abstract: This dissertation examines cultural representations that attend to the environmental and socio-economic dynamics of contemporary water crises. It focuses on a growing, transnational body of “hydronarratives” – work by writers, filmmakers, and artists in the United States, Canada, and the postcolonial Global South that stress the historical centrality of water to capitalism. These hydronarratives reveal the uneven impacts of droughts, floods, water contamination, and sea level rise on communities marginalized along lines of race, class, and ethnicity. In doing so, they challenge narratives of “progress” conventionally associated with colonial, imperialist, and neoliberal forms of capitalism dependent on the large-scale extraction of natural resources. Until recently, there has been little attention paid to the ways in which literary texts and other cultural productions explore the social and ecological dimensions of water resource systems. In its examination of water, this dissertation is methodologically informed by the interdisciplinary field of the energy humanities, which explores oil and other fossil fuels as cultural objects. The hydronarratives examined in this dissertation view water as a cultural object and its extraction and manipulation, as cultural practices. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways in which power, production, and human-induced environmental change intersect to create social and environmental sacrifice zones. This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary environmental humanities approach, drawing on fields such as indigenous studies, political ecology, energy studies, cultural geography, and economic theory. It seeks to establish a productive convergence between environmental justice studies and what might be termed “Anthropocene studies.” Dominant narratives of the Anthropocene tend to describe the human species as a universalized, undifferentiated whole broadly responsible for the global environmental crisis. However, the hydronarratives examined in this dissertation “decolonize” this narrative by accounting for the ways in which colonialism, capitalism, and other exploitative social systems render certain communities more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe than others. By attending to these issues through problem water, this dissertation has significant implications for future research in contemporary, transnational American and postcolonial literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the energy humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on representations of resources in literary texts and other cultural productions to better grasp the inequitable distribution of environmental risk, and instances of resilience on a rapidly changing planet. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2018

My dissertation maps the "scattered hegemonies" of the British Empire in the nineteenth-century British feminist utopian tradition. Beyond recovering this significant tradition of feminist thought and women's writing, my project considers the way these works both contest and replicate the dominant hegemony of the Victorian period. In the first chapter, "A Feminist Satirical Disutopia, Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett's New Amazonia," I argue that New Amazoniais a satirical disutopiathat bears witness to the dystopic reality of women's status in nineteenth-century Britain. Through elliptical critiques of her own feminist utopia, Corbett creates a hybrid genre, enabling a multifaceted critique of her present and the space for theorizing a feminist future. The second chapter, "The Extinction of Patriarchy: F.E. Mills Young's War of the Sexes as a Parody of Patriarchy," considers the function of the gendered role-reversal in Young's feminist utopia. War of the Sexes, like New Amazonia, is less concerned with imagining an ideal future and focuses instead on exposing and investigating gendered oppression in the Victorian period. Through role-reversal, Young critiques the separate spheres doctrine that constructs gender difference and shows that the doctrine has deleterious effects on the nation's development. While both New Amazoniaand War of the Sexescritique gender inequality through role-reversal, Florence Dixie's Glorianadirectly addresses inequality through sustained gender performance. In "From Reform to Revolution: Gender Subversion in Florence Dixie's Gloriana," I aver that Dixie uses the title character's cross-dressing to undermine the gender roles created by the separate spheres doctrine. Throughout Gloriana, Dixie illustrates that gender is a social construction and that gendered oppression has a complex relationship to other intersecting forms of oppression, especially classism and imperialism. In "India as Feminist Utopia: Gender, Identity, and Nation in Amelia Garland Mears' Mercia," I demonstrate that Mears unlike Dixie, sees the scattered hegemonies of Victorian culture as too embedded to correct. Whereas Dixie's heroine starts a feminist revolution in Britain, Mears' heroine abandons England to find feminist utopia in India. Yet even as Mears replicates stereotypes and exoticizes the Other, she, like Dixie, recognizes the value of intersectional feminist critique. All four of these chapters highlight the heterogeneity of feminist thought to be found in nineteenth-century feminist utopias. Yet, even the most disparate visions of a feminist future respond to the same scattered hegemonies of the British Empire. In the conclusion, I bring two feminist utopias not traditionally categorized as British into the conversation: Annie Denton Cridge's Man's Rightsand Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's Sultana's Dream. I include Cridge and Hossain as necessary components to complicate my analysis of the transnational flows of knowledge and the ways in which the scattered hegemonies of Empire continue to be replicated in Victorian literary studies and contemporary feminist thought in the Global North. I argue that the exclusion of works like Cridge's and Hossain's from the study of British literature further illustrates the persistent adherence to imperialistic nationalism in the Global North and point to a Global Anglophone feminist utopian tradition.

En prenant appui sur dix romans anglophones contemporains par les auteures indiennes et pakistanaises, cette étude explore et évalue les enjeux politiques et poétiques de la représentation de l'amitié et de l'amour inter-classes dans une littérature souvent considérée comme essentiellement ‘élitiste'. Cette thèse s'écarte de l'approche habituelle dans les études postcoloniales qui privilégie l'idée d'hybridité conçue uniquement en termes binaires (Occident/Orient ou Nord/Sud) et au cœur de l'étude se trouvent la figure du subalterne et la négociation complexe des identités liées à la classe, à la caste et au sexe dans le sous-continent indien. Si les textes examinés révèlent la précarité des rapports humains qui transgressent les diverses frontières sociales, ils soulignent également leurs possibilités contestataires. Cette étude s'intéresse aussi aux enjeux éthiques des choix formels dont témoignent les textes examinés et à la manière dont ces choix peuvent à la fois confirmer et contredire le projet politique du texte. / This dissertation is a detailed analysis of ten contemporary Anglophone novels by women writers from India and Pakistan. It explores and evaluates the politics as well as the poetics of the literary depiction of cross-class love and friendship in Anglophone literature of the Indian sub-continent, which is often considered ‘elitist'. The figure of the subaltern lies at the heart of our study and by focusing on the portrayal of the negotiation of class, caste and gender identities in the Indian sub-continent, this dissertation moves away from postcolonial studies' customary focus on the notion of hybridity, often conceived solely in East/West or North/South terms. The texts examined reveal not only the tenuousness of cross-class relationships but also underscore their subversive possibilities. The ethical ramifications of questions of form are also explored as are the ways in which the poetics of a text can both confirm and contradict its politics.

No description available.

ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS RE-IMAGINING THE VICTORIAN CLASSICS: POSTCOLONIAL FEMINIST REWRITINGS OF EMILY BRONTË by Yannel M. Celestrin Florida International University, 2018 Miami, Florida Professor Martha Schoolman, Major Professor Through a post-structural lens, I will focus on the Caribbean, specifically Cuba, Guadeloupe, Marie-Galante, and Roseau, and how the history of colonialism impacted these islands. As the primary text of my thesis begins during the Cuban War of Independence of the 1890s, I will use this timeframe as the starting point of my analysis. In my thesis, I will compare Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heightsand Maryse Condé’s Windward Heights. Specifically, I will examine Condé’s processes of reimagining and rewriting Brontë’s narrative by deconstructing the notions of history, race, gender, and class. I will also explore ways in which Condé disrupts the hegemonic and linear notions of narrative temporality in an attempt to unsilence the voices of colonized subjects. I argue that Condé’s work is a significant contribution to the practice of rewriting as well as to the canon of Caribbean literary history. I argue that the very process of rewriting is a powerful mode of resistance against colonizing powers and hegemonic discourse.