Date of Award
2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
English (Ph.D.)
Department
English
First Advisor
Dohra Ahmad
Second Advisor
Raj Chetty
Third Advisor
Elda Tsou
Abstract
Constellations of Alterity is a creative/critical project that practices reparative storytelling across genres and forms. It asks how women and queer writers, from Asian American, Black and Muslim contexts, generate counter-narratives not just against, but from within, the overlapping violences of patriarchy, empire, and racial capitalism. I situate my work at the nexus of Asian American feminisms, Black reparative praxis, and Muslim women’s narratives from Palestine to Pakistan. Alterity, as sites of otherness in body, mind and landscape, can be mobilized as a generative position from which to imagine and construct alternative epistemologies, archives, and futures. Through reading, writing, pedagogy we can unfold all the possibilities that have been collapsed into linearity and one-dimensionality. The dissertation unfolds in multiple forms: narrative essay, fiction and autofiction, a television pilot, syllabi as pedagogical praxis, and scholarly essays. By moving across these forms, the project resists rigid disciplinary divisions and instead embraces a decolonial aesthetics of hybridity. Central to this work is an interrogation of misogyny and patriarchy both within Western institutional spaces (academia, publishing, media) and real and imagined ancestral homelands, the family, and the community. The creative pieces (working titles) American Girls, Aunt Mehmoona, and Child of an Owl, alongside the TV pilot script Under a Mountain of Light, stage encounters with racialized and gendered violence while also enacting reparative forms of storytelling and witness. The pedagogical component reimagines classroom space through syllabi on young adult literature, Filipina/x media and activism, and African American diaspora and the afterlives of enslavement.
Recommended Citation
Younis, Sana K., "CONSTELLATIONS OF ALTERITY: A CREATIVE/CRITICAL DISSERTATION" (2026). Theses and Dissertations. 1117.
https://scholar.stjohns.edu/theses_dissertations/1117