The European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies

Triennial Conference 2023

 

Imagining Environmental Justice in a Postcolonial World

 

Book of abstracts

 

1. Keynotes
2. Writers
3. Panels
4. Individual papers

   Keynotes

 

Amanda Boetzkes

University of Guelph

amanda.boetzkes@uoguelph.ca

 

The Reorigination of Realism in Contemporary Inuit Art: Founding Environmental Justice with a Teenage Magical Magic Magician

In this lecture, I will consider the renewed importance of realism in navigating the confluence of art, decolonial praxis and environmental justice. While the aesthetics of realism have been reinvigorated in the context of the “post-truth” era, a time characterized by the rise of populism and the exhaustion of critique, I suggest that realism’s challenge can best be understood through scenes of its reorigination in Inuit art. I argue that Inuit art reenacts originary experiences in which reality is contested across the parameters of epistemology. Inuit art founds a common origin of art and politics, and unveils their mutual corroboration as a counter-hegemonic force of realism. Through a discussion of the concept of sulijuk and its contemporary iterations in the work of Annie Pootoogook, Shuvinai Ashoona and the film collective Isuma, I consider the terms by which Inuit art delivers an aesthetico-political form of realism that overturns paternalistic approaches to environmental justice. Such a feat could only be achieved with a teenage magical magic magician…

 

Amanda Boetzkes is a theorist of contemporary art and aesthetics. Her research focuses on the relationship between perception and representation, theories of consciousness, and ecology. She has analyzed complex human relationships with the environment through the lens of aesthetics, patterns of human waste, and the global energy economy. She is the author of Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (MIT Press, 2019), The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and a forthcoming book titled Ecologicity: Vision and the Planetarity of Art. Co-edited books include Artworks for Jellyfish and Other Others (Noxious Sector, 2022), Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Routledge, 2014), and a forthcoming volume on Art’s Realism in the Post-Truth Era (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). Her current project, At the Moraine, considers modes of visualizing environments with a special focus on Indigenous territories of the circumpolar North. Amanda Boetzkes is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph. She lives in T’karonto (Toronto, Canada) which is covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit.

 

 

Elizabeth DeLoughrey

University of California

deloughrey@humnet.ucla.edu

 

Mining the Seas: Speculative Fictions and Futures

This lecture examines the recent oceanic turn in the humanities, particularly what Gaston Bachelard once termed the “depth imagination.” It stages an interdisciplinary conversation between recent scholarship about the speculative practices of Deep Sea Mining and speculative fiction that imagines techno-utopian futures of human life under the sea. In doing so it raises questions about the ways in which particular kinds of literary genres and reading practices produce an extractive imaginary, with a particular concern with the way in which terms like the “blue humanities” might trade in neoliberal discourses.

 

Elizabeth DeLoughrey is a professor in the Department of English and the Institute of the Environment at University of California, Los Angeles on the unceded territories of the Gabrielino Tongva. She has been the recipient of fellowships from organizations such as the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and the Rachel Carson Centre. She is the author of Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Literatures (U of Hawai’i Press, 2007) and Allegories of theAnthropocene (Duke UP, 2019), an open access text that examines climate change and empire in the literary and visual arts. She is co-editor of the volumes Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture (Virginia UP, 2005); Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment (Oxford UP, 2011); and Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (Routledge, 2015) and of numerous journal issues on critical ocean and island studies.

 

Graham Huggan

University of Leeds

G.D.M.Huggan@leeds.ac.uk

 

Postcolonial Blues, Blue Postcolonialisms

Postcolonial studies has been seen as a quintessentially melancholic discipline, prone to theoretical infighting and painfully aware of the limited difference that many, possibly even most, of its intellectual manoeuvres make. Melancholia also afflicts the field’s practitioners in other ways, for example, in their consciousness of their own western biases in spite of their commitment to the dissemination of other, non-western knowledges; and perhaps above all in their realization that, for all the triumphant rhetoric that accompanied their emergence, many postcolonial states have notably failed to bring justice to their own peoples, while new forms of oppression have sprung up that offer reminders of an unfinished colonial past. It is important to recognize, though, that there are different forms of melancholic thought, with different institutional effects and real-world consequences. For Jacques Derrida, for instance, critical melancholia is a precondition for justice, work towards which is never finished – which is not the same thing as to say that there is no justice possible in this world, or that the only justice is the justice to come.

In this paper, I want to reflect on the melancholic potential offered by postcolonial studies; on the ways in which melancholia can be used as a revolutionary trigger in which – following the Marxist historian Enzo Traverso – mourning and militancy are productively conjoined. I will draw on two canonical postcolonial literary texts, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, to further my argument. Both texts, and the Subcontinental wetland environments in which they take place, provide almost paradigmatic examples of the bringing together of social and ecological justice, but both are also profoundly melancholic in their awareness that past and present injustices are not easily repaired, or even possible to repair. In this and other ways, the paper will take issue with the increasingly popular view that postcolonial criticism and ecocriticism alike need to move beyond critique and the ‘politics of negativism’ in order to find an appropriate path to ecological sustainability and social justice (Adamson et al.). Instead, it will argue that one of their most important roles is to perform a ‘splenetic melancholy’ (Traverso) that speaks to the vanquished of history without necessarily abandoning hope in a liberation to come.

 

Graham Huggan teaches in the School of English at the University of Leeds. His research straddles three fields: postcolonial studies, environmental humanities, and tourism studies, all of which come together in his latest monograph, Colonialism, Culture, Whales: The Cetacean Quartet (Bloomsbury, 2018). His latest book is the co-authored Modern British Nature Writing, 1789-2020: Land Lines (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and current pursuits include running a doctoral programme in Extinction Studies and co-leading an international research project on European national parks.

 

 

Claire Omhovère

Université Paul Valéry – Montpellier 3

claire.omhovere@univ-montp3.fr

 

The Trouble with Landscape: Reappraisals of the Eyesore in Recent Canadian Writing and Visual Art

Canada’s promotion of its image as a natural haven has intensified in recent years, especially in circumstances when the public sphere has grown wary of the environmental impact of extractivism without being ready to renounce its benefits. In this context the preservation of the wild has become a promotional mantra, and greenwashing a widespread strategy to guarantee jobs without alienating communities of voters. Lumber companies operate behind thin curtains of trees that disrobe unsightly clearcuts from the view of motorists in British Columbia. A similar strategy has been adopted with strip mining in the Athabasca region should the site of extraction be close to the highway. Most of the time, however, the exploitation of natural resources occurs in places that are so remote from Canada’s urban centers that the sites of extraction can only be reached by plane, which means that industrial operations can take place on a large scale with few immediate, visible effects, except for the Indigenous populations living in the same area (see Boschman & Trono 2019). This talk aims to query the distrust of landscape that has been asserting itself along with rising concern for the degradation of natural environments, particularly in countries that have historically come to depend on the exploitation of staple resources colonial economies induced (Barney in Wilson et al, 2017: 90). Relying on examples predominantly drawn from the petrofiction, poetry and visual art that came out of the Harper decade, I propose to reflect on the three visual regimes – the unsightly, the unseen and the invisibilized – that trouble the aesthetic appreciation of the natural environment as landsc(r)ape (Boetzkes 2017). The final aim of this talk is to observe how these visual regimes direct the gaze to the mutual dependency between colonial and environmental exploitation, thereby putting a strain on the moralizing discourse of a sentimental ecology cut off from a concrete, material engagement with place, no matter how disquieting its effects.

 

Claire Omhovère teaches English and Postcolonial Literature at University Paul Valéry – Montpellier (France) where she is affiliated to the research group EMMA (Études Montpellieraines du Monde Anglophone). Between 2011 and 2017, she presided the French Association of Postcolonial Studies (SEPC) and was the general editor of the periodical Commonwealth Essays & Studies. Her research is broadly concerned with perceptions and representations of space in postcolonial literatures with a specific interest in the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of landscape writing in settler-invader colonies such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

 

Sneharika Roy

American University of Paris

sroy@aup.edu

 

Biopolitical Allegories of Deforestation: A Buddhist Jataka, Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest and Derek Walcott’s Omeros

In the “Kusanali Jataka” (c. 300 BCE – 300 CE), the Buddha is reincarnated in one of his previous lives as humble kusa grass, a symbolic nonhuman equivalent of a low caste subject. He saves the fine Mukkhaka tree from being cut down by carpenters acting on the imperial authority of King Brahmadutta. In Derek Walcott’s Omeros (1990), felled trees and ecocide allegorise the genocide of the Caribs and the massacre of the Lakota Sioux warriors. In Ursula Le Guin’s science-fiction novel The Word for World is Forest (1972), the systematic colonial deforestation of planet Athshea by Earth is part of an entangled allegory of the exploitation of arboreal, gendered and racialised bodies within an interstellar capitalist economy. Inflected by Daoist and Buddhist philosophies of non-violence, Le Guin’s novella was also a response to the Vietnam War, the context in which the concept of ecocide emerged to designate the deliberate, targeted destruction of the environment. This transhistorical corpus points to the enduring presence of “biopolitical allegories” in which forms of hegemonic violence (caste-based Brahmanism, European imperialism and American neo-imperialism) are inscribed on the human and nonhuman bodies of their victims in contexts of internal and external colonialism. This paper therefore proposes an overdue ecocritical update of Fredric Jameson’s “national” allegory, aligning it more explicitly with questions of environmental justice and cultural ecology.

