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States of Dispossession: US Political Culture, State Form, and Race from 1930 to the Present

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States of Dispossession: US Political Culture, State Form, and Race from 1930 to the Present States of Dispossession: US Political Culture, State Form, and Race from 1930 to the Present by Christian Ravela A dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Reading Committee: Prof. Eva Cherniavsky, chair Prof. Gillian Harkins Prof. Colin Danby Prof. Chandan Reddy Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Department of English ©Copyright 2013 Christian Ravela University of Washington Abstract States of Dispossession: US Political Culture, State Form, and Race from 1930 to the Present Christian Ravela Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Professor Eva Cherniavsky Department of English States of Dispossession: US Political Culture, State Form, and Race from 1930 to the Present creates a genealogy of US political culture of dispossession to historicize contemporary experiences of left melancholia. By dispossession, I mean the material conditions, power relations, and discourses through which political subjects experience and know their loss and suffering. Even though dispossession is a condition more often associated with nineteenth and early twentieth century through settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and imperial expansion, my inquiry begins with emergence of the New Deal during which the problem of the dispossessed takes on a political prominence and a national scale in the wake of the Great Depression and then moves on into the late 20th century to trace its centrality in the development of liberal governmentalities. Through an analysis of key nodal moments, the dissertation argues how the dispossessed gets bound to the legitimacy and operations of the state through techniques of governance that simultaneously rationalize state intervention and manage political crises. Through analyses of historical documents and multiethnic literature, States of Dispossession pursues its inquiry by demonstrating the alignment of political rationalities of state recuperative practices and political subjectivities via the historical norms of race, gender, and sexuality. For instance, by situating James Agee’s and Walker Evan’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in the political operation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Chapter 1 asserts that the documentary novel normalizes the dispossessed as a technical problem by both generating a political subjectivity that sees state intervention to be direct democracy and ethnicizing whiteness as an object for state tutelage and an object of national spirit. By situating John Okada’s No No Boy in the political crises of the Pacific in World War II, Chapter 2 argues how Japanese internment ironically acts as a contradictory recuperative practice of the state that resolves the contradiction of dispossessed “Japanese American” by racializing Japanese culture through gendered and sexual norms of the reproductive family. By situating Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Revolt of the Cockroach People in the political crisis spurred by the expansion of the black freedom movements, Chapter 3 shows that projects of empowering the dispossessed poor simultaneously reified race around the uneven geography of capital and introjected the spectral body into political subjectivity. Finally, by situating Samuel Delany’s The Mad Man in the political crisis of the 1970s that formed the pre-conditions neoliberalism, Chapter 4 claims that homelessness social policy promulgates neoliberal forms of freedom that contradictorily revivifies possessive individualism at the level of political subjectivity. Taken together, the dissertation shows how the political subjectivities of dispossession both sanction the legitimacy and operations of the liberal state and chart the racialized tensions and limits of twentieth century political culture. Table of Contents Acknowledgements 1 Introduction – A Left Melancholia? : Political Cultures of Dispossession Beyond Property 4 1. New Deal Liberal Governmentality and White Dispossession in Walker Evans’s and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men 42 2. Racialized Dispossession and the Japanese American: The Global Contradiction of Race, Total War Liberal Governmentality, and John Okada’s No-No Boy 94 3. Great Society Liberal Governmentality and Political Dispossession: Community Action, the Poor, and Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Revolt of the Cockroach People 141 4. Neoliberal Governmentality and the Question of Freedom: Homelessness and the Residues of Property in Samuel Delany’s The Mad Man 211 Bibliography 257 Acknowledgements I love acknowledgement pages. I love the very gesture. I love the way it unfurls before oneself the community that had made a project possible and, in so doing, discloses the richness of a public world. In this regard, I hope to revise this page anew so that I may take stock, as it is so often needed, of the vastness of my community and the beauty imminent to a shared world. It is hard for me to imagine a better dissertation