Romance Languages Theses and Dissertations

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Open Access
Netflix: Phenomenology of the Teen Drama Genre in Italy
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Pisacane, Gerardo; Hester, Nathalie
In the era of online streaming services, the distribution of TV content has altered the old paradigm of the ‘one-way flow’ of media products. An Internet-distributed television such as Netflix enables shows to circulate more seamlessly, across national borders, allowing viewers to access content that would have been more difficult to find in the past. With a presence in 191 out of 195 worldwide countries reached and 260 million paid subscribers, Netflix stands as the most prominent global Internet TV service. Most research attention on Netflix has discussed how this online streaming service categorizes its shows and targets them to spectators, as part of the personalization and recommendations system (PRS). Scant consideration has been given instead to the effects of Netflix's technological affordances on the writing of TV series. This dissertation addresses this gap in the literature by exploring how Netflix conceives shows aimed at a potentially transnational audience, with a specific emphasis on the teen drama genre in the Italian mediascape. Through a post-structuralist analysis of the teen genre, which considers genre categories as culturally dynamic and changing constructs, this study examines Zero and Baby, two teen shows written, produced, and filmed in Italy. The examination demonstrates that, because of the friction between Netflix’s global reach and its need to produce shows ingrained with local cultures, this online streaming’s products emerge as fascinating examples of glocal dramas. Zero and Baby reveal elements in the text that specifically cater to a local viewership and counterbalance the features of a genre such as teen drama, highly globalized because of the spread of American youth content in media. The results of this analysis add to the field of media studies that examine the increasing number of youth-oriented dramas on Netflix, developing a theoretical understanding of the impact that this online streaming has on the writing of TV shows and genre formation.
Open Access
BROKEN BOUNDARIES: ALTERNATIVE FUTURES IN WOMEN’S LITERATURE OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH (1984-2006)
(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Clementi, Jordan; Millar, Lanie
DISSERTATION ABSTRACTTitle: Broken Boundaries: Alternative Futures in Women’s Literature of the Global South (1984-2006) How do Black women in the Global South envision alternative futures which subvert the prescribed patriarchal futures that dominate discourse? My dissertation examines the works of three Black authors from the Global South, specifically from Cameroon, Mozambique and Puerto Rico—Werewere Liking, Paulina Chiziane, and Mayra Santos-Febres, respectively—who write new futures in their works by redressing ways in which women are removed from narratives of the present and the past in order to build power to change the future. This dissertation seeks to join their works together through a deterritorialized understanding of the Global South, an economically marginalized space which exists in the unevenness of development across the globe. These writers explore ways in which they can challenge and subvert patriarchal boundaries placed on them to break them and redraw them as they see fit. Patriarchal systems oppress women and alternative solutions to social issues in various ways to maintain dominance. The works by these authors explicitly challenge that suppression; they succeed in breaking away by subverting language and expectations to find ways to sabotage dominant discourses. Each author intentionally reads genre, language, or cultural practice in a way which subverts dominant discourse and instead reads it in a way that benefits their needs. The primary outcome of this is that it redresses ways in which women are erased from narratives of the past and present, negating their creative solutions to present issues which not only affect them but everyone in the broader society. On top of that, these narratives then allow women to envision alternative futures which do not conform to the often grim and violent predictions of patriarchal discourse about the future. Their texts essentially demonstrate pathways which can be used to unwind the present and follow alternative routes into the future. My project attempts to demonstrate the diverse demonstrations of ingenuity which go into the vision of alternative futures and the ways that specific contexts can arrive at those futures through subversions of established genres, language, and cultural practices.
Open Access
Lines Re-drawn: Envisioning Feminism and Islam in Francophone Fiction (1980-2019)
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-10) Youssefzadeh, Kiana; Moore, Fabienne
What does it mean for a woman in or from an Islamic space to be liberated? My dissertation examines the works of five Francophone authors from Iran and Algeria—Marjane Satrapi, Négar Djavadi, Délphine Minoui, Assia Djebar, Swann Meralli—who question the invisibility or misrepresentation of women in national histories of Iranian and Algerian revolutions. These writers shed light on women’s perspectives on revolution and on the violence in which they participated and to which they were subjected. Official narratives by Iranian and Algerian governments and media about their respective national revolutions have underreported the role of women who fought for their countries. In addition, France’s relationship to Iran and Algeria, its politics of “laïcité,” and its policing of the Islamic veil have created additional challenges these Francophone authors expose.Each of the author reckons with French stereotypes regarding an alleged “backward oppressive Islam” that dominate public discourse and do not make space for nuances and alternatives. At the same time, they address their own respective countries’ lack of representation of women in their national histories. Their writing creates a space for a diversity of women, thus opening a discussion on what it means to be an Iranian/Algerian woman refusing to reduce identities to the meaning modern France seeks to impose on the Muslim veil. Decolonial feminism inspires my project as I address how islamophobia and violence impact francophone Muslims in France and the enduring legacy of France’s colonial past that crafted xenophobic, orientalist narratives about the “Eastern Other.” The Francophone Iranian and Algerian writers in my corpus work to dismantle the separation between constructions of gender, race, and religion. In creative and intersectional ways, they are rethinking womanhood under Islam, explicitly or implicitly, and its representation both in France and in their respective countries. My project analyzes representative works and various genres, including graphic novels, to showcase these authors’ audacity in writing their own narratives in the face of misrepresentations and erasure.
