Nature and Other Mothers: Eco-Political Naturalization in Buddha in the Attic and Meridian (2014)

Undergraduate: Dillon Crockett

Faculty Advisor: Donna Bickford
Department: English & Comparative Literature

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Naturalization is a process common in both political and ecological discourse, the first contextualized by civic or national identity and the second contextualized by environmental sustainability. Although these are two seemingly disparate contexts for the process of naturalization, each invokes questions of identity, space, and survival. The schism between these two definitions can be collapsed through an examination of how transnational and multicultural communities are able to forge identities, reclaim space, and survive in the twentieth-century United States despite social marginalization on the basis of sexism and xenophobia. This intersection is illustrated in both Julie Otsuka's The Buddha in the Attic and Alice Walker's Meridian¿the first depicting the Japanese-American communities of the Western United States during the early 1900s, and the second depicting the African-American communities of the Southeastern United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Through a comparison of these works, I show that the process of political naturalization is coterminous and synchronous to the process of adjusting to the natural landscapes of North America. Specifically, I examine how these novels represent maternity to convey the changing demands of political and ecological naturalization within multi-generational families. ​