible the yet invisible lines of interconnection among the natural world, edible matter, and living beings.</p>

<p> <i>Liberating Blackness: African-American Prison Writers and the Creation of the Black Revolutionary</i> takes an in-depth look at a selection of works written by African-American writers who, in autobiographies and novels written during the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, utilized their own experiences with the carceral system to articulate revolutionary Black identities capable of resisting racial oppression. To articulate these revolutionary Black identities these authors would develop counter-narratives to three key historical discourses&mdash;scientific discourses of Black bodies, pedagogical discourses of Black minds, and political discourses of Black communities&mdash;that had, respectively, defined Black bodies and Black intellects as inferior to White bodies and White intellects, and subordinated the political interests of Black communities to White communities. These discourses would be used by state and federal agencies to justify racially disparate practices and processes of incarceration. In my first two chapters, I closely read <i> The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Soledad Brother, Assata: An Autobiography, </i> and <i>Angela Davis: An Autobiography</i> to look at how, respectively, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Assata Shakur, and Angela Davis utilize their own experiences in prison to craft counter-narratives about Black bodies and Black minds. I argue that while these counter-narratives aided readers in developing Black identities resistant to racist stereotypes, the dialectical frameworks that X and Jackson used in shaping their revolutionary subjectivities, informed by heteronormative, misogynist, and patriarchal beliefs, had the effect of (re)producing many of the practices of exclusion that justified the carceral system. In reaction, Black women prison writers, like Davis and Shakur, would utilize a dialogical model to develop a revolutionary Black female intersubjectivity based on practices of inclusivity, diversity and community. In my last chapter, I explore the novels <i>Iron City</i> by Lloyd L. Brown, and <i>House of Slammers</i> by Nathan Heard, novels written at the beginning and end of the era I review, to display how the counter-narratives put forth by all of these authors shaped the political landscape during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. I argue that the changes in tone between these two works, from optimism to pessimism, reflect on how X and Jackson&rsquo;s dialectical models encouraged the political balkanization of Civil Rights and Black Power organizations, which inhibited them from mounting as effective a resistance against the carceral state as they could have had they taken heed of Davis and Shakur&rsquo;s intersubjective model.</p>

This dissertation is a comparative examination of how certain works by Ernest Hemingway and Richard Wright jointly address themes concerning manhood, violence, and alienation. The dissertation considers how each American writer's treatment of common themes is effected by race and the social climates they come out of: the American Midwest during and after the World War I era and the American South after The Great Depression. An important dimension of this study is how each man traveled to identical geographical settings-Spain, Africa, and France and responded to globally significant events taking place there such as The Spanish Civil War and independence coming to Anglo-Africa after World War II. The shared subject here is the affects of modernity on traditional culture. Their debut collection of short stories in the mid 20's to late 30's on through to their nonfiction journals on Anglo-Africa in the early 1950's shows a developing struggle, in each writer, with detached individualism and offering political analysis and commentary.