Open Access
Memorias de la traición y la traición de la memoria: narrativas de la traición en Chile y Argentina
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Vidal, Yosa; Enjuto Rangel, Cecilia
My dissertation questions the current cultural boom of fictional and non-fictional works on the politics of memory, characterized by a Manichaean rhetoric of heroes versus enemies, heroes versus traitors. I argue that representations of betrayal, often evoking terrible forms of torture and suffering, allow us to critique a patriarchal and epic vision of the traumatic past in the Global South. In dialogue with literary theorists (Longoni, Ruiz, Sarlo, Avelar) and philosophers (Adorno, Benjamin, JM Bernstein, Derrida), my dissertation opens a conceptual space to imagine what it means to be a political actor in a political and economic system that benefits from such violence. My project contributes to the field of Latin American Memory Studies by analyzing three texts which have been overlooked by scholars: Marcia Merino’s autobiographical testimony (Chile, 1993); the graphic novel Perramus by Juan Sasturain and Alberto Breccia (Argentina, 1985); and Enrique Lihn’s play, Dialogues of the Disappeared (Chile, 2018). The Ontology of the Traitor (first chapter) studies the specificity and the effects of incarnating the body of a traitor. The Epistemology of Betrayal (second chapter) explores how betrayal is the spark of a journey that produces (or fails to produce) knowledge, and The Dialectic of Betrayal (third chapter) examines how a conversation about treason exposes both sides of an opposition that does not end in a conciliatory conclusion. These are paths to illuminate three disturbing and controversial texts, that raise uncanny questions about state sponsored violence, and challenge consensus politics of neoliberal democracies of the Southern Cone.
Open Access
L’Absurde engagé : Parcours de l’absurde de la scène à l’écran à la suite de la seconde guerre mondiale en Iran et en France
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Saedi, Maryam; Moore, Fabienne
This dissertation explores the complex and multifaceted concept of the Absurd, tracing its trajectory through history from its origins in France to its flourishing in contemporary Iran. At its core, Absurdity is the poignant interplay between humanity's quest for meaning and the universe's silence and indifference. Absurd is not a static or homogeneous concept; rather, it is fluid and dynamic, evolving over time and across cultures.Although the Western understanding of Absurdity is often associated with nihilism and death, this dissertation argues that in the Iranian context, the Absurd is reclaimed as a celebration of life and beauty. While the modern concept of the Absurd emerged from the European existentialist movement and greatly developed in the 20th century, the Persian literary tradition has embraced the notion of nothingness in its poetry since the 13th century. This enduring theme remains integral to contemporary Iranian artistic expression. The research initially delves into French philosophy and literature, specifically focusing on Albert Camus' perspective on the Absurd, and explores the ramifications of embracing absurdity both on a philosophical and socio-political level. Through a meticulous examination of 4 the plays by Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, the first chapter argues that despite their resistance to conventional communication and meaning, the Theatre of the Absurd actively encourages audience engagement. Shifting its gaze toward Iran, a country marked by significant political transformations in the 1950s and 1960s, the research highlights how many Iranian writers and filmmakers utilize the Absurd to subvert the regime's imposition of a rigid and ideologically driven version of modernity. Instead, they celebrate the nation's rich cultural heritage and traditions through their works. The third chapter explores the usage of the Theatre of the Absurd as a means of socio-political activism and resistance against imposed modernity by Iranian writer Gholam Hossein Saedi. In the final chapter, through an interdisciplinary approach that examines New Wave cinema, this dissertation offers a fresh perspective on the different accounts of the Absurd as a subversive, transformative, and creative force as demonstrated by filmmakers such as Dariush Mehrjui, Bahram Beizaei, and Abbas Kiarostami. Iranian New Wave cinema, in particular, presents a unique lens through which absurdity is approached. By challenging conventional adult skills and embracing a spiritual vision of life, this cinematic movement cultivates a fresh paradigm for perceiving the world and discovering the beauty within nothingness.
Open Access
Reorienting the Utopian Island: Tropes, Toponymy and Transgression in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Indian Ocean and Caribbean Fictions
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Hadjivassiliou, Sheela; Moore, Fabienne
Fields like postcolonial studies widely deploy terms like multiculturalism, métissage (mixing) and créolité (creoleness) to describe the multiplicity of identity and heritage found in the regions of the global South. These terms tend to have positive connotations; however, in this dissertation I argue that although they valorize the diasporic identity and racial mixing of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean, they also reinforce an aestheticized representation of these spaces that reproduces the trope of the “utopian island”—a trope that has recurred throughout literature, travel narratives and tourist brochures. These representations often rely on the illusion of successful multicultural coexistence that obfuscates the racial stratification that continues to persist in these creole archipelagic regions. My dissertation explores a series of narratives that challenge these tropes—both of the utopian creole island and postcolonial multicultural success. In these alternative narratives, twentieth and twenty-first century authors from the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and France use tropes, toponymy and transgression (of normative expressions of gender, race and class) to depict how subaltern bodies—undocumented migrants, “low-caste” and “no-caste” individuals, and sex workers—destabilize the neoliberal logic of the economies in which they participate through their embodied and affective actions.
