A Study On Alice Walker's Meridian And The Temple Of My Familiar From The Perspective Of Environmental Justice

As a well-known novelist,poet,essayist and social activist,Alice Walker is one of the most influential black female writers in contemporary America,and her works with themes of justice have received extensive attention in particular.In the 1980 s,as environmental justice movements broke out in western countries,people began to have a deeper understanding of environmental issues.Their attention was no longer limited to the relation between human and nature,but was extended to that between people,giving rise to a new type of environmental ethics called environmental justice.This thesis studies two novels of Alice Walker,Meridian(1976)and The Temple of My Familiar(1989)from the perspective of environmental justice.Meridian discloses the injustice imposed on American Indians,blacks,and people's next generations in terms of environmental rights and burdens through the narration of the life,love and growth of the protagonist named Meridian.The novel The Temple of My Familiar is more complicated.It spans 500,000 years from the prehistoric period of the goddess worship in the dream of Lissie to the modern society under the patriarchal ruling.The scattered storyline is interspersed in the dialogues and monologues of some African Americans and Indians.With the exchanges and communication of their life experiences,the novel narrates the wild plunder and ruthless destruction of natural resources and environment by the Western colonists,their contempt on and subversion of minority culture,as well as the ethnic minorities' efforts to pursue environmental justice,reflecting the problems of environmental injustice both between human and nature and between different groups of people.These two novels link environmental issues with social issues such as racial inequality and the gap between the rich and the poor,enriching the connotation of environmental justice.With a close textual reading of the two novels,this thesis strives to discuss the negative influences some people exert on natural environment and inequalities some disadvantaged individuals and communities suffer in terms of environmental rights and environmental burdens depicted in them,exploring the causes to such problems,and the protagonists' struggle to achieve environmental justice.Chapter one discusses white colonists' plunder and exploitation of non-human nature,resulting in the environmental degradation and ecological crisis in Africa and America and reveals that the root cause of the injustice to nature was the white colonists' anthropocentric views.The second chapter focuses on the environmental injustice between people in the two novels,analyzing the environmental discrimination faced by vulnerable groups such as people of color and the poor and studying the injustice to the future generations.Chapter three discusses Walker's three ways to achieve environmental justice reflected in the two novels by exploring the efforts of the characters in the two novels to win justice,including the transformation of environmental ethics,preservation of eco-friendly indigenous cultures and social campaigns against environmental racism.This thesis concludes that these two novels manifest that environmental justice is one of the major themes of Alice Walker's works,and to her,the environmental injustice in Africa and America are rooted in some people's,especially the White colonists',neglect of nature's intrinsic values and indifference to local people's environmental interests and culture.Their wrongdoings cause ecological crises and great pain and harm to the life and culture of people in the margin.The awakening of the ecological awareness of the whole population,the protection of eco-friendly indigenous cultures and the vulnerable people's movement to defend local cultural diversity and environmental rights are possible ways to solve the problems of environmental injustice.