Browsing by Subject "Environmental Humanities"
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Item Composing the Gulf Coast: Narratives of Environmental Toxicity, Racial Injustice, and Carbon Energy Across Modalities(2019-05) Lapeyrouse-Cherry, JulietteThis dissertation examines Gulf Coast-centered environmental nonfiction narratives in texts across multiple genres, including nonfiction books, documentary films, and web-based interactives. These texts construct the region at the nexus of the negative geological, ecological, and human health impacts of oil extraction and petrochemical production. In the first body chapter, I analyze three nonfiction texts by journalists and academics who travel to south Louisiana and offer an outsiders’ perspective on the place, all of which I argue represent an emerging genre of elegiac travelogue. I then rhetorically analyze three documentaries on the BP spill, reading them rhetorically for oil’s visibility and invisibility, and arguing that all three films audiovisually construct, sometimes through the invocation of other senses, petroleum’s social-material impacts on the Gulf Coast through representations of sickness and toxicity, in alignment with environmental justice concerns. The final chapter begins with an analysis of two interactive maps focused on petrochemical industry-related environmental impacts along the Gulf Coast. I then place these maps within the context of scholarship and pedagogy in Writing Studies and Environmental and Energy Humanities, and conclude with teaching materials that aim to address these issues presented throughout this dissertation in an advanced undergraduate classroom, placing the issues faced by the Gulf Coast in broader national and international contexts.Item Megaprojects and Literature in Chile, Panama, and Brazil(2021-08) Frye, TimothyThis dissertation analyzes the interrelation of infrastructure, nature, and the human body in Latin American literature. At the mid-twentieth century, infrastructure became the primary tool of developmental statecraft and across Latin America megaprojects became the idols of modernity that obscured environmental effects on vulnerable populations in adjacent regions. While literary analysis of environmental change often fails to consider the complex entanglements of infrastructures and non-human nature and runs the risk of reproducing age-old binaries of nature and culture, this dissertation addresses these concerns in two ways: first, by expanding what is considered traditional infrastructure—like roads and lead pipes—to hydrologic, plant, and chemical infrastructures, and second, by analyzing how these infrastructures operate as environmental forces of power and control. This dissertation employs an assemblage theory framework that focuses on intersections of environmental change and the discourses and literatures that create meaning. The Chuquicamata mine in Northern Chile, the Panama Canal, and Zona Franca of Manaus emerge in literary works by Pablo Neruda, Gil Blas Tejeira, Joaquín Beleño, Márcio Souza, and Milton Hatoum as complex assemblages of infrastructures and non-human nature that enmesh and poison the bodies of miners, Afro-Antilleans, and those living on the urban margins of Latin America. This dissertation makes the following claims: first, literary works function as testimony that bears witness to the hidden, negative effects of megaprojects; and second, these negative effects can be traced in the literary text at the overlap between infrastructure, non-human nature, and the human body.