Popular Publications

“Colonize Mars: Pre-Colonial Pedagogies for Anti-Colonial Praxis.” Teaching Postcolonial Environmental Literature and Media, edited by Cajetan Nwabueze Iheka, The Modern Language Association of America, 2022, pp. 273-283.

“Speculative Diasporas: Hari Kunzru’s Historical Consciousness, the Rhetoric of Interplanetary Colonization, and the Locus-Colonial Novel.” New Directions in Diaspora Studies: Cultural and Literary Approaches, edited by Sarah Ilott, Ana Cristina Mendes, and Lucinda Newns, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018, pp. 55-68.

“We’re Alive: The Resurrection of the Audio Drama in the Anthropocene.” Philological Quarterly 93.3 (2014): 361-81. Special Issue: Genres of Climate Change.

Book Project

My current book project, Postcolonial Cli-Fi: Advocacy and the Novel Form in the Anthropocene, considers the capabilities and limitations of novels to galvanize action in response to environmental crises through the filters of postcolonial theory, environmental humanities, and digital humanities. My findings suggest that novels are well equipped to engage in environmental education, although some of the form’s conventions must be disrupted to fully capitalize upon its strengths. The modern novel is conventionally limited in scope, often resorts to apocalyptic narratives that can breed hopelessness, is dedicated to a form of realism that belies the dramatic weather events exacerbated by climate change, defers authority to a single voice, and is logocentric. By supplementing conventional novels with a variety of paratexts, including digital tools, scientific findings, non-fiction accounts of past, present, and future activism, and authorial biography, it is my contention that the novel’s potency as a pedagogical tool increases.

After addressing this project’s stakes and contexts in my Introduction, Chapter II assesses three South Asian novels in English that are concerned with sustainable development: Bhabani Bhattacharya’s Shadow from Ladakh, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. I conclude by considering how StoryMaps might further disrupt pro-sustainable development propaganda alongside more traditional novels. Chapter III examines how explicitly activist South Asian novelists construct authorial personae that propose additional solutions to the environmental problems identified in their novels, focusing on Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People. Chapter IV coins the term “locus-colonial novel,” a novel that decenters the human, situating place at the fulcrum of a work of historical fiction, using Hari Kunzru’s Gods without Men as one exemplar. I examine Kunzru’s novel alongside promotional materials for planned Mars missions to consider how narratives of settler colonialism on Earth might lead to a more socially and environmentally sustainable colonial model for Mars. Chapter V introduces the concept of a digital locus-colonial novel that allows users to develop informed, environmentally focused scenarios for colonial Mars. Through these chapters, my dissertation identifies specific rhetorical techniques that allow conscientious novels to create imaginative spaces where readers might explore solutions to the social, economic, and increasingly environmental problems facing human populations worldwide.