Intimate Other: The Rhetorics of Race, Gender, and Place in a Southern Environmental Imagination
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Date
2022-10-04
Authors
Conable, William
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This dissertation explores the imbrication of race, gender, and place in the context of American Southern literature between 1911 and 1942. It examines Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, W.E.B Du Bois The Souls of Black Folks and The Quest of the Silver Fleece, and Zora Neale Hurston’s short stories from the New Negro Renaissance as well as Jonah’s Gourd Vine. The project claims these texts are representative of how an environmental imagination rhetorically deployed the mutually constitutive categories of race, gender, and place during the decades when the United States experienced restructurings of social and cultural power as well as came to a different relationship with the environment through the acceleration of modernity. Through literary analysis, the project argues each of the four authors utilize the imaginative resources of the environment as well as the overlapping categories of race, gender, and place to rhetorically instrumentalize an environmental imagination for cultural and political ends. In the case of Faulkner and Mitchell, this project argues these authors use history, the plantation romance, and a pervasive nostalgia to embed the hegemony of white supremacy into the landscape even as their text strive to present the land as a moral and ethical resource. For Du Bois and Hurston, this project argues their works use a rhetorically active environmental imagination to present readers with a more just and economically viable future for the South as well as preserve cultural and social memories in the landscape even as the land itself proves an archive for memory. I build on research from a New Southern Studies, critical race studies, literature and the environment, and rhetoric to observe how intersections of environment, imagination, rhetoric, and narrative inflects both representations of identity and place within a particular literary artifact’s historical context. Ultimately, the project argues that because we can neither get outside of language nor environments, studying how language and the environment interact with one another provides a better understanding of how rhetorics, narrative, identity, and place.
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Keywords
Faulkner, Go Down Moses, Gone with the Wind, Quest of the Silver Fleece, Rhetoric, Southern Studies