Nationalism and narratives of subjectivity in the Cold War imaginary

This dissertation studies constructions of the national subject during the Cold War period to better understand the role of nationalism in experiences of national belonging or exclusion. It starts with the notion that individuals become interpellated daily into national discourses---meaning the myriad narratives and texts encountered in daily life, ranging from political rhetoric to popular cultural forms like television and film---that shape what it means to be a subject citizen. This process of national identification is always gendered, classed, racialized, and sexualized, and it is always met with tension as subjects interpret, internalize, rebel against, and otherwise negotiate with national discourses. I argue that those excluded from the nation, like immigrants, exiles, or those socially marginalized, offer a critically productive perspective on national formations through this ongoing negotiation. Taking this perspective as a lens, I ask what 'outsider' figures teach us about the mechanisms of U.S. nationalism. To answer this question, the dissertation studies textual figures of national subjects using theories of nationalism in a cultural and literary analysis of national subjectivity in textual representations. It focuses on those construed as national outsiders with an emphasis on Cuban immigrants and exiles in the U.S. against the backdrop of oppositional international Cold War tensions. Texts studied include U.S. literature by E. L. Doctorow, Robert Coover, and Tony Kushner, Cuban American author Elias Miguel Munoz and Cuban exile author Reinaldo Arenas, as well as articles from the New York Times and the Cuban exile paper 20 de Mayo, the television show "I Love Lucy," and the films "Daniel" (Sidney Lumet) and "Before Night Falls" (Julian Schnabel). The dissertation locates the masculinist nature of early Cold War nationalism and its resurgence in 1980s political culture marking patriarchy as a fundamental paradigm for Cold War citizenship. The gendering or ungendering of the national subject is complicated by Cold War framing of race, class, and consumerism as an engine of anticommunist freedom as well as by the various maneuvers by which subjects take up political, popular, or oppositional identities in order to find national belonging.