Jameson argues that in postcolonial literature, the struggles of the independent nation are embodied allegorically by embattled third-world intellectual figures. Alongside such national allegories, however, are “biopolitical allegories” in which, drawing from Buddhist epistemology, biopower refers to the transformation of human and nonhuman sentient bodies to fungible units of hierarchical observation, normalisation and state-sponsored corporate management. Walcott’s Omeros, however, includes a productive counterpoint. In the opening and closing of the poem, tree-cutting also enables the dignity of subaltern labour premised on use and need (not exchange value and surplus), positioned precariously within ever-encroaching systems of capitalist exchange and land development.   

   

Sneharika Roy teaches postcolonial and comparative literature at the American University of Paris. Her book The Postcolonial Epic: From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh (Routledge, 2018) traces the emergence of a postcolonial form of classical epic, prefigured by Moby Dick and typified by Omeros and the Ibis trilogy. Roy has contributed to MLA Approaches to Amitav Ghosh (2019), Amitav Ghosh's Culture Chromosome (2022), The Epic World: Comparative Approaches (upcoming, Routledge) and to Dictionnaire des littératures indiennes (upcoming, Gallimard). She has published articles on William Faulkner, Shashi Tharoor, Derek Walcott and Edouard Glissant. Her recent papers have dealt with the Black Marxist Cedric Robinson, the postcolonial theorist Edward Said, the ecocritical science-fiction of Ursula Le Guin, and the poems in prose of Édouard Glissant.

 

Imre Szeman

University of Toronto

imre.szeman@utoronto.ca

 

The Future of the Sun

2025 is when global fossil fuel use will finally begin to decrease, ending a period of energy history initiated in the eighteenth century which has traumatized the earth and its inhabitants. 

What happens next?

“The Future of the Sun” assesses claims being made about the best approach to energy transition and the shape of the renewable world that lies just over the horizon. Nation-states and entrepreneurs are offering publics competing visions of energy and environmental futures, even as right-wing ideologues fight to ensure the future looks much like the past. Who should we believe can and will undertake climate action in the interest of all the planet’s inhabitants? Are each of these actors only in it for themselves? What do the gaps, limits, and problems in the plans of the powerful tell us about how to best approach energy transition, so that we get the environmentally just futures we want? And what specific insights do contemporary literature and culture give us into the discursive struggles now being fought to establish (in the words of Bill Gates) “the dull, factually correct middle” in which green futures are supposed to be lived out?

Imre Szeman is inaugural Director of the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability and Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto. From 2021-2022, he was the Climate Critic for the Green Party of Canada. He is co-founder of the Petrocultures Research Group, which explores the socio-cultural dimensions of energy use and its implications for energy transition and climate change, and the leader of the After Oil Collective. Szeman is author (most recently) of On Petrocultures: Globalization, Culture, and Energy (2019) and co-editor of the Energized: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy (forthcoming 2023). He is at work on a book examining discursive and political struggles over the transition to a post-fossil fuel world. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. (www.imreszeman.ca)

 

 

 

II. Writers

 

Gabeba Baderoon

South Africa / United States

Gabeba Baderoon is a South African poet and scholar. She is the author of the poetry collections, The Dream in the Next Body, A hundred silences and The History of Intimacy as well as the monograph, Regarding Muslims: from slavery to post-apartheid. With Desiree Lewis, Baderoon is co-editor of Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa and edited poetry books by Bandile Gumba, Phillippa Yaa De Villiers and Natalia Molebatsi. Baderoon is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund,and co-directs the African Feminist Initiative at Pennsylvania State University. She is the Sarah Baartman Senior Fellow in the San and Khoi Centre at the University of Cape Town for 2023, where she is at work on a new collection, “The Concussion Diaries: Relief Map of a Drifting Mind.”

 

 

Alecia McKenzie

Jamaïca / France

Alecia McKenzie is a Jamaican author currently based in Paris. Her first collection of short stories, Satellite City, and her novel Sweetheart have both won Commonwealth literary prizes. Sweetheart has been translated into German and French and was awarded the 2017 Prix Carbet des lycéens. Her most recent novel is A Million Aunties (longlisted for the 2022 Dublin Literary Award). (www.aleciamckenzie.com)

 

 

Karthika Nair

India / France

Karthika Naïr is the co-author of A Different Distance (Milkweed Editions, 2021), renga written with poet Marilyn Hacker. Until the Lions: Echoes from the Mahabharata, her reworking of the foundational South Asian epic in multiple voices, won the 2015 Tata Literature Live Award for Book of the Year (India), and was highly commended at the 2016 Forward Prizes (UK). Les Oiseaux électriques de Pothakudi (Éditions Hélium/Actes-Sud, 2022), her latest children’s book illustrated by Joëlle Jolivet, is on the shortlist of the 2023 Prix Félipé and the 2023 Prix Franco-Allemand de la littérature de jeunesse.

Naïr’s poetry has been widely published in anthologies and journals like Granta, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry Magazine, Poetry International, Indian Literature, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets and the Forward Book of Poetry 2017. She is a 2012 Sangam House Fellow, a 2013 Toji Foundation Fellow, and was awarded a Villa Marguerite Yourcenar Fellowship in 2015.

Karthika Naïr’s play Beneath the Music, created and directed by Jay Emmanuel for Encounter Theatre, premiered at the Subiaco Arts Centre in Perth in May 2023. The performances she has scripted and co-scripted have been staged at venues across the world. These include Akram Khan’s multiple-award-winning DESH, and Until the Lions (adapted from a chapter of her eponymous book), an opera produced by Opéra national du Rhin (also adapted from the same book), and Carlos Pons Guerra’s Mariposa, a queer reimagining of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly. She is the co-founder of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Antwerp-based dance company, Eastman, and executive producer of several of his and Damien Jalet’s works (Vlaemsch, Shellshock 2018, Les Médusés, Puz/zle, Babel(Words), Three Spells…).

 

Uhuru Phalafala

University of Cape Town

uphalafala@sun.ac.za

 

Uhuru Phalafala (PhD) is a senior lecturer in the English department at Stellenbosch University, with teaching interests in critical race studies, material and expressive cultures, black radical traditions, and decoloniality. She is preoccupied with practices and poetics of be-ing together with ancestors, the land, plants and animal, cosmos and waters. This protracted contemplation has thus far produced essays, a sonic documentary, poetry, and a turn to deep listening as bodied method. She is the author of Mine Mine Mine and Keorapetse Kgositsile & the Black Arts Movement, and is currently based in Cairo.

 

Tara June Winch

Australia / France

 

Tara June Winch (b. December 2, 1983) is an Australian (Wiradjuri) writer based in France. She was mentored by Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. She is the author of Swallow the Air and After the Carnage. Her current novel The Yield (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin) won the 2020 Miles Franklin Literary Award. Editions were published in the US/CA/UK (HarperVia, HarperCollins, 4th Estate) and translated into French(Actes Sud), Dutch (Mozaïek), German (Haymon Verlag), Polish (Czarne) and forthcoming in Mandarin and Arabic. She is currently working in film writing and on her fourth book, In the Event of my Death. Her writing explores Indigenous issues, language and belonging.

 

Briar Wood

New Zealand

drbriarwood@hotmail.com

 

Poet, fiction writer and essayist Briar Wood (Ngāpuhi Nui Tonu) grew up in South Auckland, Aotearoa. She worked extensively as a lecturer in Britain, where she won the HolyerAnGof prize for poetry in Cornwall for her first full-length poetry collection Welcome Beltane (2012). Her second collection, Rāwāhi (Anahera Press, 2017), was shortlisted in the Ockham NZ Book Awards 2018. The third collection A Book of Rongo and TeRangahau was published by Anahera Press in 2022. Her poetry has been extensively published and anthologised.

 

 

 

III. Panels

 

Navigating Petrocultures: Representations, Infrastructures, Conflicts

The world we inhabit, the way we inhabit the world, needs energy. All movement, all change, requires it. A long view shows that all our energy comes from the slow fusion of hydrogen into helium, the light and heat from which we recognise as sunshine. As this energy is transformed, some of it is lost: food as well as fossil-fuel inefficiencies are inherent to the system. Such a long view, however, often blurs over the specifics: the injustices and forms of violence that determine uneven access to energy that are barely rendered at such a scale, but may be brought into view by postcolonial critique.

In this panel, we work to centre ways of navigating petrocultures, and their national, regional, and sociocultural specifics. We will include and go beyond aesthetic artefacts that make oil the explicit centre of attention, and bring into focus representations that critically engage with the (in)visible and contested petroleum infrastructures that have fuelled conflicts across approximately the last 50 years.

We argue that the infrastructures that make petromodernity and petrocultures possible and that shape our engagements with the world can provide a heuristic and a ‘text’ for considering the disparate and disconnected access to energy and its consequences. In global capitalism, the flows of oil – including extraction, exportation, reproduction and consumption – entail “the sponging up of social and environmental ‘externalities’ by out-of-sight, out-of-mind local communities” (Dorow 91). Similarly, Darin Barney suggests that "infrastructure remains irreducibly political, because it distributes and concentrates resources and advantage, enables and disables mobility (including migration), organizes spatial and temporal relations, and manifests inequality and power” (80). Infrastructures do particular connecting work – linking disparate places, unfamiliar peoples, and even incompatible livelihoods. They generally go unnoticed, until they stop working (well) (cf. Rubenstein et al.): gas storage facilities in Europe, for example, rarely received public attention until 2022, while the pipelines in the Baltic Sea that lead to them remained invisible until leaks bubble to the surface.

