Anthropogenic factors contributing to more frequent and extreme weather-related events are displacing vulnerable populations and increasing the global number of food-insecure climate refugees. As food sovereignty is essential to combating climate change and ensuring sustainable futures – according to the Declaration of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda – it is important to examine accepted practices in the food industry that may threaten the sovereignty of vulnerable groups. The aim of this thesis is to explore two climate fiction novels – Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl – and how they demonstrate the connection between problematic practices in the food industry and lost food sovereignty. I also examine the novels through the lens of international documents such as the 2030 Agenda. Each novel, I argue, contributes to a growing awareness about the importance of protecting first rights to indigenous and local foods and land, or food sovereignty. The environmental humanities, and climate fiction specifically, are also contributing to a better understanding of the detrimental effects that lost sovereignty has on a people’s culture and the future sustainability of the planet. Climate fiction, as these novels illustrate, can provide case studies for understanding the inextricable link between humans and nature and allow people to imagine a better future. Placed within larger contexts that illuminate the current need for global campaigns for food sovereignty and United Nations agendas such as the 2030 Agenda, literature which demonstrates the human relationship to food can be used to enrich and strengthen application of the Agenda’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. Through imagery of seeds and regeneration, Butler and Bacigalupi illuminate the critical role of seed-carriers, or bearers of food knowledge, in intergenerational food education and sustainability. Their novels demonstrate links between environmental injustices and food insecurities – violence and displacement of climate refugees in Parable of the Sower, and biopiracy and food totalitarianism in The Windup Girl – that help readers better understand the potential power of the SDGs for planning food futures.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States Midwest stood poised to lead the nation economically, politically, and ideologically. Its literary productions of this time open upon a landscape of seemingly endless possibilities and expansive futures. My project studies the ideological constitution of these possibilities, finding that they arise from the condition of unprecedented secularity which marked early twentieth-century U.S. modernity. I employ Charles Taylor’s definition of secularization as the shift to belief as possibility rather than assumption, in which new options for belief or unbelief expand like a spiritual nova. This definition makes visible in Midwest texts the different attempts protagonists make to achieve authenticity in a secular age that offers new options for living meaningfully. Like windows onto a figurative landscape, different texts reveal unique vantages as well as startling parallels. I examine the following text grouping, which underscores the heterogeneity of the Midwest: O. E. Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth, Oscar Micheaux’s The Homesteader, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, and Black Elk and John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks. As rural texts, they collaboratively depict the rural Midwest as a region that is both heartland and subaltern, at once the center of the nation but also estranged from supposed loci of modernity. I argue that their peculiar searches for authenticity offer insight on modern selfhood in a secular age, which constitutes the meaning of the Midwest then and now.

The work of one of the most prominent German Turkish authors, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, is well known for its multilingual strategies. Her collection of short stories Mutterzunge (1990) is praised for its strategic use of literal translation to convey the linguistic hybridity of cultures that emerged following twentieth century migration from Turkey to Germany. Özdamar points to the impossibility of a homogenous language by creating bilingual neologisms and by referencing Turkish language reforms. While Mutterzunge's use of translation has been well researched, the actual practices shaping the work's translations into other languages and the reception of these translations have remained underexplored. This thesis considers how Mutterzunge’s multilingual qualities are treated in English- and Turkish-language translations, and how the receiving cultures' relationship to migration and multiculturality impact their reception. This project argues that while the English translation sacrifices many of Mutterzunge's creative neologisms to introduce Turkish German cultures to English-speaking audiences through analogy to migration from Mexico, the Turkish translation reiterates the Turkish language reform’s attempt to create a "purer" language, while successfully rendering Özdamar’s neologisms in a context where Turkey is becoming an immigrant-receiving country. As the two translations aim to acquaint their audiences with a multilingual text and the migrant culture it references, they are shaped by experiences of migration and ideas about national identity in the host nations. The thesis concludes that both translations signal a reluctance to fully represent Özdamar’s multilingualism, which points to the need for further conversations on the practices of translation of literary texts that incorporate multilingual strategies.

This thesis focuses on the nine-page diary present in Ernest J. Gaines’, A Lesson Before Dying. The diary is the only real form of communication from Jefferson, a young African American man who was sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. After being stripped of his manhood while on trial, it became a group effort to assist this man in regaining his manhood. In this thesis, the diary became the topic of focus and was examined to see why it had such an important role in the novel. Separated into three chapters, each looking at specific moments and people that helped the diary come to fruition. The first chapter focuses on key moments that helped influence the diary. The second chapter focuses specifically on the content of the diary and dissects the entries. Lastly, the third chapter focuses on the effects of the diary not on the main character but to those involved in his journey. Thus, the thesis becomes centered on answering why a nine-page chapter in the African American Vernacular English uncovered one’s manhood and ultimately defines his journey to death.

