This dissertation considers dance practices emerging out of post-1980s conditions in Taiwan to theorize how contemporary dance negotiates temporality as a political kinesthetic performance. The dissertation attends to the ways dance kinesthetically responds to and mediates the flows of time, cultural identity, and social and political forces in its transnational movement. Dances negotiate disjunctures in the temporality of modernization as locally experienced and their global geotemporal mapping. The movement of performers and works pushes this simultaneous negotiation to the surface, as the aesthetics of the performances registers the complexity of the forces they are grappling with and their strategies of response.

By calling these strategies "political kinesthetic" performance, I wish to highlight how politics, aesthetics, and kinesthetics converge in dance, and to show how political and affective economies operate with and through fully sensate, efforted, laboring bodies. I begin my discussion with the Cursive series performed by the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, whose intersection of dance and cursive-style Chinese calligraphy initiates consideration of the temporal implication of "contemporary" as "contemporaneity" that underlies the simultaneous negotiation of local and transnational concerns. Extending from the Cursive series, I depart momentarily from the milieu of Taiwan to engage with two contemporaneous transnational Chinese choreographers, Shen Wei and Yin Mei, whose works blend dance and Chinese calligraphy differently as a way to problematize further the performance of "Chineseness" and the economy of forces and power at work in the transnational. The dissertation then takes up another prime case of temporal reconfiguration, examining the Legend Lin Dance Theatre of Taiwan and its artistic director Lin Lee-Chen's early works whose kinesthetic shifting and continuity form a prism through which dance mediates, complicates, and alters Taiwan's developmentalist ethos, in a way that complicates readings of (self-)Orientalisms. Finally, the dissertation engages with the Yellow Butterfly Flying to the South Butoh Troupe led by Japanese butoh dancer Hata-Kanoko, who lived and worked in Taiwan for nearly a decade and whose works draw attention to the legacy of Japanese colonial modernity in Taiwan and East Asia. The troupe's leftist and self-marginalizing politics in the legacy of Japanese postwar avant-garde performance produce alternative inter-Asian engagements.

Enacting different ways of negotiating temporalities of modernity across space, these performances are counterpoints to one another on various levels. They also articulate ways of thinking, performing, and "moving" Taiwan transnationally: transnational Chineseness, self-conscious formations of "Asian" culture in opposition to an idea of the "West," and inter-Asian relationships. Parsing out the complexity within the colossal designation of "transnationalism," this project also proposes a concept of "contemporary dance" that moves beyond simple periodization or labeling of dance genres and styles and instead unpacks the temporal negotiations of moving bodies implicated in transnational relationships from differing and sometimes contradictory perspectives. Although seeking to transcend the periodization paradigm, my historicized case studies addressing the post-1980s conditions of Taiwan and globalized Chinese culture also index shifts from the end of the Cold War to globalization that affect cultural forms and their conditions of production and circulation.

My dissertation, Visions of Power, uncovers specific moments where key Hollywood genre films blur the line between perpetrators of violence and its victims, disrupting a post-9/11 public discourse shaped by Manichean divisions. Discordant notes in these films provoke productive estrangement and challenge us to think historically, to see the resonances between this cultural moment and past traumatized moments in US history. The study thereby advances our understanding of American and international politics through its exploration of the narrative production of discourses around a state of emergency and the effects of this storytelling in creating a space of vaguely defined enemies where the parameters of the battlefield are obscured. Recent speeches by US presidents—as when George W. Bush commenced the War on Terror by citing the wanted posters of Old West, or when Barack Obama compared ISIS to the Joker—show how genre modes hold sway in executive discourse. I probe the cross-sections, slippages, and conflicts that exist within the ongoing dialogue between Hollywood entertainment and political discourse in the creation of competing visions of power to frame genre as a contested critical site—one of equal interest to politicians and to critically inclined filmmakers. My analysis both reveals and wrestles with genre’s multivalent purpose: sometimes as a tool to normalize state violence and, in its shifting perspective between wielders of state power and its victims, at other times as a potential mode of human rights critique.

