DescriptionTwentieth-century literature and theory have offered no shortage of challenges to the unity of personal identity. What these undertakings leave largely unquestioned, however, is the prevailing understanding that personal identity is sealed within the confines of the physical body—the final uncontested frontier of Cartesian identity. Emerging from a matrix of recent American literature—by Don DeLillo, Charles Johnson, Tony Kushner, Toni Morrison, among others—is a counter-argument to the notion that the materially bounded self is separate from other such selves in space. For the “individual” to take shape as such, it must locate itself within a specific social identity, disavowing its connection with those who identify themselves differently: a process, these texts suggest,
that can unleash racial and ideological violence. My dissertation explores six late twentieth-century American novels and plays (1982 to 1998) that both dramatize this violent process and propose an alternative through images of humans dislocated from
their bodies and fusing metaphysically with other open selves across space. Whereas critics have shown how global magic realist literatures use images of the non-unified self to represent the split consciousness resulting from colonial domination, my project explores how recent American texts religiously inflect such images and then through them imagine the transcendence of racial divisions. Challenging the notion of the human as a material isolate, images of the open body represent a literary vision for more expansive inter-racial identifications and more actively inclusive social solidarities for twenty-first century America.