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Unbecoming Adults: Adolescence and the Technologies of Difference in Post-1960 US Ethnic Literature and Culture

Harris, James K
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1492430783453208

Abstract Details

2017, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
Adolescence has always been a cultural construction. The designation of a separate space apart from the presumed innocence of childhood and the myths of autonomy and responsibility that come to define adulthood is a surprisingly modern phenomenon. As such, adolescence bears the traces of the ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, and nation that attend so much of the period that calls itself “modernity.” My dissertation asks how writers and artists of color imagine themselves into the archive of coming of age narratives in post-1960s US literature and culture. In thinking about the importance of identity in the period following the advent of nominal civil rights, I offer the “long(er) civil rights movement” as a way of resisting the move to periodize the struggles through which difference has historically accrued meaning in the US nation-state. Each chapter centers around a “technology,” the academy, the body, the entertainment industry, and the internet, which is essential to the formation of adolescent identity in the post-war era, alongside a key term in the lexicon of American culture that accrues added meanings when filtered through the experience of difference. Ultimately, I argue for understanding the liminal space of adolescence as a dynamic metaphor for writers and artists of color to work out questions about the meaning of difference and the concept of progress. My first chapter, “Becoming Excellent,” places Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez and Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Butterfly Boy: Memoirs of a Chicano Mariposa side by side to unpack the racialized valences of “excellence” inside the American academy. I read these two memoirs as overlapping, and at times competing, accounts of the fraught and often invisible labor involved in becoming “one of the good ones.” The second, “Becoming Trans,” considers the advent of trans identity in the context of questions about desire, and metamorphosis. I turn to Octavia Butler’s sci-fi epic Adulthood Rights as eerily prescient in its understanding of both the increasing value attached to trans identity and the very serious risks of belonging simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. The third chapter “Becoming Deviant” examines to two more recent films, Justin Lin’s Better Luck Tomorrow and Dee Rees’ Pariah to ask what currency terms like Independent Black and Asian American have on the marketplace of contemporary cinema. I argue that the emergent value attached to non-normative, or deviant, cinematic types can be understood as a part of a larger emphasis on the optics of multiculturalism and the performance of inclusion. For the final chapter, “Becoming Digital,” I ask what cultural labor the “digital” performs as a mediating concept in postwar understandings of adolescence and innocence. Here, I pursue a two-fold strategy of both offering a materialist account of the infrastructure underpinning the technological revolution often shorthanded as “the digital age” while also attending to literary and creative works, Sarah Schulman’s The Child and a computer program designed to simulate a virtual child for the purposes of soliciting potential predators, that ground these issues in human-scale stakes and consequences.
Martin Joseph Ponce, Dr. (Committee Chair)
Lynn Mie Itagaki, Dr. (Committee Member)
Jian Chen, Dr. (Committee Member)
243 p.
American Literature; Ethnic Studies; Modern Literature
adolescence, identity, ethnic studies, cultural studies, temporality, 20th century ethnic literature

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Harris, J. K. (2017). Unbecoming Adults: Adolescence and the Technologies of Difference in Post-1960 US Ethnic Literature and Culture [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1492430783453208

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Harris, James. Unbecoming Adults: Adolescence and the Technologies of Difference in Post-1960 US Ethnic Literature and Culture. 2017. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1492430783453208.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Harris, James. "Unbecoming Adults: Adolescence and the Technologies of Difference in Post-1960 US Ethnic Literature and Culture." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1492430783453208

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1492430783453208
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© 2017, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Unbecoming Adults: Adolescence and the Technologies of Difference in Post-1960 US Ethnic Literature and Culture by James K Harris is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.