Tessa Wotherspoon

My thesis will provide a dual intervention into the literary genre of naturalism through an exploration of diasporic Black writers within the geographies of the United States, South America, and the Caribbean. First, my thesis rethinks the temporal and geographical boundaries of when and where naturalism, as a genre, developed. Second, I argue for the centrality of Black authors in literary naturalism over the 19th and early 20th centuries, asserting that a complex understanding of ecology and the human/non-human divide emerges from the work of these authors. Using the methodologies of Black ecologies, geographies, and literary studies, my thesis will trace, intersect, and contrast the naturalisms of prominent Black authors to re-historicise the genre of literary naturalism.