Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Comparative Studies

My project, Modernity, Multiculturalism, and Racialization in Transnational America: Autobiography and Fiction by Immigrant Muslim Women Before and After 9/11, interrogates the enduring notion of America as the promised land of freedom and social mobility in the narratives of Muslim immigrant women. Informed by the critical theories of minority discourse, U.S. borders studies, and postcolonial scholarship, I argue that autobiography and fiction by Muslim American women writers indicate an ideological flexibility, demonstrating a spectrum of discursive negotiations and stances that strategically claim secular, religious, modern, feminist, capitalist, transnational, and multiracial identities that altogether challenge the hegemonic and binary configurations of the figure of “the Muslim” and reformulate the terms of citizenship and belonging in the U.S. I read these strategies in three different writings: Selma Ekrem's autobiography Unveiled: The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl (1930), Mohja Kahf's novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006), and Leila Halaby's novel Once in A Promised Land (2007). Collectively, these texts articulate and address anxieties about the presumed “incommensurability” of Muslim/Middle Eastern identity with the imaginary ideal of normative Anglo-American modern society, and they offer a unique ethnic, religious, and cross-racial perspective that challenges dominant U.S. conceptions of the minority difference and exclusion. My project contributes to the theorizing of transnational minority literature in a context that goes beyond the simplistic framework of minor to major anti-hegemonic discourse. While I discuss these texts as counternarratives to hegemonic articulations of citizenship and exclusionary discourses of American identity, I also focus on minor-to-minor sensibilities, paying attention to the ways in which literature offers a space for articulations of cross-ethnic alliances, solidarities, and tensions amongst immigrants and other (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Nina Berman (Committee Co-Chair); Pranav Jani (Committee Co-Chair); Theresa Delgadillo (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature; American Studies; Comparative Literature; Ethnic Studies; Gender; Islamic Studies; Literature; Middle Eastern Literature; Middle Eastern Studies; Near Eastern Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, English

German-Americans were the most populous and influential non-British immigrant group in the British colonies and in the early nation. In order to fully understand early American history, culture, and literature, it is crucial to explore the literature produced by this group. Nonetheless, the sheer number of literary works produced by Germans in America makes such a task as difficult as it is important. This project participates in the recovery of German-American literature by focusing on German-language stories written in and about American contact zones. I begin in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania and follow new waves of immigrants south and west in the nineteenth century. I argue that German-American writers used transnational genres (the captivity narrative, the frontier romance, and the urban mystery novel) to articulate the transports and traumas of their transnational experiences. In Chapters 1 and 2, I look at German-language captivity narratives of the French and Indian War. I argue that writing captivity narratives allowed German settlers to negotiate their culturally liminal place in Pennsylvania as a racially privileged but culturally marginalized group, to come to terms with the transnational traumas of captivity and religious persecution, and to define and police constantly shifting communal boundaries. Chapter 3 focuses on the frontier romances of Austrian-American novelist Charles Sealsfield, whose work deals with the transnational pleasures of an imaginary empty frontier. Sealsfield alleviates national guilt over Indian removal by alleging that southwestern farmers and pioneers are the most “legitimate” Americans, more so even than Northerners and Easterners. He nonetheless suggests that unlike Indians and Africans, Yankees and European immigrants can gain legitimacy if they undergo a process of national regeneration through marriage, which operates as a metaphor for democracy in his work. In Chapter 4, I look at urban mystery novels of the 1850s. Like (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jared Gardner PhD (Committee Chair); Chadwick Allen PhD (Committee Member); Susan Williams PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2013, Arts and Sciences: Communication

Excuses for Emotion analyzes representations of emotion in recent American poetry on the subject of parents and gay and lesbian icons. Much of this poetry demonstrates affection for and attachment to those figures, but those positive emotions are seldom without complications, whether ambivalence, resentment, doubt, or self-questioning. Moreover, even poems with a primarily negative emotional register tend to have similar complications. The standard explanation for these complications would be that human emotions are indeed complex, and that the engagement with complexity gives poetry its value as a genre. In practice, though, this complication has become less an achievement than a requirement. If it is to be taken seriously from an institutional perspective, contemporary American poetry requires what I call an excuse for emotion, a rhetorical cue that makes emotional “acceptable” by complicating it, calling its authenticity or accuracy into question, or allying it with a political cause taken more seriously than the emotion itself. My major argument is that one should not unquestioningly accept these conventions constraining the emotional content of poetry, which arise from a set of relatively unexamined assumptions about quality and significance, both in the field of literary scholarship and in the community of American poetry. I see this project as related to a recent interest in emotion within literary studies that has been called emotion theory, which considers the ways in which expressions of emotion and emotional norms carry cultural meaning. Chapter One, “Sympathetic Sons,” looks at the poetry of Allen Ginsberg and Robert Hass. Both poets write about mothers suffering from significant mental illness, which creates distance between them and their sons, even as the sons retain a strong sense of affection for them. Chapter Two, “Incomplete Daughters,” looks at the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds. Both poets write about parents whom the speaker admires (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lisa Hogeland Ph.D. (Committee Chair); John Drury MFA (Committee Member); Jonathan Kamholtz Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: American Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2009, Women's Studies

In this dissertation, I use contemporary Chinese immigrant women's visual and literary narratives to examine gender, race, ethnicity, migration, immigration, and sexual experiences in various power discourses from a transnational perspective. In particular, I focus on the relationship between body memories and history, culture, migration and immigration portrayed in these works. I develop and define “the sent-down body,” a term that describes educated Chinese urban youths (also called sent-down youths in many studies) working in the countryside during the Chinese Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The “sent-down body” in this context and in my analysis is the politicized and sexualized migrant body. The term also describes previous sent-down youths' immigration experiences in the United States, because many of them became immigrants in the post-Cultural Revolution era and are usually described as “overseas sent-down youths” (yangchadui). Therefore, the “sent-down body” is also the immigrant body, and it is sexualized and racialized. Moreover, the “sent-down body” is gendered, but I study the female “sent-down body” and its represented experiences in specific political, historical, cultural, and sexual contexts. By using “the sent-down body” as an organizing concept in my dissertation, I introduce a new category of analysis in studies of Chinese immigrants' history and culture. I use the term “the sent-down body” to explore a new terrain to study representations of historical, cultural, and political experiences in the context of body memories and coerced or voluntary human movement in physical or symbolic locations. The focus on Chinese immigrant women's cultural production also helps enrich studies of new Chinese immigrants' experiences by treating them as part of Asian American immigrants' experiences.

Committee: Linda Mizejewski PhD (Committee Chair); Sally Kitch PhD (Committee Co-Chair); Rebecca Wanzo PhD (Committee Member); Judy Wu PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Womens Studies