Intepe, Demet (2020) Environmental justice and writers as activists in multi-ethnic U.S. literatures, film, and theater. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This thesis critically engages with the literary response to environmental degradation during late capitalism that entrenches further racial and class inequalities. The rampant exploitation of natural resources by neoliberal and neo-colonial systems has been registered in a number of fiction and non-fiction works. This project focuses on the treatment of the theme of environmental injustice by writers from ethnic minority backgrounds in the US and traces the connection between race and classbased inequalities and environmental dispossession.

Environmental justice has been widely studied across disciplines in the last three decades. The scholarly interest in the topic has been piqued due to drastic environmental degradation, uneven distribution of natural resources and pollution, and the highly uneven impact of climate change. Although literary scholarship has shown keen interest in environmental justice, little attention has been dedicated to studying environmental justice with emphasis on ethnic minority writers and the strategies of resistance they offer through their works in a comparative fashion. Drawing on Jason W. Moore’s world-ecological paradigm of capitalism and new approaches to environmental justice, I investigate the ways in which ethnic minority writers are structurally better placed to explore the damaging effects of environmental degradation.

This thesis finds that, as in the civil rights movement, ethnic minority writers and artists are today at the forefront of the struggle against environmental injustice through their creative work and activism. Therefore, this project not only studies the creative response to conditions of environmental degradation, but also investigates the complex affiliation of “writer-activists” vis-a-vis the ethnic communities from which they originate, as well as the global literary market in which they must operate. The writers and artists under study engage in a form of truth-telling that allows them to function as nodes in a global struggle against environmental injustice, even as they secure often privileged positions within the circuits of the global culture industry. The thesis concludes that the complex positions writer-activists hold in return shape the aesthetic forms they deploy in their response to environmental inequality.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GE Environmental Sciences H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN1993 Motion Pictures P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN2000 Dramatic representation. The Theater
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Environmental justice, Environmental justice -- Fiction -- United States, Environmentalism in motion pictures, Environmentalism on television, Minority authors
Official Date:	January 2020
Dates:	Date Event January 2020 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo ; Lawrence, Nicholas
Sponsors:	Prins Bernhard Fonds ; British Federation of Women Graduates
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	viii, 223 leaves : illustrations
Language:	eng

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