What happens when a person becomes ill? What is the effect of this process of becoming a patient? What effect, if any, does this have on the individual’s psyche? This thesis asks these questions to provide a window into the process we all go through when we become ill and enter the world of medicine. In order to explore the idea of whether or not the moment of diagnosis can cause mental violence to the patient the extreme historical case of Hansen’s disease is analyzed. Known to many by its more common term, “leprosy,” which will be referred to as Hansen’s monstrous metaphor, a multimedia archival analysis is conducted to deconstruct how “leprosy” came to be a monstrous metaphor and what the effect of this is on the patient. Through discursive analysis of historical legislation, fictional narratives, contemporary newspapers and physician reports, as well as analysis of patient narratives or the autopathography the construction of “leprosy” as a monstrous metaphor evoking a socially stigmatizing and dehumanizing condition is revealed. The first chapter, which focuses on the construction of “leprosy” as a metaphor, demonstrates that medical discourse has the potentiality to build a dehumanizing social condition around a clinical diagnostic. It is then, from this social condition, that political action and governance is justified. As a result, the diagnostic moment becomes laden with not only social implications but political ones as well. The impact of this on the individual is at the heart of what this thesis aims to uncover. The second chapter is then, devoted to analyzing two different autopathographies in an attempt to uncover what a diagnosis of a disease which has been constructed into such a socially and politically laden identity, has on the individual. This is meant not only in relation to their physical health and their social or political positionalities, but to their own individual understandings of their ‘self’ and how this impacts them at the register of the psyche.

This analysis illuminates that the health narrative, or autopathography, should be considered a vital part of medical education in order to encourage holistic practices which focus on the patient as a person. These narratives, from the perspective of the patient, allow the patient’s voice to be heard in a field that so often silences it. These narratives can help close the gap between the patient and the practitioner who is often so focused on the disease, they forget the patient is not a subject, but a human. They forget that the disease is not only in a lab or an examination room, but a lived reality for a person. I analyze two autopathographies, Olivia: my life in exile in Kalaupapa by Olivia Robello Breitha (1988) and Miracle at Carville by Betty Martin (1950), written by patients who had the biological illness, Hansen’s disease. In this thesis a stark difference is drawn between Hansen’s disease and what, through Susan Sontag’s theory of “illness as metaphor,” this thesis will term as Hansen’s monstrous metaphor, “leprosy” (1978). Through analysis of both Betty’s and Olivia’s narratives it becomes clear that what they suffered from most is the monstrous metaphor “leprosy” which they have been forced to embody. In analyzing their narrations, the voices of Betty and Olivia expose diagnosis as a moment of a psychic rupture. Suddenly, they see their body through the dehumanizing and pathologizing discourse around “leprosy”. The internal reactions they describe can only be understood as alienation from one’s own body. I argue that diagnosis can be a moment of mental violence. This is not only as a result of the biological ailment, but any social condition which the diagnosis ascribes to the patient’s body as well. As a result, the social condition should also be considered part of that which the patient must contend. Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple (2002) argues that illness is multiple as it impacts the patient’s life in many different ways, is something different under the microscope in the lab and is yet something else to the nurse and to the doctor. Mol’s work is, therefore, a vital text which I incorporate into my own discussion of why health narratives, as they illuminate this multiplicity of illness, should be part of medical education since the practitioner should account for these multiplicities in caring for the patient.

Additionally, by analyzing this historical extreme case of an illness that has sustained a social imaginary and evokes images of zombies and “lion faces” the potentiality, and therefore, the power of diagnosis over the individual is uncovered as one that has the ability to alienate the ‘self’ from its own body. Therefore, I argue the body is a space from which the ‘self’ can become “unhomed”. By incorporating Homi Bhabha’s notion of cultural “unhoming” the body becomes an unsafe space for the ‘self’ to exist (1994). Ultimately, what this analysis reveals is the moment of diagnosis as a crucial point where the gap between the patient and practitioner must be closed by a holistic approach. This includes accounting for the multiplicity of illness as it is in this fragile moment that the patient is vulnerable to mental violence.

