Thesis Proposal

Subjects of ghosts and the body have occupied a crucial place in my life for as long as I can remember. Growing up, my father worked for the Office of the Medical Investigator in New Mexico as a grief councilor. During that time he provided therapy for the families of the deceased and participated in autopsies of the bodies of the deceased. While my father tried to keep his work separate from his home life, I still have strong memories from my childhood of sitting at the kitchen table and listening to him tell my mother about what he had seen at the office that day. I was afraid to go into his office at home because it was full of books about the dead, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe some of the dead people he had encountered inhabited his heavy bookshelves. My awareness of mortality and the body was further enhanced when I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at the age of five and a half on the same day that my family was supposed to drive to Arizona in the hopes of seeing my great grandmother before she passed away. Instead, I went to the hospital and she died shortly thereafter. Consequently, I spent a majority of my elementary school recess periods in the nurse’s office, passing the time with the nurse’s aide, Maria Elena Rivera. It is likely from Maria Elena that my interest in the lives of Latin American immigrants in the United States, the second focus of my thesis, stems from. I grew up in New Mexico being called “mija” (a term of endearment translating to the equivalent of “my daughter” or “my girl”) by many of the maternal figures in my life, and went to a high school where the population was at least 50% Latino. Many of my classmates were illegal or were born in the U.S. as anchor babies—children born in the U.S. so that they can have U.S. citizenship. I became aware of the impact that living as an individual who didn’t legally exist in the U.S. had on some of my friends and their parents.

In the Fall Semester of 2012, my strong interest in issues of immigration carried me into an internship at Central American Legal Assistance (CALA), a nonprofit organization that helps asylum seekers from Central America, based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At CALA I heard the stories of asylum seekers who had been forced to flee from their own countries and who were, in a way, without citizenship: unprotected and rejected from their own country and viewed as an issue of legality in the U.S., where court systems attempted to decide if they qualified for asylum. If the threat to their lives was deemed to originate from a non-political actor they were judged ineligible for asylum and summarily ejected from the United States. I learned that drug cartels that actually extract taxes and hold positions of power in the government in places like Honduras and El Salvador are classified as criminal, rather than political, as if the two could truly be separated in such cases. I served as an interpreter and learned what it was to act not as a person, but as a threshold or pathway between people.

It is only recently that I have come to believe that a link exists between attitudes towards the body, death, and Latin American immigrants that is made of more than my childhood circumstances. My thesis will examine the connection between American treatment and conception of the dead and the treatment and depiction of the Central American immigrant in the United States, focusing heavily on the temporal distortion associated with both death and the immigrant in American popular culture and social thought within the last two decades. It is interesting to note the shared historical mythology surrounding the immigrant and the dead body. Both were thought to carry disease during times of plague, though in reality it was the rats that came with both (to feast on the flesh of the dead and stolen away on the boats that brought the immigrants) that spread the diseases. Both undergo alternating historical periods of being viewed as loci of the semi-sacred (the beatific dead and the standard of old world values in the form of the immigrant) and of horror. One of the aims of my thesis is to critically examine why these popular similarities in depictions of the dead and the immigrant seem to be so prevalent.

After the events of September 11, 2001. George W. Bush declared a “war on terror;” combat with a spectral entity that is without a true body or face. The war on terror has since been framed within the context of a war on terrorists, those somewhat concrete individuals who would pose a threat to the United States of America and whose faces are ever-changing. Since September 11^th wire-tapping has been released from its strict stigma of taboo; surveillance and invasive security measures (such as the TSA security procedures at airports) have been normalized; ordinary citizens have been called to observe each other with mottos like “see something, say something” posted in public places like the New York subways; drone technology is used to assassinate targets who are deemed killable by the president so that such killings can be executed from thousands of miles away from the target. All of these things have promoted the creation and transformation of humans into non-human entities. It has become easy for people to shift back and forth between the realm of humanity and that of ideas—sometimes they are shuttled between the two without a choice in the matter, as is the case with the nebulous character of the Latin American immigrant and with the deceased (both the person and the body).

