PhD Oral Exam - Priscilla Jolly, English

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This dissertation studies the convergence of the ecological and popular in contemporary speculative fiction about alien invasions. Arguing that contemporary invasion novel employs tropes of tropicality to represent invasions, this study historicizes invasions to demonstrate how Chaga (1995), Kirinya (1998), Darwinia (1998), and The Southern Reach Trilogy (2014) utilize colonial tropes of tropicality to eventually deconstruct the same. My dissertation puts these texts in conversation with a diverse archive, ranging from accounts of natural history, travel journals, and medical manuals from colonial India, Algeria, the British and French empires, to flesh out historical tropes that structure contemporary representations of tropical landscapes. Situating invasion amidst current anxieties of belonging, immigration, resource extraction, and disease, I argue that the refiguration of colonial tropes in contemporary writing challenge and reconceptualize colonial worldviews through landscape and bodily transformations to create a body more attuned to its environment. Consequently, the dissertation turns to the rhetorical strategy of “trope” as a unifying device of analysis, with each of its four chapters focusing on a colonial trope associated with the tropics, which include tropical overabundance, tropical paradise, unruly tropical life, and tropical pestilence. By historicizing these tropes and their origins in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this study demonstrates how colonial tropes created hierarchized beings and regimes of extraction in the global periphery. In contrast to these unequal logics that have persisted into the current world, I argue that the contemporary ecological invasion novel, through its landscape and body transformations, questions and destabilizes binaries such as native/alien, white/nonwhite, and human/nonhuman. Consequently, in contrast to the anthropocentric rhetoric of colonial mastery, the four chapters of this study focus on those/that have not been accorded the status of human in colonial history. I suggest that unlike the colonial trope of tropicality which focused on taming the tropics, contemporary speculative fiction resists the rhetoric of mastery, focusing on a flourishing of all life forms while not being confined by logics of racialization and extraction.