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Race, Infrastructure, and US Fictions of Dependency by Jina B. Kim A

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Race, Infrastructure, and US Fictions of Dependency by Jina B. Kim A Anatomy of the City: Race, Infrastructure, and U.S. Fictions of Dependency by Jina B. Kim A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English and Women’s Studies) in the University of Michigan 2016 Doctoral Committee: Professor Sidonie A. Smith, Chair Professor Patricia S. Yaeger, Chair (Deceased) Professor Michael Awkward Associate Professor Maria E. Cotera Professor Petra Kuppers © Jina B. Kim 2016 Dedication To my mother, Hae Ran (Lisa) Kim ii Acknowledgements For a project centered around the concepts of dependency, support, and care, I cannot hope to extend adequate thanks to all of those who have supported and cared for me throughout this process, and upon whom I have been utterly dependent. I have been nourished and renewed by my participation in multiple scholarly, cultural, and virtual networks, both at Michigan and beyond. Without these colleagues, mentors, and friends I could not have seen this project to completion. These living, breathing support systems incite my continued theorizing about infrastructure and its insurgent potential. My dissertation committee has, from the beginning, provided invaluable guidance. Petra Kuppers expressed confidence in me and brought me to Michigan, and throughout my graduate career has spurred me to think in new and surprising ways about disability, methodology, and the academy writ large. I thank Michael Awkward for his honest, thoughtful, and generous insights into my work and scholarly habits, and for always encouraging me not to make things more difficult than they need to be. I thank Maria Cotera for her wit and willingness to share with me an encyclopedic knowledge about women-of-color feminisms, Ethnic Studies, and postwar revolutionary movements; to me, she is an exemplar of critical ethnic and feminist scholarship. I am forever indebted to Patsy Yaeger for producing the book, Dirt and Desire, that convinced me to take part in this scholarly enterprise, and for those few precious meetings where she sheltered me in her luminous imagination. And of course, I thank my chair Sidonie Smith, who became both my anchor and my compass at the most crucial of times, and whose patience, brilliance, and iii pragmatism provided the necessary structure for this project to take shape. Her generous mentorship and scholarly rigor have set the gold standard for my future intellectual endeavors. I could not imagine a better incubator for this project than the University of Michigan, which has given me incredible colleagues, resources, and friends. In addition to my committee, faculty Nadine “Dean” Hubbs, Victor Mendoza, Susan Najita, Susan “Scotti” Parrish, Sarita See, Tobin Siebers, Ruby Tapia, and Jennifer Wenzel have gifted me with their intellectual insights and encouragement. I could not have navigated Michigan’s various funding, programmatic, and institutional structures without the incredible graduate coordinators Aimee Germain and Jan Burgess. And it is impossible to tally the hours of commiseration and fun (in equal parts) shared with my Michigan crew, both within and without the institution: Cass Adair, Tiffany Ball, Meghanne Barker, Sony Bolton, Marie Buck, Jesse Carr, Candice Haddad, Amanda Healy, Lokeilani Kaimana, Jenny Kwak, Allie Seekely, Stephanie Rosen, Brian Whitener, Michelle Winkfield, and Sunhay You. Special thanks are extended to Cookie Woolner, ultimate peer mentor and total rad-fem inspiration, and Wendy Sung, with whom I feel completely seen. I am further indebted to the Disability Studies Graduate Group and my Dissertation Writing Group(s) (Sony Bolton, Mejdulene Shomali, David B. Green, Jenny Kwak, Tiffany Ball, and Lokeilani Kaimana) for engaging my work and providing valuable feedback, as well as to the Rackham Graduate School and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender for furnishing the necessary financial support, health care, and resources that made my graduate career possible. I have been very fortunate to be part of several flourishing disability studies networks, which have offered the necessary encouragement and excitement to see this project through. At Michigan, I was lucky enough to call Sony Bolton, Emily Lind Johnston, Joshua Kupetz, Crystal Yin Lie, Shannon Walton, and Phil Witte my DS companions. Through the Society of Disability iv Studies and nearby University of Toledo, I have met incredible friends, mentors, and interlocutors: D.L. Adams, Juliann Anesi, Max Baumkel, Liat Ben-Moshe, Karisa Butler-Wall, Angela Carter, Ally Day, Nirmala