In light of its (post)colonial history and unique geographical features, the Caribbean is primed for a multidisciplinary approach that considers ecology alongside economics, and culture alongside history and politics. This dissertation thus argues that both the climate crisis and the Caribbean demand an intersectional approach to gain a deeper understanding of our fraught relationship with the environment and its flora and fauna. In the process, I develop the neologism “eco-epistemology” as a term that insists on the fundamental linkage between knowledge and environment. Moreover, the concept helps elaborate the underpinnings of a Caribbean literary corpus that frequently foregrounds other-than-human nature as an essential component of understanding a self often envisioned as multiple and mosaic.

The Caribbean eco-epistemology I tease out from a reading of diverse writers and theorists recognizes that understanding the human and other-than-human relation also means understanding how capital and empire have conceived it and transformed it, with accumulation and exploitation envisioned as inexhaustible processes. As such, the postcolonial-ecocritical (PCE) approach is well-positioned to approach Caribbean literature and theory and sketch the eco-epistemology underpinning its various texts. Via what might be termed the “tropical sublime” of the writers and artists that I examine, Caribbean literature and theory articulates a less hierarchical and anthropocentric vision of the world. Challenging the supposed singularity of Western civilization are texts as dense and intransigent as the thickest mangrove forests—in their rigorous interrogation of identity, they privilege interconnectedness as the primary means of understanding humanity and its relation to other-than-human nature. Rather than taking up an exceptional position somehow outside of nature, and/or at the unequivocal summit of a “great chain of being,” Caribbean writers frequently locate the human within nature.

This dissertation thus engages at length with literature as a means of deepening our understanding of the human and other-than-human relation and as a tool for creating new possibilities in post/colonial environments—and not only in the Caribbean, but in the world at large. As Amitav Ghosh succinctly puts it, “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.” Literature can help fill the gap as a privileged space for imagining new realities and thus new—and, ideally, improved—iterations of the human and other-than-human relation. Ultimately, this dissertation aims to trace a movement from messiah to mangrove—from miraculous saviors to rhizomatic ecology—by interrogating various strands of environmental thinking and proposing a Caribbean eco-epistemology, as drawn out through the PCE approach, as a compelling addition and complement, one that leads us toward a more just and fulfilling relationship with the natural world.

This essay explores the aesthetic and theoretical implications of canonical urban writing in French literature from roughly 1830 to 1930. Beginning with Balzac and the popular works of his time such as the tableau, I trace the rise of the flâneur as the quintessential embodiment of new modes of reading and writing the city. I then turn to Baudelaire’s poetry and aesthetic theory, which reveals the conception of the city as materials awaiting metamorphosis through symbolism and allegory. In the fiction of Zola, I analyze the eponymous grand magasin of Au Bonheur des Dames as a paradigmatic site of phantasmagoria that produces the counter-force of the conte within Zola’s realist representation. I then read two essential Surrealist novels as reflective of these issues of representation that continued to vex the twentieth century. The Surrealist appropriation of flânerie, their preoccupation with chance and with le merveilleux, their insistence upon the visual and its power of enchantment—these concerns ground them firmly within the French literary tradition at the same time as they seek to break with it. In these works, are utopian spaces realized, or do such efforts end in disenchantment? does the flâneur reach new heights in literature or simply reenact ad infinitum Icarus’s ill-fated flight? With such questions in mind, I explore the ambivalence that prevailed in the urban literary aesthetics of nineteenth-century writers, and which continued well into the twentieth century through the works of the Surrealists and the criticism of Walter Benjamin.