committee. Their collective brilliance and personal generosity has been an inspiration to me. Eva Chernaivsky had the herculean task of chairing me with seven other colleagues who were also dissertating at the same time. This entailed an incredible juggling act of organizing a dissertation writing group; reading and commenting on our work individually outside of the group; giving us individualized advice about personal, social, and political complexities of the profession; meeting with us individually during breakdown moments; and, in my case, receiving phone call meetings at odd hours. I can think of no better testament to her brilliance and dedication to mentoring than the fact that I and five others of her cohort will be successfully completing the PhD together this year while the remaining two will be finishing next year. I have no doubt that without her unwavering commitment and nuance guidance I would have never finished the dissertation. Chandan Reddy has truly been an inspiration to me as an unapologetically theoretical and politically minded scholar. His insights abound in my work but nowhere are they more evident than the stakes that drive my historical and theoretical inquiry. His unsentimental and principled commitment to abstract thinking has been the model for me in developing a critical stance to this particular kind of intellectual labor. And furthermore he has shown me that there can really be pleasure in critical thought. Gillian Harkins weaves together a demand for intellectual rigor with an unwavering devotion to social justice. Thus, she has shown me their absolute necessity for not 1 simply good scholarship but radical scholarship. Colin Danby has been unbelievably generous to me by not only sharing his work and knowledge but also by providing professional opportunities. I can say without qualification that I have the greatest cohort of friends in graduate school. They constantly amaze and inspire me with the ambition and brilliance of their work, their devotion to social justice, and their commitment in bringing them together in their daily practices with others. I had the great fortune to collaborate with many of them in the Race/Knowledge Project. Pacharee Sudhinaraset, Simón Trujillo, Kate Boyd, Jed Murr, Suzanne Schmidt, Sooja Kelsey, Jason Morse, and Sydney Lewis were the ideal colleagues for this ambitious project and its success should be seen as nothing but the effect of their collective intelligence and shared desire to comprehend the contemporary contradictions of race. Pacharee Sudhinaraset and Simón Trujillo have been there for me at every moment in graduate school and I am glad to know with confidence that their presence in my life will continue on unabated with its end. They embody the daring commitment to thinking through the personal stakes and social possibilities of the politics of race—its terrifying histories, reified forms, and its unthought potentials. Kate Boyd constantly amazes me with her unwavering efforts in pursuing social justice and her sensitivity to the need to reckon with its personal toll, its collective efforts, and its changing social form. Jed Murr dreams of a better and beautiful world. His efforts to always think critically and act collectively with love reminds me that that world is not a flight of fancy but a canny insight into the inherent possibilities of this world. Suzanne Schmidt and Mike Viola have always made feel welcomed and at home whenever we are together. Their kindness, warmth, and care make every visit back to Seattle a homecoming. Annie Dwyer’s brilliance and incisiveness can only be matched by her generosity to others. I am constantly impressed with her rigor in thinking, her endurance to struggle with radical thought, and her breadth of knowledge. 2 Yet, even more impressive has been her remarkable ability to listen to others and bring honesty and thoughtfulness to every conversation. Curtis Hisayasu brings levity and optimism to everyone that he meets. We may always be conversing endlessly about comic books but these moments disclose to me his un-ironic love of culture, his incredible talent for analysis, and his generosity of spirit. This project could not exist without my family. They form the very material conditions upon which the very possibility of this project could exist. Their support of me in every dimension of my existence informs this project profoundly in ways that, at once, have become apparent and, at the same time, remained a deep personal mystery to me. It is in honor of that debt and a desire to know more that I dedicate this project to my parents—Erlinda and Roberto Ravela—and my brothers—Frederick Ravela and Oliver Ravela. This project and everything that I have gained in pursuing it would not have been possible and even imaginable without Angela Rounsaville. She has helped me in every possible manner—from discussing my ideas and proof-reading through my materials to reminding me to stop when I was working too long and comforting me during times of difficulty. But more than anything she reminded me of the stakes of this work and urged me to continue on. Indeed, there were many times in the course of the project that I doubted the work and my capacity to complete it.
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