If infrastructure is “the material bedrock upon which social, political, and economic life now depends for its energy” (Diamanti 200), then our focus on petroinfrastructures in various peripheral locations aims to contribute to our understanding of the material relations between and conflicts over energy and sovereignty, territory, community and social reproduction.

Panel convened by:

Gigi Adair

University of Bielefeld

gigi.adair@uni-bielefeld.de

 

Gigi Adair

Petromasculinities and extractivist cultures in Canada and Scotland

While direct literary representations of the “oil encounter” (Ghosh 29) from the global North remain relatively rare, especially compared to its outsized role in petromodernity, very recently a number of memoirs by oil industry workers or close associates have emerged. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (Kate Beaton, 2022), a graphic memoir set during the author’s time in the Canadian tar sands industry in Alberta, and Sea State (Tabitha Lasley, 2021), a memoir of the author’s time living in Aberdeen and writing about the Scottish offshore oil industry, both place their attention on the forms of hegemonic masculinity in these locations, thereby thickening our understanding of “the entanglement of masculinity and fossil fuels” (Daggett 28). In this paper, I will explore how these texts cast a critical light on oil extraction in the global North—which is frequently framed as a more ethical, even as a more green fossil fuel industry—through a gendered and classed lens. I also consider the significant limitations of these texts’ critiques, and the petrofeminism from which they emerge, in particular their apparent inability to think through the gendered and environmental consequences of petrocultures together or to generate a postcolonial critique of British-Scottish and Canadian extractivism.

 

Gigi Adair is Junior Professor for Migration and Anglophone Cultures of the Global South in the English Department at the University of Bielefeld. She works across postcolonial and gender/queer studies and on literature from around the Black Atlantic. She is the author of Kinship Across the Black Atlantic: Writing diaspora relations (Liverpool UP, 2019) and co-editor of the Narratives of Precarious Migrancy in the Global South and Companion to Migration Literature (both forthcoming with Routledge).

Kylie Crane

University of Rostock

kylie.crane@uni-rostock.de

Shifting Terrains: Energy Cultures, Infrastructures, and the Marshall Islands

Petro-culture entails static and mobile infrastructures. Drills, mine sites, pipelines are usually set on-site, their mobility mostly a function of blueprints; other infrastructures are much more mobile: containers for logistics, such as trucks and ships. In this paper, I look to the Marshall Islands, which have the second largest contingent of oil tankers in the world (following Panama). This is not because the island group has any significant fossil fuel assets, but due to the practices and policies of international companies acquiring ‘flags of convenience’ under which to register their ships. I am interested in the ways in which such ships laden with oil relate or interrupt epistemological categories, for example: static and mobile; terrestrial and aquatic; deep time and just-in-time; and the bounded borders of the nation-state. I will draw on data and policy to sketch an argument about the aqua-territorialisation of nation (through the ships, located across the globe at any time), and the externalisation of risk and minimalization of cost/responsibility (by the oil companies). Attending, in particular, to the specific infrastructures set up as blueprints for these practices, and the way the legal frameworks shelter corporate bodies at the cost of organic ones, this line of argument also brings in the histories of nuclear testing and storage on the Bikini Atoll (a no longer inhabited group of islands within the Republic of Marshall Islands). Affordances of energy cultures overlap on these islands, which are, as activists from the region continually assert, at the forefront of repercussions from multiple environmental crises, including the rising of sea levels, pelagic waste, and overfishing/ species extinction. Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poetry, along with representations of other material artefacts, will help to concretise my argument.

 

Kylie Crane is Professor of British and American Cultural Studies at the University of Rostock. Her publications in the field of postcolonial ecocriticism include a monograph on Myths of Wilderness in Contemporary Narratives, as well as shorter pieces on “Ecocriticism and Travel”, the Anthropocene, and articles on material culture, including fungi, tomatoes and plastic. Concrete and Plastic: Thinking through Materiality is forthcoming with Bloomsbury (probably 2024).

Ellen Grünkemeier

University of Bielefeld

ellen.gruenkemeier@uni-bielefeld.de

Visual Arts – Representing Petrocultures and Infrastructures in the Niger Delta Region

The inequalities, injustices and forms of violence that shape petrocultures often go unnoticed, not least because, in global capitalism, the flows of oil entail “the sponging up of social and environmental ‘externalities’ by out-of-sight, out-of-mind local communities” (Dorow 91). Confronting the disconnected access to energy and its consequences, video artist Zina Saro-Wiwa and photographer Arteh Odjidja engage with (in)visible, filthy and contested oil infrastructures in the Niger Delta region. In a way, they follow Ken Saro-Wiwa’s footsteps in his fight for ecological and social justice for the Ogoni people. As part of the global Rise for Bayelsa campaign, Odjidja’s photos capture the devastating environmental and social damage caused by frequent oil spills. The material and social relations between pollution, land, water and community are also explored, albeit indirectly, in Zina Saro-Wiwa’s series Table Manners (2014-2016) via cultural practices of food and eating. In her multi-channel video installation Karikpo Pipeline (2015), she connects the antelope-inspired Karikpo masquerade of the Ogoni people with remnants of oil infrastructures. Reading such artworks alongside and against each other helps tease out the dynamics and pitfalls of representing petro-infrastructures and -cultures. The challenge is to convey the impact oil extraction has had on the region and its peoples, without, however, defining the local communities exclusively via their relation to oil.

 

Ellen Grünkemeier is Professor of British Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Bielefeld. Informed by postcolonial studies, cultural studies, economic criticism, and medical humanities, her research focuses on questions of social inequality. She is the author of Breaking the Silence. South African Representations of HIV/AIDS (James Currey, 2013) and co-editor of Postcolonial Cultural Studies and Postcolonial Studies across the Disciplines.

 

 

Speculative futurism from the margins: Climate justice and the counterfactual

This panel addresses the understudied domain of speculative literary and visual culture from the global South as a vehicle for examining climate (in)justice. Focusing on literary texts by Efua Traoré (Children of the Quicksand, 2019) and Anne Landsman (The Devil’s Chimney, 1997),  as well as the short film In Vitro (2019) by Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour, co-written and directed with Søren Lind, it reads these works against the background of national and transnational histories of political domination, contestation, resistance and instability etched into the social and telluric landscapes of territories marked (albeit differently) by European colonialism.

            Speculative expressive culture departs from the “consensus reality” of everyday experience (Osiewicz 2017). Like its science fictional precursors, it troubles the boundaries of the known to precipitate “cognitive estrangement” in Darko Suvin’s classic formulation (1979). Given the fundamentally social capacity of the speculative to defamiliarize the existing order, it offers fertile ground for examining how the unequal legacies of racialized modernity are entangled with the biophysical manifestations of climate emergency. As harbingers of dystopia, speculative works from the global South allegorize what Jennifer Wenzel posits as the massive redistribution of risk associated with the Anthropocene (2019). Yet, as repositories of the political imagination, they also help to articulate “nonextinctive” future possibilities presaged on more equitable forms of social valuation (Canavan 2021, 275, emphasis in original). In their presentations, our panelists explore these and other dynamics.

 

Panel convened by:

Louise Bethlehem

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

louise.bethlehem@mail.huji.ac.il

Louise Bethlehem is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Chair of the Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The author of Skin Tight: Apartheid Literary Culture and its Aftermath (2006), she has also co-edited nine volumes on South African literature, anti-apartheid expressive culture, African studies and cultural studies, including the prize-winning collection South Africa in the Global Imaginary (2001). Between 2014 and 2019, Bethlehem held a European Research Council Grant for the project “Apartheid—The Global Itinerary: South African Cultural Formations in Transnational Circulation 1948-1990.”

 

Ruth S. Wenske

‘The Rains are Refusing to Come’: Climate Change and Yoruba Cosmology in Efua Traoré’s Children of the Quicksand (2019)

 

Wenske considers the speculative dimensions of Traoré’s Children of the Quicksand (2019), tracing the novel’s conceptualization of drought/rainfall through its twin employment of Yoruba mythology and a child’s perspective. By foregrounding mythology as a living ontological framework, the paper adopts the framework of “reading for rain” (Nuttall 2022) as a locus for interrogating how “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” (Ghosh 2016, 15).

 

Ruth S. Wenske is a senior lecturer in the Department of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Her main research area is contemporary Anglophone African literature, with a focus on the realist novel and the embedding of oral formations within written literature. She also works on the interconnectedness of literature, literacy, and language in East Africa, and has published articles in a range of literary and educational journals, including Research in African Literatures, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Ariel. She is currently completing a book manuscript on fictionality in Anglophone African literature.

Norma Musih

Crafting the Seeds of the Future: Sansour and Lind’s In Vitro

Musih engages the short film In Vitro (2019) to think about the sustainability of native life and its relationship with cultural identity and collective memory after eco-colonial catastrophe has made life on earth unlivable. Musih deploys Hannah Arendt’s (1968, 1998, 2005) notion of world-making in relation to the visual tropes of Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind’s film, to ask what other models of belonging we can create and what kind of future we can imagine to counter violent nationalism, ethnic cleansing and climate injustice.

Norma Musihis a researcher of communication, visual culture, and digital media. Musih holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University and is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where she studies cinematic and visual culture futuristic works from the Middle East and Africa and their complex interrelations with colonial modernity and the Anthropocene. Drawing on her curatorial and activist engagement, her book manuscript in preparation, Deliberative Imagination, traces a link between potential histories, activism, art, and digital imaginaries to suggest practices for training the political imagination in Palestine/Israel.

