Browsing by Author "Ni, Zhange"
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- Encountering Agency with Decolonial Thought, New Materialism, and The VegetarianEggleston, Julia Dale (Virginia Tech, 2019-04-16)In this thesis, I bring into conversation two political theoretical frameworks -- decolonial thought and new materialism – with the South Korean novella The Vegetarian. I suggest that the novella, especially through its protagonist, performs a form of agency which calls for a reading that hinges not on the pursuit of definitive analysis but on the recognition of a personal, affective interaction with violent status quo sensibilities. I demonstrate that there exist understandings of agency within decolonial thought and new materialism which could be attuned to this call. I suggest a method that relies upon two thinkers in these frameworks for reading the novella, and after reading the novella through this method and transparently reflecting on my own role in these texts' encounter, I demonstrate that this way of simultaneously reading the novella and the theoretical texts has the capacity to affirm the open and uncertain mutual changes that happen at their encounter.
- Hip Hop, Bluegrass, Banjos, and Solidarity: Race and Class Histories in Appalachia U.S.ASalmons, Patrick Jeremiah (Virginia Tech, 2021-06-10)This dissertation examines the historical race and class tensions across the United States, and particularly focuses on Appalachia as a potential place of resistance against racial and class injustice. Arguing for a thick cross-racial solidarity movement, I examine the history of Black oppression from slavery to current modes of oppression such as mass incarceration and colorblind constitutionalism. The presence of anti-Black racism and under acknowledgement of whiteness hinders any form of cross-racial solidarity. To combat this, I ask, are the genres of hip hop, bluegrass, and country able to provide a reckoning of the continual racial oppression of Black people and an acknowledgement of whiteness, in Appalachia and the U.S.? I examine the historical progression of bluegrass and country, and hip hop, through the history of the banjo and music industry. The banjo, an African instrument, links Appalachia with histories of both Black expression and racial oppression. From here, I argue that the history of the music industry provides a further understanding of racial injustice that is parallel to the instances of institutional racial injustice in the U.S. This history provides evidence that Black artists used their music to enable social movements and resistance against systemic racial injustice in the U.S. Throughout several chapters, I analyze the many untold, forgotten, and hidden histories of Black racial violence that exists in the U.S. and Appalachia, and how music operates as a tool of resistance that can enable Black liberation against racial injustice. Through an examination of racial injustice in my hometown of Martinsville, Virginia, and using music as a tool, I suggest that, a thick cross-racial solidarity can exist with a recognition of historical racial injustice against Blacks, both locally and nationally, an acknowledgment of whiteness, an anti-racist framework for community activism, and a centering of Black voice, narrative, and Black liberation.
- Objects in Protest: Bread and Puppet Theater's (Non)Human SolidaritiesPlummer, Sarah E. (Virginia Tech, 2023-07-17)Bread and Puppet Theater's use of performing objects offers an aperture to contemplate complex assemblages that blur lines between the human and the nonhuman. Drawing upon cultural studies, feminist materialism, circus studies, and puppetry studies, I consider both the bread and the puppets as they intersect with various assemblages and fields of interpretation. These configurations demonstrate how the objects embody (non)human, material, and conceptual aspects. Because of this ability to exist within the meshes of binaries, performing objects are well suited to challenge and expose other binaries and hierarchies through three categories of analysis — movement, difference, and intra-action — based on Karan Barad's work on matter. In addition to the theoretical framework, I conducted ethnographic interviews and rely on my own experience as an apprentice at Bread and Puppet in 2004, considering myself as co-constitutive actant within the scope of analysis. I examine the way the theater uses sourdough bread and puppets as performing objects to create meaning, express ideology, apply tension within constructs of power, and demonstrate a model for co-dependent living between humans and objects
- Precarious Bodies in Motion: Choreopolitics, Affect, and Flamenco Dissent in SpainYildiz Alanbay, Sengul (Virginia Tech, 2023-09-27)This dissertation explores the political potential of dance and dance performances in public protests whereby dancing bodies are capable of performing politics through actions and movements within the boundaries established by existing power structures. Building upon the insights of political theorist Jacques Rancière, dance theorist André Lepecki, and affect theorist Brian Massumi, this study reveals the micro-political value of dancing in the form of dissensus and as an affective and aesthetic practice in politics. Dissensus, as articulated by Rancière, refers to the collision between the prevailing order and opposing viewpoints that disrupts "the distribution of the sensible" (or common sensual