Bearing a proposal for a master's project

by Lucy S.

At long last, I have a proposal ready to turn in. I am posting it here because I am trying to find ways to make these processes a little more visible beyond academia and to begin to create bridges. But of course, this is not made all that visible because I am still putting it up here intact. The process does not show - the many sentences which were erased, the poor word choices, the paragraphs moved. Still, this is what I will be working on for the next few months. 

Proposal

I am not revising a previous essay for my final project, but I am drawing extensively on my studies in a multitude of my classes here and including many of the ideas and theories utilized in previous final essays.  Topics and concerns I find myself returning to repeatedly include the place of our educational institutions and the study of literature in society and their potentials for reinforcing or challenging the capitalist status quo; foregrounding material /economic realities with an emphasis on labor; working-class authors, protagonists, concerns, and intended audiences; the roles of empathy and care, including care as labor; the impact of literary texts on social injustices in their societies; protest literature; and the role of writing processes.

In this project, I am exploring and exposing the contradictions in narratives or novels written partly or largely for an American or ‘Western’ readership about undocumented immigrants to the U.S.  I am particularly interested in narratives of ascension with a focus on labor and class issues along with migration.  Ascension narratives reveal the contradictions of capitalism and the many exclusions and filtering mechanisms upon which it relies. At the most basic level, a reader (or film viewer) is often led to wonder: what if the protagonist did not make it? Or, what about those who are similar yet do not ascend because of small differences in circumstances or the luck of a few moments?  

This ascension may involve the attainment of a college education and further related achievement, as with Francisco Jimenez's trilogy about coming with his family from Mexico, working as migrant workers, being deported, coming back with documentation (when it was much faster and easier to obtain and without the ten year penalty for deportation), and being able to go to college. Readers are not likely to read his ascension cynically, but at the same time, what cannot be contained inevitably spills out of his narrative– issues regarding the entire pyramid-like structure of our society, which depends upon many laboring at the bottom with few rising.  I also hope to find a narrative or novel which focuses more on traveling and crossing the border, and ideally involves mothers, people in caregiver roles, and/or children. All of the aforementioned elements will allow me to explore the huge, contemporary and still widely accepted filtering mechanisms which justify capitalism’s continued exploitations. 

Depending upon how this develops and the other ‘primary’ literature that I find, I may end up focusing especially on care-giving as societal labor and looking at those who enact that labor in a multitude of ways, including in the act of immigrating and attempting to ascend. We often hear dehumanizing rhetoric accusing undocumented immigrant women of having "anchor babies" in discussions about immigrant rights; this accusation will be interrogated.  I do not identify caregivers as such in a sort of mythologized, iconic, ideal nurturers sense (not wanting to re-inscribe a ‘cult of true womanhood’), but instead will identify and examine characters / narrators  as caregivers for the reasons that they are pregnant, have had babies, are raising kids, or are caring for those who need extra help.  All of this fits into some of my long-term interests in interrogating the ways in which having kids is construed as a kind of 'lifestyle choice' in a neoliberal sense which then is supposed to absolve others from a communal/societal sense of responsibility. 

Also, in a broad sense, I am interested in the categorizations used as sorting mechanisms to justify the appropriation of people’s labor as surplus profit while treating them badly and partially or fully excluding them from both circle(s) of social care and of democratic participation. Prior to and over the course of capitalism’s development, these categories have included: race /ethnicity; gender; nation of residency and/or origin; religion; family status (including notions of good or bad blood); caste, and level of education / ‘culture.’ 

Theorists such as Alain Badiou, Walter Benn Michaels, and a number of others have argued that emphases on diversity and pluralism as celebrations of identity or even as calls for expanded inclusion do not adequately challenge capitalism with its appropriation of labor and voraciously destructive consumerism and state violence which necessarily accompany this oppressive exploitation.  I lean toward their arguments. At the same time, I believe it is evident that maintaining some of these categorizations as filtering mechanisms remains useful to capital, even as getting rid of others can be touted as proof of democracy and progress. These sorting assignations mask the stark ‘might makes right’ realpolitik relations of capitalism, making people more apt to accept it and its purported concerns for democracy and human rights for the included, as long as they believe the sorting methods are fair and /or inevitable. At this historical moment, some categorizations (such as race / ethnicity and gender) are at least overtly considered unacceptable as reasons for domination and exploitation, even as their connections to economic and social oppression remain rampant on a de facto level, bound to class. 

Those which remain more acceptable as sorting mechanisms include nationalities, documents designating legal residency or the lack thereof, and level of education.  Furthermore, supply and demand logic insists that if a kind of labor is commonplace, it cannot be valued and, in wage-labor terms, paid well. Thus, many of the acts bound to caring for children or the elderly, growing food, building shelter, making clothes, or the multitude of other skills and labor efforts which have been fundamental aspects of being human (in varied instantiations) are devalued for the very reason that they are common. 

Another way in which the role of care interests me with regard to these issues is the question of how people drawn into relationships with the protagonists are affected. Caring for particular people who are kept out by borders crossable by others may erode our faith in the rightness of these borders and the legitimacy of authorities to make them. We see an arbitrariness. This kind of care may be felt and enacted by characters within the texts as well as by those reading the stories. 

This ties into my continuing interest in the power of literature. Cristina Bruns says that immersive reading “temporarily blurs the boundaries between fiction and reality, between self and other, between inner and outer experiences, and so it calls for readers to enter a state that resembles that of early self-formation in which the boundaries of the self are more malleable” (25). What allows readers to inhabit this transitional space is the “transactional” nature of a literary text (33). Bruns, drawing on Gabriele Schwab’s scholarship, agrees that not only content but especially the form of a work – its “language, rhythm, perspective, tone” – let readers know and feel “new ways of being in the world” (34, 35). What Bruns describes is entering into a deep relationship with a work that allows us to be both in and outside of it while it also is in and outside of us. We merge, and with this comes both empathy and insight into other lived realities. The imprint of the relationship remains on us. We in turn may be moved to change the places that we inhabit (institutions, cities, nations) and the ways in which we (individually and societally) interact with those who have been exploited and excluded. 

Additionally, I will historically contextualize the forces which have driven and now drive migration, particularly unauthorized immigration from Latin American countries into the U.S. Examples may include U.S. involvements with far right dictatorships and military and paramilitary groups; Guatemala’s civil war; El Salvador’s death squads backed by the Reagan administration; NAFTA and its effect on Mexican corn farmers and the maquiladora sector; and neoliberal austerity measures imposed. At the same time, I am interested in providing context regarding U.S. immigration policies, economic elements which demand this undocumented labor in the context of American capitalism, and the options available to immigrants here. 

Works Cited: 

Bruns, Cristina Vischer. Why Literature?: The Value of Literary Reading and What It Means for Teaching. New York: Continuum, 2011.