The modern American tradition of embalming bodies (its popular genesis rooted in the American Civil War and its subsequent fallout) has made it possible for the living to exert a hold over the dead that was not possible when bodies decayed at their own rate, and, in transforming their appearance, rejected the belief that they are the same entity in death that they were in life. Through embalmment, the corpse can be made to hold the form that it possessed in life and, thus, to act as a memory capsule for the living, assuring them that even if they forget aspects of the face of their loved one years down the line, their loved one’s body will still “remember” how it is supposed to look, even six feet under ground. I believe that this practice illustrates a frustration and confusion regarding the reality of the physical body and its relation to that which animates it. This confusion is portrayed over and over again in the obsession of American popular culture with ghosts and zombies, who are portrayed as not quite human, compelled by their own death or appetite to destroy that which exists around them, possessing the shape of a human and yet existing as something else. These ultimately familiar figures cling to the edges of society like Kathleen Biddick’s “dead neighbors,” unerring in the hold that they possess over the living or those located more comfortably within the bounds of qualified human society.

Asylum-seeking immigrants are held to standards of memory and fact retention that United States citizens are not. Many of the individuals seeking asylum in the U.S. from their homes in Central America suffer from PTSD, or have their temporal memory altered or inhibited due to trauma they experienced in their home country. Despite this, asylum seekers are expected to repeat exact dates, times, and details with a degree of accuracy that is normally only expected from tape recorders and machines. Should the individual give contradictory times (i.e., it happened Thursday around 2:00 versus, around 4:00) or scramble certain dates (i.e., it was on September 3^rd, versus, it was on August 29^th) it is possible for the judge to dismiss the case on grounds of credibility, sometimes even with expert testimony stating that the asylum seeker suffers from PTSD. In this way, asylum seekers are viewed as tools of narration and legal technicalities by the court system, rather than as people and subjects of their own stories until they are granted personhood in the form of asylum by the court system.

In 2012 the so-called “show me your papers” provision was passed in Arizona. The provision “ requires officers, while enforcing other laws, to question the immigration status of those suspected of being in the country without documents”(Huffington Post). The abovementioned Act and provision are laws that create and place an image, story, and body on Latin American immigrants in the U.S., both legal and illegal. They impose the stigma of criminality and transgression and attempt to force a sort of bifurcation on the immigrants who cross the border that asks not only for the separation of the legal from the illegal, but also of the Latin American identity from the American. In this way, a secondary body of meaning and history is superimposed over Latin American immigrant in the U.S., giving the immigrant an oddly permeable identity that is not unlike the identity of the ghost of popular horror movies. This thesis will use a variety of sources, including court cases, American, Latin American, and Spanish horror films about ghosts and/or possession, novels, and critical essays and books regarding subjects of the body, the ghost, and the immigrant. 

Proposed Bibliography

Books:

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer.

Aries, Phillippe. The Hour of Our Death.

Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

Biddick, Kathleen. Dead Neighbor Archives: The Enemy’s Two Bodies.

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter.

Bosteels, Bruno. Marx and Freud in Latin America.

Camus, Albert. Exile and the Kingdom.

Caso, Nicole. Practicing Memory in Central American Literature.

Castronovo, Russ. Necro Citizenship.

Crais, Clifton, Pamela Scully. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus.

Danner, Mark. Massacre at El Mozote.

Dazai, Osamu. Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy.

Eco, Umberto. Inventing the Enemy.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish.

Foucault, Michel. Herculine Barbin.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality.

Galeano, Eduardo. Days and Nights of Love and War.

Haroway, Donna. Cyborg Manifesto.

Hobbes, Thomas. The Leviathan.

Honig, Bonnie. Emergency Politics.

Honig, Bonnie. Democracy and the Foreigner.

Laderman, Gary. The Sacred Remains.

Lombroso, Cesare. Criminal Man.

Markell, Patchen. Bound by Recognition.

Pullman, Philip. The Amber Spyglass.

Pullman, Philip. Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm

Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned.

Seery, John Evan. Political Theory for Mortals.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis. The Séance.

Sophocles. Antigone.

United Nations High Commision for Refugees. Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status

of Refugees.

Waldby, Catherine. The Visible Human Project.

Wright, Melissa. Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism.

Films:

Alexandre, Aja. Mirrors. 2008.

Amenábar, Alejandro. The Others. 2001.

Amenábar, Alejandro. Tesis. 1996.

Anderson, Joel. Lake Mungo. 2008.

Bayona, J. A. The Orphanage. 2007.

Bielinsky, Fabián. El Aura. 1973.

