| This project brings together an analysis of regional history, industrial capitalism, and U.S. empire to argue that ugliness---much more than a private concern between an individual and her mirror---became a method of justifying control over the people and places transformed by the economic processes of nineteenth-century expansion. This dissertation engages ugliness as a historical formation to analyze how its repeated invocation in popular cultures provided an easy avatar of horrific difference against which a nationalist body could be revered. Ugliness designated a body so out of place or outpaced by modern ideals that exclusion became the resolution to nationalized conflict. In this way, metaphors of appearance and aesthetic value buttressed the prevailing rhetoric of expansion. This project contributes to the study of nationalist formation and embodiment by illuminating gender as a prop for racial abjection. |
