Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Descended From Cain: The Biopolitics In Beowulf, Jia-Ying Liu

The Oswald Review: An International Journal of Undergraduate Research and Criticism in the Discipline of English

No abstract provided.

"Dream Police": Political Imagination In William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Ethan Jg Haapala

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

The Carceral Death Machine: Savagery, Contamination And Sacrifice In The Contemporary Prison, Timothy Malone

CGU Theses & Dissertations

In this dissertation, I develop a convict epistemology that interweaves two elements: 1) a deep engagement with the works of particular philosophers and scholars investigating questions of punishment, violence, biopolitics and political philosophy 2) with some specific, publicly-reported incidents within California prisons in the late 20th and 21st centuries and my own detailed narration of events and the structural and quotidian dynamics of the prison yard as I experienced them as inmate #K73299 from 1997 to 2005. Diverging from Foucauldian theories of disciplinarity, I argue that under neoliberalism, the primary punishments that any inmate is subjected to within the carceral …

From Franz Kafka To Franz Kafka Award Winner, Yan Lianke: Biopolitics And The Human Dilemma Of Shenshizhuyi In Liven And Dream Of Ding Village, Melinda Pirazzoli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

To date, many studies have exhaustively explained how and why Yan Lianke deals with both the intimate relationship between disease and biopolitics and the relationship between utopia and dystopia. These are certainly the most important themes in Liven (2004) and Dream of Ding Village (2006). However, biopolitical discourses cannot fully account for the complexity, depth and humanity of these novels, which in addition to exploring the complex and protean meaning of life also represent shenshizhuyi, an expression coined by Yan Lianke to describe his human dilemma in representing the complex relationship between shen 神 (soul, spirit, mind and myths) …

The Politics Of Wounds, Jonathan Nash

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

What configuration of strategies and discourses enable the white male and settler body politic to render itself as simultaneously wounded and invulnerable? I contextualize this question by reading the discursive continuities between Euro-America’s War on Terror post-9/11 and Algeria’s War for Independence. By interrogating political-philosophical responses to September 11, 2001 beside American rhetoric of a wounded nation, I argue that white nationalism, as a mode of settler colonialism, appropriates the discourses of political wounding to imagine and legitimize a narrative of white hurt and white victimhood; in effect, reproducing and hardening the borders of the nation-state. Additionally, by turning to …

Contesting Liberalism, Refusing Death: A Biopolitical Critique Of Navajo History, Melanie Yazzie

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation considers the pivotal role that liberalism, particularly as it is expressed and enforced through post-livestock reduction era logics of tribal economic development, plays in advancing a relentless and violent form of U.S. settler colonialism bent on the elimination of Navajo life. I use Michel Foucault’s framework of biopolitics as a theory of history to unlock, identify, and interpret what brought Navajo life into the realm of explicit calculation in Navajo political formations. I use the terms ‘experimental liberalism’ and ‘extractive liberalism’ to frame the two primary biopolitical formations I see at work in this period of Navajo history. …

The Anxious Shadow Of A Coldwar: Affect, Biopower & Resistance In Fiction & Culture In The Period Of Intra-Anxiety 1989-2001, Kate Adler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld stands as the framing text for this study of fiction, cultural affect, and resistance in the later part of the 1980’s – the exhausted, waning years of the Cold War – and the 1990’s, the period immediately following its collapse. DeLillo’s book is situated in the 1990’s, a period of what I term “intra-anxiety” following the Cold War and prior to the attacks of September 11^th and the ensuing “War on Terror.” The Cold War had provided an organizing myth for America and American culture, absorbing and structuring anxieties and governing affect. “The Cold …

Between Species: Biopolitics, Resistance, And Interspeciesality, Temple Jo Gowan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines three twentieth-century novels—Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale, and Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats—in the context of posthumanist animal studies. A Foucauldian biopolitical lens foregrounds the inextricably linked ways that both human and nonhuman animal bodies are governed and controlled in a biopolitical era. Each chapter focuses on textual links between speciesism and the oppression of particular human groups based on gender, sexuality, and race, arguing that each novel offers new ways of thinking about both our own species, other animal species, and how humans relate to the nonhuman world.

Life In The Penit: Framing And Performing Miami's Graffiti Subculture, Victor M. Merida

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the tradition of the Birmingham School of cultural studies, this thesis focuses on Miami’s graffiti subculture and the conflicts between market economies and economies of social meaning. As a reference point, I consider Miami’s “Penits”: the name given to the seemingly abandoned buildings where graffiti is performed. Short for penitentiary, the term derives from the 1980s after a large building rumored to be a prison was defunded midway through its construction. After this first reclamation, every other graffiti heterotopia in Miami has been similarly recoded as spaces that mock structures of discipline and industry.

Through Michel Foucault’s biopolitical framework …

Unsettling Accounts: Life, Debt, And Development In The Middle Rio Grande, Samuel Karrigan Robison Markwell

American Studies ETDs

This thesis reexamines the history of the formation of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD) during the first half of the twentieth century. Previous histories have either uncritically celebrated the MRGCD, or have been critical of its formation because of the way it negatively affected Mexicano/Hispano farming communities. This thesis extends the critical literature by situating the MRGCD as a formation of settler colonialism and attending to the ways it affected Pueblo Indian Nations. I argue that the MRGCD, ostensibly designed to "protect life and property" in the valley, was actually concerned with securing forms of life and property …

Bio+Terror: Science, Security, Simulation, Melanie Armstrong

American Studies ETDs

The United States government has spent more than $125 billion since 2001 to prepare the nation for bioterrorism. This dissertation examines the emergence of bioterrorism as a credible threat in the contemporary moment, considering how the preparedness practices of the security state constitute new biopolitical formations. To explore how changing ways of knowing disease and risk are reshaping communities, this multi-sited study investigates the material outcomes of biosecurity in people's lives. It shows how complex histories of disease and terror are remade in the modern age to bring about new spaces and forms of biological citizenship.Through interview, observation and detailed …