Nomadic and state ideologies: Oppositional discourses in the construction of identity

Abstract

"A book," write Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari in their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , is "an assemblage," one that is connected to "other assemblages." Once it is understood as such, literary interpretation becomes less a quest for meanings in the form of fixed destinations as an investigation into what the book under consideration "functions with." What, in other words, is the relation of "this literary machine to a war machine, love machine, revolutionary machine, etc.---and an abstract machine that sweeps [it] along?". Specifically, this dissertation examines the production of ethnicity in various North American literary works from the Twentieth Century. Each section juxtaposes "State apparatus-books" with "war machine" ones. The first posit the ethnic group as a minority, as an "objectively definable state", whether of language, ethnicity, or sex, as a subsystem of a Majority, and give emphasis to such strategies as centering, unification, totalization, integration, interiority, hierarchization, and finalization as the means to affirmation. The second posit the ethnic group as "minoritarian" in nature, as a "potential, creative and created," as a becoming "over which they do not have ownership" and "into which they themselves must enter". It attempts to make its reader cognizant of the various strategies by which ethnic groups both empower and delimit themselves in the process of self-affirmation.