Into the Forest Archive: A Feminist Genealogy of the Postindustrial Pineywoods Restricted; Files Only
Johnson, Jordan (Spring 2020)
Published
Abstract
Working at the intersection of feminist theory, posthumanism, and environmental studies, this dissertation analyzes how the management of forests maps onto the social and political management of multispecies assemblages, attending to how forestry is enmeshed in and co-constitutive with the patterns and behaviors of humans and humanism. Each chapter explores a specific management issue onsite at the Angelina National Forest, demonstrating how each example evokes and/or reworks liberal humanist fantasies of mastery and modernization. Throughout, I examine issues of power, governance, and ethics on the Angelina exploring how forest management practices in the Pineywoods expose limitations and incongruities inherent in liberal humanist narratives of progress and development. My work seeks to contribute to the theorization of a feminist environmental ethics responsive to the postindustrial ecologies of the Anthropocene, working forests like the Angelina, landscapes that diverge sharply from operative idealizations of nonhuman nature in the US.
This project uses the methods and strategies of Foucauldian genealogy and feminist discourse analysis to rethink liberal humanist narratives of mastery, management, and modernization in the East Texas Pineywoods, applying feminist theorizations of genealogy, affect, and ethics to more than human historical scenes in order to situate the Angelina as a multispecies archive involving a conglomeration of actants becoming-with each other. A feminist genealogy of the postindustrial Pineywoods exposes the complexities and contradictions of modernization, made visible in East Texas in the undeniable destructiveness of colonization and industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries as well as in the confusions and unintended implications of forest management and regeneration efforts in the 20th and 21st centuries. On the Angelina, the ghosts of colonization, industrialization, and modernization are enshrined in formal sites and historical plaques, in risk assessments and management plans, across maps and surveys, in historical documents and scientific reports, as well as in the forest itself. Analyzing the forest as archive, this dissertation traces strategies of ongoingness and destruction, exploring modes of living and dying in troubled times, gathering a collection of differently situated stories enmeshed in overlapping processes of modernization and maldevelopment.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Theorizing Feminist Environmental Ethics on the Angelina National Forest …………………………………………………………………………….……1
Chapter 1: Angelina in the Archives: Settlement, Surveying, and Scientific Resource Management …………………………….……………………………………………57
Chapter 2: Encountering Aldridge: Reckoning with the Ruins of Industrialization...116
Chapter 3: A “Living Laboratory” in the Pineywoods: Stephen F. Austin Experimental Forest and the Institutionalization of Forest Science on the Angelina ………………188
Chapter 4: Un/Managed Nature, Proliferate Pests, and Charismatic Species: Reframing Wildness on Upland Island Wilderness Area ………………………………………..266
Chapter 5: Healthy Forests and Future Old Growth: Response-ability and Restoration on Longleaf Ridge …………………………………………………………………...328
Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………371
About this Dissertation
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File download under embargo until 18 May 2026 | 2020-04-01 17:19:57 -0400 | File download under embargo until 18 May 2026 |
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