Environmental Studies Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Environmental Studies Theses and Dissertations by Subject "American literature"

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    The ecological other: Indians, invalids, and immigrants in U.S. environmental thought and literature
    (University of Oregon, 2009-09) Ray, Sarah Jaquette, 1976-
    This dissertation argues that a fundamental paradox underlies U.S. environmentalism: even as it functions as a critique of dominant social and economic practices, environmentalism simultaneously reinforces many social hierarchies, especially with regard to race, immigration, and disability, despite its claims to recognize the interdependence of human and ecological well-being. This project addresses the related questions: In what ways does environmentalism--as a code of behavioral imperatives and as a set of rhetorical strategies--ironically play a role in the exploitation of land and communities? Along what lines--class, race, ability, gender, nationality, age, and even "sense of place"--do these environmental codes and discourses delineate good and bad environmental behavior? I contend that environmentalism emerged in part to help legitimize U.S. imperial ambitions and support racialized and patriarchal conceptions of national identity. Concern about "the environment" made anxieties about communities of color more palatable than overt racism. Furthermore, "environmentalism's hidden attachments" to whiteness and Manifest Destiny historically aligned the movement with other repressive ideologies, such as eugenics and strict anti-immigration. These "hidden attachments" exist today, yet few have analyzed their contemporary implications, a gap this project fills. In three chapters, I detail nineteenth-century environmentalism's influence on contemporary environmental thought. Each of these three illustrative chapters investigates a distinct category of environmentalism's "ecological others": Native Americans, people with disabilities, and undocumented immigrants. I argue that environmentalism defines these groups as "ecological others" because they are viewed as threats to nature and to the American national body politic. The first illustrative chapter analyzes Native American land claims in Leslie Marmon Silko's 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead . The second illustrative chapter examines the importance of the fit body in environmental literature and U.S. adventure culture. In the third illustrative chapter, I integrate literary analysis with geographical theories and methods to investigate national security, wilderness protection, and undocumented immigration in the borderland. In a concluding fourth chapter, I analyze works of members of the excluded groups discussed in the first three chapters to show how they transform mainstream environmentalism to bridge social justice and ecological concerns. This dissertation contains previously published material.
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    Representational Challenges: Literatures of Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene
    (University of Oregon, 2018-04-10) McHolm, Taylor; LeMenager, Stephanie
    In 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.