1,720,970 research outputs found
Land Acts: Land's Agency in American Literature, Law, and History from the Colonial Period to Removal
Full text linkThis dissertation examines land’s agency and relationships to land in the places now known as the United States as these relationships appear in literature and law from early colonization to the removal period. Land Acts is a project of archival recovery and an intervention into American legal imaginaries that have wreaked havoc on ecological systems. I consider texts by John Arthur Gibson and Canassatego (Haudenosaunee), Uncas, Samson Occom, and Joseph Johnson (Mohegan), and Elias Boudinot, Nancy Ward, and John Ross (Cherokee) in contrast to iconic settler legal decisions regarding land, including the Mason Land Case (c. 17th Century), federal Indian Removal Policy (c. 1820s-50s), and contemporary cases such as Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta (2022). Drawing from a framework of key Indigenous concepts such as Glen Coulthard’s (Yellowknives Dene) “grounded normativity,” Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s (Anishinaabe) “place-based relationality,” Vanessa Watts’ (Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee) “Indigenous place-thought,” and Kyle Powys Whyte’s (Citizen Potawatomi) “systems of responsibility,” I find that Native authors in my primary texts elucidate land’s role as an historical actor, influencer of cultural production, and ally in resistance.
As Indigenous authors and land co-produce literature, history, and legislation, both suggest ecologically sound legal policy in contrast to settler property law, which marks land as a commodity at worst or a tool for communication with a higher power at best. Through agential relationship with land, Native authors offer contexts for resisting settler violence as well as situating land’s needs (and a responsibility to land) at the center of social order. I argue that literature must be reperiodized around legislation centering on land, as Native writers preempt, detail, and respond to such legislation in partnership with land. Once land is understood to influence cultural production, it may be (re)animated in our present moment, and it must be viewed as an agential relation in contemporary resistance to ecologically destructive policy and legislation. As an intervention in American and Indigenous Studies, I am hopeful that Land Acts calls attention to Native ties to land across American history, reminding readers that Native sovereignties are non-negotiable through a studied awareness of the relationships that Native peoples maintain with land.2025-07-2
War by Other Means: Environmental Violence in the 21st Century
No full textThis dissertation studies the intersections of militarism, climate change, and environmental justice in U.S. literature and popular culture since the end of the Cold War. The project identifies different mechanisms enacting environmental military violence through discursive analysis of literary and cultural texts, and considers the ideas, values, and beliefs that support environmental military violence. In each chapter I trace a different dynamic of environmental violence structured through the logics of U.S. counterinsurgency theory by examining what I call “narrative political ecologies”—cultural texts that center concerns of ecology and broadly defined political economy. Chapter I establishes the stakes and questions of the dissertation. The next two chapters investigate the dynamics of environmental violence depicted within narrative political ecologies. Chapter II investigates how eruptive interpersonal violence secures more insidious, hidden forms of slow environmental violence in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier. Chapter III considers the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands and the environmental military violence responsible for the deaths of undocumented migrants by examining Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Devil’s Highway and the Electronic Disturbance Theater’s Transborder Immigrant Tool. Chapter IV turns to potential f wars and conflicts that may be caused by climate change as they have been depicted in speculative fiction. In novels depicting climate migrants, such as Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (2014), I show that even politically progressive, intersectional approaches to environmental endangerment naturalize conflict and occlude dialogic solutions to environmental change. The final chapter traces how the environmental refugee has become a paradigmatic figure in climate change discourse, particularly the aspects of this discourse where issues of national security are articulated. At the center of these texts is the figure of the migrant and narratives of migrations, and I argue that the figure of the environmental migrant offers a privileged vantage on the constitutive forces of the Anthropocene. The dissertation identifies the specific literary and rhetorical techniques that authors use to contest environmental militarization and expand the U.S. public’s capacity to creatively and compassionately reason around increased flows of environmental migrants— issues of vital importance for humane climate change adaptation
Climate Change in Literature and Culture: Conversion, Speculation, Education
