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Lim, Olivia

University of British Columbia

This thesis attends to questions of redress and justice that arise from the ways American militarism in the transpacific endures in the body-mind as disability and debility. Focusing on the Cold War in Asia, including the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the legacy of the War in Vietnam, and the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime following the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, my research intervenes in liberal humanist juridical redress culture’s pathologization of disability as an index of harm and expresses its critical limits in accounting for the long temporality and nebulous scope of debilitative violence. Mobilizing the theoretical apparatuses of critical disability studies, redress studies, critical refugee studies, and scholarship on the Cold War in Asia, I theorize a transpacific aesthetic of redress, a cripistemology of redress that develops from aesthetic forms that work to produce alternative fields of sensibility surrounding disability and debilitative violence, making perceivable the complex transpacific entanglements of survival, beauty, and harm in the afterlives of U.S. imperialism. To articulate this epistemology of redress, I close read contemporary transnational literature that engages with histories of U.S. militarism in the transpacific. I consider how the formal qualities of these texts, particularly fragmentation and non-linear narrative, orient us towards frameworks of redress that emerge from recognizing U.S. imperialism’s debilitative violence as a condition of possibility for disability, while still resisting the reduction of disability to a redressable harm. Chapter One examines the quantification of violence in Kim Thúy’s novel Em, exploring critical ambivalences that express the entanglement of beauty and debilitation within the conflict’s chemical legacy. Chapter Two reads Marie Clements’s play Burning Vision for the slow violences of uranium that highlight the temporal limits of contemporary redress frameworks, turning to debilitation to theorize modes of contending with this unredressability. Chapter Three analyzes the rhythms of debilitative time held within Madeleine Thien’s novel Dogs at the Perimeter to conceptualize a theory of fugitive redress that unsettles state-based justice paradigms. Ultimately, I argue that a transpacific aesthetic of redress enables more capacious understandings of interconnection, disability, and debilitation that offers a radical reimagining of redress culture.

Text

2024-04-04

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87681

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/