Visions of Power follows a five-chapter structure. The introduction establishes its interdisciplinary framework that spans trauma, legal, and post-9/11 film studies. Via my analysis of executive and political discourse, tracking its homages to genre, I uncover the state's investment in genre framings. Why did Bush speak of the Old West at the opening of the War on Terror and the search for Bin Laden? Why, to paraphrase Attorney General Eric Holder, was there no sustained outrage towards revelations of America's torture program? Why the general acceptance toward extrajudicial killing through drones? The core chapters, focusing on the Border Western, film noir, and Superhero Film answer these questions and show that such myths contain a potential to normalize state violence. At the same time, I frame each genre as a platform for critically inclined filmmakers to shed light on such violence, and, at times, our own collusion with it.

My first chapter on the Border Western considers Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015), Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) as well as Ridley Scott and Cormac McCarthy’s much-maligned The Counselor (2013). Their position as genre films about the borderlands is crucial in this study of the interrelation of trauma, genre, and the law, since few spaces were as affected as the US-Mexico border following the 9/11 attacks on either a discursive or political level. Saturated with surveillance imagery, Sicario frames a panoptic border wherein the state’s eye acts as a kind of haunting phantom that reduces the humans it surveys to little more than specks and blurs. Historian Mae M. Ngai identifies the illegal alien as an impossible subject—one stripped of all rights who exists within a legal limbo where his immigration status denies him his humanity. In The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), I argue, Jones visualizes this limbo to articulate the psychological toll of such a status upon illegal aliens. Examining the film against the fearful discourse surrounding immigration after 9/11 which often conflated the Mexican and the terrorist, I show how Three Burials exposes the discursive process by which the illegal immigrant is transformed into a potential threat. The Counselor extends these concerns with discursive transformation, framing the US-Mexico border space as a kind of broken mirror glass, in which contemporary American anxieties find themselves refracted. Finally, The Counselor, along with the other Border Westerns of this chapter which merge the tropes of film noir and the Western together, frame genre as a vital critical mode where suffering might be confronted and where a revolutionary violence might be perceived, one defined by a greater humanity for how it reckons with our own propensity for violence.

My second chapter on film noir offers readings on Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City (2005) and David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007). Using Paula Rabinowitz’s concept of a “pulp politics” which argues that a noir mood emerges within paranoid political discourse, I offer entirely new insights into the political critiques of both texts. Long viewed as a chauvinistic fantasy, I disrupt traditional readings of the Sin City. Placing it against the Abu Ghraib controversies, I reveal how the film visualizes a destabilizing potential in the “female perpetrator,” a militant portrayal of the femme fatale. Few have read the 1970s period film Zodiac against the political climate in which it was produced. Concerned with the failed search for a killer who encroaches into the everyday through his pervasive presence in the mass media, Zodiac cannily allegorizes the bureaucratic failures in the lead up to 9/11 and the search for the United States’ chief menace of the 2000s, Osama bin Laden: Furthermore, both films express the burden of the genre frame upon executive actors. Yet even as these texts capture how myth can haunt, they also show that it is only in such a violent, often spectacular mode where the phantoms of public discourse might be gleaned.

My final core chapter on the superhero film focuses on Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy. My framework draws out the nuance of Nolan’s critique, already glimpsed within other critical readings, to uncover the depth of his indictments of American executive during a state of emergency. I find the muddy definition of “enemy combatant” within the amorphous terrorist threat of the Joker and excavate the black bodies of Hurricane Katrina in Batman’s Gotham City. Nolan is invested in symbolic fluidity, with the broken borders between the hero and villain, perpetrator and victim. The Batman films position the superhero as a spectacular "show" for the executive—legally unbounded and intoxicating for how it can turn excessive force into fodder for collective fantasy. However, Nolan also frames genre as too volatile to be entirely co-opted by the state, calling attention to both the terrorizing power of such genre myths as well as their resistant potential.

Just as American policy has shaped international law, influencing the creation of Global Security Law after 9/11, so too has the shadow of America's global War on Terror rippled through international cinematic works. Considering a range of films that either inhabit or comment upon genre types, my conclusion uncovers echoes to these American productions, these haunted texts, compelled and repulsed by the exhilarating modes of Hollywood spectacle. In these international films, we witness key disorienting moments that underline how these texts articulate regional concerns and reflect on the ways in which their respective governments have responded to America's wars. An emblematic Japanese example is Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata (2008), which presents a Japanese youth joining America's conflict in Iraq. A nightmare sequence of his homecoming, shell-shocked in his military fatigues, employs a noir staging to reflect a home space invaded by American political forces. In France, I consider Nassim Amaouche’s 2009 Adieu Gary, a banlieu-Western that appears distant from post-9/11 transformations in international law. Yet its French-Arab protagonists negotiate mass media envisionings of the “terrorist” in ways that highlight the pressures the controversial resolution placed upon Arab and racially mixed populations. Adieu Gary subversively refashions the Western aesthetic and its iconic heroes for this post-9/11 context to signify not strength but weakness. In its appropriation of the ghost town convention, the film thus becomes a unique example of the disrupted, transnational Western which visualizes the disrupted lives of banlieue youth, articulating the psychological disempowerment of an ethnic group framed in legal terms as a potentially violent threat.

