Octavia Butlers Kindred and Nalo Hopkinsons Brown Girl in the Ring are African diasporic texts that trouble the boundaries of nation, home, time, and genre, as they are traditionally defined. This thesis argues that Butler and Hopkinson accomplish such a troubling through the use of post-apocalyptic frameworks that displace the characters in time and space in their respective national contexts. With Kindred set in the United States and Brown Girl in Canada, the effect of national context on the experience of post-apocalypse in the African diaspora is felt strongly, making salient the differences between the United States melting pot and Canadas government sanctioned multiculturalism. Through exploring scholarly theorizations of time, belonging, home, and nation within and without the African diaspora, I argue that the dynamic differences and similarities Brown Girl and Kindred offer within their post-apocalyptic contexts mirror those that exist for literary analysis of African diasporic texts more broadly. This theoretical basis helps clarify the productive possibility of considering certain African diasporic texts as post-apocalyptic without foreclosing their position within existing literary genres, including speculative and science fiction, and the neo-slave narrative. Butler and Hopkinsons texts help us understand that post-apocalypse in the African diaspora presents more than a fevered warning of what could come if our actions continued on unfettered in certain trajectories. Post-apocalypse is a reminder of a past that will not disappear, and a call to embrace the longevity of this past in the interest of best serving our possible futures.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-06282013-100304 |
| Date | 17 July 2013 |
| Creators | Averin, Rosalee Coleen |
| Contributors | Ifeoma Nwankwo, Vera Kutzinski |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-06282013-100304/ |
| Rights | restricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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