perception) in society. In this sense, this study suggests that the subversive affective intensities of dancing in the form of dissensus not only transgress politics as what is articulated in words, but also, transindividually, spread to other bodies and thus potentially compel them to act and think differently. Within this theoretical framework, this study argues that dissensual dancing not only expresses via the body political messages and alternative ways of living and becoming in motion, but also enables bodies to disrupt the predominant, normative, representational, and choreographic structures of power that control them in certain ways. Following the insights of critical theorists Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi, Judith Butler, François Debrix, and Nigel Thrift, this dissertation methodologically problematizes the idea of a singular mode of knowledge and the operation of normative frames that limit our apprehension of different worlds and lives. Thus, it adopts a more-than-representational mode of thinking, coupled with affect theory to work towards a pluralistic methodological perspective that avoids simplistic dichotomies stemming from established linguistic constructs and structures of meaning. In doing so, this study offers an alternative mode of intelligibility about precarious and resistant dancing bodies in the context of dissensual flamenco performances. Within the context of flo6x8's protests in Spain (between 2010 and 2019), this study explores how these dance performances affectively destabilized the ways people perceived and understood flamenco as an art form and challenged the physical embodiments and social norms associated with it. By putting the flamenco body at the center of this exploration, the dissertation argues that flo6x8's dissensual dance performances are not only dialectical or antagonistic, in other words, designed to be positioned against relations of economic oppression. Rather, choreographically and affectively, they also unsettle the very categories of historical, social, cultural, and normative understanding and representation of flamenco as an art and of flamenco bodies.
- Spiritual, But Not Religious Identities in U.S. Faith-Based Activism: Case Studies in the Nipponzan Myohoji Order and the Catholic Worker MovementCross, Katharine Hester (Virginia Tech, 2018-07-16)Within the field of American religious studies, a growing area of scholarship has been that of "spirituality" as a category distinct from religion. Scholars have examined the sociological, cultural, and historical features that characterize Americans' use of the concept of spirituality. Within this field, one subject of study is the growth in the number of individuals who identify themselves as "spiritual, but not religious." This phrase is used to denote a rejection of organized or traditional religion and an interest in a variety of belief systems. Via ethnographic methods, this dissertation analyzes this self-styled identity in the context of two phenomena: the Protestant legacy in the United States and "engaged spirituality," in which individuals' spirituality is integrally linked to engagement with social activism. The early Protestant history of the United States and the "Protestant ethic," per Max Weber, have shaped how Americans define and perceive religion and how Protestant values persist as cultural norms. American "spiritual, but not religious" individuals who are also "engaged" reject organized religion and find activism necessary due to issues that originate in this Protestant legacy. Evidence for this can be found in cases in which these individuals participate in activism by collaborating with non-Protestant religious groups. In this dissertation, I present this finding through three case studies featuring two radical religious groups which are active in peace protests: Nipponzan Myohoji, a Japanese Buddhist monastic order, and the Catholic Worker, a lay movement that assists the poor and homeless. The case studies are: the 50th anniversary Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights March; Catholic Worker protests in Washington, DC, on the anniversaries of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings; and events at the Buddhist Great Smoky Mountains Peace Pagoda. I argue that these individuals form these alliances because in working with a Catholic and/or Buddhist group, they find a venue for activism which both accommodates their spiritual motivations and includes a critique of the Protestant-based elements of American culture.
- Steampunk, Zombie Apocalypse, and Homoerotic Romance: Rewriting Revolution Plus Love in Contemporary ChinaNi, Zhange (Virginia Tech, 2018-10)What if the industrial revolution had first taken place in late imperial China, which had taken the lead in technological innovations but suffered a severe shortage of fossil fuels and clashed with the equally energy-hungry West? What if, fast forward to 2012, global warming had released a fatal virus and unleashed a zombie pandemic threatening to terminate the human civilization and transform the entire planet? These are some of speculative scenarios enacted in contemporary Chinese popular novels. To one’s surprise, these novels are not associated with the relatively more established field of science fiction, but consumed and produced as danmei, that is, homoerotic romance featuring love affairs of male characters primarily but not exclusively for the entertainment of young women.