Open Access
Género y Lengua: Literacidad Crítica en el Aula de Español como Lengua Heredada
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Boyero Agudo, Lara; Holguín Mendoza, Claudia
En este trabajo cualitativo que sigue una metodología de participación de acción, estudio el desarrollo de la conciencia crítica sociolingüística de la lengua y el género en doce hablantes bilingües latines en un curso avanzado dentro del programa de español como lengua de herencia de una universidad predominantemente blanca del noroeste del pacífico en los Estados Unidos. Para ello, sigo el acercamiento crítico de CriSoLL: Literacidad Lingüística Sociocultural Crítica, el cual se centra en paradigmas antirracistas, de historicidad crítica y de variación estilística, así como los estudios sociolingüísticos de tercera ola de lengua y género y las premisas del feminismo chicano. Con este marco crítico, diseño la clase feminidades latinas en los medios: lengua, género y sus interseccionalidades, así como los materiales didácticos y las tareas por las cuales obtengo todos los datos que forman mi análisis. Los resultados demuestran que, a lo largo de las diez semanas que duro el trimestre, les estudiantes sumaron capas de conocimientos sociolingüísticos (lengua, género, raza, clase, sexualidad) problematizando ideologías que se habían dado por sentadas debido al status quo que permea en las escuelas. Aunque la conciencia crítica que mostraron por medio de sus posicionamientos actitudinales no es lineal, al final del curso, se observa cómo argumentan aludiendo a las diferentes variables sociolingüísticas y al vocabulario utilizado en clase en relación a los marcos pedagógicos empleados en la instrucción. Asimismo, trabajar en el aula como una comunidad de práctica, valida y legitima el capital sociocultural que estes estudiantes traen a la clase y les empodera para usar sus experiencias como conocimiento válido en la clase. Usando pedagogías críticas en la clase de español como lengua heredada, no solo nos revelamos y luchamos ante la cultura privilegiada que afecta a los currículos y marginaliza a les estudiantes que se encuentran en grupos subordinados, fortaleciendo los espacios para que ejerzan su agencia.
Open Access
La crónica literaria urbana en Perú y México (1999-2022)
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Sotelo, Elizabeth; García-Caro, Pedro
In “La crónica literaria urbana en Perú y México (1999-2022),” I explore the political significance of contemporary literary chronicles published in books to identify agencies and political operators. The theoretical perspectives of Aníbal Quijano, Jacques Rancière, Elizabeth Jelin, Sayak Valencia, and Luciana Peker are employed in a comprehensive study that extends throughout four chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion. In the first chapter, “Agencias en el espacio urbano,” the critical agencies of disempowered individuals are explored through assorted selections from Juan Villoro’s El vértigo horizontal (2018), demonstrating the active presence of political actors. The second chapter, “Operadores desde el espacio laboral,” delves into the subjective and physical agencies of political subjects by analyzing selected chronicles from Julio Villanueva Chang’s book Mariposas y murciélagos (2022). The third chapter, “La memoria como herramienta política,” illustrates how memory functions as a tool for constructing political subjects through an examination of the past and the narration of the present in texts from Daniela Rea’s Nadie les pidió perdón (2015). In the fourth chapter, “La memoria, puente constructive,” chosen texts from Gabriela Wiener’s book Sexografías (2008) exemplify how memory becomes a political tool, enabling the construction of political operators. Additionally, an appendix is included, providing supplementary information and analysis on contemporary and lesser-known female chronicle writers in Peru and Mexico. Besides being the first study of its kind, this dissertation holds great potential for enhancing the understanding of how the chronicle personifies a living political body by connecting writers, regions, texts, and temporal contexts.
