The Body Speaks: Interrogating the Material Body in Contemporary Arab American and African American Literature and Cultural Production

In my dissertation project, entitled The Body Speaks: Interrogating the Material Body in Contemporary Arab American and African American Literature and Cultural Production, I examine literature and visual media produced after 1980 for the way that authors and figures privilege discussions of the body and embodied experience to promulgate political critiques. Specifically, it is the embodied experiences of sexuality, disability and scatology that dominate their discussions of larger issues related to the construction of a gendered and racialized subjectivity, realizing and asserting political agency, or retelling history from the perspective of the oppressed. Rather than subordinate discussions of the body to these larger issues, I argue that the material body is an equal participant in these discourses: subverting existing social scripts and underscoring the critical utility of the body and embodied experience as a way to understand Arab American and African American subjectivities. I am inspired by Judith Butler's work on performativity, and Merleau-Ponty's understanding of the body for the way that they privilege embodied experience as an integral part of understanding the world and suggest that Cartesian dualisms are perhaps unhelpful in working through the complexities of human experience. Despite their critical merit, I find that neither alone accounts for the strategies these authors employ in using the body to upend existing narratives about the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and disability. To wit, the idea of a 'speaking body' brings to the fore the fact that the body is an entity which is already spoken about and for using the very social scripts that suffocate its ability to 'speak.' I do not discount that physiological response is always already tied to sentience and articulated by discourse, so I focus on the interplay between narrative and embodied experience. This interplay is of central import to these authors since they offer descriptions of their bodies and their bodily experience which counter the narratives that circulate, for good or for ill, regarding Arab American and African American identity.;My first chapter explores moments of sexual encounter and bodily (dys)function in Alicia Erian's Towelhead (2001) and Danzy Senna's Symptomatic (2003) for what they suggest about the possibilities of the visible. In the period after 1980, African Americans who explore racial and sexual passing begin to argue against a "neither one nor the other" discourse to a "both one and the other" discourse. Arab American writers rarely explore bi-raciality, preferring instead to couch their critiques in terms of national identity, but recently bi-raciality has become a fertile ground for exploring nationality. On the one hand, Erian and Senna suggest a blatant instability of all identity categories related to biological realities (for instance, melanin), concluding that the reliance on stability leads to chaos; on the other, they make the case that choosing a racial, ethnic or sexual identity is not only necessary, but also that choosing not to choose is dangerous. Both novels and the filmic adaptation of Erian's Towelhead take as their premise that the body is not a reliable visible marker of any identity category, but also disrupt the way existing discourse about bi-raciality claims authority over interpreting visible features.;In my second chapter, I explore the tension between discourse about HIV/AIDS and the experience of living with the virus and syndrome. I examine Rabih Alameddine's text, K.O.O.L.A.I.D.S: The Art of War (1998), and the figure of Earvin "Magic" Johnson as represented through his own writing, magazine interviews and television appearances. Both Alameddine's characters and Johnson combat the politically conservative climate of the 1980s, long-standing ideas about (homo)sexuality and popular conceptions of death. Both narratives, if I may use the term loosely, highlight a disconnect between the reality of what occurs inside the body and what remains visible to others.;My last chapter not only discusses the tension between the material body and the constraints of discourse, but also reckons with the ways in which the body lacks a discourse. With regard to pain, we lack a discourse that can adequately describe pain. Much like Elaine Scary describes in The Body in Pain, we always understand pain by proxy, as it has no linguistic referent. One can have sexual desire for someone or be pregnant with a child, but pain operates in the realm of the figurative since it always feels as if something is occurring. My third chapter looks at Evelyne Accad's The Wounded Breast (2001) and Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals (1980) for how they create discourses of pain. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).