- Xiuzhen (Immortality Cultivation) Fantasy: Science, Religion, and the Novels of Magic/Superstition in Contemporary ChinaNi, Zhange (MDPI, 2020-01-02)In early twenty-first-century China, online fantasy is one of the most popular literary genres. This article studies a subgenre of Chinese fantasy named xiuzhen 修真 (immortality cultivation), which draws on Daoist alchemy in particular and Chinese religion and culture in general, especially that which was negatively labelled “superstitious” in the twentieth century, to tell exciting adventure stories. Xiuzhen fantasy is indebted to wuxia xiaoshuo 武俠小說 (martial arts novels), the first emergence of Chinese fantasy in the early twentieth century after the translation of the modern Western discourses of science, religion, and superstition. Although martial arts fiction was suppressed by the modernizing nation-state because it contained the unwanted elements of magic and supernaturalism, its reemergence in the late twentieth century paved the way for the rise of its successor, xiuzhen fantasy. As a type of magical arts fiction, xiuzhen reinvents Daoist alchemy and other “superstitious” practices to build a cultivation world which does not escape but engages with the dazzling reality of digital technology, neoliberal governance, and global capitalism. In this fantastic world, the divide of magic and science breaks down; religion, defined not by faith but embodied practice, serves as the organizing center of society, economy, and politics. Moreover, the subject of martial arts fiction that challenged the sovereignty of the nation-state has evolved into the neoliberal homo economicus and its non-/anti-capitalist alternatives. Reading four exemplary xiuzhen novels, Journeys into the Ephemeral (Piaomiao zhilv 飄渺之旅), The Buddha Belongs to the Dao (Foben shidao 佛本是道), Spirit Roaming (Shenyou 神遊), and Immortality Cultivation 40K (Xiuzhen siwannian 修真四萬年), this article argues that xiuzhen fantasy provides a platform on which the postsocialist generation seek to orient themselves in the labyrinth of contemporary capitalism by rethinking the modernist triad of religion, science, and superstition.
- Young Moroccans Navigating Family, School and Work: Exploring Agency in contexts of Neoliberalism and ColonialityBerrada, Nada (Virginia Tech, 2021-01-14)Middle East and North African (MENA) nations, including Morocco, are witnessing the largest cohort of young people in their history, which today makes up roughly one-third of their total populations. Influenced by the democracy uprisings in 2011, state, media, and international organization discourses on youth in the Middle East and North Africa have solidified in two directions. One perspective presents the group as a threat to the security and fabric of their nations, potential purveyors of delinquency and extremism, in states of "waithood." The other view, a variant of which is explored here, considers the cohort as a group that constitutes an untapped potential and hope for addressing the ills and flaws of their societies. This accounting depicts Moroccan and MENA youth as passive victims of circumstances while also assuming their abilities to address their life circumstances without considering the complex contexts they confront. While those structural realities are surely real and sometimes paralyzing, youth can and do deploy several tactics, strategies and subversive accommodation to address the conditions they confront. That is, they continuously navigate liminal spaces created as they seek to move from "where they are" to "where they wish to be." This dissertation explores how a sample of young men and women from underprivileged neighborhoods in Morocco exercised their agency in their everyday lives. Addressing their family, education and work, this study draws on the findings from 30 semi- structured interviews focusing on the challenges and agential potentials of young individuals from underprivileged neighborhoods in Casablanca, Morocco, as they described their everyday paths to coming of age in their society. To contextualize their journeys, I present how young people have historically demonstrated individual and collective agency in ways that helped shape Moroccan modern history. I then employ the concepts of bounded agency, liminal space, tactics, strategies and subversive accommodation to demonstrate how young individuals navigated their everyday lives within their families, as well as educational and work trajectories. I argue that young people are not simply passive; they indeed exercise strategies and tactics to navigate and negotiate their daily lives. However, they do so in bounded or limited conditions as they address colonial legacies of social inequality compounded by demographic realities and neoliberal policies that have deepened those conditions. This study challenges mainstream conceptions of youth agency as empowerment, resistance and freedom and instead suggests that the agency of youth as well as their everyday aspirations and struggles need to be contextualized based on the social and material conditions in which they live. Their agency is real, but so too are the structurally difficult and limiting social, political and economic conditions they confront.