Racialized Ecologies and the Literary Afterlives of the British Empire

Abstract

Racialized Ecologies and the Literary Afterlives of the British Empire is an interdisciplinary dissertation that places nineteenth-century alongside neo-Victorian texts, and thereby spans a wide range of formerly-colonized locations and brings together postcolonial literary studies and the environmental humanities. Responding to recent calls to “undiscipline” Victorian studies, my aim is twofold. First, to explore connections between nineteenth-century processes of racialization, knowledge about the natural world, and the colonial appropriation and management of natural resources; second, to understand how contemporary authors are using nineteenth-century forms alongside speculative conceptions of nature to grapple with the lingering effects of British imperialism. I use an expansive and palimpsestic definition of the term “speculation” or “speculative fiction” to analyze neo-Victorian texts that make visible the complexity of racialized experience under two often-overlooked locations with distinct relationships to the British Empire. I claim that speculation can take multiple forms: thematic, formal, analytic, and epistemological. The contemporary authors I study use what I term formal speculation to create alternate versions of our familiar world, therefore requiring that characters, and, in turn, the reader, question their understanding of reality. In approaching these texts, I attempt to analyze speculatively in order to highlight the ameliorative possibilities post-colonial literature might offer as we attempt to grapple with the ongoing aftereffects of imperialism. The dissertation begins by drawing out connections between affect, ecological thought, resource management, and processes of racialization and nativization before proceeding to draw connections between objective legal and scientific knowledge and race. I then explore how legal and scientific objectivity informed racialized processes of colonial resource management, and, in turn, how contemporary authors are drawing attention to the continued resonances and sometimes surprising trans-continental interconnections of British imperialism. The first chapter uses the poetry of Charlotte Smith and The History of Mary Prince (1831) to consider how different forms of knowledge about the natural world—including naturalism, experiential knowledge involving contact with nature, medical folk knowledge, and more—become racialized and are, in turn, used to justify racialization and racial exploitation. The second chapter, concerning Emily Brontё’s Wuthering Heights and Thomas Carlyle’s racist pamphlet, “Occasional Discourse on the N* Question” (1849), takes on questions of the racial nature of resource management itself, and studies how “proper” and “improper” forms of resource management were used as justification to divest colonized subjects of their access to land. This chapter connects the claim of property ownership as well to those of nativeness, belonging, and naturalization. In the third chapter, I analyze early detective fiction, including Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and novels, to demonstrate how racialized processes and theories of knowledge-creation, such as objectivity, bled into and ultimately informed policing and the law. Chapter four concerns Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013) and examines the legal manipulation of nineteenth-century treaty language for the appropriation of natural resources, and Catton’s speculative use of astrology to highlight injustices in the colonial legal system. Finally, fifth chapter takes up the speculative possibilities of fungi for decolonizing readings of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s novel, Mexican Gothic (2020).