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- All Subjects: English Literature
- Genre: Academic theses
- Creators: Adamson, Joni
Description
This dissertation considers the potential of desire to protect humans, animals, and the environment in the biopolitical times of late capitalism. Through readings of recent South African Literature in English from a postcolonial ecocritical perspective, this project theorizes desire as a mode of resistance to the neocolonial and capitalist instrumentalization of communities of humans and nonhumans, where they are often seen as mere "resources" awaiting consumption and transformation into profit. Deleuze and Guattari posit this overconsumption as stemming in part from capitalism's deployment of the psychoanalytic definition of desire as lack, where all desires are defined according to the same tragedy and brought into a money economy. By defining desire, capitalism seeks to limit the productive unconscious and attempts to create manageable subjects who perform the work of the capitalist machine--subjects that facilitate the extraction of surplus value and pleasure for themselves and the dominant classes. Thinking desire differently as positive and as potentially revolutionary, after Deleuze and Guattari, offers possible resistances to this biopolitical management. This different, positive desire can also change views of others and the world as existing solely for human consumption: views which so often risk bodies towards death and render communities unsustainable. The representations of human and animal desires (and often their cross-species desires) in this literature imagine relationships to the world otherwise, outside of a colonial legacy, where ethical response obtains instead of the consumption of others and the environment by the dominant subjects of capitalism. This project also considers other attempts to protect communities such as animal rights, arguing that rethinking desire is a necessary corollary in the effort to protect communities and lives that are made available for a "non-criminal putting to death" since positive desire precedes the passing of any such laws and must exist for their proper administration. These texts often demonstrate the law's failures to protect communities through portraying corrupt officials who risk the communities they are charged with protecting when their protection competes with government officials' personal capitalist ambitions. Desire offers opportunities for imagining other creative options towards protecting communities, outside of legal discourse.
ContributorsPrice, Jason (Author) / Broglio, Ron (Thesis advisor) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Mallot, J. Edward (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
ABSTRACT
Much attention has been given to food justice in both academic and activist communities as of late. This project adds to the growing discourse around food justice by using creative works produced by members of the black community as case studies to analyze the relationship between food justice and the criminal justice system in their neighborhoods. In particular, this project examines two unique sources of creative expression from the black community. The first is the novel Been ‘Bout Dat, the story of a young boy Fattz, who is born into the projects of New Orleans and takes to street life in order to provide for his siblings and struggling single mother. Written in prison by Johnny Davis it offers a valuable perspective that is combined with historical context and statistical support to construct an understanding of how concepts of food and criminal justice influence each other. The second source is the lyrical content of several hip-hop songs from rappers such as Tupac Shakur, Mos Def, Nas, and Young Jeezy. Comparing the content of these works and the lived realities expressed in both brings new and useful insights about food justice and criminal justice as experienced in poor minority communities. Recognizing this relationship may illuminate solutions to food justice issues through criminal justice reform as well as inform fresh efforts at community renewal.
Much attention has been given to food justice in both academic and activist communities as of late. This project adds to the growing discourse around food justice by using creative works produced by members of the black community as case studies to analyze the relationship between food justice and the criminal justice system in their neighborhoods. In particular, this project examines two unique sources of creative expression from the black community. The first is the novel Been ‘Bout Dat, the story of a young boy Fattz, who is born into the projects of New Orleans and takes to street life in order to provide for his siblings and struggling single mother. Written in prison by Johnny Davis it offers a valuable perspective that is combined with historical context and statistical support to construct an understanding of how concepts of food and criminal justice influence each other. The second source is the lyrical content of several hip-hop songs from rappers such as Tupac Shakur, Mos Def, Nas, and Young Jeezy. Comparing the content of these works and the lived realities expressed in both brings new and useful insights about food justice and criminal justice as experienced in poor minority communities. Recognizing this relationship may illuminate solutions to food justice issues through criminal justice reform as well as inform fresh efforts at community renewal.
