In this dissertation I argue that Jewish women have served as cynosures of change in Jewish culture, and American Jewish culture in particular. The-turn-of-the-century representations of Jewish women in America that I have chosen to explore exemplify the paradox of the "unhampered child of liberty"--they were generally portrayed as having unconstrained equality but also described as children, thus implicitly reinforcing the child/parent power imbalance, including control over the discourse. The women that I write about, Rosa Sonneschein, Molly Picon, and Rose Pastor Stokes, had some access to the arenas in which the struggle for control over representation could take place. At the same time that these active women had some power to project their messages, however, because those messages advocated change, they were regularly put in the position of transgressing the status quo. They became the literal embodiment of change. The strategy that I have chosen to illustrate this concept highlights differences within the American Jewish community at the same time that it points out the particular commonalities of identity and change. The first chapter, an analysis of the 1895 magazine The American Jewess, attempts to understand the symbolic process of constructing and representing identity within the Jewish community, especially the liberal Jewish women's community and argues that the discourse moves toward containment. Other chapters, while also concerned with representation in popular texts such as newspapers, biography, and fiction, moves beyond an immediate audience of American Jews to European Jews as well as, in chapter three, American non-Jews. "Unhampered Child of Liberty" is an attempt to add to the growing scholarship about Jewish American women and representation by attempting to move toward a theory of identity and change in which Jewish American women carry the load of being the subjects around which important discussions of and decisions within both religious and secular Jewish culture turn.

This dissertation scrutinizes the writings of two major literary figures of early-twentieth-century Argentina and the United States with the aim of revealing how representations of motherhood function in their journalism as the site for a reformulation of the configuration of female subjectivities astride the private/public divide. Alfonsina Storni's and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's discursive acts of questioning socially and culturally validated mothering practices interrogate the classic divide, thus threatening to unsettle the very foundations of patriarchal ideology, which at least partly explains the neglect displayed towards this production. Alfonsina Storni's fame as Argentina's most famous "poetess of love" drastically overshadowed during her life and afterwards her journalistic contributions, which have as a result been largely overlooked by most scholarship on her work. In a similar vein, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's renown as a leading feminist thinker and reformer have traditionally led critics and scholars to focus almost exclusively on her utopian fiction, to the detriment of her journalistic endeavors. This study sets up a dialogue between the journalism of both women writers through the recuperation and examination of Storni's contributions to the "feminine" column of the journal La Nota and of Gilman's pieces for The Forerunner—the monthly she published entirely by herself. It is via a transgressive use of their journalism that both writers manage to critique the "domestication" of female subjectivity endemic to most existing accounts of motherhood, which cancel and negate the empowering possibilities of mothering practices for new forms of female agency. A close analysis of the discursive and rhetorical strategies employed by Alfonsina Storni and Charlotte Perkins Gilman thus helps unearth a neglected literary corpus and contributes at the same time to enriching new and innovative feminist analyses of mothering.

This study focuses on Blackness and shows how changes in its meaning reflect arguments about the short story as a fictional form. I argue that Blackness, as a socially constructed identity marker and the corresponding discourse designed to reify Whiteness, led to the evolution of an aesthetic consciousness that found critical and creative expression during the Black Power and Black Consciousness movements of the 1960s and 70s. In a process I call the "Politics of Creation," where Blackness and the short story move towards self-definition, we discover that Blackness and the short story reshape the socially constructed groupings designed to "fix" categories of people and genres. In chapter one reviewing the relevant literature concerning the origins of racial prejudice proves instructive for understanding the role of narrative in constructing discursive categories: i.e. Blackness and Whiteness. Chapter two addresses the historical context and introduces this study's attitudinal "common ground." In chapter three, we see how the collective identity of a community, marginalized by the "majority" status society (in this respect, the "imagined community" of Blackness), coalesces in response to white domination and becomes part of the larger culture of resistance known as the African diaspora. Examining Black participation in the discourse shows how "essentialism" racialized the ideological discourse. Chapter four reviews the critical literature on the short story and shows how its diminishment as a "minor" form of fiction, is analogous to the process by which Blackness was "othered." In chapter five, the short story and Blackness meet in a discussion of the aesthetic issues that fostered the explosion of African and Black Short Story anthologies and the growth of a critical discourse to offset the prejudicial attitudes expressed under the guise of "universalism." Using representative short stories by Henry Dumas, Toni Cade Bambara, Njabulo Ndebele, and Sindiwe Magona, chapter six addresses storytelling as "expressive" common ground, while revealing the "conflicts of unity" to Black solidarity. Chapter seven closes with a discussion of the commonalities I find in their writing styles. African American, African/a, Literary, Cultural, and Genre Studies will benefit from this study's insights into Black American and South African's reconsiderations of Blackness.

This dissertation investigates the radical black feminist theatre of the 1940s through the 1970s, focusing on the work of playwrights Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Sonia Sanchez. Each of these artists critically intervened in the discourses of gender, race, and class during the civil rights movement, and, later, the Black Power and Arts movements. Using archival and historical research, I argue that there was a vibrant, radical black feminist theatre movement throughout the twentieth century that sought equal representation for African Americans and a voice for black women. Chapters Two and Three add to the growing body of scholarship that situates Alice Childress as a major figure within the black left and the Communist Party. Through archival research and readings of her work, I demonstrate how Childress scripted dignified, humorous, and realistic portrayals of working class black women. Childress illustrated the theory of "triple jeopardy," the idea circulated within black radical circles that working class African American women were triply oppressed due to their class, race, and gender. Through her experimental forms and daring content, Childress revised racist stereotypes of, for instance, the black female domestic worker, into full-fledged characters. The manner in which African Americans were represented—artistically and politically—was her greatest concern. In Chapter Two, I argue that Childress's body of work can be viewed as an alternative feminist chronicle of African American women through its scripting of the working class black woman, specifically in her play Florence (1949) and her experimental novel of monologues, Like One of the Family (1956). Childress wrote, "I concentrate on portraying the have-nots in a have society, those seldom singled out by mass media, except as source material for derogatory humor." Her focus on the ordinary is anti-bourgeois in its refusal to participate in racial uplift stories lionizing the successful black middle class. In Chapter Three, I focus on Trouble in Mind. While this play has been hitherto regarded as formally conservative, I argue that, to the contrary, Childress uses innovative Brechtian structures. Childress employs radical formal experimentation to forcefully argue for black self-determination in the arts, well before the artists of the Black Arts Movement would. Chapter Four, "The White Problem: White Supremacy and Black Masculinity in the Work of Lorraine Hansberry," focuses on Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and Les Blancs and the playwright's critical interventions into the racial discourses of whiteness, black masculinity, and their intersections, in the civil rights era. By focusing on Hansberry's critique of whiteness and patriarchal white supremacy, this essay redresses a gap in scholarship on Hansberry. I argue that Hansberry was one of the central assessors of whiteness and black masculinity in the civil rights-era United States. Hansberry's representation of black men across her career attempts to find common ground for progressive black masculinity and black feminism to work together to defeat the white supremacist patriarchy detrimental to all African Americans. Moving into the Black Power era, my final chapter posits an alternative model to current scholarship on gender ideology within the Black Arts and Power movements. Rather than envisioning a movement led by men who repressed women, or considering women as marginal figures fighting from the periphery to address questions of feminism, gender, women's issues, and sexuality, I ask, what happens if we center such feminist concerns in our narrative of the Black Arts Movement? Using works by Alice Childress and Sonia Sanchez, I demonstrate that black feminists in this time not only critiqued the masculinist rhetoric of much Black Arts writing, but also proposed a community-centered alternative model of black nationalism. This feminist model was grounded in love and support between black women and men, and advanced by black feminists as imperative for the success of the black nation's political goals.

This dissertation examines how marginalized subjects have altered rigid structures of class, race, sexuality and gender in American culture during the fifty-year period from 1940 to1990. This research utilizes an interdisciplinary approach that sources literature, film, historical documents, government statistics, sociological studies, and urban history. These varied resources provide insight about subject identities that exist outside the social and cultural mainstream. Some examples include the sexual outlaw, the racial transgressor, and men who have sex with men but identify as heterosexual. This work explores how the marginalized subject has been a dynamic locus for social and cultural changes. The literary works selected examine the marginalized subject through the lenses of sexuality, race, class, and gender. Furthermore, the works expose how the marginalized subject and the social practices in which these individuals engage often serve as transgressive acts that dismantle the categories of race, class, gender and sexuality. The hyper-masculine "pimp persona" is one example where the paradoxes and interstitial spaces between male and female gender performance become blurred. Additionally, this work examines masculine subjectivity through film and television, with particular analysis given to the persona of the sexual outlaw, the "magical Negro and white working-class male subject.