Open Access
INFRAESTRUCTURAS DE MODERNIDAD: ESTÉTICAS DECADENTISTAS Y DESARROLLO URBANO EN BOLIVIA
(University of Oregon, 2024-01-09) Velasco, Javier; Millar, Lanie
Esta disertación analiza el desarrollo de la estética literaria decadentista en Bolivia en conexión con las infraestructuras de urbanización del espacio a principios del siglo XX. A diferencia del decadentismo europeo, que desarrolló un lenguaje experimental para dar cuenta de un cansancio civilizatorio y para mostrar el lado oscuro de la modernidad, en Latinoamérica el decadentismo fue parte de un proceso político y cultural criollo de integración a la modernidad. Desde el caso de estudio boliviano, mi disertación examina en periódicos, fotografías, documentos administrativos y otros materiales de archivo, junto a varios textos narrativos de la época, la forma en que la expansión de la ciudad, impulsada por nuevas tecnologías e infraestructuras de urbanización del espacio, no sólo reflejó las tensiones sociales entre las elites criollas y grupos subalternos en ascenso (cholos e indios), sino que fue el lugar desde donde las elites imaginaron un espacio material y simbólicamente ordenado con el criollo al centro de la modernidad. En una aproximación inicial, infraestructuras son presencias materiales en el espacio que, además de posibilitar el movimiento de cosas y personas, determinan subjetividades, procesos racionales y formas de imaginación colectiva. Por tanto, mi trabajo plantea que la modernidad criolla fue infraestructuralmente imaginada en la reorganización técnica y espacial de la ciudad, con nuevas tecnologías de transporte, calles ampliadas, nuevas construcciones y novedosos diseños urbanos. Este proceso de urbanización produjo al mismo tiempo la infraestructura literaria de la narrativa de estilo decadentista, que reanimó las tensiones raciales coloniales en un intento por contener el avance de grupos subalternos que amenazaban la hegemonía criolla. En cada uno de los capítulos de mi disertación examino cómo la llegada e implementación de las nuevas infraestructuras se manifestaron en un lenguaje de movilidad y estacionarismo; cómo el desarrollo de un lenguaje de conectividad y cosmopolitismo estuvo relacionado con la emergencia de nuevas construcciones urbanas, hábitos de consumo y fantasías de contacto cultural en las elites; y cómo, en una versión alternativa de la modernidad criolla, una infraestructura de origen rural, como es la chichería, produjo un lenguaje de enamoramiento y feminización de la mercancía para fundar la idea de una modernidad económica de tipo liberal-mestiza. Estos elementos compusieron la aplicación local del decadentismo de principios de siglo, que, siguiendo el modelo europeo presentaba la imagen de personajes criollos enfrentados al orden instituido, sensibilidades pesimistas e individualistas, y reflejaba la urgencia criolla de organizar la modernidad y afirmarse dentro de un espacio social en transformación del cual se sentía desplazado.
Open Access
Viral Bodies: AIDS and Other Contagions in Latin American Life Narratives
(University of Oregon, 2023-07-06) Jaramillo, Jon; Garcia Caro, Pedro
The HIV/AIDS crisis in Latin America was overshadowed by the late phase of the Cold War, while authoritarian governments promoted discourses reflecting moral and ethical exceptionalism. People with AIDS (PWAs) experienced multiple crises—moral excision by the state, marginalization, and the certainty of death. Existing societal infrastructures of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality urged their marginalized lives into even more precarious ways of being. The authoritarian and hegemonic discourses complicated and intensified how PWAs experienced isolation, internal exile, neglect, condemnation, discrimination, and death. These exceptional conditions led to a 10-year delay before works by Latin American artists and writers emerged. My dissertation examines works by Reinaldo Arenas (Cuba), Pedro Lemebel (Chile), and Pablo Perez (Argentina) since they reveal a spectrum of intersectional AIDS subjectivities exhibiting accommodation, resistance, and transgression of prevailing national and religious norms. Drawing from the fields of exile studies, transfeminism, contagion theory, and virality, my dissertation argues that these narratives break imposed silences by radically exteriorizing the insularity, anonymity, and decomposing bodies of those dying, and living, with the disease. They intervene in national, transnational, and religious discourses. They also challenge the limits of gender and genre, while contributing to a (re)imagining of homosexual history. They offer utopian visions of kinship, belonging, and community formation and bring practices of difference such as transvestism, sadomasochism, and spiritual fetishism into focus.
Open Access
Unbreaking Bonds: Queer Prison Testimonies from the Holocaust to Today
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-26) Regan-Maglione, Kevin; Lollini, Massimo
This dissertation examines the queer prison testimonial practices in a graphic novel, three memoirs, and two films that reproduce a new kind of witnessing. The authors are Luca de Santis with illustrator Sara Colaone, Gabriella Romano, Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque, and Pierre Seel and the directors are Pietro Marcello and Jean Genet. Each of these texts offers a mediated and constructed re-elaboration of an original witnessing encounter which emblematizes the community building nature of these queer prison testimonies. From Italian to French, the project is an intervention in discussions on testimonial theory, Holocaust literature, queer temporality, and queer archive studies as these texts function as the original subject’s attempt to mirror and perpetuate a community of listeners. First, I take up the graphic novel’s medium as an entryway to community building as I examine de Santis’ relationship to the original witness. Then, I explore how queer Holocaust survivors establish their own voice through the primary witness and secondary witness exchange. After, I look at how queer films open up a visual horizon into realizing a utopic time and how the films are a guide to imagining similar horizons. Finally, I explore how the body as a personal archive expands upon the queer turn from the archive. Throughout each chapter, I contend that each text functions pedagogically as it shifts the responsibility from speaker and listener to a communal affective labor. The project overall proposes a practice of community building which repeats itself as it reaches other public members: the foundation and framework behind the witnessing, which involves a meditation and another person, builds community and that community then promotes further community with the reader or viewer.
