Browsing by Author "Salaita, Steven G."
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- The Burdens of History: Problems Invoked by Occidental Travel Writing on the BalkansBoynton, Eric Grayson (Virginia Tech, 2011-04-27)Works on the Balkans currently face a crisis of representation--from Ivo Andric's fictionalized memory to Joe Sacco's humanitarian witnessing, the occidental reader must examine the Balkans within a historical context of colonialism to avoid misrepresentation. The goal of this study is threefold: to provide a firm historical grounding while observing the instruments of colonialism, to give an overview of Occidental travel writing on the Balkans with a particular focus on the formation and dissolution of Yugoslavia, and to suggest examples of travel texts that strive to read colonized worlds without losing sight of their own Occidental positioning or pretending that it does not exist. When approaching a contested space that involves a multitude of competing discourses, a hefty responsibility is thrust on both the reader and writer of Balkan representations to retain an awareness of counter and hidden discourses while resisting the urge to define, or even pursue, the definitive "true story" of the Balkans. Thus, an occidental reader of East Europe must be able to contextualize various and often contradicting texts without naturalizing recorded experiences. He or she must also maintain a poignant awareness of how Western imperialism has constructed and reconstructed the region by journalism, memoir, artificial borders, ethnography, classification, historical absolutism, and financial exploitation. If this work simplifies or answers "What is Balkan?" then it has failed utterly. We can only hope to further complicate and challenge the dominant discourse of Balkanism to keep the reader's mind alive and questioning rather than dead and assured.
- "The Length of Our Vision": Thoreau, Berry, and SustainabilityGibbs, Jared Andrew (Virginia Tech, 2010-04-22)The past several years have seen increased awareness of environmental degradation, climate change, and energy concerns—and with good reason; addressing the problem of sustainability is vital if American culture is to both persist and thrive. Because this issue affects all aspects of our lives, it can easily seem overwhelming, encouraging the belief that solutions to these problems lie beyond the scope of individual action. This study seeks to identify legitimate personal responses one can make to issues of sustainability. I approach this subject with an eye toward answering a simple series of questions: Where are we?; How did we get here?; Where are we going?; Is that where we want to go? I briefly investigate the history of the idea of progress, focusing especially on our culture's fascination with and embrace of technological progress. Following this investigation, I examine two works that offer critiques of progress: Thoreau's classic text, Walden, and Wendell Berry's, The Unsettling of America. These texts are chosen for a few reasons. First, a clear tradition of critical inquiry can be traced from Thoreau to Berry. Second, the historical distance between these authors makes a comparison of their work particularly illuminating. Though they are citizens of the same country, speak the same language, and ask similar questions, each author writes in response to different worlds—Thoreau's just beginning to embrace industrial capitalism and technological progress, and Berry's very much the product of that embrace. Most importantly, however, both authors focus on individual action and responsibility.
- "Like Their Lives Depended On It": The Role of Comics in Subverting Anti-Arab and Islamophobic DiscourseLawson, Daniel (Virginia Tech, 2011-04-22)This dissertation examines the role the medium of comics plays in the construction and subversion of anti-Arab and Islamophobic discourse. It seeks to address the following questions in particular: how does the medium of comics interpellate subjects regarding the Western discursive formation that conflates Arab, Muslim, and terrorist? What does the medium of comics afford creators in subverting dominant discourses that dehumanize Arabs and Muslims? I argue that as a hypermedium in which text and repeated images are in continual tension, comics challenge the sort of foundational notion of truth necessary for dominant discourse. I use a Foucauldian lens to examine several comics in relation to larger discursive formations. In Chapter 1, I explain the problem, my methods, and my theory in more detail. In Chapter 2, I apply this theory as a lens to examine the rhetorical work the medium plays in subverting dominant discourse in Palestine, a nonfiction piece of comics journalism. I use Chapter 3 to problematize the assertions made in the first two chapters by looking at an instance where comics are used to reinscribe dominant discourse. Specifically, I analyze the graphic adaptation of The 9/11 Report. Chapter 4 acts as something of a retort to Chapter 3; it examines In the Shadow of No Towers to interrogate the ways in which Art Spiegelman explicitly addresses not only the issues he grappled with as a New Yorker during and after 9/11, but the complex relations of representation that arose from the event. Chapter 5 I examine how subversion works when a hypermedium is further remediated by analyzing Didier LeFevre's The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors without Borders. The Conclusion is devoted to discussing the implications of this study, both in terms of pedagogy and in terms of theorizing the relationship and differences between image and text. I argue that comics demonstrate the productive ideological tensions that exist between modes of signification (such as verbal and visual). An understanding of this ideological tension is key for scholars of visual rhetoric and hegemonic discourse.
