Virgin Territory: Theology, Purity, and the Rise of the Global Sex Trade

Sex sells. A lot. But who exactly is on the market?

What kinds of bodies are calibrated for traffic and consumption, and how exactly do they get there? When it comes to “sex” trafficking—which comprises a minority percentage of human trafficking, yet dominates the moral imagination as an “especially heinous” crime—the rise in predominantly white, evangelical Christian American interest in the trafficked subject galvanizes an ethical outrage that rarely observes critiques of race, ethnicity, sexuality or class as conditions of possibility. Though a nuanced mandate to fight trafficking is all but cemented in the contemporary American political and moral conscience, Virgin Territory accounts for the ways Christian ideas of purity annex both gender and sexuality inside the legacies of racialized colonial encounter, and foreground the market expansion of the global sex trade as it exists today.

In Part I, I argue that the narratives of virginity tied to Mary’s body simultaneously foregrounded the gendered, sexed Other as sparked disdain for the religious Other, for the Jewish body and for Mary’s Jewish identity. Through this analysis I explore the connections of racial identity to the Christian theological elision of Jewish election. I demonstrate how the questions of sexual ethics materialized at the site of the Virgin Mary, and align the moral attachments of sex and purity in the production of whiteness. These machinations, tied to the emerging European identity of empire, irrupt horrifically into the narrative ontology of dark flesh in Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

In Part II, I highlight the function of these narratives inside of the moments of colonial encounter, demonstrating how the logics of purity and virginity were directly applied to manage dark female flesh. I map the visual iconography of the Black Madonna first through a Dutch painting entitled The Rape of the Negress. I read this image through the social theological imagination instantiating the idea of the reprobate body and white imperial gaze. This analysis foregrounds a theological reading of Sarah Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus,” as the center of a complex sex trafficking investigation, outlining the genealogy of race, as well as the ideologies of the racial, ethnic and national Other, as mitigating factors in the conditions of possibility of a global sex trade. By restoring these narratives and their theological undertones, I reiterate the ways Christian thought is imbricated in the global sex trade, and propose theological strategies for rethinking humanitarian responses to sex trafficking.

Spaces of Order: An African Poetics of Space

“Spaces of Order” argues that the African novel should be studied as a revolutionary form characterized by aesthetic innovations that are not comprehensible in terms of the novel’s European archive of forms. It does this by mapping an African spatial order that undermines the spatial problematic at the formal and ideological core of the novel—the split between a private, subjective interior, and an abstract, impersonal outside. The project opens with an examination of spatial fragmentation as figured in the “endless forest” of Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard (1952). The second chapter studies Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) as a fictional world built around a peculiar category of space, the “evil forest,” which constitutes an African principle of order and modality of power. Chapter three returns to Tutuola via Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1991) and shows how the dispersal of fragmentary spaces of exclusion and terror within the colonial African city helps us conceive of political imaginaries outside the nation and other forms of liberal political communities. The fourth chapter shows Nnedi Okorafor—in her 2014 science-fiction novel Lagoon—rewriting Things Fall Apart as an alien-encounter narrative in which Africa is center-stage of a planetary, multi-species drama. Spaces of Order is a study of the African novel as a new logic of world making altogether.

The Images of Democracy: Tocqueville and American Exceptionalism

This thesis addresses how Alexis de Tocqueville’s political thought is related to American Exceptionalism. First, I illustrate the multiple meanings of the concept of American Exceptionalism and in what sense it is indebted to Tocqueville. Second, I articulate how the historical background and personal qualities of Tocqueville contribute to the success of his masterpiece Democracy in America. In the main part, by analyzing Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and other writings on America, I argue that he indeed reveals America as exceptional and increasingly recognizes this idea through a process of intellectual development. An elaboration on Tocqueville’s theoretical contribution to the discussion of American Exceptionalism can reveal the different images of modern democracy as he suggests and how they would influence the prospect of human freedom.

Rhetoric, Roman Values, and the Fall of the Republic in Cicero's Reception of Plato

This dissertation seeks to identify what makes Cicero’s approach to politics unique. The author's methodology is to turn to Cicero’s unique interpretation of Plato as the crux of what made his thinking neither Stoic nor Aristotelian nor even Platonic (at least, in the usual sense of the word) but Ciceronian. As the author demonstrates in his reading of Cicero’s correspondences and dialogues during the downward spiral of a decade that ended in the fall of the Republic (that is, from Cicero’s return from exile in 57 BC to Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BC), it is through Cicero's reading of Plato that the former develops his characteristically Ciceronian approach to politics—that is, his appreciation for the tension between the political ideal on the one hand and the reality of human nature on the other as well as the need for rhetoric to fuse a practicable compromise between the two. This triangulation of political ideal, human nature, and rhetoric is developed by Cicero through his dialogues "de Oratore," "de Re publica," and "de Legibus."