 

 

 

 

Mahasweta Devi, Literary Environmentalist

In this panel, we will explore Indian writer, Mahasweta Devi’s literary-environmentalist interventions. Devi’s work has long engaged with Adivasi (indigenous people’s) struggles in postcolonial India, from the everyday intersecting material concerns of land, forest, and food, to the social and ontological ones of class, caste, tribe, gender, state, belief, the non-human, and marginality. Devi’s positionality as a writer and an outsider-insider who spent substantial time with Bengal’s and Jharkhand’s tribal populations, is important here. Aimed at celebrating Devi’s birth centenary in 2026, this panel has particular relevance for Paris/France as Devi’s literary and activist work was influentially recognized here with an Ordre des Arts et des Lettres award in 2003.

Sourit Bhattacharya will facilitate the panel introducing Devi’s work and offering a brief reading of the short story ‘Mahadu: Ekti Rupkatha’ on the topics of colonial deforestation and postcolonial hunger in India. The panel comprises three papers below.

 

Panel convened by:

Sourit Bhattacharya

University of Edinburgh

sourit.bhattacharya@ed.ac.uk

Sourit Bhattacharya is Lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures at the University of Edinburgh. His research and teaching interests include colonial and postcolonial studies; famine and food studies; South Asian literatures; and critical theory. He is the author of Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel: On Catastrophic Realism (Palgrave 2020) and Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising (forthcoming with Orient BlackSwan).

 

Lucio de Capitani

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

lucio.decapitani@unive.it

Adaptation (In)justice: Interrogating Resilience through Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Pterodactyl’

 

Lucio de Capitani engages with the representation of post-Green Revolution contexts of famine and drought in India through the concept of resilience, frequently used to stress a community’s ability to deal with crises, adapt to hazards, and recover. “Pterodactyl”, he argues, juxtaposes competing understandings of resilience and adaptation, which promote, respectively, forms of environmental justice or practices of environmental injustice.

 

Lucio De Capitani is a postdoctoral researcher in English Literature at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research interests are colonial and postcolonial literatures (especially Indian writing in English, the work of Amitav Ghosh and Robert Louis Stevenson); theories of world literature; ecocriticism; and the connections between anthropology and literary studies. He has recently co-edited Venice and the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Guide (wetlands 2022).

 

Alessandra Marino

The Open University

alessandra.marino@open.ac.uk  

Bitter soil: Mahasweta Devi’s Geographies of Unequal Development

Alessandra Marino proposes to see through a reading of Devi’s short story “Shishu” (1998), or “Little Ones,” the arid lands and wastelands as a poignant space where to situate radical social critique. The mysteries surrounding the Agariyas and the anomaly of their small bodies, she argues, brings to the fore the progressive impoverishment of the forests and their inhabitants in modern India.

Alessandra Marino works as Research Fellow in International Development and Inclusive Innovation at The Open University (UK). Her interest is in Critical Development Studies and issues of justice and ethics. She has long been interested in the relation between literary productions and politics and continues to cross disciplinary fields, making use of different research methods. She holds a PhD in Postcolonial and Cultural Studies awarded by the University of Naples, L’Orientale (Italy). Alessandra is the author of Acts of Angry writing (Wayne State University Press, 2015), a monograph based on fieldwork in Adivasi communities in Northern India.

 

Arka Chattopadhyay

Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar

arka.chattopadhyay@iitgn.ac.in

The Non-Human and Ethics in Pterodactyl

 

Arka Chattopadhyay offers a reading of posthuman ecologies in indigenous community life.  As Spivak among others has indicated, Arka contends, Pterodactyl presents ethics as an experience of the impossible when the Other remains ungraspable. His paper will read Devi's environmental activism in terms of an ethical encounter with the non-human Other that interrogates any simplistic idea of rational modernity with the complexity of belief and fantasy. 

 

Arka Chattopadhyay is assistant professor of literature and philosophy at the department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Gandhinagar, India. He is the author of Beckett, Lacan and the Mathematical Writing of the Real (Bloomsbury Academic UK, 2019). He is currently working on a book on posthumanism and a Charles Wallace project on Bengali Modernisms.

 

Sayan Chattopadhyay

Indian Institute of Technology

sayanc@iitk.ac.in

Untranslatability as Environmental Justice: Planetarity, sacredness, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s translation of Mahasweta Devi’s “Pterodactyl”

(see abstract and author’s bionote in “Individual papers” section)

 

 

Translating environmental justice through Patricia Grace’s Potiki

 

Animal Remains – Feather – Shell:  Rethinking the Intersections of Ecological and Imperial Injustice in the Metropolitan Museum

Over the past decade, Western museums have come under substantial pressure to work through their colonial histories: to document the provenance of their collections, to open their archives, and to begin returning ‘objects’ that were looted from formerly colonised communities. In the context of Berlin, two milestones in this process have been the grassroots protests against the Humboldt Forum (displaying Berlin’s ethnographic collections in the reconstructed Prussian City Palace), as well as Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy’s recommendations for the restitution of African cultural patrimony held in French and German institutions. In the wake of these developments, Germany has seen an unprecedented wave of research foregrounding the entanglement of German colonialism, German scientific disciplines, and colonial collections.

            Whilst we very much welcome this wave of research, in this panel we wish to complicate some of its ongoing assumptions about what constitutes sensitive items. We propose that the debates around provenance and ‘contexts of injustice’, the ethics of museum display and storage, and imperatives for restitution continue to be informed by what is ultimately a Eurocentric distinction between culture and nature. Only ‘objects’ and ‘artefacts’ in which institutions and invested researchers recognise cultural value tend to enter discourse. ‘Objects’ which are attributed to nature tend to be by and large excluded. It is not accidental, for instance, that whilst ethnographic museums are at the heart of the recent discussions, natural history museums are rarely targeted. If they are, such as the Berlin Museum of Natural History, the target has been less the collected flora and fauna itself, but the violent colonial infrastructures which facilitated the extraction and relocation of, for instance, African megafauna.

            Following key interventions in Indigenous Studies, we argue that the nature–culture divide in this context is itself a legacy of settler colonialism and imperial capitalist extractivism. Truly decolonising metropolitan museums, we argue, demands to seriously engage with traditions of being in and knowing the world which challenge this divide. In this panel, we wish to probe into the consequences of such an approach in different regional, historical and material contexts.

Anja Schwarz will reflect on Australian mammals held by the Natural History Museum Berlin and their connection to Country, drawing on a collaborative research project bringing together Indigenous Australian communities with museum stakeholders. Lars Eckstein will focus on feathers in the context of the Oceania exhibits of the Humboldt Forum. Fogha Mc Cornilius Refem, finally, will draw on his long-standing involvement in the restitution of Ngonnso’ from Berlin to her community in Cameroon, in a discussion ranging from the materiality of Ngonnso’s cowry shell body to the ecocidal contexts of her abduction by German colonial officers. By focussing on animal bodies, feather and shell, this panel wishes to open a debate about the intersections of ecological and imperial injustice in the museum context and beyond.

Panel convened by:

Lars Eckstein

University of Postdam

lars.eckstein@uni-potsdam.de

 

Fogha Mc Cornelius Refem

University of Postdam

foghamc@uni-potsdam.de

Shell: Ecologies of colonial injustice and the ethnological museum

 

Fogha Mc Cornelius Refem is a fellow of the Potsdam- and Berlin-based research training group minor cosmopolitanisms. His PhD project focusses around the restitution of the ancestral Nso deity Ngonnso’ from the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.

 

Lars Eckstein

University of Postdam

lars.eckstein@uni-potsdam.de

Trails of feather: Ecologies of the Tahitian chief mourner costume in Berlin

 

Lars Eckstein is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Potsdam. One of his main research projects over the past years has focussed on the Oceanian encounters between the Ra‘iātean tahu‘a Tupaia and Captain James Cook.

 

Anja Schwarz

University of Postdam

anja.schwarz@uni-potsdam.de

‘Brother belonging to black fellow’: Recontextualising the Australian mammal collection in Berlin’s Museum of Natural History

 

Anja Schwarz is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Potsdam. She is co-leader of the project ‘Berlin’s Australian Archive’ investigating how natural historical collections and the Indigenous histories and knowledges that they hold can be researched, cared for and presented today.

 

Raw Materialities: Africa and Eco-injustice

Eco injustice in Africa takes many forms. Its physical manifestation can be identified both in localized pollution (at for instance, sites of extraction) and in the diffuse effects of climate change with the disturbances in weather patterns that result in droughts and flooding. Natural elements – sea, water, ground, animal and plant life – are by now irremediably mixed up with the side effects of capitalist modernity – plastic, oil, toxic chemicals, waste. The complexity and scale of environmental damage, the geographical divide between production and consumption, extraordinary profits and externalized costs means that environmental injustices are often in danger of exceeding legibility. They have, in many cases, become indistinguishable from everyday life on the continent.

This panel brings together papers that reflect on the way in which creative texts of various kinds have engaged with the material realities of eco-injustice in Africa. It seeks to put the material ecocriticism of Serenella Iovino, Serpil Opperman and others, in conversation with the much older African traditions such as animism which offer an alternative inscription of relations between the human and the more-than-human world. It traces the continuities and discrepancies between social histories, ecological realities and conventional narratives of environmentalism on the continent, asking questions about the continued influence of colonial and anthropocentric claims to knowledge. It considers the evolving role of traditional literary forms, like allegory, in shaping our understanding of environmental degradation and its injustices. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism’s insights into the ecological afterlives of imperialism in Africa, ‘Raw Materialities’ explores the ways in which creative works incorporate both the historical and the material to render legible the neocolonial environmental present, and to open older and deeper forms of experience that lie beyond it. It invites contributors to read the stories of the material world, both directly but also indirectly through the literary and cultural texts that have translated the vibrations of the disturbed material world into human narratives.

