Reconciling Locality and Globalization through Sense of Planet in Kiana Davenport’s the House of Many Gods

Abstract

This study positions the House of Many Gods, a novel written by Kiana Davenport as a possible area of intersection between globalization and environmental/eco-criticism. The primacy of locality within American environmental discourse hinders the acceptance of global theory under the assumption that embracing the global will lead into the erasure of the local altogether. In her book, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008) Ursula K Heise asserts that what she considers as sense of place is incomplete without considering ourselves as a part of a global ecosystem, which she considers as sense of planet. The reading of the House of Many Gods contextualizes sense of place and sense of planet through the perspective of Ana, in which she complements her adherence of Native Hawai’ian epistemology of place with a broader outlook of environmental crisis. A global outlook of perceiving environmentalism also aligns with Transnational American Studies which perceives America from an internationalist perspective. The paper concludes that sense of place and sense of planet provides a possible intersectionality of conceptualizing local discourse of place within a global outlook of environmentalism.