Unfenceable Sovereignties: Race, Nature, and the Genres of Possession in American Literature

This dissertation asserts that climate change is a narrative problem in addition to a scientific one. I show the representational challenges of climate change to be bound to the complexities of race and nature expressed in the nineteenth-century American environmental imagination. In turn, I uncover an early and unbroken environmentaljustice tradition that precedes and exceeds what is currently called the United States. Instead of separating histories of race from the environment and environmentalism, or assuming that histories and literatures of American environmentalism run counter to the nation’s racial and environmental exploits, I uncover canonical nineteenth-century American environmentalist texts that code the land as “naturally” what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls “white possession” through their use of literary genre. Extending the genealogical method utilized by American and Indigenous studies scholars, I build a genealogy of white possession through literary genre, or genrealogy. My genreaology pursues both functions of the genealogical method, theorizing power relations more clearly and thinking otherwise. It establishes how literary genres like apocalypse, the gothic, or national allegory can uphold or obstruct “naturalized sovereignty,” a form of power that proclaims the “natural”-ness of settler colonial understandings of land as property which hides the extractive violences of white supremacy and settler capitalism. I complicate conventional readings of the American canon that see nineteenth-century writers as merely endorsing land theft, environmental exploitation, and racial hierarchies. Instead, I excavate a counter-archive of early environmental justice literature that is anti-colonial, genrecidal, and survivance-oriented. I follow this counter-archive into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to clarify the genrecidal environmental imagination, which uses literary genres to eradicate the logics of white possession and to instead build ecologies dedicated to human and other-than-human survivance. Throughout this project, I draw on theories from Indigenous studies, environmental justice scholars, settler colonial and whiteness studies, American studies, the environmental humanities, and genre studies. Through the methodology of genrealogy and the mode of genrecide, I emphasize the political complexity and diversity of coalition building imperative to imagining and building antiracist environmental movements in the context of climate change. This dissertation includes both previously published and unpublished material