PhD Oral Exam - Alexei Perry Cox, Humanities

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

The Poetics of Indigenous Nationhoods: Trans-Indigenous Theory From Turtle Island to Palestine is a research-creation dissertation that brings literary analysis and experimental poetics into sustained dialogue to theorize trans-Indigenous solidarities across Turtle Island and Palestine. The project is organized in two parts: a critical study of contemporary poetry and a creative manuscript that activates its theoretical commitments.

Part I is a scholarly exploration of the connections. The Introduction, “Toward a Trans-Indigenous Literary Studies,” traces the relational poetics linking Palestinian and Indigenous writers. Chapter one, “Tandem Becoming,” examines paired constellations of poets – Peter Blue Cloud and Etel Adnan, Russel Means and Mahmoud Darwish – whose work stages a mutual recognition across difference. Through close readings, it develops “tandem-becoming” as a concept describing how speakers inhabit each other’s histories and political realities, forging a diachronic lineage of solidarity grounded in both literary address and activist practice. Chapter two, “Beyond Legal Recourse,” turns to poetry as an affective archive in the work of Layli Long Soldier and George Abraham, arguing that their formal strategies—redaction, refusal, and reiterative naming—contest the limits of state apology and produce counter-documentation that reimagines contractual relations to land, history, and accountability. Chapter three, “Lessons in Lasting,” analyzes the use of digital ephemera in Mosab Abu Toha and Smokii Sumac, showing how platforms such as Instagram and fax transmission become formal extensions of poetic voice. These works articulate ongoingness under conditions of war and dispossession, producing fluid subjectivities that resist closure while insisting on presence and survival.

Part II, [SPACE]: Lessons in Taking and Making, is a collection of poems composed through recombination and erasure of contemporary texts, structured through a MadLibs-inspired participatory form. By inviting readers to supply missing language, the manuscript foregrounds complicity in extractive systems while opening space for imagining reparative futures. Together, these two components argue that trans-Indigenous poetics enact both critique and praxis, unsettling hegemonic discourse and cultivating modes of mutual liberation.