Cerdá, Nacho. Aftermath. 1994.

Clayton, Jack. The Innocents. 1961.

del Toro, Guillermo. The Devil’s Backbone. Original Title: El espinazo del diablo. 2001.

Fawcett, John. The Dark. 2005.

Friedkin, William. The Exorcist. 1973.

Hooper, Tobe. The Poltergeist. 1982.

Je-Woon, Kim. A Tale of Two Sisters. Original Title: Janghwa, Hongryeon. 2003.

Jones, Tommy Lee. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. 2005.

Koepp, David. Stir of Echoes. 1999.

Kurosawa, Akira. Kagemusha.1980.

Kurosawa, Kiyoshi. Pulse. Original Title: Kairo. 2001.

Medak, Peter. The Changeling. 1980.

Morales, Guillem. Julia’s Eyes. Original Title: Los ojos de Julia. 2010.

Morales, Guillem. The Uninvited Guest. Original Title: El habitante incierto. 2004.

Nagasaki, Shunichi. Shikoku. 1999.

Nakata, Hideo. Ringu. 1998.

Pang Chun, Oxide, Danny Pang. The Eye. Original Title: Gin Gwai. 2002.

Peli, Oren. Paranormal Activity. 2007.

Pisanthanakun, Banjong. Shutter. 2004.

Roeg, Nicolas. Don’t Look Now. 1973.

Safran, Peter. The Conjuring. 2013.

Shimizu, Takashi. The Grudge. 2004.

Siegel, Don. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 1956.

Wise, Rober. The Haunting. 1963.

Wood, Andrés. Machuca. 2004.

Zemeckis, Robert. What Lies Beneath. 2000.

Tentative Chapter Outline

Introduction

I.               Brief history and overview of United States asylum policy beginning with the United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1951. Operation Wetback (1954) and the U.S. response to extreme influx in Mexican illegal immigrants. Analysis of anxieties surrounding the invasion of the foreign and the dangers of the familiar body in American popular culture as demonstrated in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and later in The Exorcist (1973).

II.             Fear of the familiar, continued. The revenant and its role in cultural myths. Hobbes and political theory on the connections between intimacy and violence. Honig and Markell on ghosts of intimacy and the gothic. Where is the place of the foreigner and/or exile?

III.           Examination of Arizona's SB 1070 in 2012, in particular the ruling of the supreme court over certain particularities of the Act and the implications and ramifications of certain provisions from the Act that were passed such as the “show-me-your-papers” provision. Created bodies. Identity overlays. Introduction to interplay between body and identity. How are the fringes redefined? Which narratives become prized, how do you prove citizenship? Associations of illegal immigrant with perpetrators of crimes (besides illegal entrance into the U.S.).

IV.           American cult of memory and its transformation in relation to the advent of embalming post American Civil War. Laderman on 19^th century American attitudes towards death and the body. Distortion of time in relation to ghosts. Trauma and time distortion. Intro to connections between ghost and asylum seeker.

V.             Those without citizenship. Brief overview of US involvement with Mexican drug cartels and the wall between the US and Mexico. Brief overview of the Colombian conflict with the FARC and paramilitaries. Brief overview of the evolution of the drug cartels in El Salvador and possibly the bleed-over into Honduras. Differentiation between classifications of transnational criminal organizations versus political actors in American Asylum policy.

VI.           Process of applying for asylum and procedures for proving credibility and testifying in court (potential case study of clients from CALA). Case law.

VII.         The haunting. Illegal immigrants from Central America who have been displaced by bloody conflict and have immigrated to the U.S. The culture of the displaced. Pockets of monolingual Spanish speakers in New York City and New Mexico. Popular depictions of the Spanish-speaking immigrant. Fear of the immigrant and their integral role in the functioning of daily life in the U.S. Why fear the immigrant? Return to anxieties of the familiar. Historically the immigrant and the dead body were both thought to carry disease. Biddick and the dead neighbor.

VIII.       Media elision. If immigrants from Central America are reminders of U.S. involvement with bloodshed in the nearby countries in Central America and are treated similarly to pestilent dead bodies, how is the media still so silent about the happenings in Central America? Invasion of the counter-narrative in the form of the immigrant.

IX.          The problems associated with acknowledgment and bringing back the dead. Intimacy, bridging political gaps (and the unbridgeable).

Conclusion