Full text linkThis dissertation examines an emergent archive of contemporary literary and cultural texts that engage with the wicked problem of anthropogenic climate change. Following cultural geographer Michael Hulme, this project works from the assumption that climate change is as much a constellation of ideas as it is a set of material realities. I draw from a diverse media landscape so as to better understand how writers, artists, and activists in the global north are exploring these ideas and particularly what it means to be human in a time of climate change. How do individuals learn to live with climate change, that is, with a daily commitment to navigating these chaotic and unprecedented times? Whether a memoir or a novel, an alternate-reality storytelling game or a collection of agitprop posters, each of these texts call on us to imagine different kinds of selves, different kinds of communities, or different kinds of futures. Just as the modes of inquiry practiced in the Environmental Humanities ask us to question the political, economic, and cultural status quo that has led to climate chaos, these texts also call on their audiences to engage in modes of transformative learning incited by this ongoing disorienting dilemma. The project thus also offers a set of ideas and practices for teaching climate change in literary and cultural studies. I argue that climate change poses both challenges and opportunities for educators in the Humanities, particularly in the context of its psychological impacts and emotional contours, and I suggest that transformative learning is a productive framework through which to understand such education. Ultimately, transformative climate change learning requires that students question their own assumptions and identities as well as exercise their cultural agency as a way of generating hope and working together to imagine and enact more just and sustainable futures
Going Feral: The Utopian Horror of Human-Animal Hybrids
Full text linkAccording to the material feminist corpus, namely Stacy Alaimo’s concept of trans-corporeality, material flows and interconnectivity between humans and their environment insists that the human body has never been atomistic, but rather a porous figure that continually interacts/intra-acts with its environment. The recent biotechnological boom allowing for the production of human-animal hybrids (chimeras) provides the kind of visualization of these interconnectivities that can help instigate a reconception of the human—as not human at all, but rather posthuman. This study looks at the presence of these human-animal hybrids in popular art media, specifically: the horror film, Splice (Dir. Natali 2009); the YA novel, Inhuman (Falls 2013); and the comic, Sweet Tooth (Lemire 2009-2013). This thesis argues that the human-animal hybrid figure exhibits utopian horror, or the use of horror to produce new, better, ways of conceptualizing human-animal relationships, ones that acknowledge our already posthuman plurality of self
Appalachian Moderns: Poetry and Music, 1936-1947
Full text linkWhy has Appalachia been written out of the story of modernism? Current scholarship on American modernism’s geography proposes a bipartite model: proximal modernism in the North, a movement based in New York and Chicago concerning life in an urban zone, and distal modernism in the South, as a dispersed movement concerning life in an agrarian zone. Yet participating in another regional stream of modernism are Appalachians, a third group, whose homeland was defined neither by urbanism nor agrarianism, but was developed along a third developmental path: extractivism. This developmental model restructured state governments and laws to enlarge the region’s capacity to produce wood, minerals, coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Extractivism is thoroughly examined in works by Appalachians. This dissertation focuses on two such works, arguing that they reveal another, as yet overlooked, stream of modernism. Written on frontlines of industrial resource extraction, Gauley Mountain (1939) by West Virginian poet Louise McNeill and Folk Songs of the Hills (1947) by Kentucky musician Merle Travis make modernist interventions in form and content yet have never been classed as modernist, mostly going unnoticed by literary scholars. To better understand why this the case, I compare each of these two critically neglected figures with a historical contemporary who, at one point or another, did become established as a canonical modernist: Travis, with the undisputed “master of modernism” Louis Armstrong (1901-1971), a New Orleans musician sixteen years older than Travis but facing a similar turning point in style with his Town Hall Concert (1947); McNeill, with New York City poet Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), writer of The Book of the Dead (1938), who has been venerated in recent decades as a significant twentieth-century American writer. Close readings of these works, and their critical fates, reveal the geographic and regional indexing of cultural value in modernist studies. Specifically, uneven economic development positioned Appalachia within the cultural spheres of thirties poetry and forties music in a certain way, as a source not only of natural resources, but of cultural resources as well. Appalachian Moderns therefore works to widen our appreciation of American modernism’s geographic and historical dynamics
Nature Industries: U.S. Environmental Fictions after Fordism, 1971-2011
Full text linkThis dissertation recontextualizes literary, critical, and popular models of nature in contemporary American fiction, and argues that the transformations in the post-Fordist economy reframe environmental concepts and their uses in a new light. Scholars in the environmental humanities have long recognized that understanding changes in the political economy are a key way to understanding our ideas and representations of the natural world. These ideas serve as metaphysical models that relate individuals to society and to the broader world described by the sciences. However, much environmental criticism only goes so far as to historicize, either arguing that images of nature are wholly determined by structures and institutions of power, or, by privileging certain ideas of nature as absolute, critics lay claim to an imagined oppositional, but no less normative, space outside of society. Nature Industries intervenes in this dilemma by drawing on pragmatist and cultural studies methods to reconstruct the experience of American life in the aftermath of Fordism. Constructing this historical conjuncture enables interpretive practices which foreground the diverse political articulation of environmental figuration.