Open Access
The Significance of Black Women to Early Modern Iberian Literature
(University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Tweede, Cornesha; Middlebrook, Leah
Chapter 1 is a thorough literary review and further discussion of the field and how Black women characters are conventionally perceived to discuss my own “second look” and my reading practices. The introduction also provides context about Spain, Portugal, and Africa geographically, literarily, and culturally in the early modern period. Chapter 2, titled “Seed of Language and Root: Beauty, Fala de preto and Spiritual Gifts” engages the Portuguese tradition. Portugal was the leading country during the time for maritime exploration and “discovery” of uncharted and unknown areas in Africa. I split the chapter in two by focusing one part of it on one poem: “Endechas a Bárbara Escrava (aquela Cativa)” (1595) by Luís de Camões. In the second half, I engage theater and drama in the Portuguese tradition by using the play, “Autos das Regateiras” (1565) by António Ribeiro Chiado. The poet writes similarly to how Luís de Góngora writes about Black beauty in “Mientras por competir con tu cabello.” This poet uses description of body parts and the sense of captivity to describe this captive person that has him captivated by love and beauty. Through lyric poetry and theater, I discuss how black African females were figured into an abject position and how this cultural production in Portugal portrays Black characters as minor and marginal. My interpretation of these black African women in this poem and play is that they are integral to the narrative and plot. I center these characters as Black subjects and recuperate their agency through this theorization of Blackness. Chapter 3, titled “Seed of Positionality and Resistance: African Princess, Language and Substance” shifts focus to the Spanish tradition. This chapter is split in half. The first part engages with Cervantes’s work, as I will bring in Don Quijote de la Mancha I (1605) and Las novelas ejemplares II (1613), while the second part discusses cultural appropriation with regard to verba y res. I focus on the African princess Micomicona and the Black female from El coloquio de los perros for the first part. I analyze the representation of the erstwhile African princess Micomicona and argue that this African princess is a central character that shapes the plot, rather than the minor character field renders her. My work on Micomicona exemplifies the “reparative process” I conduct throughout the dissertation in the context of Iberian early modern literary production. The second part of the chapter engages in a discussion of cultural appropriation. Speech is a pervasive device early modern writers used to distinguish Black characters in a narrative or prose. I use the Renaissance humanist concept of verba (“word”) y res (“substance”) with regard to Micomicona and Dorotea. In the first part, I explore the position of the figure of Micomicona as a function of res (nonspeech but creates the substance for words) and how her characterization in the episode underscores the subject position of a White elite woman, Dorotea as a function of verba (speech with words). I will argue the point that this African character is necessary to Dorotea’s existence, participation and agency throughout the novel. I will also explore the gestures and resistance of the Black female character in El coloquio de los perros. I won’t compare these two characters as I will theorize their form of Blackness differently, but both serve to recuperate Blackness and Black female presence. This section will also tie in Fanon’s ideas of cultural appropriation with regard to language. Chapter 4, titled “Seed of Love and Restoration: Black Beauty and Freedom” brings in another discussion of the Spanish tradition, this time delivered from the perspective of a White Castilian woman. The chapter has an introductory section to set up the nucleus of the argument. The introductory section will bring in my interpretations of Luis de Góngora’s poem “Mientras por competir con tu cabello” with regard to Black beauty. I also tie in the representation and African beauty of the African queen in Book 5 of Petrarch’s Africa book, Sophinisba. This character is similar in physical representation as Princess Micomicona, somatically described as white or cream but still an African princess or queen. In the main portion of the chapter, I theorize the representation of Blackness through beauty and elaboration of dress in Los desengaños amorosos by Maria de Zayas. Specifically, I will focus on Desengaño 4 “Tarde llega el desengaño” which features a black African female house slave who dies a tragic death after lying about a mishap with a family member. The tale points out clearly her beauty and how elaborately she dresses. I tie in interpretations of the authorship and the writing and casting of a Black female servant. Additionally, I bring in discussion of a novella by Mariana de Carvajal y Saavedra titled “La industria vence desdenes,” where in the seventh novella there is a Black female slave named Antonia. Since Zayas and Carvajal played a major role in the early modern cultural production, I briefly discuss this work as it features a Black slave woman. I do not intend to bombard this chapter with information, but Carvajal’s work is at least mentioned in this chapter. Through these approaches and interpretations, I restore subjectivity and agency for this Black female character. I use this space to discuss how my approaches and theorization push towards the future of where the field is going. The conditioning of Black Feminist approaches highlights the role and value of Black women in society and how their value has not changed since the fifteenth-century. This is not to be anachronistic, nor do I view my work as such, but I highlight how the past is in the present. This section underscores the bridge between black African women on the Iberian Peninsula during the fifteenth to seventeenth century and how their contributions greatly impacted modern and contemporary thought surrounding Black women. Moreover, this discussion explains how my theorizations and interpretations are a forward-thinking meditation of the field and conventional thought towards racialization during the early modern era. This section is not necessarily a summary of the dissertation but rather how my thinking and interpretations are ways towards moving thoughts surrounding racialization and gender forward in the field of early modern Iberian Studies. Indeed, the field is moving forward with more radical thoughts and interpretations surrounding racialization and gender so my work will be integral to that shift. Also, I bridge early modern thought concerning representations of black African women to modern and contemporary thought surrounding Black women. This work ultimately exudes an Iberian Blackness that is significantly ignored in the field pervasively.
