UC San Diego

This dissertation examines how different perspectives on apocalypse and catastrophe allow for alternative understandings of the formation and importance of community through an examination of intersections among race, religion, culture, and politics in apocalyptic texts and rhetoric in late 20th- and early 21st-century United States literature. Using texts such as Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkin’s Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, and Matthew Mather’s Cyberstorm, I analyze how apocalypse narratives serve a myriad of functions that center around contradictory understandings of the function of community. An understanding of apocalypse as a deserved and inevitable consequence of bad, individual human behavior is one persistent definition, from U.S. Puritan days to the present. Although it is important to see how this definition continues to have power in contemporary culture, I also analyze apocalypse as an ongoing process shaped by racism, genocide, and violence firmly rooted in a settler colonialist and imperialist system that depends on structures of inequality. This is ultimately important because ideas about apocalypse impact the way U.S. empire is understood: either as a naturalized structure that rewards those who recognize and change their behavior, or alternatively, as a structure that people have created, and that people can change, which stigmatizes and punishes those on the outside of U.S. empire. By reframing apocalypse in this manner, I transform it into a generative category of analysis for understanding the U.S. empire as well as anti-imperialist writers and movements. A deeper re-consideration of the apocalypse genre, with special attention to intersections among race, religion, and gender, can help us understand how theorizing and practicing community is key to survival and a hopeful, more equitable future.