Date of Award

Spring 2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

English

Committee Director

Margaret Konkol Kilcline

Committee Member

Marc A. Ouellette

Committee Member

Don Rodrigues

Committee Member

Bart H. Welling

Abstract

Landscapes affected by colonial domination are contested landscapes—places not only in danger of environmental destruction through colonial and neocolonial violence but also landscapes of struggle for people who survive in these precarious spaces. Historically, separate postcolonial and ecocritical literary analysis addressed contested landscapes; postcolonial critique centered on the lasting devastation of colonial violence on people and place, while ecocriticism, in its infancy, enjoyed the privilege of ignorance, focusing on endangered species and the preservation of land, but it did not consider the impact of landscapes on the very people who were largely forced to either leave or cross “natural” spaces. I contribute, therefore, to twenty-first century postcolonial ecocritical work by considering the ways in which gender and race create disproportionate ecological burdens for characters in three postcolonial novels: The Rape of Shavi by Buchi Emecheta, Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, and Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall. The protagonists in each novel move through marginal and contested desert, sea, and islandscapes by navigating what Kathryn Yusoff identifies as “geotrauma,” a term that signifies the continual colonial and neocolonial impact on bodies and land/seascapes. As deserts and oceans are often deemed disposable spaces, so too are the Black bodies that occupy them; therefore, my focus also takes into account Rob Nixon’s intersectional work on bodies and environmental violence, as well as Timothy Morton’s aesthetic-political theory of dark ecology. I argue that it is over and through these contested, non-neutral spaces that women interact and struggle to survive and reclaim identities. The desert spaces of Emecheta’s and Gundar-Goshen’s novels are contrasted with the greenness of nationalistic spaces, setting up boundaries that mark who may occupy green spaces and who may not. Only when deserts are seen as opportunities for extraction and profit are they deemed valuable and, subsequently, disposable bodies are removed. Borders and boundaries are often shifted in desert environments to make room for cultivation, removing people in the process to open up landscape for monetary control. Marshall’s novel centers on the colonial spaces of the modern cruise ship and the contested islandscapes of the Caribbean. Echoes of the Middle Passage become the catalyst for the transformation of an African American protagonist who, I posit, undergoes this transformation only because she finds herself on a cruise ship over the waters that surround Grenada and Carriacou, islands of neocolonial environmental violence that are reimagined through the Black female body. Additionally, I reposition Marshall’s novel within postcolonial scholarship through a queer ecological reading of the protagonist’s transformational journey, thereby connecting it to Black women’s experiences during the Middle Passage. The variety of landscapes in each novel allow for a multifaceted literary analysis of how Black women shift and change through contested spaces even as those spaces continually shift and change throughout the process of geotrauma.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.25777/9gz1-s625

ISBN

9798197809742

ORCID

0009-0001-6293-6758

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