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Border-Crossing Travels Across Literary Worlds: My Shamanic Conscientization Scott Eumein Ster University of South Florida, [email protected]

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Border-Crossing Travels Across Literary Worlds: My Shamanic Conscientization Scott Eumein Ster University of South Florida, Scottneumeister@Hotmail.Com University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School November 2018 Border-Crossing Travels Across Literary Worlds: My Shamanic Conscientization Scott eumeiN ster University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the American Literature Commons Scholar Commons Citation Neumeister, Scott, "Border-Crossing Travels Across Literary Worlds: My Shamanic Conscientization" (2018). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/7553 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Border-Crossing Travels Across Literary Worlds: My Shamanic Conscientization by Scott L. Neumeister A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy with a concentration in Literature Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Major Professor: Gary L. Lemons, Ph.D. Ylce Irizarry, Ph.D. Quynh Nhu Le, Ph.D. Phillip Sipiora, Ph.D. Date of Approval: October 19, 2018 Keywords: feminism, womanism, autocritography, identity, multicultural Copyright © 2018, Scott L. Neumeister ACKNOWLEDGMENTS No appreciation could begin without recognizing my major professor and “Brother of the Soul,” Gary L. Lemons. I cannot overstate his influence on me as a scholar and as a human being, especially in bringing me into feminism, womanism, and autocritography. Without his presence in my life, the conscientization my writing speaks of would not have been possible. I also wish to express my immense gratitude to Ylce Irizarry, whose belief in me from the beginning is only matched by her steady and assuring support during the hard times. I am deeply indebted to Phillip Sipiora and Quynh Nhu Le, both of whom stepped into the gap and eagerly offered scholarly and editorial guidance as committee members. I also want to acknowledge my father, who, despite reservations about the academic world, has given his support in many areas. Finally, I wish to thank my mentor and friend Thomas Moore for awakening me to my soul’s life and encouraging me in my writing and teaching to find and share my spiritual technology. TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Notes ..................................................................................................................................13 Chapter One: Shifting to New Worlds: Initiation and Identity in The Agüero Sisters ..................15 Shamanic Intentions and Initiations: Santerían World Traveling ......................................17 Bless Me, Virgen, for I Have Sinned: Confessional Cleansing .........................................20 It Will Take Something of a Divine Intervention: Influential Luminaries ........................25 Offering Her to the Sky: Making Sacred, Making Whole .................................................33 Voices Gather in Her Head: Intuitive (P)re-visioning .......................................................37 Lightning Has Its Work to Do: Stitching the Self with Motley Embroidery .....................40 Skin and Bones: Body and Racial Politics .........................................................................41 Erotics and Employment: Sexuality and Class Power .......................................................48 Everything Elegguá: At Home at the Crossroads ..............................................................56 Notes ..................................................................................................................................58 Chapter Two: The Old (Sha)Man and the Student: Finding My (Heming)Way into Manhood ......................................................................................................................61 Male Psychic Anatomy: (En)Gendering a Theoretical Approach .....................................64 Battle, Wherein Is the Warrior’s Glory: Agon(izing) Manhood ........................................67 What a Man Can Do and What a Man Endures: Wounding Self to Be(a/s)t the Other ............................................................................................................................71 The Happiness of the Garden That a Man Must Lose: Sighing for Eden ..........................79 For Whom the bell hooks: Writing as a Farewell to Harms ..............................................91 Notes ..................................................................................................................................93 Chapter Three: Sick and Tired: Night Journeys in Literary and Literal Ability ............................98 Trusting in Myself: Hoping to Transcend ........................................................................100 Power and Speed Be Hands and Feet: By the Labor of My Hands Only ........................103 Gasping for Breath: Dark Nights in Liminal Spaces .......................................................110 Virulent Impairment: Mono(lithic) Weakness .................................................................115 (In)valid Resonance: Connecting a White Man to Our Nig ............................................117 Spirituality in the Dark: Traveling to the Sublime...........................................................123 Remade: Crossing Between the Mean and the Sublime ..................................................128 Notes ................................................................................................................................131 Chapter Four: Hoodooed by Mumbo Jumbo: How a White Man Caught Jes Grew ....................134 Lindsay’s Liturgy: The Source of “Infection” .................................................................137 i Resisting Apollo: Dionysus Drums the Music of the (Hemi)Spheres .............................145 Playing on the Plantation: Jazz in Color ..........................................................................150 Picture This: Racial Politics, National and Local ............................................................155 Shifty Healers: Mediation at the Border ..........................................................................157 Notes ................................................................................................................................164 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................167 Works Cited .................................................................................................................................176 ii ABSTRACT Border-Crossing Travels Across Literary Worlds is an autocritographical journey that places a group of U.S. literary texts into critically conscious dialogue with the “text” of my life. As a white, American, middle-class, cishetero, able-bodied man, I historicize, contextualize, analyze, and deconstruct the process by which my ten years of graduate academic studies at the University of South Florida fostered my ongoing awakening to critical consciousness—the personal and political evolution Paolo Freire terms “conscientization.” I present the analytical insights I realized about landmark feminist and womanist texts I encountered during my graduate studies that resonate with the prominent literary works and events from my youth. By identifying personal contexts and identity-aware frameworks for how I read these influential texts in my past, I give concrete examples of how hegemonic systems of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability operate within such writing. I also demonstrate how utilizing feminist and womanist theoretical lenses allows a scholar to re-vision and recover problematic texts. Across all my autocritographical travels, I imagine my own life experiences, as well as the positionality of my selected texts’ protagonists, in terms of the archetype of the shaman—a liminal, border-crossing person who walks between worlds to function in the capacity as a messenger, intermediary, and balance-bringing healer. iii INTRODUCTION From the very outset of this dissertation, I wish to call out—in the sense of both “divulge” and “decry”—my identity as a white, American, middle-class, cishetero (heterosexual whose gender matches the birth-assigned one), able-bodied, fifty-two-year-old male. As such, I hold the most advantages in what bell hooks labels the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,”1 because I stand at the intersection, as Kimberlé Crenshaw2 has termed it, of many historically- privileged stations of hegemonic power. By default, I have been handed “the keys to the kyriarchy,” using Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s word for “intersecting multiplicative structures of oppression” (118). Moreover, as Michael Kimmel has asserted, these identity constructions hold the summative advantage of obscuring their own power: “The privilege of privilege is that the terms of privilege are rendered invisible. It is a luxury not to have to think about race, or class, or gender” (363). My encounter
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