This project comprises of a response much recent ecocriticism that has, in a polemical move, dismissed nature writing and the notion of “nature” as uncritical. In what follows, I attempt to outline a symptomatic method of reading that critiques these texts while at same time insisting on their relevance to contemporary critical thought. My primary theoretical approach consists of an active repositioning of the work of deconstructive literary critic Paul de Man. I use de Man’s rhetorical critique of hermeneutics to argue that reading texts of nature writing—Henry David Thoreau’s “Ktaadn,” Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire—succeed in producing the experience of alterity commonly attributed to the “natural” in the ways they force us to examine the nexus of language and meaning. Put simply, reading these texts “wildly,” which is to say rhetorically in such a way that they begin to disarticulate themselves, produces an encounter with otherness in that which is most human—language. In doing so, I argue that the close reading of literature has a crucial place in critical environmental studies because it problematizes the very position with which it begins, the human. What is typically lost in the contemporary critical humanities is otherness. The stakes here are high. Without an insistence on the otherness of the nonhuman, what we call nature, we struggle—as do many in the critical humanities—to articulate a case for both active conservation and non-intervention in the nonhuman world. Without an ability to articulate such a case, we seem doomed to continue down the road of the Anthropocene—the road of extinction and environmental crisis.

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Africana Profunda employs a transdisciplinary lens through Black critical theory and performance studies to interrogate the “racially democratic” performances that constitute Puerto Rican hegemonic nationalism from the 1930s to the present. It does so by demonstrating how theses performances depend on antiblackness for the sustainment of discourses of racial hybridity, or which is described throughout the dissertation as a distancing from Blackness. In order to tease out this conscious and unconscious antiblack dependence, the dissertation creates encounters between texts and performances and allow for these encounters to take on their own mode of representation, even if this representation gestures toward racial and gendered contradiction and antagonism. The dissertation thus compels long-overdue encounters between antiblackness and national belonging in the Puerto Rican cultural imaginary to reveal an instructive subtext between texts and performances that have been integrated into nationalist discourse, such as the writings of Antonio Pedreira, and those that have been disavowed from the national memory because they center Blackness or an interrogation of antiblackness within their repertoire, such as the writing of Mayra Santos Febres and the performances of Sofía Córdova. In turn, such encounters show the pervasive and subtending force of antiblackness in reproducing what it means to be a national subject of Puerto Rico and its diaspora. In other words, what the dissertation hopes to make clear through these encounters is how nationalist imaginaries are easily taken for granted as ethical markings of belonging. Each chapter illustrates this by focusing on Puerto Rican aesthetics in their various forms: 20th century nationalist literature, Puerto Rican feminist poetics, the aurality of Borícua punk, trans/queer documentary filmmaking, and Black queer theatre and performance. While the dissertation aligns with the historical and material conditions that produced a coalitional politics between African American and Puerto Rican movements in the U.S., specifically between the Black Panthers and the Young Lordes, it centers and theorizes Blackness and antiblackness within the aesthetic realm in order to show the (im)possibilities of world-making for Black and Blackened folks on the island and its diaspora.