Date of Award

5-2025

Degree Type

Report

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

Committee Chair(s)

Travis Franks (Committee Chair)

Committee

Travis Franks

Committee

Adena Rivera-Dundas

Committee

Charles Waugh

Abstract

While many scholars have already described N.K. Jemisin’s Hugo Award-winning speculative novel The Fifth Season as one that highlights intersections between race, settler-colonialism, neoliberalism, and, most frequently, climate change, I apply a necropolitical lens to The Fifth Season in order evaluate a relationship that exists between systemic violence and environmental degradation. The Fifth Season depicts a socially inscribed relationship between an othered race of humans, called orogenes, and the land, anthropomorphized as “Father” Earth. Orogenes have a paradoxical social status: they are simultaneously feared and revered for their ability to control the Earth. This paradox is the impetus for many customs and laws on the Stillness that keep orogenes socially and literally on the brink of death. Jemisin’s framework of race and racism, which relies on the same imposed socio-political connection between orogenes and the Earth, does more than simply showcase how race is a social construct; rather, the rhetorical positioning of orogenes as the offspring of a vengeful Earth creates a cyclical, self-sustaining ideology that enacts violences against orogenes and the Earth for their reciprocal relationship. Thus, I use The Fifth Season to extend Mbembe’s theorization of necropolitics by situating the land as a body that can be acted upon in a necropolitical system.

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