My dissertation analyzes the genealogical methods Latina authors of memoir use to rethink transcultural subjectivity. Through a gender-focused use of genealogy, I consider the ways twenty-first century Latina life writing communicates historical knowledge. As an alternative to traditional patrilineal genealogy in which names, power or property are traced across multiple generations, my project aims to foreground the various ways Latina memoirists use genealogy to share the intersections of female cultural identity and belonging, sexuality, labor politics, and the processes of this communication. My investigation of genealogy in Raquel Cepeda’s Bird of Paradise: How I Became Latina (2013), Daisy Hernández’s A Cup of Water Under My Bed (2014), Cherríe Moraga’s Native Country of the Heart (2019) and Myriam Gurba’s Mean (2017) elucidates the methods by which matrilineal histories are passed on from one generation to another.

"Find Yourself Here" argues that since transmigrants often form profound connections to place, we can develop a nuanced account of transmigrant subjectivity through innovative fiction by migrants who describe their own neighborhoods. The authors studied use their own hometowns as both setting and stylistic inspiration, deploying various formal techniques to mirror the fictional location to the real one, thus literarily enacting the neighborhood. I construct a neighborhood geography from each work, by traveling on foot, interviewing the neighbors and local historians, mapping the text’s fictional setting upon the actual spaces it references, and teasing out connections between place, narrative form, and migrancy, to demonstrate how excavating the locale illuminates the text. My methodology is interdisciplinary: it incorporates recent sociological studies of transnationalism by Linda Basch, Patricia Pessar, and Jorge Duany, tenets of Human Geography, and the work of Latino literary theorists including Raúl Homero Villa and Mary Pat Bray on space in narrative. My literary neighborhood geographies—of Salvador Plascencia’s El Monte barrio, Junot Díaz’s New Jersey housing development, Sandra Cisneros’ Westside Chicago, and Helena María Viramontes’ East Los Angeles—sharpen Latino literary criticism’s long-standing focus on urban and regional spaces in narrative by zooming in on neighborhood streets, while building on contemporary theories of transnationalism to analyze the broader cultural implications of local migrancy. By grounding the effects of transmigrancy in concrete locations, “Find Yourself Here” presents a comprehensive vision of the US Latino immigrant experience without generalizing from its myriad versions and numerous sites.

William Wells Brown is best known today as the fugitive slave who authored several firsts in African American literature. That reputation has been both a boon and a boundary. While it has provoked prodigious commentary on Brown’s indictment of slavery in the United States, it has largely obscured his placement of that critique within a broader picture of the Anglo-French Atlantic in the Age of Revolution. This dissertation restores some of that complex geography by locating Brown’s antebellum corpus within the context of U.S. abolition’s underdiscussed response to the European Revolutions of 1848. As a transatlantic traveler in France and the United Kingdom between 1849 and 1854, Brown narrowly missed the revolutions, but he saw firsthand the conservative counter-revolution that followed. His response was intertextual, international, and even inter-imperial. This dissertation traces the development of that response from its inception in a speech that Brown delivered to the Second International Peace Congress in Paris in 1849, through the panorama of American slavery that he presented to audiences in the United Kingdom in 1850, and to its efflorescence in the European travel narrative that he published in London in 1852. I argue that in those tours and texts Brown draws on the Christian anarchism that he learned as an agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society in order to articulate the failures of Europe’s mid-century democratic revolutions as developmentally and etiologically intertwined with those of the English, American, and French Revolutions that preceded them. In Brown’s account, the root of those failures was that instead of eradicating the depredations of the aristocratic order, democratization had set them on a new footing by embracing cultural nationalism and expropriative violence. Against such a backdrop, Brown presents the revitalization of slavery in the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a problem in which the fate of the French citizen and the free Briton were inseparable from that of the American slave.