Erevelles, Lezlie Frye, Aimi Hamraie, Leon Hilton, Alison Kafer, Julie Avril Minich, Akemi Nishida, Ellen Samuels, Sami Schalk, Neil Simpkins, Eli Vitulli, and Jess Waggoner. The comradery, intellectual generosity, and excitement present within Disability Studies continue to fuel my faith in the academic enterprise. I would like to extend a special line of thanks to my undergraduate (and beyond) mentor Cindy Wu, whose unparalleled ethical compass, imaginative scholarship, and warm mentorship operate as a blueprint for academic citizenship. During my time as an undergraduate, Rosemarie Garland- Thomson gifted me with her extensive knowledge of disability-oriented graduate programs, and her course “Disability and Life Writing” gave me my first glimpse of a feminist disability classroom. I am thankful for the support of the Society for Disability Studies, which granted me both the Irving K. Zola Award for Emerging Scholars in Disability Studies, as well as the Chris Bell Memorial Scholarship. My foundational friendships with Lauren Macdonald, Rahul Desai, and Elizabeth Yates make life more possible, and they continue to give me life from afar. My feline companions Little Edie and Bruce lovingly tended to me as I conceptualized and executed this work; I am grateful for purring friends who are illiterate and can therefore never judge me for my scholarship. I have endless gratitude for my mother, Hae Ran (Lisa) Kim, who provided the conceptual foundation for this work and unquestioningly supports my financially unprofitable pursuits. She has more than earned her tricked-out suite in my future home. The Flowers family (Barb, Chris, Bill, Neil, and Marie) have provided me with unparalleled levels of material and social support—a home, meals, transportation, parties, and friendship. Finally, I am most v indebted to Neil Flowers, whose love, patience, humor, intellectual prowess, and tireless efforts have nourished and renewed me time and again throughout this process. vi Table of Contents Dedication ....................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iii Abstract ........................................................................................................................................ viii Infrastructure and Dependency: An Introduction ........................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 Crips, Black Mothers, and Welfare Queens: Toward a Crip of Color Critique ........... 43 Chapter 2 Fictions of the Freeway: Narrating Interdependency in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange .............................. 88 Chapter 3 Intimacies with Waste: Sanitation, Containment, and Disposability in Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Samuel Delany’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders ........................... 139 Chapter 4 Unsupported Lives: Witnessing Disability and Infrastructural Neglect in Detroit and New Orleans ................................................................................................................................ 187 Coda: To Cure or to Care for the City? ....................................................................................... 226 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 238 vii Abstract This dissertation argues that city infrastructure, in the literary-cultural afterlife of 1996 U.S. welfare reform, operates as a focal point for recuperating the stigmatized condition of state dependency—a stigma commonly attached to racialized, impoverished, and disabled populations. Drawing together ethnic literary, women-of-color feminist, feminist disability, and urban sociological studies, it re-conceptualizes the pathologized cityscape disabled by anti- welfare policy, and positions dependency as an underexplored yet vital analytic for ethnic American cultural critique. Attending to infrastructure as thematic, formal, and analytic concern, I argue that writers, artists, and activists like Anna Deavere Smith, Audre Lorde, Karen Tei Yamashita, Helena María Viramontes, Samuel R. Delany, and Grace Lee Boggs recuperate dependency by highlighting public support systems: healthcare, transportation, education, sanitation, and food welfare. In doing so, they emphasize our contingency on human and material infrastructures alike—the often-obscured pipes, wires, roads, and labor networks that regulate metropolitan life. As a set of fields borne from social protest, ethnic literary studies has largely prioritized the politicized subject engaged in projects of self-determination, which hinge on standard, able- bodied conceptions of autonomy. But when I sift through multi-ethnic American literatures, I find stories
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