Open Access
Combatientes fascistas de España: La División Azul a través de los estudios culturales
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Tejada Lopez, Macarena; Herrmann, Gina
Gradually in Spain, the Blue Division—a volunteer corps of 47,000 sent by the Spanish fascist government to fight alongside Hitler in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front (Novgorod-Leningrad area) between October 1941 and October 1943—has been acquiring increasing visibility in popular literature. This mini-boom is better understood within a broader context that spans back to the "memory boom" of the 2000s, which in Spain counted with the support of the socialist government of Prime Minister Rodríguez Zapatero (2004-2011). His efforts to recuperate the historical memory and the unearthing of crimes during Francoism also drove the ex-Divisioners to share their experiences in the Russian campaign, since, ultimately, their stories also belong within the complex historical memory of World War II Spain and Europe. Combatientes Fascistas de España examines the memoirs and war diaries that three key Divisioners, Dionisio Ridruejo, José Martínez Esparza, and José Luis Gómez Tello, penned in the 1940s and 1950s, to address how their racial and ideological positions inform their observations of the confrontation between the Other (the Russians, the East) versus Us (the Spaniards, the West); and to explore questions of gender identity related to the soldier as the model of masculinity under fascism. This project additionally deconstructs the only two feature films directed by exdivisioners Pedro Lazaga (1954) and Falangist José María Forqué (1956) from the standpoint of the political economy of cinema, an approach that understands films as a marketable product. The cinematic sections of this project address how the Francoist State financed cinema to elevate the anti-Communist discourse during the Cold War. My study of imaginative filmic and autobiographical works about the Blue Division contributes to a piece of European history that illuminates—beyond historiography—the Hispano-Nazi collaboration and the performance of Spanish fascist masculinities in World War II. Moreover, it contributes to the cultural production of the Cold War period by studying how Francoism borrowed from the social capital inherent to the novels, memoirs, and films of the Blue Division in order to shore up the anti-Communist ideological foundation that fueled and permitted the protraction of the Franco regime: the longest-lived dictatorship in 20th century Europe. This dissertation builds on previously published material.
Open Access
Time, Memory, and Justice in Chilean and Ecuadorian Documentary Film
(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13) Plescia, Mariko; Enjuto Rangel, Cecilia
Time, Memory, and Justice in Chilean and Ecuadorian Documentary Film studies the relationship between a shift in temporality and emerging forms of political agency in Latin American documentary film. What became of the leftist New Latin American Cinema (1950s-80s) when repressive dictatorships, and then neoliberal politics, foreclosed the path to their alternative visions of the future? In this dissertation, I argue that for the generations of filmmakers working over the last 20 years, reassessment of the past—and the telling of the past—has become strategic ground to reclaim a sense of identity and the possibility of a future not over determined by earlier philosophical questions. While institutional measures paint the dictatorial past as distant, as if it had been replaced by neoliberal governments, documentary films Nostalgia de la luz (2010), Abuelos (2010), La muerte de Jaime Roldós (2013) and Con mi corazón en Yambo (2011) invite the spectator to see the disappeared, and the legacy of the dictatorships, as still very much present on ethical, emotional and material levels. Through cinematic reflexivity, archival remediation, embodied aesthetics, a focus on the material world, an appeal to affect, non-linear montage, and the incorporation of intimate family archives, these historical memory films move beyond the desire to prove the human rights violations. Instead, they question a concept of history based on the event and offer a subjective perspective that engages the spectator in an ethical relationship with collective history. By bringing into conversation the Pinochet Dictatorship in Chile and the Cold War period in Ecuador, and by focusing on alternative constructions of time (cosmic, geologic and biological), this research provokes a rereading of the shift toward neoliberalism through repressive governments. In addition to contributing to an emerging environmental humanities discourse, engaging these narratives of time destabilizes the Cold War narratives of democracy as synonymous with justice, and dictatorship as justified by the threat of communism. In their place, these films, and my analysis of them, foregrounds the push for market society as a historic impetus for violence in the region.