As the crises of neoliberal capitalist globalization come to a head, long-standing liberal fictions are coming apart at the seams. From India to Mexico and beyond, the liberal democratic state is increasingly an instrument of extreme repression to defend its ruling class clientele rather than any semblance of a representative or redistributive mechanism. The nation is increasingly an incubator for nativism, religious fundamentalism, and proto-fascism rather than an imagined community of plural subjects. And the much-vaunted domain of civil society, which was supposed to guarantee stability with its rationality and openness, is increasingly incapable of confronting these mounting threats. The alternative globalization movement that once underpinned “global civil society” now seems like a distant echo. Is another world, then, still possible? And, if it is, where can we find its building blocks? My dissertation addresses these imperative questions by analyzing Indigenous mobilizations against neoliberal dispossession and state violence in Jharkhand, India and Oaxaca, Mexico. As historic centers of Indigenous politics subjected to intensive and violent neoliberalization over the past three decades, Jharkhand and Oaxaca are ideal sites for understanding ubiquitous patterns of neoliberal dislocation and the complex modalities of insubordination that they can generate, wherein entanglements with the state and capital do not inhibit the cultivation of autonomous political horizons. I propose the interlinking analytical frames of quasi, pseudo, and anti-political society to explain the strategies of dis/simulation and minimal, strategic engagement with the state, capital, and civil society through which the Pathalgadi Movement of Jharkhand has created openings for communal autonomy. Similarly, I propose the concept of inverted civil society to illuminate how Oaxacan Indigenous communities have striven to protect their already existing autonomy from various forms of extractivism underwritten by state and paramilitary violence. Quasi, pseudo, and anti-political society and inverted civil society constitute repertoires of ungovernability, which I understand as collective maneuvers to reject, elide, and escape regimes of sovereignty, governmentality, and coercion. These inevitably partial and contradictory repertoires nonetheless retain the potential to renew, reimagine, and realize “another world” by subverting the ontological discontinuity between human and other-than-human beings and forging alliances based on mutually constitutive heterogeneity, thereby contributing to the proliferation of the global “uncommons.” My dissertation draws upon twenty-four in-depth semi-structured interviews and five participant observation sessions conducted with organizers, intellectuals, journalists, and non-profit professionals working among Indigenous communities in Jharkhand and Oaxaca between 2018 and 2021. It is also grounded in an extensive literature review focusing on the past and present dynamics of colonial and postcolonial state-building; capitalist dispossession, displacement, and accumulation; and Indigenous collectivities and mobilizations across these overlapping time periods. My project is theoretically situated in the wake of postcolonial and subaltern studies and at the interstices of Indigenous, decolonial, and alter-globalization studies, reconfiguring key conceptual instruments and subverting romanticizing tendencies from these fields to understand the multifaceted dynamics of ungovernability among many Indigenous communities.

This dissertation advances an emerging critical interest in contemporary financial culture by both identifying a new genre, financial culture literature, and by theorizing its depictions of "80s businessmen" as iconic of late capitalism. I describe this genre's development in canonical and non-canonical works from the last three decades through sociological theories of risk (especially financial risk), and a history of Western economic practice. My dissertation first establishes financial culture literature's genealogy in modernist novels like Theodore Dreiser's The Financier (1912) and later in post-war novels like Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road (1961), texts that depict how business culture absorbs white-collar workers figures into paradoxically alienated, yet extreme social lives of starched-collar efficiency. Against this backdrop, I explain how the trade of new, massively lucrative credit "products" (derivatives, securities, junk bonds) made possible by Reaganomics' deregulation of banking practices created a new, bizarre class of risk-loving, fast-buck financiers, extreme in their disconnection from social responsibility and socioeconomic realities. Financial culture literature both critiques and glamorizes these figures; novels and films that represent the 80s businessman's glamorous world of penthouses and tinted windows with the extreme, shocking, or macabre, in order to unmask the businessman's heroic gambler's bravado as a form of corporatized violence and hedonism. Consequently, my dissertation reveals how fictional characters such as the film Wall Street's Gordon Gekko (1987) and American Psycho's Patrick Bateman (1991) are paradigmatic of an emerging literary tradition critical of (and fascinated by) the unsustainable life of new corporate worlds.

Placing the mining-oriented model of development within a historical and colonial context, this study examines extractivism as a fundamental Peruvian statecraft. Centering the region of Espinar in the area known as the Southern Mining Corridor, this study de-economizes export-driven mining or extractivism and reads it as the state’s key subject and meaning-making technology.

As it’s central statecraft, this study understands extractivism as carrying out three key functions or technologies of power in Peru: racialization, territorialization and commodification. Engaging in a critical theorization of state discourse and meaning-making across the colonial and contemporary epoch, this study threads together the mining operations in two of the most contentious mining sites, Antapaccay and Coroccohuayco, and places them within longstanding historical processes. As such, the central thesis of this research puts forth the argument that extractivism forms the nexus point that congeals the underlying politics of race, commodities, and territory in Peru. By extension, this research disrupts the dominant framework that posits resistance as the expression of counterhegemonic contentious politics and instead claims that anti-extractivist movements in the Andes are for this reason always already contentious. In preserving their place-based cultural ways of being, anti-extractivist movement are thus inherently oppositional to the Peruvian state and its political forms and ideologies. Ultimately, this reading of anti-mining resistance as the enactment of a kind of praxis of refusal and epistemic disruption contributes to what is referred to as the ontological turn in the humanities and social sciences.

