Imperial ecophobia: Landscapes as sites of corruption in colonial fiction
Date
2024-05
Authors
Delaney, Talon Clausen
Major Professor
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Zuck, Rochelle
Zuck, Rochelle
Menefee, Charissa
Withers, Jeremy
Committee Member
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Abstract
For centuries, the British and American empires produced fiction set deep within their imperial territories. These novels were equal parts fantasy, ethnography, travel narrative, and testimony of life at Empire’s furthest reaches. More often than not, this literature featured a white protagonist struggling to survive against threats posed by these exoticized, foreign landscapes and the people who dwell there. Beginning with Leonora Sansay’s account of the Haitian Revolution in her epistolary novel A Secret History; Or, the Horrors of St. Domingo, this thesis aims to analyze how colonial authors used the relationships between humans and their environments to ground conceptual differences between colonized and colonizer identities. What influences do non-European landscapes exhibit over those who live there, or even those who visit for only a short while? What distinguishes the colonizers from their colonized counterparts, and what role do environments play in the reification of these differences?
Threads can be drawn from Sansay’s experiences in Haiti to Rudyard Kipling’s and Joseph Conrad’s violent odysseys through the mysticized environments of India and Africa, respectively by entwining the fields of environmental studies and postcolonial studies. In Kipling’s Kim and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, characters’ behavior with their environments will be analyzed under an ecocritical lens to explore how ecologies are used to construct social hierarchies upheld by these authors and characterize the violence they portray in their works. The conclusion explores the implications of these ecophobic ideas in modern international relationships.
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thesis