Disrupting Anthropocentrism through Human and More-Than-Human Engagement in Afro-Descendant Women's Fiction

Abstract

Beginning with the seminal text, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and culminating with Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel, Salvage The Bones, this dissertation explores Afro-Descendant Women’s fiction from the largely avoided intersection of Black Studies and Animal Studies. From ants in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby to frogs and “Mon Inutil” (useless mountain), in Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light, to the quiet presence of Oysters in Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage The Bones, this project engages the more-than-human to interrogate and deconstruct the heirarchical, anthropocentric relations between beings. The limits and capacities of literature and language must be examined to challenge and revise the damaging narratives of human supremacy rooted in the global history of colonialism and the consequences of plantation slavery. This project urges the reader to question pervasive dominant cultural “truths” and to acknowledge their incomprehensiveness, alongside the colonially-derived and socially constructed divisions between human and more-than-human life to aid in thinking through the implications of anthropogenic changing climate, and the accompanying violences of environmental exploitation and degradation. Ultimately, this project asks the reader to think and exist differently in relation to the human and more-than-human in service of a gentler future.