Critical discursive analysis and the reconceptualization of two key terms threads this work. The first is a counter-reading of Peru Profundo, the term referring to an imagined geography used throughout Peru’s modern historiography. This works reads the historical evocation of Peru Profundo as a self-serving discursive power informed by colonial geographies. As such, it finds a postcolonial imaginary present in the way that contemporary extractivism continues to reorder populations and motivate discourses of development. By the end of this work, Peru Profundo is redeployed as the potential hermeneutic to read autonomous formations against extractivism. The alternative politics of being described in this study ultimately reconfigure dominant contemporary models of Indigeneity in the region as inherently antithetical, and instead attempts to create a critical framework for reading the enunciation of these politics across time and places them within an Andean radical tradition.

In examining extractivism as statecraft, this study ends up building upon contemporary politics of Indigeneity, particularly as it pertains to resistance and autonomy. The study concludes in a dialogue with key thinkers in the field of critical Latin American Studies, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar and Raúl Zibechi. Seeking to contribute to the broader redeployment of difference in Latin America, this thesis provides an important contribution to understanding Indigenous-based models of autonomy as emerging from differentiated politics. It finds itself in conversation with various paradigms that seek to read similar politics. One of them is the Guna people’s term of Abya Yala. This term has been used by Indigenous movements across the South American continent to assert differentiated ways of being that have coalesced against rapacious colonial violence. The analysis foregrounds how ontological difference informs the politics of refusal in the Andes and elsewhere. The study is ultimately about how states render certain subjects illegibly or invisible and subsequently relagate them to spaces of subjugation.

Focusing on the unquestioned basis of the Silk Road as an enlivening historical concept, I suggest that conversations about China’s rising power miss the complexity of its peculiar diplomacy, which has been used to legitimate and justify a foreign policy project referred to as the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI). This dissertation makes a case for the Silk Road Redux, or a revival of ideas of connection circulating across infrastructural, technological and multimedia components that began to re-present the development of China’s incorporation into modern world system as well as its central role in the transnational network of supply chains. Combining global history, geopolitics, infrastructure, development, cultural and media studies, I position the Silk Road as an analytical category to better understand the BRI and modern China.

This in-depth study of historical texts, blueprints and physical objects, suggests the necessity to reconsider ideas about great power relations and soft power globally. I argue that the Silk Road has become an ambient and social aesthetic to be reprised in a larger project of worlding China. This approach allows me to develop an understanding of an ambitious power, which manifests itself in the material world as well as promotes, legitimizes and justifies its physical presence globally. This dissertation is composed of four chapters, a prologue and an epilogue.

The Prologue begins with the 1907 Peking-Paris race that sets the stage for an enduring desire to shrink distance, conquer hostile terrain, and provide the possibility of achieving the unattainable. The Introduction describes the BRI, positions it within the current literature in relation to the Silk Road, as well as sketches the air of romance and mystique associated with the cultural heritage of ancient connectivity. Chapter I focuses on the BRI’s antecedent by exploring the various ways in which divergent ideas, meanings and memories of worldliness formed a collective dream that connected vast geographies and survived centuries.

Chapter II interrogates the journey the Silk Road idea took to become a cultural imaginary – from the birth of the concept in 1877, I sketch the movement of the Silk Road idea across global circuits of geological knowledge. Chapter III traces the circulation of the Silk Road imaginary in both political and popular discourse to eventually became an icon of cosmopolitan connectivity. Chapter IV focuses on the BRI as its own agent and actor in the production of a persuasive and plausible ontology of connectivity legitimated with spatial imaginations, drives and ambitions.

The Epilogue furthers scholarly conversation of BRI’s opaque nature by suggesting that the plasticity of the initiative provides new optics to capture the socio-political, economic and cultural forces at play and well as invites further research into the plasticity of the BRI framework. In the Conclusion, I summarize the argument, specifically the Silk Road positioned as a global cultural imaginary and the repercussions of BRI’s malleable political mechanism, which offers a unique opportunity to better understand modern China as a rising and distinctively ambitious global power.

This thesis re-examines two significant socio-political movements in pre- and post-WWII Taiwan in which two generations of Taiwanese activists sought licensed reformation for self-determination instead of overthrowing the alien regimes. By studying the Peace Act Incident (1923-1925) and Kaohsiung Incident (1979-1980), I aim to illuminate such moderate resistance mode as a historical category of anti-colonial struggle and the structural conditions under which such mode was produced. My studies use verdicts, newspapers, and other trial records to reconstruct the legal-political debates. The magazines the activists published also allow us to understand how they utilized modern Western progressive values, such as human rights and democracy, as discursive strategies to construct the nation of Taiwan and defy Japan’s and Kuomintang’s oppression.