This dissertation examines literary representations of Chicanx experiences of higher education in autobiographical writing to excavate new insight into the past, present, and future of education for diverse students. Throughout the US, we continue to struggle to achieve equitable access to education across racial/ethnic, and though many universities and colleges make strides toward inclusivity and diversity, these institutions often fall short of meeting the needs of a diverse student population. As a first-generation Chicano student and teacher, troubled by these concerns in and around the classroom, I recognized similar preoccupations in various forms of self-writing—including autobiography, memoir, essay, poetry, and short narrative—of many Mexican American and/or Chicano/a/x writers. From Richard Rodriguez, Ruben Navarrette, and Sergio Troncoso to Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, to Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros, to, more recently, Reyna Grande and Rigoberto Gonzalez, education haunts their written lives—sometimes in the subject matter and sometimes in the formal qualities of their work. It is as if they cannot help but simultaneously account for their educational privilege while giving testimony to the racial trauma of education. Studying the self-representational writing of these highly educated authors, I argue that Chicanx self-writing is a particular site for the manifestation of the burden of representation—the pressure to perform as othered racial/ethnic subjects. These works, published from the late 1970s to the late 2010s and giving accounts of experiences as early as the mid-1960s, are indicative of the shifts in education for students from underserved communities in the late 20th century that we continue to see: mainly increased but uneven and precarious inclusion. Self-writing—operating less as a genre and more as a rhetorical mode in its unique constellations between writer, historical context, “truth,” and reader—becomes a critical space that calls for the interrogation of one’s own exceptionality. Each of these authors, to varying degrees, at times embraces and at others resists their exceptional status as all of them, on some level, express an understanding of how the rhetoric of exceptionalism can often function to justify the continuity and continuation of inequity. This project reveals that within these authors’ accounts of and reflections on higher education lie a basis for both a sustained critique of the shortcomings of the university for Latino/a/x people as well as the potential for reimagining what higher education can be and do.

This Dissertation analyzes the findings of a two-year ethnography of an American CrossFit community. CrossFit is a world-wide sport and fitness brand, with over 13,500 franchised fitness affiliates around the world and an annual sporting competition: The CrossFit Games. While CrossFit is beginning to become the subject of some ethnographic research, there has yet to be published a long-term in-depth ethnographic study of a CrossFit community and its participants. Research questions investigated how and why an increasing number of American women are seeking larger and stronger muscularity, how neoliberal discourses of health are internalized and enacted at the level of individuals and communities, and what role fitness plays within processes of subjectification under late capitalism. This study, which includes participant observation, 37 interviews, and a body-idealization survey, reveals three major findings of great significance affecting theories and embodied practices of neoliberal discourses of health, the self as a project, and ideal femininity, all within the ideological framework of Biopower (Foucault; Hardt and Negri) and the Biopolitics of neoliberal capitalism. Key findings include the following: 1) CrossFit discourses of health align with neoliberal ideologies of Healthism (Crawford) while also exceeding these ideologies, 2) the primary motivation of individual CrossFit participants is the pursuit of meaning-making and purpose through processes of perpetual becoming, self-realization and self-care via the self as a project, which is accelerated through collective effervescence (Durkheim), and 3) female muscularity is greatly encouraged and valorized, within new limits that also enable some forms of agency and resistance.

Africana Profunda employs a transdisciplinary lens through Black critical theory and performance studies to interrogate the “racially democratic” performances that constitute Puerto Rican hegemonic nationalism from the 1930s to the present. It does so by demonstrating how theses performances depend on antiblackness for the sustainment of discourses of racial hybridity, or which is described throughout the dissertation as a distancing from Blackness. In order to tease out this conscious and unconscious antiblack dependence, the dissertation creates encounters between texts and performances and allow for these encounters to take on their own mode of representation, even if this representation gestures toward racial and gendered contradiction and antagonism. The dissertation thus compels long-overdue encounters between antiblackness and national belonging in the Puerto Rican cultural imaginary to reveal an instructive subtext between texts and performances that have been integrated into nationalist discourse, such as the writings of Antonio Pedreira, and those that have been disavowed from the national memory because they center Blackness or an interrogation of antiblackness within their repertoire, such as the writing of Mayra Santos Febres and the performances of Sofía Córdova. In turn, such encounters show the pervasive and subtending force of antiblackness in reproducing what it means to be a national subject of Puerto Rico and its diaspora. In other words, what the dissertation hopes to make clear through these encounters is how nationalist imaginaries are easily taken for granted as ethical markings of belonging. Each chapter illustrates this by focusing on Puerto Rican aesthetics in their various forms: 20th century nationalist literature, Puerto Rican feminist poetics, the aurality of Borícua punk, trans/queer documentary filmmaking, and Black queer theatre and performance. While the dissertation aligns with the historical and material conditions that produced a coalitional politics between African American and Puerto Rican movements in the U.S., specifically between the Black Panthers and the Young Lordes, it centers and theorizes Blackness and antiblackness within the aesthetic realm in order to show the (im)possibilities of world-making for Black and Blackened folks on the island and its diaspora.