This dissertation examines representations of Muslim women in contemporary Germany and considers them in the context of the intensely gendered politics of cultural difference at work. It particularly addresses how immigrant women are understood as Muslim women. As a consequence, immigrant women are considered primarily as representatives of an essentialized and racialized culture. Such discursive reductions ignore immigrant women's participation in the realms of economy, politics, and knowledge production in Germany. The first part of my dissertation critiques representations of Muslim women by revealing the national and nationalist forces that overdetermine these representations. Utilizing transnational feminist cultural studies and feminist deconstruction as my theoretical and methodological underpinnings, I explore representations of Muslim and immigrant women in Der Spiegel from the time of reunification to the present. I then analyze discourses around Germany's headscarf debates in legal texts, newspapers, and court decisions. In the next section I work to theorize potential alternative discursive fields for representing immigrant women. Drawing in particular on Gayatri Spivak's notion of teleopoeisis, I discuss the need for representations and discourses that also imagine immigrant women as political actors, economic agents, and agents of knowledge. I then perform readings of interviews with Muslim and Turkish women as well as of Feridun Zaimoglu's literary rewritings of interviews with Turkish women to consider what a politics of teleopoeisis and careful listening might mean for literary and cultural studies. I suggest that even in texts that explicitly choose their subjects based on participation in a particular "culture," it is possible to read for subjectivities as agents of politics, economics, and knowledge production. The final chapter performs such an alternate reading through an analysis of the work of Emine Sevgi Özdamar. By reading textual figures for political, worker, and intellectual subjectivities one discovers that Özdamar herself has provided a transnational critique of histories of the political movements of the 1970s. In my concluding chapter I consider the difficulties of interdisciplinary work in relationship to my trainings in Comparative Literature, German Studies and Women's Studies.

My project explores the impact of the great Orishas (Yoruba: "deities") of the crossroads, Eshu-Elegguá, on the thriving literary and visual arts of the African diaspora. Eshu-Elegguá are multiple figures who work between physical and spiritual realms, open possibilities, and embody unpredictability and chance. In chapter one I explore the codes, spaces, and functions of these translating, intermediary deities through cultural anthropology, religious studies, and art history. Chapter two explores patterns in the artistic employment of Eshu-Elegguá by analyzing these figures' appearance in visual arts and then in four texts: Mumbo Jumbo (Ismael Reed, 1972), Sortilégio: Mistério Negro (Abdias do Nasicmento, 1951), Chago de Guisa (Gerardo Fulleda León, 1988), and Brown Girl in the Ring (Nalo Hopkinson, 1998). Chapter three explores how those patterns converge in Midnight Robber (Nalo Hopkinson, 2000) by looking closely at the novel's narrators and translators, Eshu and Elegguá. I argue that Midnight Robber, when read through the literary theories and poetry of Kamau Brathwaite, is a novel "possessed" by the Orishas and that they take on authorial roles. Chapter four analyzes the translation of Midnight Robber into Spanish ( Ladrona de medianoche, Isabel Merino Bode, 2002); presents a way of translating the novel's multiple languages; and puts contemporary translation theories in dialogue with Eshu-Elegguá's translative and interpretive functions. Chapter five argues for a way of reading Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966) through the figures of Eshu-Elegguá. ^ The objective is to explore the aesthetic codes and philosophies that the figures of Eshu-Elegguá carry into the texts; trace their voices across multiple forms of cultural expression; and navigate the dialogues that these intermediary figures open between a group of literary texts that have not yet been studied together. The dissertation extends the critical work on the selected literary texts; uses the arts to further understand the nature of these deities of communicability; and analyzes Afro-Atlantic texts through figures and interpretive systems from within the tradition. By surveying contemporary translation theories and based on my close reading of the translating capacities and metaphors that Eshu-Elegguá embody, I offer a new model for translation.^

