This dissertation focuses on five North American novelists who, in the latter half of the 20th century, strategically broke from realism to advocate for environmental justice. It argues that Ursula ...K. Le Guin, Gerald Vizenor, Octavia E. Butler, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Karen Tei Yamashita use what I term fantastic realism to dramatize continuities between colonialism and capitalism and to envision alternatives to a dominant culture of whiteness, consumerism, and environmental harm. Situating the works that I discuss with respect to North American histories of genocide and oppression, and developing my readings in conversation with a range of critics of contemporary society, I make the case that politically-engaged imaginative literature can upset established ideologies and inspire new forms of relation.I argue that as a discourse and practice that combines respect for nature with the demand for social justice, environmental justice needs fantastic narratives. My dissertation echoes the concerns of critics and activists such as Wendell Berry, Vine Deloria, Jr., Rob Nixon, and Elizabeth Ammons by foregrounding texts that use science fiction, fantasy, and other reality-reshaping genres to name the lethal delusions of Western civilization. The texts I examine show that our destruction of the biosphere is not accidental or inevitable, but is related to patterns of oppression that have been imposed upon women, poor people, and people of color in North America for centuries; and they maintain that abolishing these patterns requires creating communities in which both ecological integrity and human difference are respected.My first chapter discusses Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea writings (1964-2018) to trace the movement from environmentalism to environmental justice. While Le Guin's novels and short stories begin by reproducing a version of environmentalism that is redolent of the British pastoral romance, I explain that they develop into a radical critique of patriarchy, anthropocentrism, and Western metaphysical dualism. Chapter Two then takes up Gerald Vizenor’s Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978) and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) to ask what life in America has been like for those excluded from dominant modes of fantasizing. The chapter argues that Vizenor and Butler use dystopian fiction to portray the continuity between colonial and capitalist phases of US history from Native American and Black points of view respectively.The importance of multiculturalism is reiterated in Chapter Three, which argues that Paolo Bacigalupi’s portrayal of a drought-ravaged future-Southwest in The Water Knife (2015) under-represents Native American and Mexican American perspectives while reinforcing the myth that technology will solve environmental problems. More broadly, in emphasizing Bacigalupi’s inattention to cultural and racial diversity, this chapter criticizes texts that trade on scientific predictions about the future without a commensurate regard for history. In my final chapter, I turn to a text that foregrounds multicultural realities, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997), which I argue uses magical realism to highlight the injustices of neoliberal economic globalization.I conclude with a reflection on how the critique of the colonial-capitalist mindset in the texts I discuss has changed my thinking about the environmental and environmental justice issues in my home state of North Carolina.
This essay is based on Ken Saro-Wiwa’s novel, titled
Sozaboy.
Apart from using this novel to interpret and locate the history and politics of Nigeria within a particular period, the essay tried to ...look at the 1967–1970 Nigeria’s civil war as fictionalized by Ken Saro-Wiwa, the nature of the language and implications on the English language in Nigeria. It also attempted an understanding of the moral and political consequences of war on humanity in general and the special effect of the Nigerian civil war on the minority areas within the Biafran enclave in particular as epitomized by Dukana, the setting of Sozaboy. The essay concluded that the novel itself was a bold attempt at experimentation with language, considering the fact that it was written in what the author himself described as “rotten” English.
Two widely noted cases against major corporations under the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) have recently been settled following court of appeals decisions allowing the cases to proceed. Pfizer Settles in ...Meningitis Drug-Testing Case. In Apr 2009, pharmaceutical manufacturer Pfizer reached a settlement with the plaintiffs in a multibillion dollar ATS suit by numerous Nigerian children and their guardians. Shell Settles Saro-Wiwa Case. In Jun 2009, in a second settlement of a high-visibility ATS claim against a major international corporation, the long-running ATS case of Wiwa v. Shell Oil Co was settled on the eve of trial.
