Voices from below: Locating the underground in post-World War II American literature

This dissertation begins with the premise that scrutinizing imaginative representations of the underground can give us insight into its prevalence as an organizing principle in our cultural consciousness. Moreover, such a study is unbound to any particular identity or movement and thus offers a compelling framework for tracing our evolving conceptions of national identity and citizenship through intersecting histories of the dispossessed. Situating the underground in the historical and political context of the Cold War and beyond, I examine stories of resistance through a locale that is spatially configured as literally or figuratively below, in which those driven below the radar of their communities by social and political commitments animate what Richard Wright calls "the underground logic of the democratic process." I begin with Richard Wright's invocation of the underground as a topography of African-American life in The Man Who Lived Underground , which uses an old sewer to activate psychological links between rising and freedom in the pre-Civil Rights era. Shifting to the 1950s hipster culture, I argue that the subterranean imperative is cultural. In The Subterraneans, Jack Kerouac magnifies the contradictions of the hipster movement fraught with the social inequalities of the era by recuperating the democratic potential of cross-racial identification in ghostly reimaginings of Cherokees repopulating the land. I continue by tracing the underground's political iterations in the 1960s and 1970s, in which questions of nationhood emerge through global alliances formed by the activist youth movement. In American Woman, Susan Choi stages a feminist corrective to the excesses of the radical fugitive underground by providing a platform for redressing Japanese American Internment through a critique of U.S. imperialism. Finally, I argue that at the close of the twentieth century, the underground is the place where intersections between metaphorical and geopolitical borders are magnified---where the material meets the symbolic most acutely. In Mosquito, Gayl Jones depicts a "new" Underground Railroad that spirits undocumented migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border, linking nineteenth-century anti-slavery crusades to the contemporary immigration rights movement. Jones inscribes a Pan-American vision into our national imaginary by interpolating population fluidity through the figure of the refugee and denaturalizing the border. In the twenty-first century, the underground offers the displaced subjects of official American histories possibilities for reinscription through a newly conceptualized cosmopolitanism. Their stories from below weave a narrative of solidarity between subjugated peoples throughout American history. The geography of such an underground presents new possibilities for transcultural and transnational mappings, which can provide a richer understanding of our intertwined pasts and a clearer blueprint for both local accountability and global mindedness.