Global Corporealities

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Global Corporealities is written by Yanoula Kelly Athanassakis and published by . It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 1124884823 (ISBN 10) and 9781124884820 (ISBN 13).

In likely and unlikely pairings of written texts by Asian-American, Haitian-American, Chicano/a, Latino/a, Greek-American, and South Asian-American writers, and visual media by Jewish and Asian-American directors, this dissertation develops a theory of nationally-inflected somatic immigrant subjectivity that both questions and redefines the parameters of U.S. citizenship. These pairings interleave the cultural, technological, and ecological registers of globalization and provide a new framework for evaluating literary responses to the rapidly shifting face of American attitudes towards immigrants. The official rhetoric of U.S. national security has increasingly co-opted the language of the body to both express the inherent risk of allowing foreigners into the U.S. and to describe groups of persons that are deemed a threat to our safety: cellular organizations, acephalous bodies of power, shadowy networks of individuals (to name a few). Implicit in these descriptions is the schematization of America as a cohesive national body. While many critics have discussed the racially-charged language, little work has been done to expand upon the idea of America as a body and its self-generated shadow as a byproduct of American imperialism and globalization (when globalization is reductively defined as synonymous with Westernization and thus Americanization). The purposeful pairing of works mimics the crucial motif of the parasitic imaginary whereby the U.S. plays host to its immigrants and recasts them as pathologies of the national body. While the writers and directors of my project are not wholly in control of the corporeally-anchored moments of contact with foreign bodies, they categorically insist on the materiality of the body as a register for the psychosomatic manifestations of the impacts of globalization.