“American Sediments” is a study of Black, white, and Indigenous literatures and complementary visual culture centered on the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, in texts written after Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn—still the archetypal version of the Mississippi, but inevitably unaligned with historical changes, cultural diversities, and economic shifts that have transformed the river and its representations over time. I argue that the river’s environments and industries seep into its literatures and manifest in different ideologies and literary genres: the nostalgia-colored river pastoral; the paradoxical wilderness quest; Black nature writing and post-Katrina environmentalism in flood literature; and anticolonial remappings of the river in Indigenous poetry. Drawing on Rob Nixon’s and Edward Soja’s respective theories of environmental slow violence and spatial justice, “American Sediments” addresses the long and ongoing histories of dispossession, environmental extraction, and resistance along the river. Building on scholarship around Black and Native reclamations of social spaces, my arguments attend inextricably to cultural and natural factors, superseding simplified narratives of erasure. Instead, my work centers historical memory, literary place, and their nuanced expression in works written by marginalized writers. Moreover, rather than focus on isolated environmental catastrophes, as many scholars have done, I approach the river and its creative legacies more broadly as interconnected networks, encompassing multiple archives and unexpected influences. This research contributes to debates about the relationship between ecological and cultural conditions and their expression in different literary genres and highlights the ways in which my archive shapes cultural memory. While situated within the interdisciplinary fields of environmental humanities and American Studies, my work maintains a strong foundation in literary studies, privileging multi-ethnic literatures.

Creator

• Cerne, Sara

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-jymb-xz64

Subject

• American literature
• American studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15314
• etdadmin_upload_768497

Keyword

• Southern Literature
• Mississippi River
• African American Literature
• Native American Literature
• Environmental Literature

Date created

• 2020-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright