Neocolonialism, postcolonial ecology, and ecofeminism in the works of Native American, Chicano/a, and international writers

The mind/body, man/woman, culture/nature dichotomies dominant in Western ideologies have subordinated women, nature, and minority groups and subjected them to exploitation and oppression. In this study, I examine how Western civilization has affected the environment and, at the same time, degraded the status of women since the time of imperialist expansion due to the Western patriarchal traditions and colonial legacies. My thesis centers on the relationships between environmental racism, gender-biased colonial ideology, and ecological imbalance. I historicize such concepts as nature, development, science, and technology from the sixteenth-century European colonial expansion to the modern neo-colonial stage of "maldevelopment," as Vandana Shiva terms it. Influenced by Edward Said's theory of "contrapuntal reading," I stress the significance of juxtaposing both canonical and non-canonical literary works. The center chapters, for instance, focus on writers such as Leslie Silko, Joy Harjo, Pat Mora, and Ana Castillo, in order to contrast their representations of the land and culture to the dominant European tradition. I also develop the definition of multi-culturalism beyond U.S. borders and discuss such writers as Mahasweta Devi and J. M. Coetzee of India and South Africa. Women as subject and its heterogeneity are my focus. I employ Gayatri Spivak's theory of the subaltern to support my argument that decolonization, accompanied by the growth of multi-national capitalism, brings more destruction to the land and women than the previous colonial stage. I conclude with Amilcar Cabral's theory on national culture; Cabral's theory insists that a nation will not achieve a total economic and political independence unless its mode of production is in harmony with the land. The purpose of this dissertation is to help develop the common ground between ecology, literary theory, and literature.