Between Profits and Primitivism: Rehabilitating White Middle-Class Manhood in America, 1880–1917 uses primary sources in literature and the social sciences to locate and analyze changing discourses, images, and scientific representations of middle-class manhood and masculinity. The first chapter examines the construction of a specific white, middle-class male body. I argue that despite the attention-grabbing muscle men of the period, the middle-class sought a particular type of body, one that emphasized symmetry over swelling muscles and efficiency over superfluous beauty. Through their exercise manuals, I examine the ways physical educators sought to make a science out of streamlining “flabby businessmen.” My second chapter focuses on two works of fiction by Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914). Through my reading of these often overlooked novels, I investigate men's dependence on the new consumer culture. I link this dependence to financial trusts and new market economies which incorporated men of finance into dependent combinations that relied heavily on image. Chapter three explores the role of gender in the construction of the subconscious. I look at the ways hysterical symptomology influenced the construction of the subconscious, as well as contemporary understandings of mystical or supernatural experience in the work of William James and his circle. I argue that James adopted many hysteric symptoms in his characterization of the unconscious in order to “locate” a primitive essence within white intellectual men. My last chapter examines how turn-of-the-century supernatural fiction was influenced by new psychological theories—especially the idea that the unconscious housed a more primitive self Using the stories of Henry James, Jack London and William Dean Howells, I argue that the supernatural experience becomes a place for white educated men to have strenuous, often senorially intense experiences, and to be irrational subjects. My work illustrates the ways in which the massive cultural and social transitions between 1880 and 1917 de-naturalized definitions of manhood and created a national conversation that self-consciously fashioned gender. What I find most intriguing is how often this conversation constructed men as problematic and in need of some physical, mental, or supernatural reconstruction.

“Culinary Scapes” analyzes culinary cultural production produced and consumed by South Asians in various “national” sites: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Britain, Canada and the United States. It juxtaposes contemporary South Asian cultural production to identify the potentials as well as limitations of thinking through culinary practices to understand how South Asian subjects inhabit multiple identitarian locations made possible by particularized relationships to food and culinarity. This juxtaposition of texts reveals that food is implicated in vital ways in a number of cultural, political and economic debates that both produce and contest ideas about gendered national culinary identity. The dissertation uncouples the seamless link between “food” and “nation” in a range of South Asian contexts to argue that food and nation and gender are not naturally linked, but instead are rendered isomorphic within the popular imagination for politically motivated reasons. The first chapter offers a schematic overview of culinarity in different disciplinary locations. It ends with an exploration of the politics of food production in Ketan Mehta's Mirch Masala (Spices ). Chapter II analyzes how the rhetoric of cookbooks, including those by Kala Primlani and Madhur Jaffrey, discipline middle class “housewives” in India and the United States into performing versions of Indianness, upholding the values of middle class Hindu India. Chapter III explores how queer desire—routed through culinarity—emerges against the backdrop of the classed and sexualized domestic sphere in Romesh Gunesekera's Reef and Deepa Mehta's Fire. Chapter IV examines how food is embedded in discourses about authenticity and citizenship within diasporic contexts, comparing Shani Mootoo's “Out on Main Street” with Sara Suleri's Meatless Days . Chapter V asks what it means to think “beyond the nation” analyzing the gendered, culinary television and cookbook performances of Padma Lakshmi and Raji Jallepalli as well as the writings of Geeta Kothari. It asks how fusion cuisine can be read against U.S. racial discourses of assimilation and otherness. The final chapter reflects on the politico-economic implications of thinking about food and nation in isomorphic terms by reading Nisha Ganatra's Chutney Popcorn alongside debates over basmati rice patenting in South Asia.

Transnational black American women writers' literary renderings of "home" evidence an intersectional relationship among black American literature and cultures. This dissertation analyzes, through the trope of home, these authors' portrayals of the multiplicity of experiences informing black American women's lives and identities both domestically and transnationally. Embracing the transnationalism of black American female subjects, as well as a paradigm of intersectionality, this dissertation creates a framework that challenges not only canon formation with regards to black women's literature in the Americas, but also the rigidity surrounding racial/ethnic and national identities generally. To this end, it distinguishes itself from other scholarship that has largely analyzed these women's writings comparatively or within a larger diasporic framework---which, while insightful, tends to undermine the impact and specificity of "New World" or black American cultures. This dissertation consists of an Introduction that delineates "intersectionality," explicating its significance and relational aspects to what I refer to as "transnational black American." Chapter I analyzes how these black women writers' representations of home problematize "nation"; and, it situates the novels within particular historical, sociopolitical, gendered, and literary contexts. Chapter II investigates Paule Marshall's depictions of African American and Caribbean settings as homespaces integral to protagonist Avey Johnson's black cultural consciousness and healing in Praisesong for the Widow. Chapter III examines the ways Haiti and the United States serve as sites of female sexual violation in Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory . Chapter IV analyzes Toni Morrison's and Opal Palmer Adisa's delineations of African American women's attempts to establish a homespace and connection to their "black woman-ness" in transnational black American settings in Tar Baby and It Begins with Tears, respectively. Lastly, the Conclusion underscores this dissertation's significance in its challenging the rigidity of not only African American and Caribbean literary canons and their respective criticisms, but national boundaries and spaces, as well.