No More New Worlds: Utopic Anxiety and the US Settler Imagination, 1885-1925
| dc.contributor.advisor | Aranda, Jose F. | |
| dc.creator | Pett, Scott A. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2022-09-23T18:17:50Z | |
| dc.date.created | 2022-08 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2022-08-10 | |
| dc.date.submitted | August 2022 | |
| dc.date.updated | 2022-09-23T18:17:50Z | |
| dc.description | EMBARGO NOTE: This item is embargoed until 2024-08-01 | |
| dc.description.abstract | No More New Worlds charts a heightened utopic anxiety in the US settler imagination at the turn of the twentieth century. Recognizing that if Indigenous Americans can be displaced and disempowered so too can “native” white citizens, the utopic anxiety leverages a crisis epistemology to facilitate the distributions of humanity and territoriality along racial lines. As Anglo-Protestant awareness grew that their so-called frontier was closing, and that there were “no more New Worlds” for Puritan descendants to expropriate and transform, colonial iconographies and literatures became increasingly committed to prognostications of Western collapse. Believing that the very fate of humanity rests on the successful outcomes of Anglo-Saxon transition from colonist to “native,” and from colony to “homeland,” the crisis-oriented arts and letters of US-America were particularly dynamic during the forty-year period of 1885 to 1925. That said, No More New Worlds treats this periodization as more symbolic than strictly historiographic. 1885 is the year before the Statue of Liberty was inaugurated; 1925 is the year after the US established its Border Patrol in El Paso, TX. These historical bookends capture the dissertation’s interest in thematic conflicts of citizenship, coloniality, documentation, hospitality, police power, and regionalism. But with the aim of articulating the preconditions and lasting impacts of white precarity as a logic of national membership, No More New Worlds examines texts and contexts well outside this relatively brief but transformative moment. In its four chapters and introduction, the dissertation traces the utopic anxiety—a white supremacist structure of feeling—across street murals, environmental poetry, good-digestion jeremiads, juvenile adventure fiction, and the anti-Black play that shepherded the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. From Walt Whitman’s digestive nationalism to Henry James’s sensitive citizenship, these texts portray a utopic settler project perpetually unsettled by an “un-American” (i.e., non-white, immigrant) imaginary. | |
| dc.embargo.lift | 2024-08-01 | |
| dc.embargo.terms | 2024-08-01 | |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
| dc.identifier.citation | Pett, Scott A.. "No More New Worlds: Utopic Anxiety and the US Settler Imagination, 1885-1925." (2022) Diss., Rice University. <a href="https://hdl.handle.net/1911/113269">https://hdl.handle.net/1911/113269</a>. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1911/113269 | |
| dc.language.iso | eng | |
| dc.rights | Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder. | |
| dc.subject | American literature | |
| dc.subject | settler colonialism | |
| dc.subject | whiteness | |
| dc.subject | citizenship | |
| dc.subject | immigration | |
| dc.subject | Statue of Liberty | |
| dc.subject | Walt Whitman | |
| dc.subject | Thomas Dixon | |
| dc.subject | Border Patrol | |
| dc.subject | Anglo Texas | |
| dc.title | No More New Worlds: Utopic Anxiety and the US Settler Imagination, 1885-1925 | |
| dc.type | Thesis | |
| dc.type.material | Text | |
| thesis.degree.department | English | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Humanities | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | Rice University | |
| thesis.degree.level | Doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Doctor of Philosophy |
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