Digesting Difference PDF Download

This dissertation is a study of how the U.S. nation has been created as a body, and how discourses of digestion-chewing, eating, assimilating, shitting-have been central to that process. It is a study of the digestibility rhetorics that produce and maintain the white nation. The project demonstrates the affective, and thus political, power that digestion discourses provided. It illuminates early instantiations of the disgust that pulses through 21st century anti-immigrant and white supremacist discourse in the United States through three case studies where digestion appears prominently in public discourse. The question I pose to each is, what are the connections between digestion as a mode of bodily comportment and the emerging racial order in the U.S. 20th century? The cases represent key moments in the construction and negotiation of the U.S. nation and its attendant constructions of race and belonging: immigration policy, Western territorial expansion, and Black radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s. Using a critical rhetorical approach, I seek to further illuminate scholarship on race, immigration, and coloniality in the field. My primary focus concerns moments when the language of digestion appears outside of its more literal contexts-in conversations about immigration policy, national identity, and national security. I argue that these three ostensibly separate moments of U.S. nation-making are deeply inter-related, not only by the commonality of national identity, but because at each moment, the national identity being negotiated carries with it the racialized baggage from the past. Digestion (and its various disorders) functions as what Molina terms a racial script in the United States. These cases are "projects" of nation and race making where digestion emerges as a script for producing and managing the body politic.