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Session 10: Of Monsters and Nations
Chair: Gerardo Rodriguez Salas

Dracula as Ethnic Conflict: U.S. Humanitarianism in the Former Yugoslavia
Neda Atanasoki
Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego, United States of America

This paper considers the post-Cold War position of the U.S. in the “new” global order with respect to the ethnic violence of the civil war in the Balkans from 1992-2000. With the “fall of the iron curtain,” the demise of Communism in Eastern Europe provided the occasion for the U.S. to distinguish itself against the “ethnic troubles” in Eastern Europe and to represent itself as the fulfillment of Enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy. Highlighting media representations of ethnic conflict in the “Balkans,” my paper connects the U.S. self-understanding of having overcome its past of racial inequality and of being a democracy rooted in diversity to its foreign policy that establishes its right to intervene in regions troubled by ethnic intolerance thereby displacing domestic racial anxieties through its “humanitarian” projects around the globe.
I argue that the gothic novel provides the narrative within which the U.S. role in Eastern European affairs is represented. Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula is the exemplary gothic tale that expresses a phobia of non-Western spaces marked as racially other. Stoker’s tale of the imperative to modernize non-modern spaces is especially relevant to the Balkans, a region that in the Western imagination conveys racial and continental sameness alongside a fundamental alterity from the West in terms of its economic and political development and lack of liberal consciousness. I read diplomatic accounts of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia (Richard Holbrooke’s To End a War) and major U.S. newspaper and TV network coverage of the wars and their aftermath. The 1990s media and political discourses recast the Dracula narrative to locate the threat to Western rationality and progress in the primordial ethnic conflicts of the Balkans, while inscribing the U.S. as a space of human rights.

A Monster in Paradise : Family and Nation in Disney’s Lilo and Stitch
Emily Cheng
Department of Literature, University of California, San Diego

My paper takes up Disney’s 2002 animated film, Lilo and Stitch, in order to address the family, domestic space, and adoption (of the alien monster) in relation to the U.S. multicultural nation. The film takes place in Hawaii , which is presented as a liminal U.S. space in which a local multiculturalism is made visible through representations of indigenous bodies and culture. I argue that the portrayal of Hawaii as multicultural paradise comes about both at the level of visual representation and of the narrative of domesticating the monstrous alien, Stitch, so that the alien threat is peacefully incorporated into the cultural pluralism of the nation.
In the figure of the alien monster from another planet programmed to destroy civilization, the film references histories of anxieties over Asian labor recruitment and immigration to Hawaii and the mainland alien threat to the U.S. Pacific. I particularly focus on the film’s borrowing and deployment of the monster narratives of Frankenstein and Godzilla in Disney’s last hand-drawn animation feature to represent Stitch’s particular threat to family and civilization. Stitch’s eventual incorporation into the family, and allegorically, into the U.S. nation, as the figure of state authority in the film is both a CIA agent specializing in protecting the U.S. from extra-terrestrial threats and the family’s social worker. In becoming part of the U.S. family, Stitch also goes through a process of becoming a citizen and a proper subject of the law.

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