The life of paper: A poetics

"The Life of Paper: A Poetics" explores the role of letter correspondence in practices of social reproduction, specifically within histories of genocidal racism, mass incarceration, and human resilience in California and the West. I trace this life by fleshing out the labors that comprise letter correspondence in three case studies: "Detained" focuses on migrants from Southern China during the early period of U.S. Chinese exclusion (1880s–1920s); "Interned" focuses on people identified with Japan during the World War II period (1930s–1940s); and "Imprisoned" focuses on diasporas of Blackness in the post-Civil Rights period (1960s–present).;Using a range of methods to analyze previously unstudied archives of letters, this project explores how targeted diasporas—facing conditions of radical alienation and confinement—engaged in practices of reading, writing, and circulating letters to sustain communal life. I study a number of these inventive practices by thematically framing each chapter. First, I historicize "detained" letters in relation to emerging technological, epistemological, and social infrastructures. Second, I analyze "interned" letters through dialectics of censorship and aesthetic production. Third, I clarify how "imprisoned" letters have transformed practices of collectively re-embodying the human.;Situating letters within the political violence that qualifies them, I define letter correspondence in these contexts as a social response to coercion, ritually distinct from more commonly-studied epistolary social practices. I argue that such conditions radically alter how and what letters mean, and how we might better understand them. Thus, in this cultural studies project I interrogate the processes that connect paper objects to historical human identity and being. I also examine how these forms of connection—internalized in the letter—create alternative conditions of existence that both ground and animate struggles against premature death. As such, I methodologically elaborate the life of paper to re-create an "abolitionist" epistemology of race, space, gender, and labor. Finally then, I call the life of paper a "poetics": a process of both literary and social reproduction that revolves around maintaining the dynamics of creative essence.;This interdisciplinary project contributes to critical thought and methodology in History, Media/Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Geography, and Political Theory by addressing gaps in each field. Typically, historians' uses of letters as evidence overlook the humanistic aspects of letters as literary works and media forms. Inversely, literary and media analyses commonly neglect the historically material contexts in which letters were written. Dominant geographic research likewise remains under-attentive to disenfranchised epistemologies, as manifest in and through "the life of paper," and the ways they radically transform knowledge about space and place. Lastly, both critical race scholars and political theorists take for granted categories of analysis—such as race, ethnicity, space, gender, and labor—which my sustained cultural study of letter correspondence ruptures and re-defines. By combining the strengths of each discipline, I present letters in their deeper dimensions: simultaneously as forms of historical evidence, as literary works of art, and as acts of communication that mediate power to be and become in real space-time. Hence, my project bridges discourses often viewed as separate to provide fresh insights about the human experience.