Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation examines the prevalence of illness in postnationalist Afro- and Native American novels, and the ways in which such sickly identities offer alternatives to conventional models of communal affiliation and organizing. I argue that the pathological body plays a crucial double role in ethnic American fiction of this period. In one sense, the medical crises invoked in works by John E. Wideman, Gerald Vizenor, Paul Beatty, Louise Erdrich, Colson Whitehead, and Blake Hausman symbolize insidious forms of racial discrimination that continue to plague the American body politic. Specifically, somatic ailments mirror the chronic economic inequality engineered by neoliberal policies and the subtle erosion of Civil Rights and Self-Determination reforms. In another sense, however, the diseased body alerts readers to the proscriptive identity politics that seek to salve economic exploitation with esoteric cultural values. By prizing connection and contingency over isolation and determinism, pathological tropes reveal the rhyme between commodified and nostalgic reproductions of minority identity, and counter both with depictions of individuals and communities that are interdependent and mutable. The pathological body is thus a rich and historically resonant trope that magnifies the contradictions within both neoliberalism and the identity politics deployed to resist it. The diseased figures in the novels I examine are not expressions of relativism, pessimism, or metaphorical remainders of past trauma, nor are they merely symptoms of a deeply entrenched systemic racism. Rather, such tropes trouble reified and inborn identities and introduce other forms of belonging based in liminality, uncertainty, and debate. The Native- and African American texts I analyze suggest that surprising alliances and powerful new means of affiliation can arise from the throes of illness. In valuing states of vulnerability and entanglement, these works implicitly prioritize forms of agency and belonging that are profoundly interconnected and dynamic. Such contingent positions embrace and channel paradox, contradiction, and conflict into a materially engaged pluralist politics that remobilize ethnic communities struggling against neoliberal multiculturalism.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2018
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Citation
Pfaff, Sara L.,
"Pluralism and Pathology in Afro- and Native American Fiction"
(2018).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/6csy-h402
