Composing the Gulf Coast: Narratives of Environmental Toxicity, Racial Injustice, and Carbon Energy Across Modalities
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Composing the Gulf Coast: Narratives of Environmental Toxicity, Racial Injustice, and Carbon Energy Across Modalities A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Juliette Michèle Lapeyrouse-Cherry IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Daniel J. Philippon, Adviser May 2019 © Juliette Lapeyrouse-Cherry 2019 i Acknowledgements I want to begin by thanking my dissertation committee. Thanks especially to my advisor Dan Philippon, for the many helpful comments and words of encouragement. Thank you, Ron Greene, for being one of the most influential teachers I’ve ever had and for consistently asking the most thought-provoking questions. Thank you, Tom Reynolds, for always being available to talk with me about writing pedagogy and ecocomposition. And finally, thank you, Charlotte Melin, for your perspective from the environmental humanities, and for giving me the opportunity, along with Dan, to work with the Environmental Humanities Initiative. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to learn from many great teachers over the course of my graduate education. In particular, I want to thank Clancy Ratliff, my MA advisor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who taught me how to be a writing teacher. I am also thankful to have worked with two phenomenal scholars early in my time at the University of Minnesota: the late Carol Berkenkotter, who was my first advisor and shaped my thinking on genre, and Christina Haas, Professor Emerita, whose sharp questions and thoughtful critiques made me a better thinker and writer. It has been a privilege to be part of the community of graduate students in the Department of Writing Studies over the past 5 years. I am especially grateful Ryan Eichberger; I couldn’t have asked for a better friend on this intellectual journey. I look forward to sharing cat content for many years to come. Jason Tham, it has been so fun learning with you. Thank you, Alexander Champoux, a true and dear friend, for chats about pedagogy and many delicious meals. Thank you, Kari Campeau, for your crucial feedback as I wrote Chapter 3. Finally, thank you, Niki Ciulla, Evelyn Miesenbacher, and Eddie Nevarez, for your perspectives and feedback, which were integral to the development of my final chapter. I must also thank my parents, who have always encouraged me to be curious. Thank you for reading to me, for the hours and days spent at the library, and for making it a priority to travel with me so I could experience other cultures. I am also grateful for my sister, Marielle, who made me an aunt to Margot, the coolest kid I’ve ever met. And finally, I am grateful for Jacob, who has been a steadfast and patient partner for almost a decade, and who has read and talked with me about pretty much all of my research during my graduate studies, all while excelling in his own pursuits. Thank you, I love you, and I’m proud of you. ii Dedication For Margot Camille Selig, my favorite little Southerner. iii Abstract This 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. iv Table of Contents List of Tables v List of Figures vi Chapter 1 1 Chapter 2 17 Chapter 3 119 Chapter 4 157 Bibliography 198 v List of Tables Table 4.1: Sample Course Schedule 187 vi List of Figures Figure 3.1: Whale Covered in Oil 134 Figure 3.2: BP Spill Oil Collected by Latham Smith 136 Figure 3.3: Safety Smell Test 137 Figure 3.4: Shrimpers with an Oily Shrimp and Plastic Bag 139 Figure 3.5: Morgan City’s Water Tower 141 Figure 3.6: View of Oil Infrastructure from a Fishing Boat 141 Figure 3.7: Illustration of Dispersant in Action 1143 Figure 3.8: Impacts of Fresh and Salt Water on Oysters 145 Figure 3.9: Tickells and a Fisherman on a Boat in the Gulf 147 Figure 3.10: Impact of Corexit Exposure 148 Figure 3.11: Harris Discusses BP Claims with a Local Resident 151 Figure 3.12: Knights of Columbus at the Festival Mass 154 Figure 4.1: Red Dots Identify Industrial Facilities 161 vii Figure 4.2: Blue Pinpoints Identify Municipalities at Risk 162 Figure 4.3: Gold Pinpoints Identify Hazardous/Disaster Sites 162 Figure 4.4: Deepwater Horizon Roadkill Tollbooth Main Page 164 Figure 4.5: Video Clip on Roadkill Tollbooth Path 169 Figure 4.6: Misrach’s “Crucifix and Union Carbide Plant” (1998) 183 Figure 4.7: Example Slide from Lecture 184 Figure 4.8: Example Story Map Panel 195 1 Chapter 1 Introduction: Reading the Anthropocene on the Gulf Coast Introduction The Mississippi River has shaped South Louisiana and has been shaped by its inhabitants; Native Americans manipulated the landscape of Louisiana through shell middens that impacted marsh ecology prior to the arrival of Europeans (Kidder). These populations also occupied natural levees near present-day New Orleans before the French claimed the land; these levees were subsequently expanded using slave labor to protect land from periodic flooding. Levee building eventually became so crucial to colonial agricultural practice that it served as a driver for the increased importation of enslaved Africans (Morris, 2000). Thus while humans have long interacted with the Mississippi River system, it was European colonization and plantation agriculture that fueled the rise of the modern levee system still maintained today. The history of domination and exploitation of Louisiana’s landscape by colonial, governmental, and corporate interests is inseparable from systemic racism. French colonial settlements in Louisiana began at the turn of the eighteenth century, and within two decades, African slaves were being forced to labor on sugar plantations. In 1724, in response to the slave population overtaking the colonial population, the Code Noir was introduced, aiming to exert more control over the slaves (Ducre, 2008). This legal designation of racial inferiority was also eventually formally applied to Native American 2 populations (Milne, 2015). In the twentieth century, as the center of Louisiana’s economy shifted from agriculture to petrochemicals, the levee system that had been maintained for the plantation system was repurposed. Robert Bullard explains, “The Mississippi River served as a magnet for petrochemical companies because of its capacity for carrying barges and its access to disposal of chemical waste” (2000, p. 103). Though the economy has shifted from export-focused plantation agriculture dependent on slave labor to oil and petrochemicals, a similar exploitative attitude toward resources interacts with systemic racism to perpetuate environmental racism (Wright, 2003, pp. 126–127). Over the course of the 20th century many petrochemical plants were established along the Mississippi River in south Louisiana, attracted by the transportation opportunities of the river along with incentives offered by the state; eventually this area came to be known as the petrochemical corridor (Wright, 2003, p. 128). A continuity of extractive systems exists between Louisiana’s plantation economy1 and culture and the petrochemical industry along the banks of the Mississippi River and the Louisiana Gulf Coast. Subsidence fueled by the river’s levee system, along with the dredging of offshore oil industry canals, have led to rapid coastal land loss (Freudenburg & Gramling, 1994), and these factors, in conjunction with climate-change induced sea level rise and high concentrations of pollution, endanger Gulf Coast communities and the ecosystems in which they are enmeshed. For instance, 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster can be understood in the context of a long history of 1 See Mintz, 1986 on sugar and the concept of plantation economy. 3 extractive economy,2 colonial ways of thinking that have disproportionately impacted poor communities of color along the Gulf Coast, and imbalanced systems of power in which industry shapes policy and narrative. In this dissertation, I examine Gulf Coast-centered environmental nonfiction narratives, which construct the region at the nexus of the negative geological, ecological, and human health impacts of oil extraction and petrochemical production. In particular, I focus on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, the largest