Institutional Persistence in Eastern Europe: Economic and Political Legacies of Empires and Communism

This dissertation seeks to advance our understanding of the roles that institutions play in economic development. How do institutions evolve? What mechanisms are responsible for their persistence? What effects do they have on economic development?

I address these questions using historical and contemporary data from Eastern Europe and Russia. This area is relatively understudied by development economists. It also has a very interesting history. For one thing, for several centuries it was divided between different empires. For another, it experienced wars and socialism in the 20th century. I use some of these exogenous shocks as quasi-natural social experiments to study the institutional transformations and its effects on economic development both in the short and long run.

This first chapter explores whether economic, social, and political institutions vary in their resistance to policies designed to remove them. The empirical context for the analysis is Romania from 1690 to the 2000s. Romania represents an excellent laboratory for studying the persistence of different types of historical institutional legacies. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Romania was split between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, where political and economic institutions differed. The Habsburgs imposed less extractive institutions relative to the Ottomans: stronger rule of law, a more stable and predictable state, a more developed civil society, and less corruption. In the 20th century, the Romanian Communist regime tried deliberately to homogenize the country along all relevant dimensions. It was only partially successful. Using a regression discontinuity design, I document the persistence of economic outcomes, social capital, and political attitudes. First, I document remarkable convergence in urbanization, education, unemployment, and income between the two former empires. Second, regarding social capital, no significant differences in organizational membership, trust in bureaucracy, and corruption persist today. Finally, even though the Communists tried to change all political attitudes, significant discontinuities exist in current voting behavior at the former Habsburg-Ottoman border. Using data from the parliamentary elections of 1996-2008, I find that former Habsburg rule decreases by around 6 percentage points the vote share of the major post-Communist left party and increases by around 2 and 5 percentage points the vote shares of the main anti-Communist and liberal parties, respectively.

The second chapter investigates the effects of Stalin’s mass deportations on distrust in central authority. Four deported ethnic groups were not rehabilitated after Stalin’s death; they remained in permanent exile until the disintegration of the Soviet Union. This allows one to distinguish between the effects of the groups that returned to their homelands and those of the groups that were not allowed to return. Using regional data from the 1991 referendum on the future of the Soviet Union, I find that deportations have a negative interim effect on trust in central authority in both the regions of destination and those of origin. The effect is stronger for ethnic groups that remained in permanent exile in the destination regions. Using data from the Life in Transition Survey, the chapter also documents a long-term effect of deportations in the destination regions.

The third chapter studies the short-term effect of Russian colonization of Central Asia on economic development. I use data on the regions of origin of Russian settlers and push factors to construct an instrument for Russian migration to Central Asia. This instrument allows me to interpret the outcomes causally. The main finding is that the massive influx of Russians into the region during the 1897-1926 period had a significant positive effect on indigenous literacy. The effect is stronger for men and in rural areas. Evidently, interactions between natives and Russians through the paid labor market was an important mechanism of human capital transmission in the context of colonization.

The findings of these chapters provide additional evidence that history and institutions do matter for economic development. Moreover, the dissertation also illuminates the relative persistence of institutions. In particular, political and social capital legacies of institutions might outlast economic legacies. I find that most economic differences between the former empires in Romania have disappeared. By the same token, there are significant discontinuities in political outcomes. People in former Habsburg Romania provide greater support for liberalization, privatization, and market economy, whereas voters in Ottoman Romania vote more for redistribution and government control over the economy.

In the former Soviet Union, Stalin’s deportations during World War II have a long-term negative effect on social capital. Today’s residents of the destination regions of deportations show significantly lower levels of trust in central authority. This is despite the fact that the Communist regime tried to eliminate any source of opposition and used propaganda to homogenize people’s political and social attitudes towards the authorities. In Central Asia, the influx of Russian settlers had a positive short-term effect on human capital of indigenous population by the 1920s, which also might have persisted over time.

From a development perspective, these findings stress the importance of institutions for future paths of development. Even if past institutional differences are not apparent for a certain period of time, as was the case with the former Communist countries, they can polarize society later on, hampering economic development in the long run. Different institutions in the past, which do not exist anymore, can thus contribute to current political instability and animosity.