The title is a play on Horkheimer and Adorno’s 1944 essay on “the culture industry,” which announced that cultural production had been subsumed into monopoly capitalism. Following culture, nature has undergone a similar loss of perceived autonomy. From the affective to the biogenetic, informational to the atmospheric, post-Fordist technologies and economies intervene in the world at scales that previous vocabularies struggle to describe without the help of fiction. Contemporary capitalism not only produces new natures—new combinations of nature and culture, or new “natural-history”—but, given the ecological consequences of industrialism, environmentalists too are forced to intervene in ways that would give pause to previous generations of conservationists. Rather than announcing the “death of Nature,” as the fictionalized Immanuel Kant does in the final moments of Mary McCarthy’s Birds of America (1971), we encounter a proliferation of natures, each with their own political valence, and each mobilizing a different set of social and natural referents in the public sphere
Multispecies Memoir: Self, Genre, and Species Justice in Contemporary Culture
Full text linkLiberal humanism articulates an individual, rational, autonomous, universal, and singularly human subject that possesses various rights and freedoms. Although the imagined subject at the heart of liberal humanist philosophy has improved the material and social conditions of many, this dissertation diagnoses the liberal subject and the feelings and experiences of isolation it produces as the root cause of multiple social and environmental injustices. Multispecies Memoir reimagines three interconnected projects that have played central roles in the production of the liberal human subject and human apartness: narrative, selfhood, and justice. Pursuing modes of living premised upon reciprocal relationships with nonhumans, not the logics of isolation and domination perpetuated by liberal humanism, I study a subgenre of life writing that I call “multispecies memoir.” Developing in the late twentieth century, these global narratives theorize selfhood, and literature more broadly, as emerging through relationships with multiple species. I look to the “entangled self” described by multispecies memoirs as fashioning an alternate subject, one that disrupts and dislodges the liberal human figure. In the process, I reimagine justice around an entangled, multispecies self. The modes of multispecies justice developed in this project shift the focus of justice away from serving an isolated, rights-bearing individual to instead prioritizing the maintenance of reciprocal relationships and the elimination of violence that threatens these relationships.
Multispecies Memoir makes three primary interventions in the environmental humanities: 1) it articulates selves as emerging through multispecies relations; 2) it asserts that justice for marginalized peoples and justice for other species must be pursued together via entangled subjects; 3) it theorizes literature as a multispecies contact zone co-authored and populated by nonhumans. The dissertation is organized around two sections, each of which proposes modes of coexistence that disrupt liberal humanism and its logics of isolation. The first section, “Entangled Knowledges and Practices,” studies how contemporary science and care have opened the boundaries of the self to other beings. The second section, “Multispecies Violence and Resistance,” examines how violence impacts humans, nonhumans, and their relationships with each other, and it considers how humans and nonhumans have come together to resist such violence.2024-08-0
Unfenceable Sovereignties: Race, Nature, and the Genres of Possession in American Literature
Full text linkThis dissertation asserts that climate change is a narrative problem in addition to a scientific one. I show the representational challenges of climate change to be bound to the complexities of race and nature expressed in the nineteenth-century American environmental imagination. In turn, I uncover an early and unbroken environmentaljustice tradition that precedes and exceeds what is currently called the United States.