ContributorsDennis, Matthew (Author) / Delmont, Matthew (Thesis advisor) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Killsback, Leo (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
In Writing the Goodlife Ybarra details the reasons why Mexican American Literature emphasizes domestic life while seeming not to address human relationship to the environment. Ybarra reveals how environmental relationships take shape within the domestic lives of characters in Mexican American Literature, rather than in ‘wilderness’ settings as is often the case with Anglo American literature. In my own reading of Mexican American novels, I have been interested in how affect, or the emotional, also illuminates the human-nonhuman relationships within and outside of domesticity. To explore this area of interest and analysis, I call upon Teresa Brennan’s Transmission of Affect, which provides a technical language for understanding emotion. Brennan writes that the transmission of affect occurs “via an interaction with other people” [and] that the emotions of “one person, and the enhancing and depressing energies these affects entail, can enter into another” (Brennan 3). Describing the limits of her work, Brennan states that the environment in which human affective interactions occur are always a factor but, in her book, she is not “investigating environmental factors” if the word “environment” means human-nature relationships. That area of analysis falls “outside the scope of [her] book” (Brennan 8).
Stepping into that opening, I bring Ybarra’s insights on ‘the good life’ together with Brennan’s technical language of affect to lay out the argument of my thesis. I build and expand understandings of domesticity, perceptions of environment, and transmission of affect with an analysis of three representative works of Mexican American Literature: Like Water For Chocolate 1989 by Laura Esquivel, So Far From God 1993 by Ana Castillo, and Bless Me, Ultima 1972 by Rudolfo Anaya. Linking analysis of affect to analysis of Mexican American domestic literary representations (that are replete with concepts of human-nonhuman relationships) highlights the intersectionality and multisubjectivity of these three important novels. I also trace Ybarra’s discussion of the “good life” to its South America roots in the concept of “buen vivir” as I explore how understanding traditional indigenous scientific literacies helps fortify Ybarra’s notion that the environmental is always at work within representation of the domestic in Mexican American literature.
ContributorsVaron, Alma Victoria (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Maring, Heather (Committee member) / Jensen, Kyle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
This thesis examines perceptions of climate change in literature through the lens of the environmental humanities, an interdisciplinary field that brings history, ecocriticism, and anthropology together to consider the environmental past, present and future. The project began in Iceland, during the Svartárkot Culture-Nature Program called “Human Ecology and Culture at Lake Mývatn 1700-2000: Dimensions of Environmental and Cultural Change”. Over the course of 10 days, director of the program, Viðar Hreinsson, an acclaimed literary and Icelandic Saga scholar, brought in researchers from different fields of study in Iceland to give students a holistically academic approach to their own environmental research. In this thesis, texts under consideration include the Icelandic Sagas, My Antonia by Willa Cather, Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita, and The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi. The thesis is supported by secondary works written by environmental humanists, including Andrew Ross, Steve Hartman, Ignacio Sanchez Cohen, and Joni Adamson, who specialize in archeological research on heritage sites in Iceland and/or study global weather patterns, prairie ecologies in the American Midwest, the history of water in the Southwest, and climate fiction. Chapter One, focusing on the Icelandic Sagas and My Antonia, argues that literature from different centuries, different cultures, and different parts of the world offers evidence that humans have been driving environmental degradation at the regional and planetary scales since at least the 1500s, especially as they have engaged in aggressive forms of settlement and colonization. Chapter Two, focused on Tropic of Orange, this argues that global environmental change leads to extreme weather and drought that is increasing climate migration from the Global South to the Global North. Chapter Three, focused on The Water Knife, argues that climate fiction gives readers the opportunity to think about and better prepare for a viable and sustainable future rather than wait for inevitable apocalypse. By exploring literature that depicts and represents climate change through time, environmental humanists have innovated new methods of analysis for teaching and thinking about what humans must understand about their impacts on ecosystems so that we can better prepare for the future.
ContributorsBurns, Kate S (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019