My turn to the global in the final chapter of Visions of Power intends not to simplify contemporary world cinema as a response to American policy and the contemporary traumas that underpin it: rather, it is a first step within an emergent dialogue, a challenge to scholars of world cinema, that aims to situate local cinematic texts within transnational frameworks to help clarify and critique states’ responses to terrorist threats. Through such work, we might bring what Paul Giles describes as a "critical transnationalism" to contemporary genre studies (Giles 65). Giles finds that “to reinscribe classic American literature into a transnational framework is to elucidate the ways in which it necessarily enters into a negotiation with questions of global power” (Giles 72). Reinscribing American genre cinema into this larger framework within the final chapter of my study allows us to appreciate the ways filmmakers cannily negotiate and question a geopolitical terrain shaped by American visions of power. In moments of enigmatic and compelling ambiguity, the global examples of genre cinema show the fraught ways such visions might also be appropriated by those rendered Other and relatively voiceless within post-9/11 political discourse and law, to express and potentially transcend their marginalized condition.

Giles, Paul. “Transnational and Classic American Literature.” PMLA. 118.1 (2003): 62-77.

This dissertation, titled “Staging the Bright Life: White-Collar Cinema in Japan’s Era of High Economic Growth (1954-1971),” examines the ubiquity of the male white-collar employee (or salaryman) in Japanese media, focusing specifically on this figure’s iteration in studio cinema during the decades following the Second World War. Although first emerging during the expansion of industrial capitalism and the managerial class in the 1920s and ‘30s, I argue that the salaryman acquired an exceptional ideological centrality in the era of high economic growth (1954-1971), bolstered by mass media representations, which profoundly shaped popular perceptions and discourse on work, class, gender, and national identity. In particular, I take up studio cinema contextualized within serialized fiction, advertising, popular social science texts, and management literature to elucidate what I term a “mass cultural theorization” of the salaryman, in which he was posited as both an object of fascination elaborated through analysis of his working patterns, consumption practices, and intimate relationships, as well as a subject of identification framed as an “everyman” specific to the era. Such texts enlist a set of narrative and formal conventions that situated the individual within the unprecedented expansion of Japan’s postwar economy, thus dramatizing the suffusion of economic logics into everyday life for what was in fact a demographically heterogeneous audience.

By elucidating salaryman cinema, an integral yet neglected genre of Japanese studio film, my research functions both as a cultural history of this figure’s central role in the fabrication of an enduring middle-class image of Japan as well as an inquiry into the status of Japanese postwar cinema as a medium in flux. Attending to Tōhō Studios and its films such as the Company President series (1956-1970), The Elegant Life of Mr. Everyman (1963), and You Can Succeed Too (1964), amongst others, both tracks the salaryman figure’s mediation of the high growth era’s economic and cultural shifts, and indexes film’s compensatory transformations as it was decentralized and resituated amongst emergent concepts of leisure and mass media. I argue that these films and the contingencies of their production are important for both understanding the industrial response to film’s much discussed decline post-1958, as well as locating in these responses an image of an expanding white-collar world of leisure technologies and consumption. I claim that the compensatory measures of studio cinema to maintain viewers mobilized articulations of the media and leisure technologies towards which white-collar cinema's salaryman-spectators migrated.

As part of the Townsend Center's 1997-98 "Futures" program, Alan Liu conducts a full-scale inquiry into the prospects for literary knowledge in an information age driven by digital technology, management systems and corporate economics. His respondents, Miryam Sas, Albert Ascoli, and Sharon Marcus, Professors of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages, Italian Literature, and English, respectively, enrich the dialogue by posing questions to Liu and by pointing beyond him to other ways of envisioning questions of literary studies.