Thesis advisor: Brian D. Robinette / The proliferation in recent decades of “stewardship model” approaches for developing a theology of creation, which places human beings at the center of the cosmos as caretakers or managers of the divine oikos, is the result of an intentional effort to correct overtly problematic “dominion model” approaches that have contributed both to reifying a sense of human sovereignty and the resulting environmental degradation. However, the first part of this dissertation argues that the stewardship model of creation actually operates under many of the same problematic presuppositions as the dominion model, and therefore does not offer a correction but rather a tacit re-inscription of the very same pitfalls. After close consideration and analysis of the stewardship model, this dissertation identifies scriptural, theological, and philosophical sources to support the adoption of a “kinship” or “community of creation” model. Drawing on postcolonial theorists and theologians as key critical and constructive interlocutors, this project then proposes the concept of “planetarity” as a framework for conceiving of the relationship between human and other-than-human creation, as well as the relationship between the whole of creation and the Creator, in a new way. This theoretical framework invites a theological supplément, which, this dissertation argues, is found best in the writings of the medieval Franciscan tradition. Several distinctive characteristics of the Franciscan theological tradition offer key constructive contributions. Among these themes are the foundational sense of the interrelatedness, mutuality, and intended harmony of creation within the early spiritual texts and later Franciscan theological and philosophical writings; John Duns Scotus’s distinctive principle of individuation; the alternative appropriation of Peter John Olivi’s category of usus pauper for use in navigating the tension between creation’s intrinsic and instrumental value; and the application of a Franciscan understanding of the virtue of pietas as a proposal for environmental praxis. The result is what can be called a postcolonial Franciscan theology of creation imagined in terms of planetarity as reconceived in a theological key. It is a constructive and non-anthropocentric response to the need for a new conceptualization of the doctrine of creation. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

<p>This dissertation examines space as a privileged yet <italic>repressed</italic> site of cultural production in a global America, in response to ongoing attempts to reconfigure American literary and cultural studies through the lens of globalization, postnationality, worlding, and planetarity, and to build conversations between literature, the arts, and space. Drawing its inspiration from Henri Lefebvre's work on the production of social space and Fredric Jameson's theory of postmodern global culture, this project studies globalization with a particular emphasis on its unique spatial apparatus, which through geographical expansion and contraction and worldwide connection and disconnection produces hitherto unprecedented social spaces, including most notably the global city, virtual space, transnational diasporas, postmodern architecture, and the "non-places" of shopping malls, airports, and highways. I discuss how these global social spaces radically alter our experience of the lifeworld (<italic>Lebenswelt</italic>) and transform our representational practices, by analyzing innovative contemporary cultural forms such as literary theory (Jameson, Derrida, Adorno, and Deleuze), deconstructive architecture (Peter Eisenman), video art (Nam June Paik), diasporic writing (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha), postmodern detective fiction (Paul Auster), the cyberpunk novel (William Gibson).</p> <p>While I thus mediate global spatial production and cultural production, I argue that the predominant focus on deterritorialization, disjuncture, and postspatiality in much of contemporary discourse on globalization oftentimes diverts our attention from the complex mechanism whereby the spatial world system of globalization brings the entire globe into its all-encompassing and totalizing force field. I formulate the concept of a <italic>spatial unconscious</italic> in order to address the salient, though repressed, presence of the totalizing spatial logic of global capitalism that underlies contemporary cultural production. In so doing, I demonstrate that diverse contemporary literary and cultural forms have their conditions of possibility the newly emergent global spatial network of cultural flows and exchanges; and that those literary and cultural forms function as symbolic acts or registering apparatuses that reflect, remap, and reimagine the multifaceted and even contradictory spatial configurations of the world today. By bringing a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective to American literary studies, this study seeks to shift our critical attention from a putatively unitary and homogeneous national literature towards manifold cultural loci crisscrossed by dynamic interplays and fluid interchanges amongst multiple axes and nodal points on the globe.</p> / Dissertation

<p>My dissertation explores contemporary coming-of-age stories that employ spectral and relational narrative strategies to address readers, demanding a re-negotiated response from them. Drawing upon and extending the observations of critics who emphasize the role of liberalism and its contradictory legacies for post-colonial <em>Bildungsroman</em>, my research highlights a radically ethical potential in unsettling reiterations of this long-standing narrative form. The narratives that I have chosen to examine—namely, U.S. Latino/a and Canadian diasporic second-generation coming-of-age stories and African child soldier narratives—reflect a broad geographical and linguistic range, drawing attention to constitutive relationality and various kinds of haunting to call upon a globally entangled sense of disappointment and responsibility in a profoundly critical register. These coming-of age stories signal the need to imagine alternative ethical and political frameworks for reconceptualising the way we think about knowledge, responsibility, and belonging in twenty-first century planetary relations. Even as they inevitably participate in the global market for stories of otherness and epistemological and/or material dispossession, these texts challenge generic and market expectations, troubling the reader’s easy consumption of them. The open-endedness and ambiguity in the indirect, yet insistent, rhetorical manoeuvres of these narratives urge us as readers to confront complicated questions about global solidarity if we are to respond ethically to global, national and transnational realities.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)