Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0002-3450-4306

Date Available

5-1-2025

Year of Publication

2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

English

Faculty

Michelle Sizemore

Faculty

Matthew Giancarlo

Abstract

Fatal Futures: Slow Violence, Utopia, and the Postnatural Human in Contemporary American Literature investigates the ways in which ideas of futurity are articulated in narratives that conceptualize both the end of the world and post-calamity society through the lens of a pessimistic, queer approach to understanding the future. The purpose of this project is to not only build previous research in the configurations of the body in queer, gothic, and speculative American writing as a whole, but to enter into a developing conversation surrounding Appalachian literature through the idea of kinship (the broadening of relationships both chemical and postnatural) as a tool of post-society survival. This research combines a number of kinship theories in my work – American conceptions of the gothic and grotesque, Afrofuturism, affect theory, future studies, and queer theory specifically – to understand how different contemporary works of Appalachian literature imagine a future within the fatalistic realities of land destruction, white supremacy, and capitalism throughout the landscape of contemporary American literature as a whole. The dissertation focuses on speculative Appalachian future imaginaries specifically and the relationship between the American gothic and Afrofuturism / Afropessism more broadly by looking at texts that envision climate disasters in conversation with the postnatural human landscapes of spatial climate novels, especially in dystopian Appalachia.

Chapter one situates the study of post-apocalyptic futures in the broader theory of utopia and dystopia, arguing that climate fantasies, however fatal, are best read as tools for building narrative hope about the future. Chapter two further investigates what toxic kinships are and how they function in novels that utilize alien characters in their post-society visions. The third chapter applies the theoretical frameworks established in previous chapters to novels specifically set in Appalachia in order to conclude that it is not that two components of the self – the body and the land – need to be separated to ensure survival or even potential utopic imaginings. Rather this research contends that as physical landscapes change so too does the kinship networks of the human body. It is not a physical disappearance of land that is the threat – but that the potential severings of the body from the land that might keep us from dreaming of new modes of being in altered and unknown bodies and lands. The dissertation argues that as land becomes altered, changed, and/or unliveable, postnatural human bodies come unearthed from previous ways of dreaming and knowing, which narratives of calamity and survival must answer to.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2025.128

Download

Share

COinS