Ecologies of exception: Gender, race and the paradox of sovereignty in American literature and culture

Ecologies of Exception: Gender, Race and the Paradox of Sovereignty in American Literature and Culture synthesizes research in nineteenth and twentieth-century American literature and culture alongside theories of gender, race, ecofeminism and postcolonial theory. Beginning with a comparative reading of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, the project examines how Jefferson's cartographic writing revealed his desire to orient and produce an American national narrative predicated on a scientific, spatialized code of ethics that systematically disavowed the actual "living" portion of the land itself. By privileging order, mapping and spatialized environments over and against ecological alterity, I argue that Notes on the State of Virginia was a harbinger for the political and ecological problems that developed throughout the course of the nineteenth-century. By placing Cooper's The Pioneers in conversation with Notes, I reveal how Jefferson's eco-spatial "vision" had begun to permeate the literary consciousness of American writers. Building from this analysis, the majority of my project examines the relationship between exclusionary geographies, gendered forms of racial oppression and environmental destruction. For example, I theorize the writings of Sojourner Truth in concert with Harriet Jacobs and Harriet E. Wilson, revealing how the devaluation of African women's bodies under the institution of slavery was commensurate with the exploitation of the land and the burgeoning development of American Empire. I argue that, as revealed within these narratives, it was on the fringes of America's spatialized, ordering power that the sheer violence underwriting empire became uncomfortably explicit. Following my analysis of these "African American Ecofeminists," I read Nathaniel Hawthorne as an ecocritical author whose project was intended to demystify the patriarchal, racialized, eco-imperial impulses of the American cultural imagination. I conclude with an examination of Willa Cather's O Pioneers!, emphasizing that Cather's recapitulation of Jeffersonian agrarian democracy, land development, science, technology and empire served to revive the imperatives of American patriarchy---the very institution that had oppressed women throughout American history---by falsely promoting the belief that women could achieve emancipation through land ownership and development.