Instead of separating histories of race from the environment and environmentalism, or assuming that histories and literatures of American environmentalism run counter to the nation’s racial and environmental exploits, I uncover canonical nineteenth-century American environmentalist texts that code the land as “naturally” what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls “white possession” through their use of literary genre. Extending the genealogical method utilized by American and Indigenous studies scholars, I build a genealogy of white possession through literary genre, or genrealogy. My genreaology pursues both functions of the genealogical method, theorizing
power relations more clearly and thinking otherwise. It establishes how literary genres like apocalypse, the gothic, or national allegory can uphold or obstruct “naturalized sovereignty,” a form of power that proclaims the “natural”-ness of settler colonial
understandings of land as property which hides the extractive violences of white supremacy and settler capitalism. I complicate conventional readings of the American canon that see nineteenth-century writers as merely endorsing land theft, environmental
exploitation, and racial hierarchies. Instead, I excavate a counter-archive of early environmental justice literature that is anti-colonial, genrecidal, and survivance-oriented.
I follow this counter-archive into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to clarify the genrecidal environmental imagination, which uses literary genres to eradicate the logics of white possession and to instead build ecologies dedicated to human and other-than-human survivance. Throughout this project, I draw on theories from Indigenous studies, environmental justice scholars, settler colonial and whiteness studies, American studies, the environmental humanities, and genre studies. Through the methodology of genrealogy and the mode of genrecide, I emphasize the political complexity and diversity of coalition building imperative to imagining and building antiracist environmental movements in the context of climate change.
This dissertation includes both previously published and unpublished material
Representational Challenges: Literatures of Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene
Full text linkIn this dissertation, I draw together an archive of twentieth and twenty-first century North American authors and artists who explore the settler colonial and racist ideologies of the Anthropocene, the proposed name for a contemporary moment in which anthropogenic forces have forever altered the Earth system. I hold that the “the Anthropocene” names a moment in which localized environmental injustices have become planetary. Addressing the representational challenges posed by the epoch requires engaging the underlying cultural assumptions that have long rationalized injustices as necessary to economic prosperity and narrowly conceived versions of national wellbeing. Works of literature and cultural representation can use literary and artistic form to this end.
In this dissertation, I identify one such formal strategy, which I term insensible realism. As a form of realism committed to representing the real impacts of discursive and material practices, insensible realism refers to the rejection of rationality and Enlightenment ideals that have been used to justify the White supremacy, settler colonialism and environmental destruction that instantiates the Anthropocene. A realism of the insensible also refers to my archive’s concentration on what cannot be easily sensed: the epoch’s social and environmental interactions that are physically, temporally, geographically and/or socially imperceptible to dominant society. I argue that these works eschew accepted notions of rationality and empiricism in favor of using non-dominant cultural traditions and theories of environmental justice to address the problems the Anthropocene poses. Challenging the dominant logics that have been used to rationalize racist, settler colonial and environmental violence of the Anthropocene creates space for alternative environmental commitments and narratives.
Throughout the dissertation, I draw on theories from women of color feminism, environmental justice scholars, settler colonial studies, theories of race, and new materialism. Through a critical environmental justice framework, I argue that the authors and artists that make up my archive develop a literary and artistic approach to environmental justice, using forms of representation to highlight—and challenge—the intersections of racism, settler colonialism and environmental destruction.2019-10-1
Atlas of Petromodernity
No full textThe Atlas of Petromodernity is many things in one: historical and geographical non-fiction, cultural theory essay, and picture book. In forty-four short essays, inspired by an equal amount of pictorial findings, Klose and Steininger develop a technical, geographical, political, and speculative panorama of the declining era of petroleum modernity. The authors stroll through Baku, Rotterdam, and Louisiana, into Manchuria and through the Vienna Basin. They read Bertolt Brecht, technical manuals, and petroculture theory, and they listen to Neil Young. They go to the moon, through refineries and over highways emptied by the COVID-19 pandemic. They confront petrochemistry with petromelancholy, catalysis with catharsis, cosmos with cosmetics. The Atlas of Premodernity tackles the contradictory ambivalences of a substance that has been vital for our epoch, and whose roles and meanings need to be understood in order to be able to leave this epoch behind
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