Open Access
Torn Cobwebs of Memory: Interweaving Film and Fiction in Post-Franco Spain and Post-Communist Hungary, Shifting Narratives of the Holocaust and Dictatorship in the Wake of Political Transition to Democracy
(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Serfozo, Eva; García-Caro, Pedro
This dissertation examines discourses on the memories of both the Holocaust and of the national dictatorships in Spain (1939-1975) and Hungary (1949-1990). In both post-dictatorial societies, the narrative shift about the dictatorial past occurs simultaneously with the re-emergence on the narratives of the Holocaust. I analyze the narrative strategies of memoirs, historical novels, and biographical films (biopics) produced between 1964 and 2014, drawing on concepts of multidirectional and palimpsestic memory, developed by Michael Rothberg and Max Silverman. Through these recollections similar patterns of avoidance and silence can be observed in the two regions. The frequent framing of memories in terms of “us” and “them” suggests that memory discourses remain nationalized and that mental walls survive both within and across nations. “In A Cobweb: Europe as a Hostile Space in Antonio Muñoz Molina’s Sepharad (2001)” looks at life-stories of “uprootedness” from all across Europe. The Spanish narrator passively relays the accounts of persecution during the Holocaust and Stalinism. His position of ‘outsider’ mirrors the dominant Spanish discourse of neutrality during WWII. “Buchenwald Memoirs, When Living Memory Becomes History: Jorge Semprún and Imre Kertész”, connects the works of a Hungarian Jew and a non-Jewish Spanish resistance fighter. Analyzing their first literary productions along their reflexive works three decades later highlights the different narratives on the Holocaust during and after the dictatorships. “Empty Photo Frames and Giant Posters” brings together Javier Cercas’s The Impostor and Alice Zeniter’s Gloomy Sunday, two multigenerational novels that depict the quest of two protagonists to learn about the past of their ancestors. The well-kept family secrets symbolize how the new democracies failed to come to terms with the legacies of a grim past. Competing Narratives of Heroism in rescuing Hungarian Jews: The films Perlasca: The Courage of a Just Man (2002) and the Angel of Budapest (2011) demonstrates the process of constructing a national Holocaust hero. The two films have identical plots, both narrate the rescue activities of the Spanish legation in Budapest during 1944, albeit with different leading heroes. By emphasizing the rescuers’ actions, these films seek to mask the complicity of Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy in the Holocaust.
Open Access
A Mad Certainty: Narrative Instability, Insanity, and the Search for Answers in Late Nineteenth Century French Fiction
(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27) Cogan, Elizabeth; Gould, Evyln
Writers of every period articulate a sense that the world is changing; in modernity, that constant change is intensified by an accelerating pace and comprehensive upheaval. Our reaction to change (personal, social, or technological) and its concurrent disequilibration defines us. Some adapt to new circumstances and struggle through the uncertainty while others turn instead to delusion or constructed realities that provide the illusion of certainty. In the latter reaction late19th-century French psychologists recognized the possibility of insanity: religious mania, megalomania, spiritualism, and use of hallucinogens were all possible pathologies related to this dynamic. Fin-de-siècle French novelists were very aware of contemporary psychological theories and models, as some demonstrate in their texts. Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Isidore Ducasse, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Jean Lorrain explore the danger in constructing selective realities and sketch the failure and madness inherent in these strategies. All manipulate the tropes and typical construction of fiction to highlight their depictions of madness; the authors variously reshape the narrative arc, introduce comedy to undercut narrative reliability, and create temporal inconsistencies and ambiguities. Using thematic analysis via late 19th-century psychological theories and the “New Rhetoric” as well as narratological examination of plot and structure, I have charted the spectrum of the insane reactions these authors portray. These works combine the madness of the protagonists with unsettling narrative techniques to portray the dangers and depths of untenable reactions to the wrenching changes of their time.
Open Access
En Clave de Mujer:La construcción de la Subjetividad femenina en el Caribe
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Pérez Ibáñez, Doralba; Enjuto Rangel, Cecilia
This dissertation proposes a study of female Caribbean subjectivity based on corporeality. By establishing relationships that break racial, geopolitical, linguistic and cultural barriers that have historically separated the subjects from the region, this methodology allows for the construction of the subject from a less limiting spectrum. This study explores the construction of female subjectivity—and the mechanisms women use to subvert structures of power—through the analysis of the images and voices of girls and women represented in five novels and a short story written by six Caribbean female authors. My dissertation takes as its point of departure the hypothesis that female subjectivity emerges from the tension between the “lived body” and the “objectified body,” which is produced socially by the inscription of its materiality through relationships of power. For this reason, I analyze the place of bodies in society and the inscription of what is social in them, since bodies are a vehicle for social discipline par excellence. At the same time, they are the locus where the reinvention of identities becomes possible. What more, bodies are spaces or places where society can see its starkest reflection. In other words, bodies constitute social canvasses with agency for change. This dissertation argues that the symbolic appropriation of bodies by means of religious, political, legal, and medical discourses is the thread that holds together the patchwork quilt that constitutes the Caribbean region. Female authors such as Maryse Condé and Mayra Santos Febres are important for this study because of their approach to history, their re-writing of the black body in official history, and their attention to the racialization of the Caribbean woman. Rosario Ferré and Marvel Moreno exemplify in their fictional worlds the ways in which the female body is harmed through medical and religious discourses, and Rita Indiana Hernández and Zoé Valdés illustrate the ravages that ideologies and political discourses infringe on the bodies and the capital cities of the Dominican Republic and Cuba.
