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Framing Environmental Justice: from American to Global Perspectives Framing Environmental Justice: From American to Global Perspectives By Ali Brox Submitted to the graduate degree program English and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson Byron Caminero-Santangelo ________________________________ Lawrence Buell ________________________________ Giselle Anatol ________________________________ Paul Outka ________________________________ Paul Stock Date Defended: July 3, 2013 ii The Dissertation Committee for Ali Brox certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Framing Environmental Justice: From American to Global Perspectives ________________________________ Chairperson Byron Caminero-Santangelo Date approved: July 3, 2013 iii Abstract This dissertation contests the idea that environmental justice discourse emerges solely from the United States. It creates dialogue between texts that represent a traditional American environmental justice frame and those that depict situations of environmental injustice outside of U.S. borders. It identifies eight coordinates that are crucial components of what can be considered environmental justice discourse. These characteristics become a rubric for establishing a traveling theory of environmental justice and include: issues of scale, types of knowledge and the institutions that produce it, anthropocentric and ecocentric perspectives, realist and constructivist representations, individual and societal responsibilities, identity constructions like race and class, particularist and totalizing representations, and genre considerations. Analysis of Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s A Month and a Day, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide reveals that certain coordinates that comprise environmental justice discourse are more fraught than others. I focus on the role of the American activist as reader or character in the texts and how the authors emphasize the coordinates to varying degrees. I argue that the American figure’s ideology transforms when she develops an environmental double-consciousness where she becomes aware of how she sees herself but also how others view her and her position in the world. The texts reveal that scalar considerations and the positions the texts take on types of knowledge and the institutions that produce it represent the greatest divergence among environmental justice representations and become crucial elements for differentiating the ways various genres and texts from different national contexts fulfill themselves as environmental justice discourse. iv Acknowledgements I am grateful to many people for their help with this project. I would like to acknowledge the generosity of my committee for making this dissertation possible. Byron Caminero- Santangelo deserves great thanks for inciting my interest in the field and for being the ideal advisor, mentor, and friend. He has always had my best professional interests in mind, and his patience and guidance during the research and writing process have been invaluable. To Lawrence Buell I am grateful not only for his advice and suggestions about this project, but also for his gracious friendship and generous spirit. He is a model scholar, mentor, and person. Giselle Anatol has helped enormously throughout my graduate career. She always asked the right questions about my writing and revisions for this project, she has influenced my teaching, and she has been a wonderful mentor during my professionalization as a scholar. Paul Outka has pushed my scholarship, writing, and self-presentation in ways that I am truly appreciative. He is and will continue to be the reader I have in mind when framing a convincing argument. Special thanks to Paul Stock for stepping in at the last moment, which allowed me to defend on my preferred timeline. His suggestions and perspective on my project and teaching have been extremely helpful. Many friends and colleagues from Lawrence and Kansas City have supported me during this process. I particularly wish to thank my graduate school colleagues Paula Console-Soican, Gaywyn Moore, Ann Martinez, and Colin Christopher, and my lifelong friends and teammates Alane Thomas, Stephanie Mahal, and Bonnie Wohler, who keep me sane, grounded, and in good spirits. Additional thanks to the Lawrence Bikram yoga studio for keeping my mind and body able to tackle the rigors of academic life. I am thankful for the members of KU Ecojustice and the Haskell Wetlands Preservation Organization who practice the strategies and ideals on a daily v basis that I analyze in literature, and I am in debt to the professors and students of the Global Environment courses for expanding my perspectives on many of the issues in this project. I am grateful to my brother, Brian Brox, who has generously dispensed personal and professional advice that has helped me find my way in life and academia. He has been my ace in the hole, and I am indebted to him for clearing the path for me. Jānis Porietis is the soundtrack to my narrative, and he has been my partner in our journeys to earn doctorate degrees. His laughter, encouragement, and love sustained me during this project and continue to enrich my life. Finally, I am eternally grateful to my parents Al and Marcia Brox, who exposed me to the importance of the written word from an early age. Their commitment to education and their activism for social justice have been my moral guides. I can never thank them enough for their love, support, and interest in everything I choose to pursue. We did it! vi Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... vi Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 A Requiem for Nature: An American Environmental Justice Frame and Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke ................................................................................................................................. 31 Lessons from the Niger Delta: Reader Transformation in Ken Saro-Wiwa’s A Month and a Day ....................................................................................................................................................... 58 Decentering an American Activist: Global Environmental Justice in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People ........................................................................................................................................... 87 Re-Imagining Places and People in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide ..................................... 114 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 137 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 140 1 Introduction The triumph of the written word is often attained when the writer achieves union and trust with the reader, who then becomes ready to be drawn into unfamiliar territory, walking in borrowed literary shoes so to speak, toward a deeper understanding of self or society, or of foreign peoples, cultures, and situations --Chinua Achebe You write in order to change the world ... if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it --James Baldwin Achebe and Baldwin speak to the power the written word has to transform the way people perceive and potentially act. This fundamental aspect of what literature can do becomes especially significant for writers who represent people and places that face situations of environmental injustice. In fiction and nonfiction, print and film, writers and directors aim to change their audience's relationship with the world through textual representation. The ability to put multiple voices in dialogue with one another represents one of the most compelling characteristics of literature, and it is the feature that offers the most promise for developing a deeper understanding of self and others. The potential to alter the way people and places are valued through exposure to additional knowledge or different perspectives resonates with Achebe's message and reflects the task undertaken by the writers and director examined here. This project is positioned at the intersection between literary production and situations of environmental injustice worldwide. It poses two central questions: how might someone transform from mainstream environmental views to environmental justice perspectives; and how does an American environmental justice frame look when it is represented in contexts outside of the United States? To answer these questions, this project starts with an analysis of Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke to establish a recent example that uses an American environmental 2 justice frame to challenge mainstream environmental views. Lee’s framing of environmental justice is then compared to other authors’ representations of American figures and readers- viewers in situations outside of the United
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