Jefferson’s Ecologies of Exception

Abstract

In the age of our current world picture, the momentum of globalization has vastly redefined our geopolitical constitution through an aggressively reductionist ethos that has mediated the ways in which humans relate to the nonhuman world. We find ourselves in the midst of an ecologically precarious moment in which borders are increasingly redefined and threatened by environmental disasters. Despite the ways in which we have sought to implement order and space both nationally and globally, the environment, it seems, cannot be contained or defined. So if we are to think about geocriticism and what it means to examine geocritical practices in literary scholarship, I suggest that we should more carefully consider the relationship between geocriticism and ecocriticism, articulating and examining the myriad ways in which theories of space and geography conjoin with theories of ecology. In this respect, I illustrate the socio-political importance of developing an ecocritical geoontology—an ecologically centered examination of geography. I define geoontology as a critical examination of how Being has been defined and coded spatially according to the hegemonic truth discourse of Western modernity. I derive my definition of “Western modernity” from William V. Spanos, who describes it as a “truth discourse whose origins lay in a totalizing metaphysical interpretation of being that spatialized, structuralized and, more precisely, territorialized temporality (the difference it always already disseminates) in the name of a transcendental principle of identity—an order tethered to an absolute Origin, the anthropologos.”4KeywordsNative American PopulationBare LifeLand EthicWestern ModernityAmerican ImaginationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.