Date of Award
Spring 5-16-2020
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
MA English
Department
English
Advisor
Mark Svenvold, M.F.A.
Committee Member
Cara Blue Adams, M.F.A.
Keywords
body as landscape, short story collection
Abstract
"Choking Hazards" is a collection of three short stories and a poem. Identity, whether national or personal relies on a collective imagination formulated from both facts and fiction. Thus, the relationship of truth is equally indebted to history and invention. Zadie Smith’s craft essay, “Fail Better,” recognizes writing as, “the attempted revelation of this elusive, multifaceted self,” (Smith 355). Though we only have our own limited knowledge of the self, we can find other selves through literature. Grappling with these old selves and their histories is a centripetal process, where bodies, their limitations, coded interactions and social constructions cannot be extricated from their physical, socio-economic, political and cultural environment.The body bears witness where the groupthink of memory cannot. As someone living in a mixed-race body and an immigrant-just-turned citizen, I’m interested in the body as a landscape— operating under the politics of difference and as a shared point of contact. I’ve always existed in this hybrid space, a product of migration and hyphenization.
Recommended Citation
Shuyama, Naomi and Shuyama, Naomi, "Choking Hazards" (2020). Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs). 2840.
https://scholarship.shu.edu/dissertations/2840