This dissertation is a literary study that focuses on allegories of debt in selected postcolonial and Third World literature. It is a critical analysis of debt, as represented in literature that ...uncovers what I call the debt unconscious. Debt is a notion that has been treated nearly always as an economic issue. Yet, via the debt unconscious, I argue that it is through literature that we can have an in-depth look at its social, cultural, and ideological negative side effects as they are mediated in the postcolonial and Third World literature. The debt unconscious represents at once a layer of disavowed social reality but also a cultural concept for understanding and interpreting this ideological mechanism. The debt unconscious is also an interpretive approach that builds upon Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious and his prioritizing of the political interpretation of Third World literature. This approach addresses the selected narratives as cultural artifacts and symbolic acts that provide insights into their historical, cultural, political, and socio-economic contexts. Using this approach, I explore how narratives unmask three forms of debt—social, institutional, and climate debt—and examine their negative impacts on social, political, and ecological lives. The debt unconscious traces stories and reflections on the relations of debt that are hidden or unspoken yet still control peoples' lives and relationships. My analysis aims to examine allegories of debt as mediums through which we can explore the new forms of exploitation, inequality, and oppression of gender, class, and power under neoliberal capitalism. My main argument here is that there is much knowledge to gain from postcolonial literature about how debt is working as a mechanism in people's lives, especially under contemporary capitalism. I argue that by paying close attention to these selected narratives' specific contexts, themes, sub-narratives, characters' subjectivities and agencies, as well as their authors' preferences of certain stylistic choices, and historical, ideological and social references, we may gain a thorough understanding of the cultural and ideological sides of debt that negatively impact people's lives, particularly in the Global South.
Consumption drives both global capitalism and the lives of literary texts, which may be consumed in two senses: they are purchased and they are read. Most literally, consumption means ingesting food. ...To consume is also to use environmental resources. In this dissertation, I scrutinize the entanglement of these several modes of consumption. I focus on food systems in an emergent literary genre, the “global environmental novel”: the contemporary novel that illuminates the intertwining of globalization and the environment. Such fictions come from both global South and North. I discuss contemporary authors from South Africa (Zakes Mda and Zoë Wicomb), South Asia (Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy), and the US (Ruth Ozeki), as well as predecessors from South Asia (Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay) and Ghana (Ama Ata Aidoo). Operating at the intersection of postcolonial studies, environmental humanities, and food studies, I situate novels in relation to social movements that invoke food, globalization, and environment. I also engage with ecofeminism, queer theory, modernist studies, and theories of the contemporary novel. The project explores the multifaceted social and environmental injustices, as well as possibilities for resistance, that are encapsulated or indexed by food. Food politics, I argue, are key to the global environmental novel: both in the realist sense that environmental justice struggles cluster around food, and in informing novelistic strategies to manage the scalar challenges of globalization and global environment. Such mammoth objects provoke a representational crisis: how can we picture (let alone save) something as large as the globe? To resort to abstraction or generalization is to universalize, to flatten out the unevenness of contributions and vulnerabilities to environmental catastrophe among different populations. To instead keep local particularity present while representing globality, global environmental novels synthesize the polyscalar facility of narrative fiction with the polyscalar nature of food politics. Food is immediate, somatic, quotidian, and intimate. Eating cultures and food access are also key to community and cultural identity. And food systems are expressions of power under global capitalism. Resonating across all these scales, food politics are an avenue to global yet specific narratives of entanglement between globalization and the environment.
The career of actor/writer/director Akin Omotoso is a case study in cultural translation. The child of a Barbadian mother and a Nigerian father, he had lived in both places before being uprooted ...again to go to South Africa, where he now lives. In South Africa, he not only had to come to terms with the reality of a place he knew only through the rhetoric of resistance to apartheid, but he also had to negotiate western classical theater after being brought up on indigenous Yoruba dramatic forms. Furthermore, he had to learn to see himself, not as a native, but asmakwerekwere, an outsider, a foreigner on his own continent. His background and experience inform his work as director and writer, both highly attuned to different cultural contexts and capable of seeing with an outsider's eye, mixing humor and respect for his subjects.
Caribbean children’s literature examined in this study contains an ecological Caribbean aesthetic, as well as a historically inherited force of dynamics that include imperialistic politics and ...subjugation of people. This study encompasses contemporary literature, largely by Caribbean authors, and/or literature that presents a Caribbean aesthetic. Through text analysis of Caribbean based picture and chapter books this study examines the role of nature in the representation of the water deity and forest deity, Mami Wata and Osain in relation to a theoretical framework guided by a Caribbean ecocriticism. Overall this collection of texts offers a diversity in style, quality, perspective and, degree to which they address an environmental aesthetic that illustrates an eco-pedagogical ethos specific to the Caribbean region. The presence of the water and forest deities shows that environmental mythic figures offer opportunities for cultivating ecoliteracy alongside an appreciation and consciousness of environmentalist thought linked to religiosity that is firmly based in the environmental culture of the region. Three key categories to evolve from the analysis of these two culture hero (in)es in this collection are: the fractured family, the environmental economy, and the opportunities for local authors publishing today. At the start of the twenty-first century these books capture what McNeal (2011) argues historically was founded in the Caribbean, a cosmopolitan community. A number of current issues face individuals locally, yet reverberate globally. Caribbean children’s literature offers a perspective that nurtures and evolves within the folklore of a people. This study concludes that more value, attention, and national support be given to the community of Caribbean writers creating art for young readers.
Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman’s pioneering work in trauma theory provided innovative critical frameworks for reading textual and filmic responses to mass violence. Yet trauma theory is rarely ...applied to African cultural production, despite the recent explosion of novels, memoir, and film from Sub-Saharan Francophone Africa grappling with civil war and genocide. In close analyses of child soldier novels, Rwandan genocide survivor memoirs, and Francophone African films, this dissertation effects such a theoretical rapprochement while simultaneously probing the limits of trauma theory’s assumptions concerning speech, temporality, and political representation. The first chapter, entitled “Giving Voice to the Icon: The Child Witness to Violence in Francophone African Fiction,” rereads Ivorian author Ahmadou Kourouma’s child soldier novel Allah n’est pas obligé (2000) arguing that Kourouma creates a “language of trauma,” which reveals how discourses of collective suffering risk limiting our understanding of violence’s psychological impact on individuals. The second chapter, “Listening to the Limit: Reading Paratext in Francophone African Trauma Memoirs,” redeploys Gérard Genette’s formulation of the “paratext” to read Rwandan Tutsi survivor Esther Mujawayo’s memoir SurVivantes (2011). I argue that the multiple introductions to SurVivantes function as a form of hospitality, inviting the reader to become a part of a virtual community of supportive listeners. The third chapter, “Hierarchies of Witnessing: Pan-African Celebrity and the Marginalization of Survivor Testimony,” investigates why Tutsi survivor memoirs have received so little attention from scholars. Using Rwandan survivor Vénuste Kayimahe’s 2001 memoir France-Rwanda: Les coulisses du génocide (2001) as a case study, I argue that the marginalization of Rwandan survivor testimonies bears troubling similarities to survivor’s difficulties being heard in the real world. The fourth chapter, “African Trauma On (and Off) Screen: Temporality and Violence in Francophone African Cinema,” argues that in leaving graphic scenes of subjective violence off-screen, African filmmakers actively bear witness to the insidious long-term effects of events such as the Rwandan genocide or the daily reality of occupation under radical jihadist groups in Northern Mali as seen Abderrahmane Sissako’s 2014 film Timbuktu.
“Beyond Crisis and Trauma” explores how storytelling has become a transformative tool for advocacy that addresses the contradictory realization of human rights in the late 20th and early 21 st ...centuries. The recognition of rights at a global level has not, as many scholars argue, led to the decrease in atrocities that it was intended to engender. While the language of rights may have triumphed at a rhetorical level, the global embrace of this rhetoric in the face of worsening violence underscores its paradoxical inefficacy in creating substantive change. “Beyond Crisis and Trauma,” however, revises this narrative of discursive failure to argue for the importance of human rights storytelling in a global context. In particular, this study conceptualizes the act of storytelling as engendering forms of what I call “literary micro-justice,” which is the attritional manifestation of justice that emerges in the telling and retelling of a story. This dissertation posits storytelling as a way to reimagine the inert discourse of human rights as a dynamic force that exceeds efforts to appropriate or control it. Storytelling is a collaborative process of empowerment in which opportunities for justice are created in the dialectic between storyteller and audience. In emphasizing storytelling as a process, this study subverts assumptions about the ease with which human rights language becomes co-opted and, in turn, complicates the increasingly pessimistic trajectory of rights discourse. In contrast to human rights scholarship that has problematized language as an object vulnerable to appropriation by neoliberal institutions, “Beyond Crisis and Trauma” contends that stories are not simply self-contained units that exist at the moment of telling, but rather are creative agents that live beyond the moment to inform and disrupt our awareness and perception of the world. Through a discussion of works by Julia Álvarez, Junot Díaz, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Dave Eggers, and Arundhati Roy, this dissertation illustrates how literary micro-justice presents a way to conceptualize the effects of storytelling and the generative ways in which stories work to bring change to the “small places” where human rights begin.
