Translational Futures: Asian/American Environmental Fiction and the Transpacific TurnGullander-Drolet, ClairecreatorKim, DanielAdvisorPerry, SamuelReaderRodriguez, RalphReaderSmailbegović, AdaReaderBrown University. Department of Englishsponsor2019xiv, 146 p.born digitalThesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2019thesesFrom rising sea levels and acidifying oceans to overflowing landfills, plastic particulates, and mass extinctions, the environmental crises of the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries often seem to resist cohesive artistic representation. This dissertation identifies an emergent genre of Asian/American literature and film that mobilizes interlingual translation as a heuristic for the representation of such crises, and well as for the limits of transnationalism in an era of extreme planetary transformation. Through close readings of contemporary works by Ruth Ozeki, Karen Tei Yamashita, Han Kang, and Bong Joon-ho, my project marks reading for translation as an important rhetorical praxis in our current historical moment, one that can recuperate marginalized histories and dilate space for imagining alternative political and environmental futures. At stake in this project are two distinct yet interrelated problematics of visibility operating within transnational American studies and the environmental humanities. The first concerns the orientation, both geographic and linguistic, of the so-called “transnational turn.” While many twentieth-century Americanists have lauded environmental literature—and its negotiation between global and local politics—for moving theory beyond the confines of the continental United States, this turn has undermined by a persistent Anglo-and-Eurocentrism. The second problematic concerns the representational slipperiness of environmental disasters themselves, particularly in artistic works that move across or straddle multiple linguistic and cultural contexts. While anthologies of climate-change literature from non-US contexts have proliferated in the past ten years, there has to date been little attempt to think through the ways in which interlingual translation—in its necessarily partial and ideologically-inflected forms—might shape knowledge production about the Anthropocene. Tracing the interplay between articulations of “slow violence”—Rob Nixon’s term for forms of ecologically-inflected violence that unfold incrementally and “out of sight”—and moments of translational failure, mistranslation, or deferral in a multilingual archive of diasporic Asian works, I argue that an attention to modalities of translation is crucial to the project of representing—and recuperating—environmental ruin, particularly as it unfolds across a variety of geographic and temporal scales.American literature--Asian American authorsKorean literatureEnglishRPB2019060310.26300/m5sn-bt46In CopyrightCollection is open for research.dissertations