Graduation Year

2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Ph.D.

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Degree Granting Department

English

Major Professor

Quynh Nhu Le, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Cynthia Patterson, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Gary Lemons, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Aisha Durham, Ph.D.

Keywords

critical race, justice, settler colonialism, criminality

Abstract

This project, “Lawful Injustice: Novel Readings of Racialized Temporality and Legal Instabilities,” examines three specific BIPOC communities across literature—Native American, African American, and Asian American—to understand the influence of U.S. legal frameworks and temporalities upon both the collective and the individual. I assess how legal frameworks create and protect their own instabilities as well as understand how they are produced by the uneven temporal structures of the law. I examine how such legal and settler colonial temporalities are at odds with Native American, African American, and Asian American temporalities. These temporalities—a legal/juridical temporality which reinscribes settler colonial oppression and the temporalities of each BIPOC community which resist the legal temporalities— demonstrate a linkage between time, justice, and the law. Taken together, these cultural texts demonstrate how time offers no resolution nor progress from these traumas because the violences are perpetuated throughout history at varying intervals. Additionally, the historical narrativization of violences committed against BIPOC communities indicates that the settler colonial system attempts to utilize temporal control through such narrativization to perpetuate domination. This dissertation explores how authors and creators use textual and cinematic approaches to portray the depth and limits of legal instabilities/temporalities as well as how Native American, African American, and Asian American communities utilize their own temporalities to highlight the capacities of legal injustices.

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