The comparative historical analysis of the two incidents shows the similarities of governmentality between imperial Japan and autocratic Kuomintang. Both regimes created constitutional states of exception which empowered them to suppress dissidents legally. Restricted by these structures, Taiwanese activists attempted to demand self-rule within the colonial legal-political institutions. However, both authorities viewed Taiwanese pursuit of home rule as separatism and trialed the two incidents’ activists publicly. The public trials were social drama arranged to delegitimize the oppositional movements and prevent them from becoming effective political agents. Yet, the defendants’ and their barristers’ eloquence not only justified the activisms, but also delegitimized the authorities’ autocracies. Through media, the trials aroused Taiwanese society’s moral shock and earned the activisms popular support. To conclude, court is the main arena for modern Taiwanese anti-colonial struggles and nationalistic movements.

How did the abstract idea of ‘nation’ become visible, material, and consumable—and thereby normalized to such a degree that people were willing to sacrifice their lives for it? When we think of nationalism and warfare, children’s toys rarely come to mind. Contributing to the field of global studies, in particular global commodity history and global material culture, the dissertation project 'Empire of Toys' traces the global 'lives' of toys from a manufacturing region in Central Germany and asks how the production, trade and consumption of toys has intersected with nationalism and war from the early modern period until the end of World War II. Through an investigation of surviving toys in museum collections in Germany, Britain and the United States and analysis of archival material related to the production, travel, trade, display, and use of toys, the dissertation seeks to accomplish two goals: First, it reveals the intrinsic historical connections between war and play and provokes readers to consider that toys don’t merely replicate the world. Instead, it proposes that toys help to normalize war and the nation as main frame of reference for the mobilization of people for war rather than dismissing child’s play as trivial and politically inconsequential. Second, it suggests that investigation of sustained cross-border circulation of artifacts—such as the mass mobility of children’s toys—provides a primary vector of historical interpretation that reveals the realities of a globalized and networked past. Following the complex trajectories of toys from their sites of manufacture in the rural toy-making area of Sonneberg/Coburg and the city of Nuremberg, a region which dominated German, European and global toy markets in the nineteenth century, this research makes visible a world of profound interaction and movement. It not only shows how in the modern world German toys came to shape the lives, worldviews, and consuming habits of people across the globe, but it also uncovers the events and processes that ended Germany’s hegemonic influence on global toy production in the first half of the twentieth century.

This dissertation looks at how atmospheric and ecological elements have left their imprints on the cultural politics of urban space, with Calcutta as a case study. Mainly, it examines the cultural imagination of earth, air, water, fire, and blood in the everyday conditions of city life. These elements' compositional and compounding nature are interwoven with the culture and politics in the city. The representative examples for this study are drawn from the genres such as New Indian cinema, documentaries, Postmodern fiction, speculative fiction, and digital media discourses. Through exploring works by Satyajit Ray, Nabarun Bhattacharya, Amitav Ghosh, Mrinal Sen, Rituparno Ghosh, among others, the dissertation traces the persistent and ever-evolving presence of elements in the cultural registers of city life, exploring how these vibrant and disruptive registers profoundly challenge the normative narratives of sociopolitical crisis. The dissertation argues that rather than seeing crisis as a pathological or diagnostic moment of recognition at a critical turn or an impasse, the elemental images of the crisis see it as a continuous yet constantly mutating narrative. Thus, a more generative crisis narrative emerges in urban imagination, emanating from a hybrid imaginary of ecological dynamics, material lives, and mediated expressions of culture. The immersive elemental imagination in the lives of the city stays in and stays with the crisis in a covalent form. The destabilizing operations and the disruptive logic of the elements reframe crisis as a concept that constantly undermines its narrative coherence with manifold registers of disarticulation. Therefore, the generative recognition (as opposed to pathological) of crisis becomes a heuristic process that always eludes meaning by reinventing itself based on changing ecological relations. To write and think about the crisis of cities is to negotiate with this dynamic and contingent ground of possibilities. Ultimately, the intimate relations between the social and environmental imaginations of crisis build up the narrative of the elemental city: a hybrid apparatus of textual and material elementality. This hybrid narrative, as the examined literary and cinematic texts demonstrate, is formed of a combination of material reality, discursive speculations, and creative expressions across textual forms. Calcutta operates as an emblematic postcolonial city, always seen in decline from its position as the colonial epicenter. Finally, the dissertation argues that reading Calcutta as an elemental city through these textual encounters can also generate a methodological proposition for archival and interpretative research into similar postcolonial urban centers, from Karachi to Hong Kong. They all share narratives that show how the elements have refused to stay put in the planned and built environment of cities across the globe.