 

Panel convened by:

 

Louise Green

Stellenbosch University

lagreen@sun.ac.za

 

Eckard Smuts

Stellenbosch University

eckards@sun.ac.za 

 

Panel 1

Louise Green

‘Unsettled background’

 

Global environmental breakdown undermines the ground on which we stand. This paper forms part of a larger project that experiments with a new method of ecocritical analysis, one which demands a rethinking of the familiar conception of perspective. I propose the concept of ‘background’ as an important mechanism for considering realist representational forms in an age when we no longer stand on stable ground. I explore what it might mean to redirect attention to the background, which is not simply the natural world, but would encompasses all the different kinds of materiality that might form the ground of human action. In this paper I will focus on two photographic images that attempt to represent environmental crisis in Africa– Kevin Ochieng Onyango’s image ‘The Last Breath’ (winner of the climate action category of the environmental photographer of the year awards 2021) and Nichole Sobecki’s image of drought in Somalia. I read these images to find the story of the material world that they are, hesitatingly, beginning to tell.

 

Louise Green is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She is interested in critical theory, studies in modernity and globalization and tracing the elusive, mobile and diverse formations of value in late capitalist society. Her research proposes Africa as an important site for a philosophical engagement with the universalising impulse that marks contemporary narratives of environmental crisis. She is the author of Fragments from the History of Loss: The Nature Industry and the Postcolony (2020).

 

Maria Olaussen

University of Gothenburg

maria.olaussen@sprak.gu.se

Proximity and freedom: The animal figure and African narratives of slavery

 

One of the most important promises of Enlightenment modernity was the idea of human freedom, articulated in terms of freedom from dependence, injustice, degradation and exploitation. Separating human life from other life forms on the planet made it possible to achieve forms of human existence, seemingly disconnected from the rest of the physical environment. This separation forms the basis of both colonial and environmental injustice and points to the need for new articulations of human freedom. In this paper I look at depictions of slavery, bondage and unfree labour in a number of African novels from Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), to Bessie Head’s Maru (1960), Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (1966) and Yvette Christiansë’s Unconfessed (1999). I focus particularly on how the physical environment and the figure of the animal appear in these texts and how ideals of freedom are bound up with the material world. Drawing on Cajetan Iheka’s concept of proximity in Naturalizing Africa (2018) in the twofold sense of closeness, in terms of both a shared physical environment and common physical needs, my analysis points to how narratives of human and environmental degradation remain intertwined.

 

Maria Olaussen is Professor of English at the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Gothenburg. She has published widely on African literature, gender studies and postcolonial studies. Among her publications in human-animal studies is an article in The Journal of Southern African Studies (2021) on human-animal transformation in Zimbabwean writing.

Eckard Smuts

Animated Terrain: From Allegory to Eco-materialism in Karen Jennings's An Island

 

The island, in Karen Jennings’s allegorical novel An Island, is a complex, provocative site of literary meaning. It is the setting for the protagonist Samuel’s psychic entrapment in a traumatic colonial and post-colonial past, but it is also a landmass situated amid oceanic flows: a littoral zone attracting the flotsam of new planetary entanglements. As such, I propose, the island configures a literary topography in which an identity politics vested in the aftermath of empire is superimposed – disjunctively, discordantly – over emergent eco-materialist questions of justice and sociability. My paper suggests that reading the island as an animate, or animating force helps us to situate these dissonant energies as a focal crisis for the problem of eco-injustice in Africa. 

 

Eckard Smuts is a lecturer in the Department of English at Stellenbosch University. Previously, he was affiliated as a postdoctoral researcher with the Mellon-funded “Rethinking South African Literature(s)” project at the University of the Western Cape. His research interests include postcolonialism, Southern African literatures and the environmental humanities. He has published academic essays in English in Africa, Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Social Dynamics, as well as short fiction in The Johannesburg Review of Books. His current research project focuses on alternative temporalities in a range of Southern African novels. 

 

Gabeba Baderoon

Penn State University

GXB26@PSU.EDU

Sand poetry: Relief Map of the Flats

In this paper, I write about the Cape Flats, an area to which Black people in Cape Town were “removed” during apartheid. Among the latter was my mother’s family, wrenched from Claremont to Athlone, where in contrast my own sense of home and landscape were formed. In both representation and experience, sand is the most familiar feature of the Cape Flats. Yet thirty metres of sand form the ground of the Cape Peninsula as a whole, dating from the period when Table Mountain to Fish Hoek constituted an island and the Flats were a seabed. Given the unspoken role of sand as fundament, I find that its materiality and deep history hold compelling alternative possibilities for reading portrayals of the Cape Flats as a sand-blown wasteland occupied by throwaway people. Since the colonial period, the capacity of sand to move has been viewed as a crucial barrier to domesticating the Cape landscape and attempts to stabilize this mobile material into settled ground have characterized the official relation to sand since at least 1875. What other relations are possible? Tracing its alternatingly mobile and static states, I rethink sand as a basis for seeing the Cape landscape and its occupants anew.

Gabeba Baderoon is a poet and scholar. She is the author of Regarding Muslims: From Slavery to Post-apartheid (2014, Wits UP) and three collections of poetry, The Dream in the Next Body, A hundred silences and The History of Intimacy (all with Kwela and Intimacy also in a US edition with Northwestern UP, 2021). Baderoon is a member of the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund, which has published over 100 books by African poets since 2012. She is the co-founder of the African Feminist Initiative based at Penn State University, where she is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, African Studies and Comparative Literature. Baderoon is an Extraordinary Professor of English at Stellenbosch University and a Fellow of STIAS.

 

PANEL 2

 

Simon van Schalkwyk

University of the Witwatersrand

Simon.VanSchalkwyk@wits.ac.za

Background radiation: South African nuclear fiction

 

At COP 27, nuclear energy emerged alongside wind, solar and natural gas solar as a green alternative to environmentally devastating extractive fossil-fuel-economies. Yet nuclear energy remains suspiciously absent from South Africa’s beleaguered national energy provider ESKOM, which has recently rolled out its “Just Energy Transition” plan designed to “to progress the evolution for transition towards a cleaner and greener energy future”. The nuclear’s spectral (in)significance in South African policy thus belies its more recent and decidedly global visibility. It also obscures the nuclear’s sustained signifcance to South African poetry, fiction and visual art, the “fabulously textual” dimensions of which have courted the nuclear since its inception. Taking South Africa’s compelling nuclear history as its cue, this paper reflects upon the nuclear’s dubious re-emergence on a planetary scale as a sustainable energy resource resistant to the anthropocene’s presiding narratives of environmental and ecological scarcity and devastation. What does it mean to set such local eruptions of nuclear aesthetics within global, perhaps even planetary, conceptual frames attentive to environmental and ecological networks? These details propel this paper’s interest in thinking about South Africa’s nuclear genealogies and aesthetic imaginaries in relation to local and global transitions toward “green” and “just” sources of energy.

 

Simon van Schalkwyk is a Senior Lecturer in English Studies in the School for Literature Language and Media at Wits University and a Visiting Researcher at WiSER, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research. His research interests include modern and contemporary literature and poetry, with a particular focus on the American twentieth-century, transnational modernism and modernity, and contemporary South African literature. He currently acts as co-editor for Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies and as the academic editor for the Johannesburg Review of Books. His first collection of poetry, Transcontinental Delay, was published by Dryad Press in 2021.

 

Fred Aluoch

Stellenbosch University

26848880@sun.ac.za

‘Hydrocolonialism, Toxicity and Slow Violence in Dayo Ntwari’s “Mother’s Love”’

 

Today’s world is experiencing uneven forms of environmental degradation. One area that calls our attention is the pollution of marine water sources disrupting life underwater. Several studies and discussions (e.g., Iheka 2018; Caminero-Santangelo 2011) have demonstrated that ecological problems can be profoundly explored through human and nonhuman actors. Nonhuman actors entail land, water and spiritual materiality. Such studies have not engaged the short story form either for its brevity or lack of content on ecological degradation. This paper is a reflection on eco-injustice using Dayo Ntwari’s short story ‘Mother’s Love’. It seeks to underscore how the short story intervenes in framing ocean pollution through an interplay of human and nonhuman actors. Drawing on hydrocolonialism and African postcolonial ecocriticism, the paper interrogates how the ocean bears the burden of ecological devastation when interspecies conflicts lead to a form of ‘slow violence (Rob Nixon 2011) when industrial effluents and other toxic wastes are discharged into bodies of water.

 

Fred Aluoch is a PhD Student in English Studies at Stellenbosch University. His work revolves around hydrocolonialism, African postcolonial ecocriticism and the Anthropocene. His doctoral research focuses mainly on reading for water as a new methodology in exploring contemporary environmental crises through African literature. He is interested in the ways in which emerging ecological issues can be understood through literary representations of the element of water. His MA research was about language and survival in transnational spaces. After graduating from University of Nairobi in 2020, he became immersed in the world of water and its place in sustaining society.

 

Philip Aghoghovwia

Independent Scholar/Research Fellow (UFS)

Radical Corporealities: Water and Black Ecopoetics

This paper explores contemporary Black ecopoetics, their variousness in the forms of spoken and written poetry, and their figuration of water in response to the prevailing ecological and ontological shifts in Africa wrought by the climate crisis. The paper draws on hydrocolonial studies, an emergent sub-field of environment humanities that foregrounds water while bringing together resource ecology and postcolonial studies under one frame of critical inquiry. Discussing the works of South African performance poet Koleka Putuma and Nigerian poet Gbenga Adeoba, the Black body presents as the site of trauma that attests to the exactions of colonial maritime encounters in Africa. The paper further rethinks the body and its material corporealities (containable and uncontainable) as the possible habitus of resistance aimed at the restoration of Black humanity previously battered by the maritime logics of slavery, colonialism, imperialism. 

Philip Aghoghovwia is Senior Research Fellow at the University of the Free State (South Africa) and a Contractor Advisor with the Government of Alberta (Canada). His research is in environmental humanities, African literature, energy and water studies, and the cultures and politics of resource extraction in Africa. Aghoghovwia holds a research rating of Y1 by the National Research Foundation of South Africa. He is the author of Violent Ecotropes: Petroculture in the Niger Delta (HSRC Press, 2022).

 

 

Decolonial Solidarities: Challenging Environmental Injustices in Chicanx and Indigenous Speculative Fiction[1]

At a time when coloniality has evolved into a neoliberal capitalism and resulted in countless environmental injustices, establishing positive socio-environmental coalitions—such as decolonial solidary relations (Gaztambide-Fernández 2012)—seems crucial. Literature, and more specifically speculative fiction, can greatly contribute to that end. This genre offers the possibility to imagine futuristic stories that can function as cautionary tales, intended to produce a change of mindset and behavior in the readership. It also allows for the rewriting of past histories of coloniality to redress environmental injustices. This panel seeks to analyze the ways in which decolonial solidarities are mobilized in North American literature by Chicanx and Indigenous authors to challenge socio-environmental injustices. 

Panel convened by:

 

Research Group Intersections (Panel 1)

University of Oviedo

 

Isabel Pérez-Ramos

isabelperez@uniovi.es

Wasting relations and decolonial solidarities in Chicanx speculative fiction

 

The presentation will focus on Alejandro Morales’, and Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s works The Rag Doll Plagues (1992) and Lunar Braceros 2125-2148 (2009). These stories challenge issues of waste accumulation and offshoring, socioenvironmental degradation, racial segregation, coloniality and human wasting in the Wasteocene (Armiero 2021), while hinting at promising socio-economic alternatives, resulting from different types of decolonial solidarities. They are moreover stylistically experimental, using alternative temporalities and, in the case of Lunar Braceros, a fragmented, epistolary style, to convey their environmental justice critique while trying to get the readers to reconsider past and contemporary socio-environmental injustices through imagined futures.

 

Isabel Pérez-Ramos earned her PhD in 2017 from KTH, Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden) having been based at the Environmental Humanities Laboratory. Currently, she is a Juan de la Cierva-Incorporación research fellow at the Department of English, French, and German at the University of Oviedo, Spain. She will become a Ramón y Cajal research fellow in January 2023. Her research focuses on literary representations of environmental injustices, mostly in Chicanx and US Southwestern literature. Her articles have been published in academic journals such as IJES, MELUS, Resilience, Environmental Humanities, and Ecozon@, and she co-edited the volume Toward an Eco-social Transition: Transatlantic Environmental Humanities (2021). She is a member of the multidisciplinary research groups Intersections: Contemporary Literatures, Cultures and Theories (University of Oviedo) and GIECO-Instituto Franklin (University of Alcalá), a member of EASLCE’s advisory board (European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment), and book editor of the journal Ecozon@.

 

Miasol Eguíbar-Holgado

eguibarmiasol@uniovi.es

Re-writing the History of Colonial Genocide and Ecocide through Decolonial Solidarities

 

The paper will examine “Buffalo Bird”, a story from Chelsea Vowel’s (Métis) collection Buffalo is the New Buffalo (2022). This story presents an alternative past in which an alliance of Indigenous nations successfully stops British and French colonial advances. The story highlights the potential of coalition between different Indigenous bands. It also exposes the impact of settler overhunting of the buffalo on these peoples, which emphasizes the mutually constitutive relationships between all living things, central to Indigenous epistemologies. I argue that these approaches to coalition and kinship contribute to shaping decolonial solidarity and moving towards climate justice.

 

Miasol Eguíbar-Holgado holds a degree in English Philology from the University of Oviedo, Spain. In 2011, she obtained a Master’s Degree on American Literatures in Trinity College, Dublin and she was awarded her PhD in 2015 from the University of Oviedo, for which she received a pre-doctoral scholarship. She currently works as Assistant Professor in English in the same university. She has published in academic journals such as EJES, African American Review, Journal of Postcolonial Writing or Canadian Literature. Her research focuses on Afro-Canadian literature and decolonial speculative fictions.

 

Fernando Perez-Garcia

perezfernando@uniovi.es

World-building Solidarities: Decolonial Cosmologies Against Ecologic Collapse

 

The paper will focus on Celu Amberstone’s “Refugees” (2006) and Wayde Compton’s “The Lost Island” (2014). “Refugees” presents a future of ecologic collapse in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples have been relocated to a new planet by aliens called “Benefactors,” and how different epistemologies and relations to land will establish complicated dynamics in the community. In “The Lost Island” a multiracial coalition of anticolonial activists attempt to claim a new volcanic island as Pan-Indigenous unceded land. Both stories explore the possibility of decolonial, intercultural solidarities, and the interconnection between land, Indigenous epistemologies, and non-Indigenous peoples against environmental injustice.

 

Fernando Perez-Garcia earned his PhD in Gender and Cultural Diversity in 2022 from the University of Oviedo, where he currently works as a “Severo Ochoa” postdoctoral researcher. He is a member of the research group Intersections: Contemporary Literatures, Cultures and Theories (University of Oviedo). He has carried out teaching and research stays at the Simon Fraser University (Canada) and the University of Kent (United Kingdom). His research focuses on theories of urban space, coexistence, and the transmodern paradigm in Indigenous and Black Canadian literature.

 

 

 

Afro-Environmental and Eco-Cosmopolitan Solidarities: A Comparative Approach to Post Anthropocentric Diasporic Fiction1

 

Drawing on an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that brings together and feminist, postcolonial and decolonial insights into the principles of solidarity, cosmopolitanism and environmental justice, this panel will explore three recent works of African and East Asian diasporic writers as they reflect on environmental solidarities, planetary belongings and its role on the development of indigenous and diasporic post-anthropocentric imaginations.

 

Panel convened by:

 

Research Group Intersections (Panel 2)

University of Oviedo

 

Ángela Suárez-Rodríguez

suarezrangela@uniovi.es

Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria: A Literary Gesture of Afro-Environmental Solidarity

 

The presentation will focus on a critical assessment of Noo Saro-Wiwa’s travelogue as a literary gesture of affective solidarity towards Nigeria, the author’s homeland, and more specifically towards the long-lasting situation of environmental injustice in the Niger Delta region. The discussion will start from the premise that, as a “part-returnee and part-tourist” in Nigeria, as Saro-Wiwa describes herself, her attitude towards the country is strongly marked by a feeling of nostalgia and an uncertain sense of belonging. As an “insider-outsider”, Saro-Wiwa’s epistemological advantage allows her to acknowledge Nigeria’s great cultural and natural richness and, at the same time, to objectively reflect on current social, political and environmental issues in the different regions of the country. Acknowledging Saro-Wiwa’s role in generating a greater visibility of some of the main political and sociological struggles of her homeland, the conclusions will revolve around the possibility of considering Looking for Transwonderland as a praxis of solidarity that, in particular, promotes actions capable of reversing Nigeria’s environmental insecurity.

 

Ángela Suárez-Rodríguez is Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English Studies at the University of Oviedo, Spain. Her PhD thesis explores contemporary Afrodiasporic women’s writing, with a focus on the protagonists’ emotional experiences throughout their migrations. She is working on completing a research monograph based on her doctoral investigation. Her research has been published in leading national and international journals such as Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her current research focuses on the study of narrative solidarities in recently published works by Afrodiasporic authors. For this, she draws from Black feminist theories of solidarity and postcolonial affect studies. 

 

Carla Martínez del Barrio

martinezbcarla@uniovi.es  

A Literary Response to Migration: Refugees as Eco-cosmopolitan Strangers in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

 

The presentation argues that the convergence of environmentalist and postcolonial thought (Huggan 2010) seeks to imagine alternative more hospitable world futures by embedding the figure of the refugee in histories of colonial conquest, neoliberal expansion, military conflict and interlocking biological and planetary systems where environmental and human exploitation are inextricably related (Maczynska 2020). In the context of the planetary, the eco-cosmopolitan stranger materializes in contemporary forced migration movements as well as in the collective sympathetic and disruptive counter-movements and cosmopolitan responsibilities that may arise in order to reshape traditional identity-politics (Nyers 2003). However, approaches to solidarity must be wary of remittent imperial and colonial models of hierarchical subordination (Spivak 2012). Thus, this paper analyzes the commonalities between the figure of the stranger and cosmopolitanism in “an attempt to envision individuals and groups as part of planetary ‘imagined communities’ of both human and non-human kinds” (Heise 2008, 61). Through a constant dislocation of political, social, racial, sexual and literary boundaries, Exit West not only overcomes binary presupposed ideas on migration and human identity but also offers a larger-than-human perspective for claiming a common planetary sense of belonging.

Carla Martínez del Barrio is a PhD candidate in Gender and Cultural Diversity at the University of Oviedo. She completed her BA in English and MA in Gender and Diversity at the University of Oviedo and she is a member of Intersections: Literatures, Cultures and Contemporary Theories research group of the University of Oviedo. Some of her research interests are contemporary and postcolonial literatures, refugee and gender studies, the figure of the stranger and cosmopolitanism. She has participated in multiple international conferences and her work on urban space and gender in Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight was published in 2021 by Odisea.

 

Rosa María Moreno-Redondo

University of the Balearic Islands

rosa.moreno@uib.es

Africanfuturist Landscapes and Indigenous Knowledge in Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti Trilogy

 

The presentationsuggests thatOkorafor is exceptional in her imagination of a world where Africa is independent from the West and in her perceptions of how to achieve it; her works can be interpreted as dismantling colonial power and Eurocentrism in all its forms. In her Binti trilogy, composed by Binti: Sacred Fire (2015), Binti: Home (2017) and Binti: the Night Maskerade (2018), the author presents a future Africa that can be considered truly postcolonial, being completely independent from Western past and present influences. This presentation intends to analyse the representations of Africa in Okorafor’s Binti trilogy and how these novels show a political and cultural independence from the West and the potential for counter-hegemonic discourse. Starting from the theoretical concept of native knowledge as used by Isaiah Lavender III (2019), I will analyse the promotion of indigenous knowledge in Okorafor’s trilogy, which implies, among other issues, the preservation of territory as well as the ecological decolonization of the environment, thus fostering the expulsion of (neo)imperialist economic power with its centuries-long exploitation of natural resources. she will also rely on Ben Herzog’s definition of anticolonialism (2013) as applied by Joshua Yu Burnett to Okorafor’s work (2015), since this is also, in my view, a key element in the Binti trilogy.

 

Rosa María Moreno-Redondo graduated in English Philology from the Autonomous University of Madrid. She holds an MA in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of the Balearic Islands, specializing in literary studies. At present she is a PhD candidate at the same institution, doing research on 21st-century speculative fiction and ecocriticism, in particular on Nnedi Okorafor and Mike Carey. She has been an adjunt lecturer at the University of the Balearic Islands since 2009 and she has presented papers at international conferences in Spain, Great Britain, Slovakia, the United States and Australia. She has also published papers on the narrative of Diana Evans, Han Khan and Nnedi Okorafor.

 

 

Reinscribing Black and Brown Body Matters: Pedagogies of Planetary Solidarities1

Through engagement with forms of performative and pedagogical projects led by Black and Brown artists and scholars in Sri Lanka, the Caribbean, the US, the UK and Australia, this panel puts forward a critical reading of the entanglement of Black and Brown bodies and necropolitical ecologies in the Global South. Centring performance art, dance and arts-based research objects and methodologies, we will look at the ways in which selected artworks by Janani Cooray, Pearl Primus and Maxime Beneba-Clarke offer alternative enactments of critical environmental and planetary solidarities.

 

Panel convened by:

 

Research Group Intersections (Panel 3)

University of Oviedo

 

Emilia María Durán Almarza

duranemilia@uniovi.es

Of Women, Rivers and Trees. Engaging Janani Cooray’s Planetary Matter(s)

 

The presentationargues thatunderlying the critical explorations of human/nonhuman agencies and relational ontologies rests a renewed commitment to generating ethical imaginations that transcend the individualistic, extractivist and monohumanist (Wynter) drives of modern/colonial epistemologies and practices. This presentation will engage the performance production of Sri Lankan performer Janani Cooray, foregrounding a relational reading of her “Planting Myself” (2020), “Pillars” (2018) and “Been Part of a River Itself” (2015). Drawing on ecofeminist and decolonial relational criticism, she aims at exploring the ways in which planetary solidary matter(s)—physical and ethical—unfold in Cooray’s artworks, inviting a critical reflection and move forward from the entangled necropolitics of Global South women and nature in the Anthropocene.

 

Emilia María Durán-Almarza is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oviedo, Spain. She specializes in postcolonial writing and performance. In this field, she has authored a monograph Performeras del Dominicanyork: Josefina Báez and Chiqui Vicioso (PUV 2010), edited several volumes, such Diasporic Women’s Writing. (En)Gendering Literature and Performance (Routledge 2014), Debating the Afropolitan (Routledge 2019) and Performing Cultures of Equality (Routledge 2022); and published several articles in international peer reviewed journals. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at Utrecht University, in the Department of Culture and Media Studies. Her recent work focuses on the exploration of relational ethics in the work of contemporary postcolonial performers.

 

 

Elena Igartuburu García

igartuburuelena@uniovi.es

Strange Fruits: Re-inscribing the Black Body in Nature through African Dance

 

The presentationsuggests that Christina Sharpe has invited us to consider the relationship between weather, climate, and ecologies as environmental phenomena but also as the pervasive conditions of antiblackness (Sharpe 106). Pearl Primus’s piece “Strange Fruit” (1943) and its history in Jacob’s Pillow dance hub (Beckett, MA) in the Berkshires reflect on such interactions. First performed by Primus herself with the title “A Man Has Just Been Lynched” at the 92^nd Street Y in New York, the choreography, inspired in African and Afro-Caribbean dances, has been relocated twice to the Pillow’s open-air stage--in 2011 (Kim Bears) and 2015 (Harumi Elders). The repertoire of performances of “Strange Fruit” trace metaphors that reflect on what it means to inhabit a Black body in the afterlife of slavery: the body as strange fruit, the body as a site of extraction and exploitation, but also the reappropriation of natural spaces through performance.

 

Elena Igartuburu is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of English Studies at the University of Oviedo, hosted by Research Group Intersections. She has been a Teaching Associate at UMass Amherst and a Visiting Scholar at SUNY New Paltz after graduating summa cum laude from the Gender and Diversity PhD program at Universidad de Oviedo in 2015. Her current research focuses on race, gender, movement and dance in contemporary US and Caribbean texts from the perspective of Performance Studies and Queer and Gender Studies.

 

Óscar Alonso Álvarez

alonsooscar@uniovi.es

Engaging Planetary Solidarity through English Language Teaching

 

The presentationcontends that, in spite of a growing interest in critical pedagogies in education (Kubota 2021, Mojica and Castañeda-Peña 2021), and in English language teaching and learning (Kumaravadivelu 2016), the concept of solidarity has not been sufficiently addressed within the educational field (Gaztambiede-Fernández 2012). As many others have before (hooks 1986, Lugones 1987, Dean 1996, Gould 2007, Scholz 2008, Gaztambide-Fernández 2012, Hemmings 2012, Cheah 2016) Alonso Álvarez conceives the concept of solidarity as dynamic, i.e., an active process that demands action in order to promote social change. In this presentation, he will discuss ways to integrate planetary and environmental solidarity in the English language classroom, both in Teaching Training programs and in the Primary classroom. For these means, and in cooperation with a network of in-service language teachers in Spain and the Netherlands, a corpus of content-integrated teaching tool-kits and ready-to-use materials will be designed and tested. For the purposes of this presentation, he will engage on a set of action and art-based research materials that center Maxime Beneba Clarke’s picture books When We Say Black Lives Matter (2020), Wide Big World (2018), and The Patchwork Bike (2016) as an entry point for the engagement of planetary solidarities.

 

Óscar Alonso Álvarez is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Oviedo (Spain) and Utrecht University (the Netherlands). He holds a PhD in the Gender and Diversity program at the University of Oviedo and specializes in teaching of English as a second language and English for specific purposes. In his extensive teaching experience, he has worked as University Lecturer at the University of Oviedo, University of León and, previously, as specialist in Bilingual Teaching (English and Spanish) in the public schools in Chicago, Illinois. His current research focuses on the development of action and art-based research projects that foreground engaged pedagogies of feminist and decolonial solidarity. 

 

 

 

Transnational Solidarities, Migrancy and Non/Human Suffering

 

Transnational mobilities are triggered, and often forced, by a variety of factors, ranging from war and persecution to the desire for a better life. The works discussed in this panel deal with mobilities and transnational solidarities in a variety of contexts and artistic genres, and draw from theories of transnational solidarity, postcolonial ecocriticism, global care work and antispeciesist feminism, to explore the ways in which authors connect and critique the complexities and intertwining of justice, empathy and sustainability.

 

Panel convened by:

 

Research Group Intersections (Panel 4)

University of Oviedo

 

Patricia Bastida-Rodríguez

University of the Balearic Islands

pbastida@uib.es

A Future through Solidarity? Migrant Communities, Sustainability and the Environment in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

 

Mohsin Hamid’s widely acclaimed novel Exit West (2017) has received much critical attention due to its depiction of the experiences of migrants and refugees in a world shaken by violent conflicts and growing inequalities. Although the novel focuses primarily on a refugee couple escaping from a war context, it contains a significant number of passages which hint at climate change as one of the reasons for the migration of entire communities, a fact that has already been reported in contemporary society. Indeed, in the kind of apocalyptic future evoked in Hamid’s novel, as warned by scientists, migrations will increasingly be motivated by weather and environmental changes producing floods, droughts and a diversity of catastrophes that will affect mostly those living in poor areas.

