UC Riverside

Data profiles have come to proliferate across the private and public sectors as digitization has engendered new technologies and techniques for gathering, aggregating, and sharing data. My dissertation interrogates the epistemologies, affects, and power-relations of this increasingly ubiquitous data surveillance. I argue that, despite disavowing its own points of view and partiality, data profiling is indeed a form of storytelling. As such, the prominence of profiling critically reframes contemporary fiction and metafiction in particular, challenging literary modes of watching and representing the world. I also maintain that postmodern literature can enact its own counter-surveillance and engage the narratological and ideological foundations of profiling culture. My dissertation draws on and contributes to literary studies, the digital humanities, affect studies, surveillance studies, critical race studies, and gender studies because, ultimately, these discourses are inextricably knotted together around the problems of profiling.

In my first chapter, “Consumer Surveillance and Profiling in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition,” I analyze the novel’s passage from the simulacra of brand culture and consumption to the sites of hidden labor within the profile economy. The second chapter, “Metadata, Metafiction, and the Stakes of Surveillance in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad” considers how metafiction is especially well-suited to grapple with the significance of metadata, given its own preoccupation with watching itself watch. I argue that the novel’s network of characters and stories speaks to the constellation of forces that not only convert analogue recordings into digital data, but also translate relationships, habits, and subjectivity into metadata. The third chapter, “Looking Back at Profile Epistemologies and Racializing Surveillance in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen,” contextualizes data profiling within the history of racializing surveillance and illustrates how critical race theory and affect theory can open up forms of “oppositional looking” to undermine the ostensible objectivity of data. In the fourth chapter, “The Orbiting Eye/I in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,” I argue that Hamid produces what I call “profile narration” or “surveillance story-telling” by hacking into the structures and infrastructures of paramilitary surveillance in the era of drone warfare.