| A critical and creative project, this dissertation studies juxtapositions of art and writing (imagetexts) by artists and writers of color to explore how subaltern subjectivities find expression in interarts media. More specifically, it considers imagetexts (texts primarily in English) by late-twentieth-century U.S. artists and writers of color, including Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Yong Soon Min, Walter K. Lew, Enrique Chagoya, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Amalia Mesa-Bains, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, with reference to early-twentieth-century influences such as children's picture books, teacher training materials, and the imagetextual arcs of Jean Toomer's Cane, as a critique from the margins of Modernism. The subjectivities of these artists and writers of color, as presented in these imagetexts, are both insistently grounded in the materiality---or visuality---of their bodies and fiercely resistant to universalizing representations of difference. Operating in the context of postmodern disembodiment, the imagetexts theorize a "proximate body," a subject that is simultaneously discursive and prior-to discourse. With the "proximate body," these artists and writers locate materiality by reproducing the visual signs of difference, while also deploying both pictorial and verbal discourses in the same space to interrogate the practice of representation itself. The dissertation's theoretical approach is founded on "mutual engagement": the author casts herself as both the analyzing subject and subject of analysis, as critic and critiqued, in imagetextual, genre-blurring discourse that restricts the critical eye to the same historicized, conditional representational zone inhabited by those artists and writers under consideration. |
