The Global Environmental Novel and the Politics of Food
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University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2018 The Global Environmental Novel And The Politics Of Food Brooke Jamieson Stanley University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the African Languages and Societies Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Environmental Law Commons, Environmental Policy Commons, and the Environmental Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Stanley, Brooke Jamieson, "The Global Environmental Novel And The Politics Of Food" (2018). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2920. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2920 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2920 For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Global Environmental Novel And The Politics Of Food Abstract Consumption drives both global capitalism and the lives of literary texts, which may be consumed in two senses: they are purchased and they are read. Most literally, consumption means ingesting food. To consume is also to use environmental resources. In this dissertation, I scrutinize the entanglement of these several modes of consumption. I focus on food systems in an emergent literary genre, the “global environmental novel”: the contemporary novel that illuminates the intertwining of globalization and the environment. Such fictions come from both global South and North. I discuss contemporary authors from South Africa (Zakes Mda and Zoë Wicomb), South Asia (Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy), and the US (Ruth Ozeki), as well as predecessors from South Asia (Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay) and Ghana (Ama Ata Aidoo). Operating at the intersection of postcolonial studies, environmental humanities, and food studies, I situate novels in relation to social movements that invoke food, globalization, and environment. I also engage with ecofeminism, queer theory, modernist studies, and theories of the contemporary novel. The project explores the multifaceted social and environmental injustices, as well as possibilities for resistance, that are encapsulated or indexed by food. Food politics, I argue, are key to the global environmental novel: both in the realist sense that environmental justice struggles cluster around food, and in informing novelistic strategies to manage the scalar challenges of globalization and global environment. Such mammoth objects provoke a representational crisis: how can we picture (let alone save) something as large as the globe? To resort to abstraction or generalization is to universalize, to flatten out the unevenness of contributions and vulnerabilities to environmental catastrophe among different populations. To instead keep local particularity present while representing globality, global environmental novels synthesize the polyscalar facility of narrative fiction with the polyscalar nature of food politics. Food is immediate, somatic, quotidian, and intimate. Eating cultures and food access are also key to community and cultural identity. And food systems are expressions of power under global capitalism. Resonating across all these scales, food politics are an avenue to global yet specific narratives of entanglement between globalization and the environment. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group English First Advisor Rita Barnard Keywords environment, food, globalization, postcolonial, South Africa, South Asia Subject Categories African Languages and Societies | English Language and Literature | Environmental Law | Environmental Policy | Environmental Sciences This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2920 THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL NOVEL AND THE POLITICS OF FOOD Brooke Jamieson Stanley A DISSERTATION in English Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2018 Supervisor of Dissertation Rita Barnard Professor of English and Comparative Literature Director, Comparative Literature Program Graduate Group Chairperson David Eng Richard L. Fisher Professor of English Graduate Chair, English Dissertation Committee Ania Loomba Jed Esty Catherine Bryson Professor of English Vartan Gregorian Professor of English Department Chair, English THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL NOVEL AND THE POLITICS OF FOOD COPYRIGHT 2018 Brooke Jamieson Stanley This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 4.0 International License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Stanley _ iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to my wonderful dissertation committee: Rita Barnard, Ania Loomba, and Jed Esty. Your range of expertise and reading styles have not only made this project possible, but also taught me skills that I’ll carry far beyond. I thank you for the many kinds of generosity with which you approached my work. Rita, thank you for sharing your formidable intellect and for always being in my corner. You are a loyal, warm, and wise advisor. You’ve introduced me to so many of the texts and ideas that have mattered to this project, and been supportive as the project has shifted throughout these years. You’ve provided me with countless opportunities and been a cheerful, friendly face as well as an excellent reader. I can’t thank you enough. Ania, thank you enough for the care and attention with which you’ve read my work, and the openness with which we’ve discussed my writing and my experience of Penn. You’ve spent more time with my work than I could have asked for, pointed me to crucial sources, and provided me with invaluable feedback. I’m a much better writer for it. Thank you for always telling me what you thought. Jed, thank you for joining a committee that you weren’t sure needed you, and proving over and over again that it did. (At least, you’ve proved that to me.) You are a generous and generative reader, with an uncanny ability to find the main thread and help me synthesize. Thank you for being a committed and thoughtful source of support, feedback, and enthusiasm. Thank you to the other faculty who encouraged and supported me, perhaps more than they realized, and to several excellent thinkers who left a mark on this project: Dana Phillips, Tsitsi Jaji, Melissa Sanchez, Paul Saint-Amour, Michael Gamer, Emily Steinlight, Rahul Mukherjee, David Eng, Suvir Kaul, Jessica Martell, Russ Kinner, Martin Premoli, Aaron Bartels-Swindells, Kristina Mitchell, Alvin Kim, Nick Millman, and Vikrant Dadawala. Thank you to Kerry Stanley, a favorite environmentalist; Jo Ann Stanley, a favorite teacher; Corinne Stanley, a favorite bibliophile; and Davy Knittle, the most energetic and loyal of readers. • An article-length version of Chapter Five is forthcoming in Modernism and Food Studies , edited by Jessica Martell, Adam Fajardo, and Philip Keel Geheber (University Press of Florida). Chapter One’s inspiration came in part from a very different piece, co- authored with Walter Dana Phillips: “South African Ecocriticism: Landscapes, Animals, and Environmental Justice,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism Online , edited by Greg Garrard, Oxford University Press, 2017. Stanley _ iv ABSTRACT THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL NOVEL AND THE POLITICS OF FOOD Brooke Stanley Rita Barnard Consumption drives both global capitalism and the lives of literary texts, which may be consumed in two senses: they are purchased and they are read. Most literally, consumption means ingesting food. To consume is also to use environmental resources. In this dissertation, I scrutinize the entanglement of these several modes of consumption. I focus on food systems in an emergent literary genre, the “global environmental novel”: the contemporary novel that illuminates the intertwining of globalization and the environment. Such fictions come from both global South and North. I discuss contemporary authors from South Africa (Zakes Mda and Zoë Wicomb), South Asia (Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy), and the US (Ruth Ozeki), as well as predecessors from South Asia (Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay) and Ghana (Ama Ata Aidoo). Operating at the intersection of postcolonial studies, environmental humanities, and food studies, I situate novels in relation to social movements that invoke food, globalization, and environment. I also engage with ecofeminism, queer theory, modernist studies, and theories of the contemporary novel. The project explores the multifaceted social and environmental injustices, as well as possibilities for resistance, that are encapsulated or indexed by food. Food politics, I argue, are key to the global environmental novel: both in the realist sense that environmental justice struggles cluster around food, and in informing Stanley _ v novelistic strategies to manage the scalar challenges of globalization and global environment. Such mammoth objects provoke a representational crisis: how can we picture (let alone save) something as large as the globe? To resort to abstraction or generalization is to universalize, to flatten out the unevenness of contributions and vulnerabilities to environmental catastrophe among different populations. To instead keep local particularity present while representing globality, global environmental novels synthesize the polyscalar facility of narrative fiction with the polyscalar nature of food politics. Food is immediate, somatic, quotidian, and intimate. Eating cultures and food access are also