Police is Dead: On the Birth of Economism

Police is Dead is an historiographic analysis whose objective is to change the terms by which contemporary humanist scholarship assesses the phenomenon currently termed neoliberalism. It proceeds by building an archeology of legal thought in the United States that spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My approach assumes that the decline of certain paradigms of political consciousness set historical conditions that enable the emergence of what is to follow. The particular historical form of political consciousness I seek to reintroduce to the present is what I call “police:” a counter-liberal way of understanding social relations that I claim has particular visibility within a legal archive, but that has been largely ignored by humanist theory on account of two tendencies: first, an over-valuation of liberalism as Western history’s master signifier; and second, inconsistent and selective attention to law as a cultural artifact. The first part of my dissertation reconstructs an anatomy of police through close studies of court opinions, legal treatises, and legal scholarship. I focus in particular on juridical descriptions of intimate relationality—which police configured as a public phenomenon—and slave society apologetics, which projected the notion of community as an affective and embodied structure. The second part of this dissertation demonstrates that the dissolution of police was critical to emergence of a paradigm I call economism: an originally progressive economic framework for understanding social relations that I argue developed at the nexus of law and economics at the turn of the twentieth century. Economism is a way of understanding sociality that collapses ontological distinctions between formally distinct political subjects—i.e., the state, the individual, the collective—by reducing them to the perspective of economic force. Insofar as it was taken up and reoriented by neoliberal theory, this paradigm has become a hegemonic form of political consciousness. This project concludes by encouraging a disarticulation of economism—insofar as it is a form of knowledge—from neoliberalism as its contemporary doctrinal manifestation. I suggest that this is one way progressive scholarship can think about moving forward in the development of economic knowledge, rather than desiring to move backwards to a time before the rise of neoliberalism. Disciplinarily, I aim to show that understanding the legal historiography informing our present moment is crucial to this task.

Coevolution of capitalism and political representation: The choice of electoral systems

Protocorporatist West European countries in which economic interests were collectively organized adopted PR in the first quarter of the twentieth century, whereas liberal countries in which economic interests were not collectively organized did not. Political parties, as Marcus Kreuzer points out, choose electoral systems. So how do economic interests translate into party political incentives to adopt electoral reform? We argue that parties in protocorporatist countries were representative of and closely linked to economic interests. As electoral competition in single member districts increased sharply up to World War I, great difficulties resulted for the representative parties whose leaders were seen as interest committed. They could not credibly compete for votes outside their interest without leadership changes or reductions in interest influence. Proportional representation offered an obvious solution, allowing parties to target their own voters and their organized interest to continue effective influence in the legislature. In each respect, the opposite was true of liberal countries. Data on party preferences strongly confirm this model. (Kreuzer's historical criticisms are largely incorrect, as shown in detail in the online supplementary Appendix.). © 2010 American Political Science Association.

A Politics of the Unspeakable: The Differend of Israel

Israel's establishment in 1948 in former British-Mandate Palestine as a Jewish country and as a liberal democracy is commonly understood as a form of response to the Holocaust of WWII. Zionist narratives frame Israel's establishment not only as a response to the Holocaust, but also as a return to the Jewish people's original homeland after centuries of wandering in exile. Debates over Israel's policies, particularly with regard to Palestinians and to the country's non-Jewish population, often center on whether Israel's claims to Jewish singularity are at the expense of principles of liberal democracy, international law and universal human rights. In this dissertation, I argue that Israel's emphasis on Jewish singularity can be understood not as a violation of humanism's universalist frameworks, but as a symptom of the violence inherent to these frameworks and to the modern liberal rights-bearing subject on which they are based. Through an analysis of my fieldwork in Israel (2005-2008), I trace the relation between the figures of "Jew" and "Israeli" in terms of their historical genealogies and in contemporary Israeli contexts. Doing so makes legible how European modernity and its concepts of sovereignty, liberalism, the human, and subjectivity are based on a metaphysics of presence that defines the human through a displacement of difference. This displaced difference is manifest in affective expression. This dissertation shows how the figure of the Jew in relation to Israel reveals sexual difference as under erasure by the suppression of alterity in humanism's configuration of man, woman, and animal, and suggests a political subject unable to be sovereign or fully represented in language.

