Cultivating Citizens: Ecology and Nationality in U.S. Immigrant Literature explores how and why American ecosystems became objects of appreciation, intervention, and attachment within immigration literature published during the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century. Fictional and nonfictional stories about US-bound immigrants represented naturalization and nationality as materializing through interactions within human/nonhuman assemblageswhat we now call ecosystems. Novels and guidebooks by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Charles Sealsfield, Mary Anne Sadlier, and Jacob Riis incorporated nonfictional nature-centered genres, including natural history and travel writing, to frame national belonging through their characters knowledge of and conduct toward the environment. These immigrant writers interlaced environmental and civic discourses in their naturalization narratives, I argue, to imagine extralegal, cultural forms of citizenship that were cultivated by interacting with nature rather than acquired through formalized naturalization procedures. Combining insights from literary studies, immigration history, political theory, and new materialism, Cultivating Citizens foregrounds the imaginative dynamics of naturalization to illustrate how immigrant characters feelings of civic agency and national belonging emerged from their entanglements with American ecosystems. By analyzing stories about how immigrant characters become naturalized, Cultivating Citizen prioritizes cultural imaginaries over federal laws to reimagine the political and ecological histories of citizenship in American culture.

Last modified

• 11/20/2019

Creator

• Kellen Bolt

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-gdyb-0z93

Subject

• English

Keyword

• citizenship
• climate
• immigration
• ecocriticism
• United States
• naturalization

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright