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2019, Journal of Postcolonial Writing
AI
This paper explores the intersection of literature and environmental issues, focusing on how contemporary texts reflect the legacy of waste left by neo-liberal capitalism. Various articles within the discourse analyze literary contributions from diasporic and postcolonial writers, examining themes of identity, ecological justice, and neocolonialism. The significance of environmental consciousness in literature is highlighted, with an emphasis on the need for critical engagement with the Anthropocene and the collective responsibility for climate change.
The British Journal for the History of Science, 2021
, aims to deepen understandings of the mutual shaping of the Anthropocene and environmental humanities. The latter, the author claims, has devoted less attention than economics, politics and historical studies to the apprehended environmental issues and climate change. The intended readership for this work needs to be stated straight up. Although written for 'an educated public' of reading clubs, 'undergraduate courses and graduate seminars' (p. xi), The Anthropocene & the Humanities read, to me, like a high-school-and early undergraduate-level take on human-made climate change, industrial capitalist economies and their depictions in art and literature. The work's geographical bias, by no means an inherent fault, should have been flagged up; the perspective it is written from, and the putative readership it is intended for, are North American. This is because the aforementioned undergraduates are the sorts of students who, in the US, study in liberal-arts colleges or take comparative-literature courses whilst intending to pursue science majors. Such constituencies have shaped the choices Merchant has made. The intention of this book is to demonstrate how 'the concept of the Anthropocene goes beyond earlier concepts and periodizations such as preindustrial, colonial, industrial, modern and postmodern by presenting a clear and forceful characterization of the future crisis humankind faces' (p. xi) and to illustrate its impact upon literature, art and philosophy, and to a lesser extent the law. The six short chapters are scaled for the designated readership. The narrative is paced to allow for non-expert readers to absorb this important argument. The temporal scope of the book ranges from circa the sixth century BC to the present. Its spatial scope is predominantly northern-hemisphere and anglophone. Chapter 1 surveys the definition of the Anthropocene formulated by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer and the key figures and researchers who have advanced various conceptual terms inspired by the former. The book includes black-and-white images of the theorists whose ideas are discussed, from
2019
The fundamental aim of this essay is to explore the phenomenon known as that of the Anthropocene, concisely the period of time in which human activity has had an impact on the planet. With an understanding of this period and its effects on literature and human society, it will be interesting to note how this moves in correlation with those changes connected to the event and their influences upon one another. For example, does the existence and legitimisation of the Anthropocene era act as a stimulus for literature, and does therefore the power of literature influence in turn the development of the climate and human in/action? These phases of human history can certainly help comprehend the growing canon of ‘World Literature’ and what this means in an interconnected, global 21st century.
Metactritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 2017
Among eco studies, the Anthropocene theory is by far the most unusual in the field of humanities. First and foremost, it differs from the Eco-Marxist criticism in that that its grounding is not in critical theory, but in the scientifically traceable changes in the environment, which are then re-politicised. Secondly, its claims pose a certain pessimism, in contrast with the activist optimism that we can still change something about our future as a species. In the Anthropocene, humans have changed the face of the Earth in so much that it is irreversible, the industrial man versus nature paradigm is now obsolete and replaced by man as a force of nature. Then why is this part of the “studies” series, what critical insight can humanities impose on the gloom data?
Ecozon@, 2016
By now, anyone in their right mind knows what it takes to avert environmental apocalypse: all we need to do is pollute less, emit less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, consume less, produce less, procreate less, and so on. However, as the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann pointedly noted in his book Ecological Communication (first published in 1985, translated into English in 1989), "whoever puts the problem this way does not reckon with society, or else interprets society like an actor who needs instruction and exhortation" (Luhmann, 133). In other words, to avoid getting bogged down in misdirected criticism, utopian or fatalistic scenarios about the end of the world, our solutions to the environmental problems of the twenty-first century should somehow be commensurate with the dynamics of an increasingly complex and interconnected world society. While this realization led Luhmann to construct a highly abstract and, according to some critics, rather unwieldly theory of modernity apparently immune to falsification, recent scholarship in the environmental humanities has adduced a lot of fascinating empirical data to show why humans continue to destroy their own life world, apparently much against everyone's advice. The Shock of the Anthropocene by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, two historians currently working at the Centre Alexandre-Koiré at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris, is a highly incisive contribution to this rapidly growing body of environmental research. The original title of the book, somewhat hastily translated from the French by David Fernbach, reads L'Evénement Anthropocène (the Anthropocene event), which hints at the authors' intellectual indebtedness to the work of, among others, Michel Serres and Bruno Latour (and via Latour, Gilles Deleuze whose philosophy of the event has been very influential in French philosophy). This conceptual framework, combined with a commitment to thorough quantitative research, gives The Shock of the Anthropocene an edge in relation to some of the conceptually and empirically less grounded debates in the Anglo-American environmental humanities. But what makes it a most stimulating book, in the present reader's view, is the authors' willingness to point out the tenacity of what they call the "grand narrative" of the Anthropocene even in the work of their intellectual mentors and allies, including Latour and such leading scholars as Dipesh Chakrabarty. What is that grand narrative of the Anthropocene? This can be stated rather simply: Overnight, as it were, we have entered a new geological era as a consequence of our tinkering with the environment. Only now, thanks to advances in climate science, we are coming to realize the implications of this potentially disastrous development,
AsiaGlobal Online, 2019
This essay explains the difference between the "Anthropocene" and "Climate Change" in about 1300 words. While climate change is an important problem, it is only one part of the more complex transformation of the Earth System, an idea captured by the concept of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene's "systems approach," if incorporated into the humanities, social sciences and policy, will better enable us to confront our unprecedented predicament.
Allegories of the Anthropocene, 2019
In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how Indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis.
Resilience, 2017
2019
Finalist, 2022 Ecocriticism Book Prize awarded by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? This book argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Working between postcolonial theory, environmental humanities, and world literature studies, I show how both environmental discourse and world literature tend to confuse parts and wholes. Drawing on insights from political ecology, geography, anthropology, history, and law, the book considers what it means to read for the planet: to read from near to there, across experiential divides, and at more than one scale. A supple understanding of cultural imagination and narrative logics, I argue, can foster more robust accounts of global inequality and energize movements for justice and livable futures. The Disposition of Nature has been shortlisted for the 2020 Book Prize awarded by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP). https://twitter.com/ASAP_artsNOW/status/1315763489571561474/photo/1
ECOHUM I / NIES X: "Rethinking Environmental Consciousness" symposium booklet This symposium sought to provide a fruitful series of cross-disciplinary conversations that could help suggest renewed or innovative theorizations of what it means to be environmentally conscious in the world today, as well as in our shared pasts and common futures. The symposium "Rethinking Environmental Consciousness" aimed to engage a number of provocative upheavals in and reassessments of the ways we think about ecologies, identities, communities, nationalities, borderlines, interactions, temporalities, spatiality, nostalgia, risks and agencies, to name some of the preoccupations that have driven new waves of scholarship, theory and criticism within the wider field of environmental humanities. The following three sub-themes provided a structure within which the interdisciplinary contributions to the symposium might be contained and contextualized: the Anthropocene, material ecocriticism, and transnational environmental consciousness. As the Anthropocene concept has already inspired and necessitated a thorough rethinking of environmental consciousness, this symposium sought to explore many varied and rapidly multiplying iterations of this concept. As Ursula Heise argues, the Anthropocene represents a watershed moment in environmentalism, a time in which we might cease longing for pristine situations of the past to which we hope to return, and instead begin to think about the possible futures of a nature that, for good or ill, will include the human. Other critics are more pessimistically concerned that the very vastness and vagueness of the concept of the Anthropocene may lend it too easily to usurpation into the discourse of the status quo. The central premise of material ecocriticism – the vibrancy of matter, or matter’s agency – has already inspired several ecocritics to look into underexplored aspects to the interplay between humans and the nonhuman world. Of equal importance is the dawning awareness that there are exchanges of agentic matter washing across the membranes in the cells of human bodies, as succinctly articulated in Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “transcorporeality.” Material ecocritical concepts open up for new ways of approaching issues of environmental justice, of addressing the temporal and spatial complexities of slow violence (to use Rob Nixon's influential metaphor), of understanding our porous bodies in their tactile intra-actions with our immediate and extended environment, of engaging with the particular risk scenarios of the Anthropocene, and, as Alaimo asserts, for rethinking our ethical commitment and orientation in the world in posthuman terms. In a historical perspective, the long unfolding of environmental consciousness has to a large extent taken place as a transnational exchange. Europe for its part has been home to some of the most influential philosophers inspiring environmental thought, from Heidegger to Arne Næss, whose concept of deep ecology has crossed and recrossed the Atlantic in steadily multiplying iterations and perhaps more than any other philosophical current animated the first wave of ecocritics. However, the transnational (or in these cited cases the trans-Atlantic/Pacific) must also be understood as a site of contestation and division, a space where environmental initiatives break down, and political action is as liable to founder as flourish. In recent years, while exchange of ideas concerning the environment has been substantial and ongoing internationally, so have disagreements and the divergences in environmental consciousness, behavior and policy in all hemispheres of the planet. ORGANIZING COMMITTEE CONFERENCE PLANNERS AND CONVENORS Steven Hartman, Professor of English, Coordinator of The Eco-Humanities Hub (ECOHUM) and Chair of the Nordic Network for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies (NIES) Christian Hummelsund Voie, PhD Candidate in English Anders Olsson, Docent in English Reinhard Hennig, PhD Researcher in Environmental Humanities, English and ECOHUM DOCTORAL ASSISTANTS Michaela Castellanos, PhD Candidate in English Nuno Marques, PhD Candidate in English .
2009
Last year's announcement of Al Gore's Nobel Prize kicked off a flurry of media coverage of climate change. As many observers noted at the time, Gore's win coincided neatly with the run-up to the December 2007 Bali talks, where scientists and diplomats from around the world attempted to frame a new global agreement limiting CO2 emissions. While it was billed as a showcase of international civil society's determination to solve the environmental crisis, what Bali really spotlighted was the illogic of Natural Capitalism. This reformist theory's proponents argue that capitalism can be radically transformed into a clean, sustainable, equitable world system through a combination of creative entrepreneurship and coordinated guidance of national and international markets. In his opening remarks, Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon argued that we are entering a new historical era:
Foreign Literature Studies, 2022
Adeline Johns-Putra is Professor of English Literature at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She is one of the first ecocritics to focus on climate change fiction (cli-fi) and has published widely in this field. This interview consists of two parts, addressing the narrative strategies of cli-fis and the genealogy of various interdisciplinary methodologies in cli-fi studies. Johns-Putra points out the importance of historicizing and contextualizing cli-fis and Anthropocene criticism in the 21st century. She emphasizes an inter-generational and cross-species perspective to incorporate both the human and the non-human, both the Global North and the Global South, in a “Critical Eudaemonistic Framework.” Also, she suggests the necessity of putting Chinese environmental literature and Western texts in a comparative atlas. However, she insists that the hermeneutic interpretation of literary texts should be valued in any interdisciplinary or comparative cli-fi studies.
Environmental Ethics, 2018
In Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene, editors Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino have assembled 19 essays and interventions by some of the most distinguished names in a now 'multisperspectival' (xi) research field, from Greta Gaard to Wendy Wheeler and Kate Rigby, all focused on finding 'more critical and imaginative tools to comprehend the Anthropocene' (13). The challenge faced by the collection's contributors is elegantly summarised by Richard Kerridge in his Foreword (xiii-xvii). 'Even as the Anthropocene challenges uscollective humanityto take greater and more exceptional responsibility,' he writes, 'it also admonishes us for past hubris, and relegates us to the category of stumbling, floundering creatures whose plans go awry because we understand too little: in other words, natural creatures, caught up in forces beyond our understanding' (xv). Not the least difficulty is, therefore, one of finding a narrative or narratives that might contain the multitudes denoted by Kerridge's reference to 'collective humanity'. In fact, and as Kerridge also points out, 'some of the contributors to the collection reject the term "Anthropocene"' precisely because it assumes a 'unitary Anthropos' (xvi). From a 'feminist, postcolonial or more broadly Environmental Justice perspective' (xvii), humans are not all equally responsible for 'environmental disasters' (xv), nor equally able to rise to the challenge those disasters present. Moreover, and as the material turn has underlined, humankind is entangled with the morethan-human in ways that emphasize the extent to which both 'are continuously engaged in the production and modification of the system and thus of each other' (xvi). If this inevitably suggests a 'rich array' of different perspectives, as Oppermann and Iovino point out in their own Introduction (1-22), those perspectives are nevertheless brought together by a strong and shared sense of the urgency of 'current ecological crises' (1) created by and 'within systems of massive exploitation of limited natural capital' (2). Arguably, the Environmental Humanities are united within a 'ethical-educational project of creating alliances between science, society, and cultural discourses' (3): '[t]he pivotal question here is: how will new modes of knowing and being, which the Environmental Humanities call for, enable environmentally just practices?' (2). Divided into four parts, the collection turns first to the challenge of 'Re-mapping the Humanities (23-112). In the opening chapter, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen asks if 'word' and 'world' are really as passive as the term Anthropocene implies (25). Instead, he shifts the emphasis towards a 'posthuman environs' (the chapter title) built around 'eco-sonorous terms' (27) that highlight the way that matter inscribes humans, 'regardless of the epochs we declare' (25). In 'Environmental History between Institutionalization and Revolution', Marco Armiero engages with a different aspect of anthropocentrism, the '"human-centric" discipline' of history (45), and the tension between its (potentially revolutionary) transformation and its absorption into the mainstream (45), wryly concluding 'I would prefer to ignore the academic Winter Palace and Occupy reality!' (57). Next, Hubert Zapf explores the challenge of interdisciplinarity through a chapter on 'Cultural Ecology, the Environmental Humanities, and the Transdisciplinary Knowledge of Literature', focusing on some of the ways in which literary knowledge might already offer forms of 'transdisciplinary GREEN LETTERS: STUDIES IN ECOCRITICISM
5-6 April 2019 Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 University. Montpellier, France Keynote speakers: Thomas Dutoit, Lille U, France Bénédicte Meillon, Perpignan VD University, France In collaboration with: Sylvère Petit (film producer, photographer), France This conference will attempt to trace and analyze modes of reading and writing that are not based on human mastery and exceptionalism, but rather make room for different possible viewpoints, while also questioning our identity as well as the objectivity and limits of human perception. The conference is built around the necessity to adopt a different way of reading and writing that shakes the foundations of our thinking about Earth and its various inhabitants, and forces us to see anew a landscape whose very form has been defamiliarised by the forces that traverse it. Such reading and writing might have to come to terms with what Timothy Morton calls “the symbiotic real” – the interconnectedness between species. Today, going beyond ourselves requires learning to reread ourselves and our current environment to understand our vulnerability while assuming responsibility for the endangered planet and non-human species. From encounters with diverse forms of non-human otherness (the planet, animals, forests, ...) and one’s otherness within, would emerge an ethics of alterity. We welcome papers for 20-minute presentations in English on writing and reading (not limited to literature or to humanities only) the Earth/the world/ worlds.
History and Theory, 2023
History and Theory 62:2 (2023), 320-333. Dipesh Chakrabarty's The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is, in three respects, far more than a synthesis of over a decade of pioneering conceptual work aimed at making sense of the Anthropocene/planetary predicament and its implications for historical understanding. First, the book makes visible an intellectual trajectory in which Chakrabarty's conceptual struggles with the Anthropocene gradually move from the centrality of the notion of the Anthropocene toward the centrality of the notion of the planet. Second, it highlights the relational complexities with which one needs to grapple when trying to make sense of the current predicament. Third, and finally, the book showcases a series of often overlapping conceptual distinctions that Chakrabarty has developed while navigating these complexities. Through a discussion of the above key aspects, this review essay highlights the achievements of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age and critically engages with its central themes. In dialogue with the book, it pays special attention to exploring the respective benefits and drawbacks of the notions of the Anthropocene and the planet, and to the character and role of human agency in the Anthropocene/planetary predicament. Finally, the essay concludes with a few thoughts concerning the question of what kind of a reinvention of historical understanding might be triggered, respectively, by the notions of the Anthropocene and the planet.
WIREs Climate Change, 2017
In the last 5 years, climate change has emerged as a dominant theme in literature and, correspondingly, in literary studies. Its popularity in fiction has given rise to the term cli-fi, or climate change fiction, and speculation that this constitutes a distinctive literary genre. In theater, the appearance of several big-name productions from 2009 to 2011 has inspired an increase in climate change plays. There has been a growing trend, too, of climate change poetry, thanks to the rise of eco-poetry (poetry that exhibits ecological awareness and engages with the world's current state of environmental degradation) and the launch of some key climate change poetry initiatives in the media. This prevalence of climate change literature has brought about a greater engagement with climate change in literary studies, notably the environmentally oriented branch of literary studies called ecocriticism. The increasing number of ecocritical analyses of climate change literature , particularly novels, is helping to shape a canon of climate change fiction. In a separate development, there has been greater interest in the phenomenon of climate change in literary or critical theory (the branch of literary studies concerned with literary concepts and philosophies rather than with literary texts). This development—centered on the study of climate change as a philosophical or existentialist problem—is sometimes termed climate change criticism or critical climate change.
This paper aims to briefly discuss the concept of the Anthropocene within the geological sciences, and to consider, more broadly, some of the theoretical unfolding of the term within the humanities. Towards its conclusion, the paper presents the demands the Anthropocene makes, as a geological Epoch (in which the human becomes a geophysical force, capable of changing the Earth’s biophysical systems), of literary studies as a possible field for theoretical articulations that may add to the debates on this historical moment in which climate change, forced dislocations, the mass extinction of several species, and other urgent matters come to the fore.
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