Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

American Studies

First Advisor

Homans, Margaret

Abstract

Manufactured Enchantments examines the way in which forms of enchantment worked at various sites—from culture industries, to self-help doxa, to esoteric and occult practices, to intellectual life—to construct an ideal self tailored to geopolitical violence in the U.S. and Latin America during the twentieth century. The dissertation studies five technologies—psychoanalysis, film, the rotoscope, the enneagram, and the tarot—that each suggested a self that could be stretched, modified, or altered to meet conditions of violence, uncertainty and precarity stemming from pre- and peri-Cold War U.S. imperial expansion efforts in the Americas. In each case study, I examine how the featured technology emerged or became popular to help subjects survive these conditions. At the same time, my case studies show how manufactured enchantments also often rendered those same subjects more vulnerable to exploitation. My first chapter studies how psychoanalysis spoke through film in order to shape an effective subject of Cold War propaganda and how, through censorship and the ideology of the OCIAA, the interstitial work of filmmaking was moved increasingly “inside” the spectator. In my second chapter, I show how the rotoscope stimulated a self that could be fortified against dramatic alterations of space, lapses in continuity, and losses of key elements that had once held a world together through analyses of cartoons by the Fleischer Brothers, Walt Disney, and Claudio Díaz Valdes. In my third chapter, I explore the enneagram of personality as a technology that illuminated paths of exile. I trace the system’s transformation across three contexts—G.I. Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way work in World War I Russia, Claudio Ichazo’s Arica School in Chile, and North American New Ageism and self-help—to show how the test encouraged subjects to cocoon themselves into the self in times of war. My fourth chapter examines two novels—Nova (1968) by Samuel Delany and The Hour of the Star (1974) by Clarice Lispector—that dynamically represent the subjectivity of the tarot. Together, these texts show how tarot cards empowered subjects to imagine themselves into narratives of endurance through interlocking crises, but often by absorbing, displacing, or disappearing their revolutionary desires. Through its hemispheric American Studies methodology, this dissertation brings Latin America robustly into conversations about the formation of Western subjectivity not as a footnote or interesting case study, but as a foundational site at which the self was redefined over a century of geopolitical upheaval. I demonstrate how the study of technologies of self as they were engaged in the twentieth-century Americas is key to understanding the subjectivity of U.S. empire as the dynamic result of dialogue not just between the Europe and the U.S., but between North and South America as well. Through Media Studies, I also argue that the hemispheric American subject made visible across these five technologies demonstrates the rise of an ideal self who is avowedly multiple, and able to engage and turn the volume up and down on their irreconcilable positions and ideas, psychic impasses, or alternate timelines in ways that prefigure the self of social media. Through a study of twentieth-century techniques of enchantment and the social-material conditions that gave rise to them, this dissertation ultimately offers frameworks for understanding the increasingly fragmented, disoriented, and networked subjectivity that underpins fascism in the Americas today.

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