Imagining Environmental Justice: Challenging Ethnocentric Visions in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and William Faulkner's Go Down, Moses

This thesis attempts to follow Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s idea based on what she terms “posthumanist animal studies.” Paul Outka, in drawing on theories of sublimity, trauma, and ecocriticism, sees no possibility for African Americans to escape the ethnocentric viewpoint that puts them on par with nature and their history of slavery intrinsic to it, while he explains that whites went into the wilderness to repress the trauma through their involvement in the history of slavery, leading to a “white flight.” According to him, unlike for white Americans, a sublime and intimate encounter with nature will always end for black Americans in a trauma. From the basis of “posthuman animal studies,” this thesis argues against Outka’s suggestion of African Americans’ impossibility to overcome an ethnocentric ideology. In contrast, posthuman animal studies calls for a cancelation of the concept of ethnocentrism to redefine the production of the “human”, and thus for an emancipation of African Americans from the vicious cycle of environmental trauma. In taking this approach, this thesis attempts to find new ways and models of imagining trauma free relationships with the social and natural world that discards ethnocentrism, painting visions for environmental justice. In joining the discourse already situated in the theoretical landscape, the thesis attempts to find necessary approaches to overcome this dichotomy, and argues that, if one leaves behind the ethnocentric point of view, a relationship with the natural world can be built, thus developing empowering and reciprocal relationships with their social and natural environment