ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE METAFICTION: Narrative and Politics in Contemporary Ethnic Women's Novels by Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Ruth Ozeki, and Karen Yamashita

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE METAFICTION: Narrative and Politics in Contemporary Ethnic Women's Novels by Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Ruth Ozeki, and Karen Yamashita by Summer Gioia Harrison A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2012 Date of final oral examination: May 8, 2012 The dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee: Susan Stanford Friedman, Professor of English and Women’s Studies Thomas Schaub, Professor of English Sean Teuton, Associate Professor of English and American Indian Studies Leslie Bow, Professor of English and Asian American Studies Grace Hong, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and Women’s Studies © Copyright by Summer Gioia Harrison 2012 All Rights Reserved i i Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Dissertation Abstract iii Introduction 1 Chapter One Trickster Metafiction: Native Identity and Survival 38 Environmentalism in Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls Chapter Two Trauma Metafiction: Ecological and Bodily Violence 103 in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms Chapter Three Documentary Metafiction, Media and Environmental Justice 170 in Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats Chapter Four Hypercontextual Metafiction and the Neoliberal Environment 241 in Karen Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange Epilogue 319 Works Cited 326 ii Acknowledgements I am so grateful to the many people whose encouragement has made this project possible. First I want to thank Susan Stanford Friedman for her steadfast support and thoughtful feedback throughout the years. She has been an amazing mentor to me and a model of how to do interesting, politically engaged scholarship. Thanks for always pushing me to see the big picture. Thanks also to my other committee members: Tom Schaub, Sean Teuton, Leslie Bow, and especially Grace Hong for their encouragement and advice. For their constant supply of Girl Scout cookies and prodding to pursue graduate school, I thank Victoria Rosner and the late Doug Brooks. My incomparably marvelous family and friends have supported me throughout the dissertation process and I can’t thank them enough. I’m grateful to my mom for our virtual toast and tea talks whenever I was struggling (and for the happy dances), and my dad for our long conversations about life on the balcony. To my little brother and sister, thanks for your long-suffering humor during our childhoods when I made you come to my fake English classes in the garage. To Izzy, the best five year old girl I know, thanks for the wacky songs you write and play on your tiny guitar. For our talks about the environment and being my pocket friend I thank Mindy, and for loving rocks and me I thank Niki. To Kristiane Stapleton and Danielle Warthen, you have been the best friends a girl could hope for in graduate school, and our frequent park adventures and commiseration throughout the years have kept me going. Kristiane, since you found me first semester having a “beautiful mind” moment you’ve had an uncanny ability to make my life sunnier and I can’t tell you what that has meant to me. Danielle, we’ve been through it all together and our check-in phone calls helped me through the dark nights of the soul (tink tink). Finally, I’m exceedingly grateful to Rob McAlear, who has supported me in every way throughout this process. From reading my work, to cooking delicious meals, to inventing silly games, you’ve been a constant source of joy and a true partner. I could not have finished this project without your encouragement and sense of whimsy. iii iii Dissertation Abstract Environmental Justice Metafiction: Narrative and Politics in Contemporary Ethnic Women's Novels by Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Ruth Ozeki, and Karen Yamashita This dissertation argues that ethnic minority women authors are creating new models of metafiction—fiction which thematizes or theorizes storytelling—designed specifically to target environmental inequalities important in their communities and in a larger global context. Since environmental injustice has a disproportionate impact on women, low-income populations, and people of color, my project examines the intersection of literary narratives with social, economic, and historical narratives to understand how the exploitation of nature is linked to the exploitation of people. In particular, I examine recent novels by Native and Asian American authors, including Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls (2004), Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms (1995), Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats (1998), and Karen Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997) to show how a formal and thematic focus on storytelling allows these writers to scrutinize the role narratives play in perpetuating environmental injustice and to construct counter- narratives which encourage political self-consciousness and change. To account for the novels’ metafictive political force, this project identifies four different models of metafiction, including “trickster” (Erdrich), “trauma” (Hogan), “documentary” (Ozeki), and “hypercontextual” (Yamashita), and then reveals how these models are used to negotiate specific environmental justice issues such as the exploitation of natural iv resources and hydroelectric damming on Native lands, factory farming, and urban degradation. Revising postmodern approaches to metafiction, I claim that these contemporary texts draw on alternative and ethnic storytelling/activist traditions not only to highlight the “constructedness” of narratives, but also the material effects of those constructions for people and environments. In so doing, this project critiques the mainstream environmental movement’s tendency to ignore race, gender, class, and non-wilderness environments. Although environmental justice scholarship is expanding definitions of the environment to include toxic/built spaces, my project argues for the need to focus on the literary and cultural narratives about these landscapes in addition to gathering social and scientific data. Ultimately, I claim that metafiction, and the humanities more broadly, are especially suited to addressing environmental injustice because understanding this phenomenon requires us to reflect on the relationship between “how” we tell stories and “how” we act in the world. 1 Introduction: Environmental Justice Metafiction Doo Dat got a message for the hood: It’s time to go green. We gotta go green. The food ain’t fresh and the air ain’t clean. My little cousin got asthma, auntie got cancer. Look, I’m from the hood, we need better food and better air. You probably wouldn’t ever care. Why? You ain’t ever there. Man we need green jobs, we don’t need no jails. —Markese “Doo Dat” Bryant, “The Dream Reborn” These lyrics, from a 2009 song by young musical artist Markese “Doo Dat” Bryant, are an example of an emerging movement known as “green hip hop.” Bryant is affiliated with Green For All, a national organization founded in 2007 which brings together musical artists, community leaders, and universities to promote an “inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.” Green hip hop is an exciting part of a growing grassroots movement that, as Bryant says, connects the “environmental justice aspect with the social justice aspect” (“Behind”). Bryant specifically situates his green “message for the hood” in terms of socioenvironmental justice. Rather than valorizing wilderness spaces, the song focuses on neighborhoods where problems like respiratory illness, lack of access to fresh food, and cancers from environmental toxins are most concentrated. Moreover, the song connects environmental and economic issues by opposing “green jobs” with “jails,” implying that without access to living-wage jobs many low-income and minority urban youth are forced to earn a living through crime. We need a new “green market” to replace the “black market” of the drug trade, he suggests, which perpetuates the destruction of communities and leads to high rates of 2 incarceration. Bryant’s own experience growing up is the source of his personal commitment to “greening the hood”: he lost his mother to drug addiction and his father to prison, and was raised by his grandmother in an East Oakland neighborhood where toxic sludge ran through a concrete channel in his backyard and the elementary school playground was mere feet from a smog-congested freeway. This kind of green rapping reflects a new environmental movement taking its cues not from the primarily white environmental conservation movement, but from minority traditions of resistance to injustice. Bryant’s music references figures like Martin Luther King and Barak Obama instead of Henry David Thoreau or John Muir. Redefining “green” as a “black” issue, he sings about Obama as a positive example of a growing concern with environmental justice, saying “my president is black but he’s going green.” Not only does this song emphasize the publicly ignored environmental issues in low-income minority communities but it also self-consciously reflects on the role of hip hop in encouraging political change. The song begins with a meta-commentary on the function of hip hop to provide valuable insight, as we hear a clip of President Obama saying “the thing about hip hop today, it’s smart, it’s insightful.” In the song itself, Bryant makes a meta-critique of popular music that ignores environmental injustice, saying that “rappers never rap about it . while these companies going toxic in my backyard.” Meanwhile, he indicts economic and social narratives that legitimate environmental

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