This thesis examines perceptions of climate change in literature through the lens of the environmental humanities, an interdisciplinary field that brings history, ecocriticism, and anthropology together to consider the environmental past, present and future. The project began in Iceland, during the Svartárkot Culture-Nature Program called “Human Ecology and Culture at Lake Mývatn 1700-2000: Dimensions of Environmental and Cultural Change”. Over the course of 10 days, director of the program, Viðar Hreinsson, an acclaimed literary and Icelandic Saga scholar, brought in researchers from different fields of study in Iceland to give students a holistically academic approach to their own environmental research. In this thesis, texts under consideration include the Icelandic Sagas, My Antonia by Willa Cather, Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita, and The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi. The thesis is supported by secondary works written by environmental humanists, including Andrew Ross, Steve Hartman, Ignacio Sanchez Cohen, and Joni Adamson, who specialize in archeological research on heritage sites in Iceland and/or study global weather patterns, prairie ecologies in the American Midwest, the history of water in the Southwest, and climate fiction. Chapter One, focusing on the Icelandic Sagas and My Antonia, argues that literature from different centuries, different cultures, and different parts of the world offers evidence that humans have been driving environmental degradation at the regional and planetary scales since at least the 1500s, especially as they have engaged in aggressive forms of settlement and colonization. Chapter Two, focused on Tropic of Orange, this argues that global environmental change leads to extreme weather and drought that is increasing climate migration from the Global South to the Global North. Chapter Three, focused on The Water Knife, argues that climate fiction gives readers the opportunity to think about and better prepare for a viable and sustainable future rather than wait for inevitable apocalypse. By exploring literature that depicts and represents climate change through time, environmental humanists have innovated new methods of analysis for teaching and thinking about what humans must understand about their impacts on ecosystems so that we can better prepare for the future.

This research paper examines the effects of politics on different aspects of citizenship within the United States. First, I will elaborate on the power of citizenship. Second, I will provide a broad understanding of birthright citizenship and the naturalization process. Third, I will explain how politics affects four key areas: Birthright Citizenship, Naturalization, the 2020 Census, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). I will primarily be focusing on Hispanic and/or Latino communities in America. As explained in my paper, Hispanics and Latinos are some of the fastest growing communities within the United States. Additionally, in today’s political climate, the rhetoric towards immigrants from Latin American countries makes them a particularly marginalized group in the context of the politics of citizenship.

Citizenship Politics is a term I use to distinguish how politics over citizenship is different from other political conversations and describe how politics can influence and pose a threat to citizenship as a whole in America. In this paper, I will address how politics can influence birthright citizenship, the naturalization process, and other related government initiatives. For instance, I will discuss how politics can discourage Legal Permanents Residents from seeking citizenship. This paper will also show how Citizenship Politics permeates at the federal level, such as adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. Contrastingly, an analysis into a recent League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) settlement regarding voting rights in Arizona will also be provided. Furthermore, this paper will analyze how politics leads to the creation of reactive programs like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an initiative offering temporary protection with no pathway to citizenship. In the end, this research paper offers solutions and long-term implications.

This dissertation examines cultural representations that attend to the environmental and socio-economic dynamics of contemporary water crises. It focuses on a growing, transnational body of “hydronarratives” – work by writers, filmmakers, and artists in the United States, Canada, and the postcolonial Global South that stress the historical centrality of water to capitalism. These hydronarratives reveal the uneven impacts of droughts, floods, water contamination, and sea level rise on communities marginalized along lines of race, class, and ethnicity. In doing so, they challenge narratives of “progress” conventionally associated with colonial, imperialist, and neoliberal forms of capitalism dependent on the large-scale extraction of natural resources.

Until recently, there has been little attention paid to the ways in which literary texts and other cultural productions explore the social and ecological dimensions of water resource systems. In its examination of water, this dissertation is methodologically informed by the interdisciplinary field of the energy humanities, which explores oil and other fossil fuels as cultural objects. The hydronarratives examined in this dissertation view water as a cultural object and its extraction and manipulation, as cultural practices. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways in which power, production, and human-induced environmental change intersect to create social and environmental sacrifice zones.

This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary environmental humanities approach, drawing on fields such as indigenous studies, political ecology, energy studies, cultural geography, and economic theory. It seeks to establish a productive convergence between environmental justice studies and what might be termed “Anthropocene studies.” Dominant narratives of the Anthropocene tend to describe the human species as a universalized, undifferentiated whole broadly responsible for the global environmental crisis. However, the hydronarratives examined in this dissertation “decolonize” this narrative by accounting for the ways in which colonialism, capitalism, and other exploitative social systems render certain communities more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe than others.

By attending to these issues through problem water, this dissertation has significant implications for future research in contemporary, transnational American and postcolonial literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the energy humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on representations of resources in literary texts and other cultural productions to better grasp the inequitable distribution of environmental risk, and instances of resilience on a rapidly changing planet.

"The Problem of Hope: Literary Tragedy in Mid-Twentieth Century American Fiction" examines Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar through the lens of tragedy. This thesis delves into how conflicts between internal and external identities can create a tragic individual, what kinds of success count toward achievement of the "American Dream," and whether the tragic "common man" is the socially normative one or the socially disenfranchised one. It raises a three-dimensional theoretical approach to American tragedy and, most importantly, considers the significance of tragic hope for American literature. This paper questions the construction of American identities across class, race, and gender according to social scripts. It seeks to uncover what forces these scripts exert on American cultural myths and rereads those myths through tragedy to explore Miller's idea of a noble common man. By moving from Miller to Ellison to Plath, this thesis traces the undercurrents of tragedy through some of the most identity-focused novels of mid-twentieth century American fiction to see how the overarching American narrative changed from 1940 to 1969 as the US underwent significant social changes domestically and image changes abroad. Ultimately, this paper concludes that tragedy in mid-twentieth century American fiction points toward a new idea of American success as a success that occurs beyond social scripts.