Bodies in Western liberal, legalistic, and psychoanalytic discourse are often portrayed as autonomous subjects who interact with others and who make choices and claims based on assertions of individual agency. This dissertation explores how African American and Chicana/o writers respond to and refigure these assertions of bodily representations in their own writings. I argue that assertions of autonomy on the part of liberal subjects assume an understanding of the human body and subject that reinforces a dichotomous framework. This dichotomous framework only bolsters a cognitive formation that obfuscates the dependency implicit in relationships among individuals and of individuals to their environments. This practice has devastating effects for people of color for it ignores material, historical sources of contemporary race relations and the spatial fields on which they've been played out. The texts I examine, however, interrogate the dichotomies of self/other, white/black, male/female by developing an understanding of the body as interdependent in relation to both space and to others. Moreover these authors show through these interdependent relationships how material histories of racism and patriarchy continue to inform the very subjectivity of people of color and the ways they experience both space and others.

I theorize the notion of interdependency specifically through the frames of embodiment and loss/trauma. The authors I examine all address loss/trauma through a bodily perspective, where trauma, whether it occurs through experiences of death, mental illness, or abuse, becomes an opening for representations of relationships of interdependency. In novels by Sandra Cisneros, Tomas Rivera, and Toni Morrison, I have found that each writer focuses on the bodily perspective that is engendered by loss. These bodily perspectives articulate an imaginary of trauma that show how the body itself embodies an experiential knowledge of past and contemporary moments of trauma while also producing ways of reading loss that pose as critical correctives to hegemonic interpretations that often pathologize or otherwise discredit those experiences.