Open Access
Generating Geographies and Genealogies: Jewish Women Writing the Twentieth Century in French
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Brenner, Natalie; Gould, Evlyn
This dissertation offers an alternative account of Jewish history and experience from within the post-Holocaust and postcolonial Francophone world through the study of six autobiographically-inclined texts written by three generations of Francophone Jewish women of diverse geographical origins. While France was the first European nation-state to grant citizenship to Jews in 1791 and the French Republic has since branded itself as a beacon of tolerance, this tolerance has been contingent upon a strict politics of assimilation and has been challenged by French colonization and participation in the Holocaust. Simultaneously, the evolution of French memory politics and official historical narratives throughout the second half of the twentieth century has reflected a slow coming to terms with and official recognition of French participation in the Holocaust at the expense of acknowledging the traumas of de/colonization also inflicted by the French State. As a result, Jews and postcolonial populations – all marginalized groups affected by these traumatic episodes of modern French history – have been placed in separate categories. This separation has on the one hand reinforced identity politics and narratives of competing victimhood, occluding the interconnections between antisemitism, racism and Islamophobia, and on the other hand excluded Jews from debates concerning multiculturalism and inclusive citizenship. This dissertation demonstrates that these histories of assimilation, exclusion and marginalization are interconnected rather than separate. With an intentional focus on Jewish women and their writing as a means of demonstrating these false separations, I posit and trace the development of “écriture juive féminine” (“Jewish feminine writing”) across the three generations of writers, a textuality characterized and driven by five principles: an ethics of openness to the true, untheorizable and irreducible alterity of others achieved through listening, extreme and perpetual liminality that calls readers into the discomfort of uncertainty, an imperative to mourn and remember losses, an endlessly regenerative writing that resists singular interpretation and opens into further questions, and writing with the body against phallologocentrism. This writing addresses politics of assimilation and exclusion, proposing instead a radical universalism that includes the particular without reducing it to essentialist categories.
Open Access
Duelos disidentes: voces de mujeres españolas y vascas exiliadas en Latinoamérica
(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18) Sedano Naviera, Nagore; Enjuto Rangel, Cecilia
Since the 1980s, Spain has attempted to recuperate the intellectual legacy of the republican exiles who fled the country after losing the Civil War (1936-1939). However, in doing so, it has produced the recuperation-integration paradigm that governs contemporary memory politics. The problem with this model is that it naturalizes an illusory, teleological line of continuity between the democratic principles of post-Francoist Spain and the Second Republic. Duelos disidentes contributes to the critique of this recuperation-integration paradigm by examining the political projects delineated in the memoirs of Spanish, Basque republican, and Basque nationalist women-in-exile. Published between 1970 and 2011, what unites the memoirs of these three women—María Teresa León (1903-1988), Aurora Arnáiz (1913-2009), and Arantza Cazalis (1929)—is the defense of the Second Republic (1931-1936) as an alternative to the capitalist liberalism that started to develop under Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975). I argue that the autobiographical works of León, Arnáiz, and Cazalis politicize emotion to articulate an aesthetics of female mourning that disrupts the continuity between the Second Republic and post-Francoist, neoliberal Spain. This aesthetics advances a double critique: on the one hand, it condemns the exclusion of women from the official history of the Spanish Civil War; on the other, it formulates an alternative to the temporality of the patriarchal capitalist nation (León, chapter 2), the legal person of the liberal political tradition (Arnáiz, chapter 3), and the elitism and colonial imaginary of the literary canon of the exile of 1939 (Cazalis, chapter 4). But as I defend in Duelos disidentes, the misencounter of these women-in-exile with Latin America reveals the limits that arise from the nationalist ideologies camouflaged in their (anti)colonial transatlantic rhetoric. This study elucidates how an aesthetics of mourning can serve as an alternative paradigm of historical memory that does not neutralize its political component. In the process, it sheds light on the colonial imaginary that troubled the relationship of progressive, European exiles with Latin America, contributing to current debates about the memory of colonialism, anti-capitalist struggles, and women in politics. This dissertation builds on previously published material.
Open Access
International Interventions: Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974) and Global Feminist Discourses
(University of Oregon, 2018-09-06) Gallo, Erin; García-Caro, Pedro
This thesis explores the international dimensions of Rosario Castellanos’ writings, which exhibit a constant—and evolving—preoccupation with feminist literature from across the world. The Mexican woman, public intellectual, professor, author, and ambassador dialogued with Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Betty Friedan, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Gabriela Mistral, and Clarice Lispector, among others, while relating their ideas to Mexican women’s lives. Her journalistic production, essays, poetry, and narrative undergo an evolution as Castellanos articulates a unique Mexican feminist project that factors in race, class, and other intersections affecting Mexican women. I access Castellanos—who has been considered the “Simone de Beauvoir of Mexico”—through the lens of global feminism, which considers the varying layers of power and powerlessness when women of disparate regions and cultures seek solidarity. Through a global feminist perspective, we see how Castellanos, rather than blindly importing First World women’s agendas, carefully intervenes in global feminist discouses with what Mexican women need. In her evolution, Castellanos grows closer to a feminist project that, rather than buying into the myth of a global sisterhood, evokes instead a desire for a Latin American sisterhood and for Mexican women’s self-definition.