Rewriting homeland(s): indigenous narrative aesthetics and ecocritial activism
Date
2020
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
My dissertation makes an intervention in the emergent study of post-colonial ecocriticism by examining how indigenous writers and filmmakers in Canada and New Zealand have adapted storytelling forms as a means of socio-political resistance to economic and racial inequalities. This work builds on Rob Nixon’s framing of the environmental vulnerabilities experienced by marginalized peoples of color across the globe. However, whereas scholars like Nixon question the value of literature as a vehicle for social change, I argue that narratives can function both as tools of direct political intervention and ideological opposition to engrained modes of thinking. By placing print and filmic sources in dialogue with the history of real-world disputes between governments, commercial interests, and native peoples over land usage, I analyze how storytelling practices participate in a larger discourse about indigenous sovereignty and cultural reclamation. In combining literary criticism on narrative aesthetics with more explicitly politically oriented readings, I highlight what these texts can teach us about the best methods of negotiating ideological conflicts over environmental practices in our ongoing eco-crisis. This project also makes an intervention in the emergent field of eco-media by tracing narrative adaptations across mediums to illustrate how creators have drawn upon and or reimagined the conventions of environmental adventure and travel fiction rooted in the colonial period. In reading these films in relation to their production history and reception, I demonstrate how such texts continue to shape modern cultural narratives about settler nations through contemporary travel advertisements and the establishment of tourist destinations like Hobbiton. I argue that this process of adaptation not only builds upon a diverse foundation of prior storytelling and site-specific environmental histories, but in turn continues to shape the economic and ecological realities of indigenous communities.
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Keywords
Indigenous, Land rights, Resistance, Tourism