- Memory Machines: Exploring Moby-Dick and Gravity's Rainbow Through the History of FilmSpencer, Benjamin Paul (Virginia Tech, 2011-03-16)For close to a decade, I have weighed comparative approaches to "the Great American Novel". Progress increased as soon as I resolved on selecting Moby-Dick as the work originally responsible for issuing that slogan. Making this particular selection required the application of a dynamic concept which, appropriately, reflects critiques of knowledge production: "the Archive". Perhaps the most direct references to a conceptual archive appear in Derrida's Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, which addresses the dual forces "preservation/destruction" that influence allegory and mythology. Other critical writers refer to a similar concept through various other terms, ultimately equipping my thesis with a method for studying the relation between myth and allegory. The method draws from each writer's focus on the form and content dynamics of artifacts, and how these dynamics reflect the historical conditions that affirm or produce them. Specifically, all the writers I have selected to study, in some way consider the play between the mechanical apparatus and the representation it produces. Thus, I concluded that my literary comparative approach could involve juxtaposing a different, historically concurrent mode of documentation: film media and photography. Gravity's Rainbow is often considered, after Moby-Dick, the most universally-recognized "Great American Novel". Pynchon spends a lot of time referring to mass-produced films, their effects on the global order emerging with WWII, and to the material occurrence of film technology as it relates to the book as a material artifact. For Pynchon, the backlots built up by such "great" as D.W. Griffith constitute the twentieth-century frontier.
- Re-visioning Katrina: Exploring Gender in pre- and post-Katrina New OrleansSkelley, Chelsea Atkins (Virginia Tech, 2011-04-26)I argue that to understand the gender dynamics of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina, and the storm's aftermath, one must interrogate the cultural conflation of the black female body and the city's legacy to explore what it means and how it situates real black women in social, cultural, and physical landscapes. Using a hybrid theoretical framework informed by Black feminist theory, ecocriticism, critical race feminism, and post-positivist realism, I explore the connections between New Orleans' cultural and historical discourses that gender the city as feminine, more specifically as a black woman or Jezebel, with narratives of real black females to illustrate the impact that dominant discourses have on people's lives. I ground this work in Black feminism, specifically Hortense Spillers's and Patricia Hill Collins's works that center the black female body to garner a fuller understanding of social systems, Kimberlé Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality, and Evelyn Hammonds's call for a reclamation of the body to interrogate the ideologies that inscribe black women. In addition, I argue that black women should reclaim New Orleans' metaphorical black body and interrogate this history to move forward in rebuilding the city. As an ecocritic and feminist, I understand the tension involved with reading a city as feminine and arguing for this reclamation, as this echoes colonial and imperialist discourses of conquering land and bodies, but I negotiate these tensions by specifically examining the discourse itself to expose the sexist and racist ideologies at work.
- Through A Glass Darkly: The Mirror Trope and Female Subjectivity in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Gloria NaylorCohen, Jessica Shepard (Virginia Tech, 2013-08-15)Throughout their respective bodies of work, both Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor invoke recurring images of the mirror and the mirror-gazing act. Because of the preponderance of these images and because of how they inform our deeper understanding of character, theme, and genre, I argue that these images constitute an important trope in Morrison and Naylor\'s fiction. Although the mirror trope pervades both writers\' bodies of work, it has not garnered significant scholarly attention, particularly with respect to the ways in which the trope highlights an intertextual dialogue between two essential writers of the 20th century American narrative. In this project, then, I conduct an in-depth but by no means exhaustive exploration into the mirror trope. I am specifically concerned with how each writer brings this trope to bear on issues of representation, the politics of recognition, and the dilemma of black female subjectivity and agency in a racist and misogynistic American society. I argue, then, that because the mirror trope is where patriarchal and racist structures of power collide, it signifies a critical point of intersectionality between race and gender. For that reason, the mirror emerges as a space of contestation within these narratives.