Follow the links below for more
information on the USC College Department of American Studies and
Ethnicity.
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graduate students
Dissertation Abstracts
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Jesus Hernandez
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| Deviant Diasporas: Illegitimacy, Exile, and U.S. Cuban Cultural Politics
is an interdisciplinary study of the ways in which the experience and condition of U.S Cuban exile is structured by notions of abjection, disavowal, and failure through narratives of illegitimate familial relations. The project primarily asks: if the nation is built upon the metaphor or model of the family, what forms of familial relations characterize those members that leave or are disavowed by the nation? Through an analysis of various cultural productions including literature, film, performance art, and law I interrogate the definition and limits of diaspora to productively engage the question of what happens when family members/ citizens abandon or are abandoned by the nation. This constitutive disavowal I argue not only structures particular diasporas as deviant, but also in turn marks and (re)produces the nation itself. |
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Emily Hobson
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| My dissertation examines the meanings of anti-imperialist politics for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender radicalism in California from 1966 to 1989. I ask how queer radicals adapted anti-imperialist thought to imagine new meanings for sexuality; to articulate their relationship to a broader left; and to construct community. I historicize my study between the formation of the Black Panther Party (1966) and the defeat of the Nicaraguan Revolution at the close of the Cold War (1989). Through these unexpected markers, I highlight the importance of racial militancy, national liberation, and left internationalism in U.S. sexual politics. Anti-imperialism produced a discourse of queer space that structured queer politics and geography in California. I locate the central role of lesbians of color in critiquing gay and straight nationalisms and reframing anti-imperialist commitment. Bridging American Studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, and history, I deepen our insight into race and sexuality from the 1960s forward. |
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Nicole Hodges
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| “Sampling Blackness: Performing African Americanness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance” uses a comparative approach to ethnic studies to examine how the global circulation of African American articulations of blackness in Hip-hop music impacts the performance practice of non-African American artists. This dissertation imagines sampling as an improvisational process of meaning making that has the capacity to challenge dominant narratives about racial difference as it creates new possibilities to envision bodies and the cultural products they engender as public texts available for appropriation and re-articulation.
This dissertation contains five chapters which address notions of embodied transnational subjectivity and are all situated in relation to critical debates on the viability of notions of authenticity, essentialism, cultural particularism and the capacity of performance to circulate new imaginings of subjectivity. Chapter One, Sampling Blackness, presents my theorization of sampling as a process of cross-racial, ethnic and cultural performance. Chapter Two, entitled Actin’ and Talkin’ Black: White Bodies Re-articulating Blackness in Hip-hop Theater and Performance uses the work of Hip-hop Theater artist Danny Hoch as an entrée to explore the sampling of black vernacular, hip-hop narratives and stereotypes by white performers inspired by Hip-hop. Chapter Three, Re-Performing African American Female Identities in Hip-hop explores the photographed performances of artist Nikki S. Lee’s ‘Hip-hop Project’ and her employment of African American female stereotypes, fashions and rituals of self-adornment. Chapter Four, Re-Membering Hip-hop: Dancing the African Diaspora explores African American dance moves in Hip-hop as quotable gestures sampled by Black British choreographer Jonzi D. Chapter Five, Re-Imagining Hip-hop Theater and Performance, gestures towards new types of performance and art inspired by Hip-hop and engages the performances of Israeli violinist Miri Ben Ari and African American violinists Kev Marcus and Wil-B of Black Violin who by playing Hip-hop music using classical instruments, "blacken" the normatively white classical music genre. I explore how these performances suggest the impact of African American cultural production on the “blackening” of global popular culture. |
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Imani Johnson
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| “Take Me Higher: Blackness, Kinesthetic Knowledge, & Global Connection in B-Boying Cyphers” This multi-sited, inter-disciplinary project analyzes a ubiquitous practice within “breakdancing” (called breaking or b-boying) culture known as cyphering—improvisational and competitive dancing in circle formation to music. Cyphering—which privileges psychic and spiritual release—acts as a performative framework through which I examine cross-racial cultural belonging as articulated through dance and the symbolics of b-boying. My methodological focus combined interviews with over fifty dancers and research sites in a dozen cities including Oakland, Boston, Miami, New York, London, and Braunschweig from 2005 to 2007. This project demonstrates how American Studies can employ anthropological methods to think differently about race, blackness and transnational identification through practice. The project’s premise centers the altered state of dancers in circles, described as a deep connection to those in the circle. The dynamic between the dancer and surrounding spectator-dancers produces what interviewees call an “energy exchange,” a tangible and even material force. I use dark matter (a Physics concept describing the non-luminous matter comprising the majority of the universe) as a metaphor for the non-empirical materiality as an unseen yet powerful force sustaining the circle at multiple scales—i.e. the dancers in immediate circles, shared practices in the African diaspora, and b-boying identifications worldwide. Because breaking is entrenched in matrices of racial and gender politics dancers seek to both navigate and transcend through dance, I extend cyphers as a model for cross-racial and transnational connection, using dark matter to describe blackness as both unmarked and influential in performances of b-boying identification. I begin by examining prominent debates among breakers about its African roots and New York history. I develop kinesthetic knowledge—understanding manifest within and borne out b-boying’s particular movement—and end by analyzing the formation and dissipation of specific circles, addressing the degree cyphering travels.
