| This dissertation examines the interconnections between human and botanical out-of-placeness from a literary perspective. In particular, it considers how authors employ the trope of transplantation to figure the fraught transition from alienness to belonging. While postcolonial theorists have critiqued root metaphors for failing to account for phenomena such as displacement and diaspora, this project asserts the possibility of recuperating rather than discarding the resonant trope of transplantation. In addition, it argues that there are ecological as well as political consequences when authors employ such botanical tropes.;The authors I consider in this study---Murray Bail, John Burroughs, Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, Michael Pollan, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor---offer ways to reconsider the productive possibilities of roots and transplantation. As they demonstrate, metaphoric uses of transplantation have real consequences for both human and botanical transplants: for non-native people who seek to claim a relationship to a place, and for plants whose survival depends on the ecological decisions we make when determining what does or does not belong. These authors reveal how the literary serves as a hub for these ecological and political concerns: they employ botanical tropes with an historical awareness, tapping into the evocative power of roots while avoiding exclusive and xenophobic modes of belonging.;By looking both within and beyond American literature and focusing on the garden rather than the wilderness, this project expands our understanding of what constitutes a viable subject for ecocritical inquiry. While ecocritics have tended to advocate for rootedness and postcolonial scholars for rootlessness, I argue that these conditions need not be understood as mutually exclusive, thus helping to close the gap between these fields. This project also examines sites for valuable interdisciplinary conversations: I demonstrate how biodiversity may be put into dialogue with cosmopolitanism in order to keep xenophobia out of discussions about botanical aliens. This project thus treats literary studies, botany, and history as fields that can and should speak to one another. Considering botanical tropes and their consequences for both human and biotic communities provides a crucial opportunity to investigate how authenticity, legitimacy, belonging, and power all converge. |