Hannah Arendt's Theory of Political Judgment

Hannah Arendt's theory of political judgment has been an ongoing perplexity among scholars who have written on her. As a result, her theory of judgment is often treated as a suggestive but unfinished aspect of her thought. Drawing on a wider array of sources than is commonly utilized, I argue that her theory of political judgment was in fact the heart of her work. Arendt's project, in other words, centered around reestablishing the possibility of political judgment in a modern world that historically has progressively undermined it. In the dissertation, I systematically develop an account of Arendt's fundamentally political and non-sovereign notion of judgment. We discover that individual judgment is not arbitrary, and that even in the complex circumstances of the modern world there are valid structures of judgment which can be developed and dependably relied upon. The result of this work articulates a theory of practical reason which is highly compelling: it provides orientation for human agency which does not rob it of its free and spontaneous character; shows how we can improve and cultivate our political judgment; and points the way toward the profoundly intersubjective form of political philosophy Arendt ultimately hoped to develop.

The `Ulama' and the State: Negotiating Tradition, Authority and Sovereignty in Contemporary Pakistan

This dissertation is an account of how contemporary Pakistani ulama grapple with their political realities and the Islamic state of Pakistan. The central conceptual question that scaffolds my dissertation is: How do Pakistani ulama negotiate tradition, authority and sovereignty with the Islamic Republic of Pakistan? In engaging with this issue, this dissertation employs a methodology that weds ethnography with rigorous textual analysis. The ulama that feature in this study belong to a variety of sectarian persuasions. The Sunni ulama are Deobandi and Barelvi; the Shia ulama in this study are Ithna Ashari.

In assessing the relationship between Pakistani ulama and their nation-state, I assert that the ulama's dialectical engagements with the state are best understood as a dexterous navigation between affirmation, critique, contestation and cultivation. In proposing this manner of thinking about Pakistani ulama's engagements with their state, I provide a more detailed and nuanced view of the ulama-state relationship compared to earlier works. While emphasizing Pakistani ulama's vitality and their impact on their state, this dissertation also draws attention to the manners in which the state impacts the ulama. It theorizes the subject formation of the ulama and asserts the importance of understanding the ulama as formed not just by the ethico-legal tradition in which they are trained but also by the state apparatus.

Revising Justice: Punitory Thought and Action in the Work of Atwood, Jordan, and Oates

*Designated as an exemplary master's project for 2015-16*

State Political Parties in American Politics: Innovation and Integration in the Party System

What role do state party organizations play in twenty-first century American politics? What is the nature of the relationship between the state and national party organizations in contemporary elections? These questions frame the three studies presented in this dissertation. More specifically, I examine the organizational development of the state party organizations and the strategic interactions and connections between the state and national party organizations in contemporary elections.

In the first empirical chapter, I argue that the Internet Age represents a significant transitional period for state party organizations. Using data collected from surveys of state party leaders, this chapter reevaluates and updates existing theories of party organizational strength and demonstrates the importance of new indicators of party technological capacity to our understanding of party organizational development in the early twenty-first century. In the second chapter, I ask whether the national parties utilize different strategies in deciding how to allocate resources to state parties through fund transfers and through the 50-state-strategy party-building programs that both the Democratic and Republican National Committees advertised during the 2010 elections. Analyzing data collected from my 2011 state party survey and party-fund-transfer data collected from the Federal Election Commission, I find that the national parties considered a combination of state and national electoral concerns in directing assistance to the state parties through their 50-state strategies, as opposed to the strict battleground-state strategy that explains party fund transfers. In my last chapter, I examine the relationships between platforms issued by Democratic and Republican state and national parties and the strategic considerations that explain why state platforms vary in their degree of similarity to the national platform. I analyze an extensive platform dataset, using cluster analysis and document similarity measures to compare platform content across the 1952 to 2014 period. The analysis shows that, as a group, Democratic and Republican state platforms exhibit greater intra-party homogeneity and inter-party heterogeneity starting in the early 1990s, and state-national platform similarity is higher in states that are key players in presidential elections, among other factors. Together, these three studies demonstrate the significance of the state party organizations and the state-national party partnership in contemporary politics.