Through the study of cyphers emerges a new model to theorize transnational social interaction through a worldwide culture. This project distinctively centers street dance, adding a vital and often overlooked form of meaning making and community building to studies of expressive cultures, performance, and Africana cultural production. |
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Jeb Middlebrook
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| Being A.W.A.R.E.: Radical White Identity and Anti-Racist Organizing in Los Angeles centers the LA-based grassroots organization, Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere (AWARE), in an ethnographic study of white people organizing other white people to challenge racism. The project explores the question “What is white anti-racist organizing?” through participant observation and ethnographic interviews of AWARE participants, members, and organizers, as well as radical organizers of color familiar with AWARE. The project situates AWARE within a historical and theoretical trajectory of white anti-racist organizing in the U.S., including an examination of white abolitionist societies, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Weather Underground, and Anti-Racist Action (ARA). The aim of the project is to investigate the implications of AWARE for academic theory and grassroots activism in terms of white anti-racist identity, organizing, base-building, and the development of a multiracial movement to end white supremacy. The project contributes to the disciplines of Whiteness Studies, Ethnic Studies, Social Movement History, and Cultural Anthropology, providing insight into what white people become when they organize against systems of racial oppression. |
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Lata Murti
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| Based on fifty two interviews, my dissertation is the first major study of how the specific occupational status of a South Asian immigrant group shapes the group’s ethnic-racial identity. This group is first and second-generation Indian immigrant doctors in Southern California. As non-white immigrant professionals living and working among diverse populations, these doctors find that their occupational status and class privilege provide only partial, situational protection from racism. The first three chapters, or Part I, of my dissertation shows that outside of their clinical interactions with patients, who respect them as culturally endowed healers, Indian immigrant doctors in Southern California are subject to racist treatment from colleagues, staff, health care institutions, and the general public. In Part II, or the last three chapters, I explain that the particular forms of prejudice and discrimination they face, as well as how they interpret these instances of prejudice and discrimination in racial terms, have as much to do with their immigrant generation, their gender, and their experiences outside of the U.S., as with their professional class status. My dissertation, therefore, complicates the implicit claims of several Asian Americanists (such as Koshy, 2001) that professional Asian immigrants’ class status and occupations in the sciences tend to shield them from racist harm and preclude their engagement in racial politics. |
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Anton Smith
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| This dissertation examines how black writers use the physical landscape in their narratives to represent spirituality in African American communities. This project will investigate how the representation of certain spaces, from the nightclub and the street corner to the porch and the courtroom, prepare black characters for ecstatic experiences. Consequently, part of this study looks at black spirituality as a set of disappearances and reappearances that reflects the discipline and comportment of the black body. Charles H. Long, Anthony B. Pinn, and James H. Evans are among the scholars who have analyzed the representation of ritualized behavior and performances that capture what African American culture considers spiritual. Moreover, this study will also discuss the ways in which a blues aesthetic work with space to facilitate the transmission of spirituality in fictional African American communities. The scope of this project also considers the relationship between black spirituality, ecstasy and testifying. Drawing upon Henri Lefevre’s notion of space as “produced and modified over time and through its use,” this dissertation will look at how certain landscapes work on the black body to produce ecstatic representations of spirituality in black fictional communities.
This dissertation explores the social implications of the presence of spirituality in African American communities in the writings of such authors as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. Drawing on the linguistic theories of female development by Geneva Smitherman and Marcylena Morgan, as well as the Black Feminist discourse of Patricia Hill Collins as a framework to interpret Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, part of this study explores how black women use spaces such as the porch and the courtroom to create new spiritual constructs and alternative understandings of community through storytelling. With Ellison’s Invisible Man, I carve out a place for a spiritual approach to understanding the power of representation in black literature by examining the role of sermonic rhetoric in the Battle Royal scene and the eviction of the old couple. Lastly, I consider the street, the altar, and the storefront church in Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain as spaces where spirituality is affirmed and contested. |
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Cam Vu
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| Cam Vu's dissertation examines Vietnamese cultural production in the postwar period. Using a comparative analysis, the dissertation examines U.S. diasporic cultural forms alongside a consideration of Vietnamese national artistic and cultural efforts. The appeal to affect in these mediums is considered central to an analysis of the dynamic and enduring legacies of colonialism and war. Utilizing film, literature, and performance studies this project seeks to examine how the arts have provided a language that at once conditions and expresses what official discourse cannot about what it means to be modern and global subjects of the colonial and imperial past. |
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Karen Yonemoto
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| At the turn of the 21st century, a growing number of multiracial religious institutions have been emerging across the United States. (DeYoung, Emerson, Yancey and Kim, 2003; Emerson, 2000 and 2006; Garces-Foley, 2006; Marti, 2005). While studies have addressed bi-racial churches and church mergers among black and white congregations, my project, "Sacred Changes: Multiracial Alliances and Community Transformation among Evangelical Churches in the U.S." analyses the process of multiracial transformation and brings an often overlooked community, Asian American evangelicals, into the center of intellectual analysis. I investigate the ways in which race and religion work together to bring about social change in urban areas asking: Why are Asian American churches becoming multiracial? How does this racial identity inform the social politics of the church and the ways in which they engage in American civic life? And how do intersections of race, religion and politics inform social change in local and global spaces? The project is based on ethnographic research of multiracial Asian American churches in five major metorpolitan cities: Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Seattle. |
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