Full of Hot Air? Three Examinations of Climate Change in the American Political Information Environment

Climate change is thought to be one of the most pressing environmental problems facing humanity. However, due in part to failures in political communication and how the issue has been historically defined in American politics, discussions of climate change remain gridlocked and polarized. In this dissertation, I explore how climate change has been historically constructed as a political issue, how conflicts between climate advocates and skeptics have been communicated, and what effects polarization has had on political communication, particularly on the communication of climate change to skeptical audiences. I use a variety of methodological tools to consider these questions, including evolutionary frame analysis, which uses textual data to show how issues are framed and constructed over time; Kullback-Leibler divergence content analysis, which allows for comparison of advocate and skeptical framing over time; and experimental framing methods to test how audiences react to and process different presentations of climate change. I identify six major portrayals of climate change from 1988 to 2012, but find that no single construction of the issue has dominated the public discourse defining the problem. In addition, the construction of climate change may be associated with changes in public political sentiment, such as greater pessimism about climate action when the electorate becomes more conservative. As the issue of climate change has become more polarized in American politics, one proposed causal pathway for the observed polarization is that advocate and skeptic framing of climate change focuses on different facets of the issue and ignores rival arguments, a practice known as “talking past.” However, I find no evidence of increased talking past in 25 years of popular newsmedia reporting on the issue, suggesting both that talking past has not driven public polarization or that polarization is occurring in venues outside of the mainstream public discourse, such as blogs. To examine how polarization affects political communication on climate change, I test the cognitive processing of a variety of messages and sources that promote action against climate change among Republican individuals. Rather than identifying frames that are powerful enough to overcome polarization, I find that Republicans exhibit telltale signs of motivated skepticism on the issue, that is, they reject framing that runs counter to their party line and political identity. This result suggests that polarization constrains political communication on polarized issues, overshadowing traditional message and source effects of framing and increasing the difficulty communicators experience in reaching skeptical audiences.

Unnatural History: Ecological Temporality in Post-1945 American Literature

While environmental literary criticism has traditionally focused its attention on the textual representation of specific places, recent ecocritical scholarship has expanded this focus to consider the treatment of time in environmental literature and culture. As environmental scholars, activists, scientists, and artists have noted, one of the major difficulties in grasping the reality and implications of climate change is a limited temporal imagination. In other words, the ability to comprehend and integrate different shapes, scales, and speeds of history is a precondition for ecologically sustainable and socially equitable responses to climate change.

My project examines the role that literary works might play in helping to create such an expanded sense of history. As I show how American writers after 1945 have treated the representation of time and history in relation to environmental questions, I distinguish between two textual subfields of environmental temporality. The first, which I argue is characteristic of mainstream environmentalism, is disjunctive, with abrupt environmental changes separating the past and the present. This subfield contains many canonical works of postwar American environmental writing, including Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy. From treatises on the ancient ecological histories of particular sites to meditations on the speed of climate change, these works evince a preoccupation with environmental time that has not been acknowledged within the spatially oriented field of environmental criticism. However, by positing radical breaks between environmental pasts and environmental futures, they ultimately enervate the political charge of history and elide the human dimensions of environmental change, in terms both of environmental injustice and of possible social responses.

By contrast, the second subfield, which I argue is characteristic of environmental justice, is continuous, showing how historical patterns persist even across social and ecological transformations. I trace this version of environmental thought through a multicultural corpus of novels consisting of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus, Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Some of these novels do not document specific instances of environmental degradation or environmental injustice and, as a result, have not been critically interpreted as relevant for environmental analysis; others are more explicit in their discussion of environmental issues and are recognized as part of the canon of American environmental literature. However, I demonstrate that, across all of these texts, counterhegemonic understandings of history inform resistance to environmental degradation and exploitation. These texts show that environmental problems cannot be fully understood, nor environmental futures addressed, without recognizing the way that social histories of inequality and environmental histories of extraction continue to structure politics and ecology in the present.

Ultimately, then, the project offers three conclusions. First, it suggests that the second version of environmental temporality holds more value than the first for environmental cultural studies, in that it more compellingly and accurately represents the social implications of environmental issues. Second, it shows that “environmental literature” is most usefully understood not as the literature that explicitly treats environmental issues, but rather as the literature that helps to produce the sense of time that contemporary environmental crises require. Third, it shows how literary works can not only illuminate the relationship between American ideas about nature and social justice, but also operate as a specifically literary form of eco-political activism.

Liberal bias and the five-factor model.

Duarte et al. draw attention to the "embedding of liberal values and methods" in social psychological research. They note how these biases are often invisible to the researchers themselves. The authors themselves fall prey to these "invisible biases" by utilizing the five-factor model of personality and the trait of openness to experience as one possible explanation for the under-representation of political conservatives in social psychology. I show that the manner in which the trait of openness to experience is conceptualized and measured is a particularly blatant example of the very liberal bias the authors decry.