An important feature to be highlighted in Exit West is how the new communities formed as a result of these migrations seem to rely increasingly on solidarity, on the one hand, and sustainability, on the other, as they learn to adapt to the new circumstances. Thus, they are soon made aware that human beings need each other for survival and that the old world must be transformed towards a more responsible use of resources. In this paper I intend to explore how sustainability, solidarity and climate change are approached in Hamid’s novel, initially in subtle ways but gradually through more overt reflections by the narrator and the characters. In order to do so, I will resort to recent theorisations on political and transnational solidarity (Scholz 2008; Featherstone 2012; Gould 2007), as well as contemporary discussions on social and environmental justice and what has been called the “environmentalism of the poor” (Martínez Alier 2002).

 

Patricia Bastida-Rodríguez is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of the Balearic Islands, where she lectures in contemporary English literature, diasporic writing and gender studies. She specialises in contemporary diasporic fiction in English, a field on which she has published extensively. She has co-edited several books and has published articles in journals such as the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, the Journal of Postcolonial Writing or the European Journal of English Studies. Her current research focuses on the concept of solidarity as explored in twenty-first-century diasporic writing in English.

 

Paola Prieto López

University of Oviedo

prietopaola@uniovi.es

Environmental Justice, Solidarity and the Legacies of Colonialism in Mojisola Adebayo’s Plays

 

Mojisola Adebayo is a theatre practitioner of Danish and Nigerian descent who has been

internationally acclaimed for her political and activist theatre projects in areas such as Antarctica, South Africa, Palestine or Sri Lanka. Her plays use theatre for social change to deal with issues such as climate change, homophobia, racism or human rights through a unique and innovative style rooted in her diasporic heritage. Drawing on postcolonial ecocriticism (DeLoughrey, Didur & Carrigan 2015; Nixon 2005; 2011) and the concept of transnational solidarity and justice (Gould 2007; Pedwell 2014), this paper seeks to explore the legacies of colonialism and their impact on environmental degradation through Mojisola Adebayo’s plays Moj of the Antarctic: An African Oddysey (2008), Matt Henson: North Star (2012) and her latest production Leaves from Family Tree (2021). I argue that the plays under analysis put into dialogue the violence and precarity of Black lives with the violence exercised against the non-human, connecting the past with the present, and the local with the global, to raise awareness about climate responsibility, blackness, gender and sexuality.

 

Paola Prieto Lopez is Assistant Professor in the English Philology Department at the University of Oviedo. She holds a PhD from the University of Oviedo (2021) and she completed her MA in Language Pedagogy at the University of Utah (2015) and her MA in Spanish Language and Linguistics at the University of Oviedo (2015). Between 2016-2019 she worked as a Marie-Curie early-stage researcher for the EU funded GRACE project (Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe). She is also part of the research group “Intersections: Literatures, Cultures and Contemporary Theories”. Her research interests include Black British theatre, postcolonialism, diaspora and gender studies.

 

Isabel Carrera Suárez

University of Oviedo

icarrera@uniovi.es

Christy Lefteri’s Songbirds: Transnational Care Plots and Antispeciesist Feminism

 

Christy Lefteri’s Songbirds (2021) tells the story of Nisha, a Sri Lankan domestic worker in Cyprus, through the double narration by her lover, Yiannis, and her employer, Petra, as they search for her in the aftermath of her disappearance. The novel highlights the complexities and injustice of the transnationalised care regime in which Nisha is trapped, defined by Arlie Hochschild (2000) in her discussion of global care chains. Drawing on Hochschild and on Esguerra Muelle’s modified concept of transnational care plots (2021), as well as on ecofeminism (Carol J. Adams 2014, 2018; Josephine Donovan 1996, 2006) and antispeciesist feminism (Briones Marrero 2022), I will argue that the parallel story of the eponymous songbirds which, in their flight from Africa to Europe, are cruelly poached by Yiannis for wealthy Cypriots to devour, does not simply stand as a metaphor for the plight of migrant workers such as Nisha, but is in fact a tragic and significant event in itself. The intertwining of the two plots effectively connects the ethics of care and the tenets of antispeciesist feminism, which holds that women and non-human animals are oppressed by the same mechanisms within patriarchal-capitalist systems, and argue for care and the reduction of suffering as priorities for transformation.

 

Isabel Carrera Suárez is Professor in English (Postcolonial Studies) at the University of Oviedo. Her research focuses on the intersections between postcolonialism and feminism, an area in which she has published widely. Recent contributions have appeared in Moving Worlds (“Feminist Epistemologies from the South: Latin American Activisms and Decolonial Futures”, 2020, with E. Durán-Almarza), The Oxford History of the Novel in English (vol. 12; 2017), EJES and Interventions (‘The Stranger Flâneuse and the Aesthetics of Pedestrianism’, 2015). She co-organised two EACLALS conferences in Oviedo (1996, 2017) and is past Chair of EACLALS, 2017-2021. She currently leads the research group Intersections, is part of the Marie Curie ITN EUTERPE on transnational literature, and co-editor of the European Journal of English Studies (EJES). 

 

 

 

Postcolonial Justice, Environmental Temporalities

 

Emphasizing place as being intrinsic to a sense of self, many postcolonial writers have countered forms of environmental alienation through processes of re-territorialization and cultural cross referencing, with a view to exposing the power structures buttressing the world-shaping forces of imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, and globalization. This tension between a desire to ground postcolonial selves in the specificity of place and a determination to re-historicize the environment – be it nature or “urbanature” (Ashton Nichols) – often reveals, in turn, the long reach of discourses of dominance, which traces an unsettling arc between the various dualisms having underpinned colonialism and slavery (i.e., self/other; humanity/nature; human/non- human) in the past and phenomena of systemic exclusions, ghettoization and environmental racism in the present.

Relying on the work of Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin as well as that of Val Plumwood, Deane Curtin, Keja Valens and Jack Halberstam, this panel puts forward the hypothesis that troubling dualistic thinking translates into new ‘history-oriented’ definitions of the environment in selected postcolonial works. Our aim is not only to explore how writers such as Behrouz Boochani, Junot Díaz, Richard Flanagan, Caryl Phillips, Monique Roffey, and Hanya Yanagihara extend the geo-physical terms by which the notion of the environment is generally defined, but also to highlight how these writers mobilize imagery (such as the trope of the toxic dump and the metaphor of the non-human) to connect environmental injustices to a multi-faceted history of violence and oppression.

 

Panel convened by:

Delphine Munos

University of Liège

delphine.munos@uliege.be

 

Panel 1

Bénédicte Ledent

University of Liège

B.Ledent@uliege.be

Snow and the Black British Imaginary in Caryl Phillips's Writing

 

This paperwill show how recurring evocations of snow in Phillips's writing historicize the Black presence in England, exposing the myth of purity of the so-called Mother Country and denouncing the long unacknowledged injustices experienced by colonial migrants. Building bridges between the long reach of colonial history, toxic masculinity and environmental racism,

 

Bénédicte Ledent is honorary professor at the University of Liège, Belgium. She has published extensively on Caryl Phillips and other writers of the Caribbean diaspora, including Robert Antoni, Michelle Cliff, and Lawrence Scott. She has worked on numerous editorial projects, the latest of which is a volume of Caryl Phillips's radio plays (forthcoming with Bloomsbury). She is co-editor of the book series Cross/Cultures (Brill). Her current research interests include biographical fiction and literary representations of mental health.

 

Delphine Munos

From Santo Domingo to Parlin, New Jersey: Toxic dumps in Junot Díaz’s short fiction

 

This presentation will explore the trope of the toxic dump in Díaz’s representations of New Jersey.

 

Delphine Munos works in the Modern Languages Department at the University of Liège, Belgium, where she is a member of the postcolonial research group CEREP. A co-editor (with Bénédicte Ledent) of the book series “Cross/Cultures: Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English” (Brill) and the author of After Melancholia (Brill/Rodopi, 2013), a monograph on Jhumpa Lahiri, she specializes in Anglophone postcolonial literatures and US ethnic literatures, with a special focus on ‘minor-to-minor’ interactions between different postcolonial places and minority histories. She has published articles in journals such as Postcolonial Text, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing and co-edited journal issues for South Asian Diaspora (with Mala Pandurang: 2014; 2018) and Journal of Postcolonial Writing (with Bénédicte Ledent: 2018; Routledge 2019).

 

Bastien Bomans

University of Liège

bbomans@uliege.be

Wild Queerture: The Unnaturalness of Binary Divides in Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020)

 

This presentationaims to discuss how the secret relationship between a Caribbean mermaid and a fisherman in Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020) disrupts colonial   binary categories and intertwines ecocriticism with postcolonial, feminist and queer concerns. In her discussion of Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees (2013).

 

Bastien Bomans is a PhD student at the University of Liège, Belgium. His doctorate focuses on queer literary representations in writings from Trinidad-and-Tobago and its diaspora, foregrounding the interlaced connections that can be drawn between the features of Caribbean queerness and other critical paradigms.

 

Panel 2

 

Shannon Lambert

University of Ghent

Shannon.Lambert@ugent.be

Ethics, Experimentation, and Containment in Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees

 

This presentationwill argue that the island and scientific laboratory function as sites of ‘contained’ contact between Indigenous and Western bodies, the human and nonhuman, thus becoming ‘experimental spaces’ to explore who and what counts as 'knowledge'. Tracing ‘solastalgia’ back to the sense of a connection to Tasmanian history and geography.

 

Shannon Lambert is a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium. Her work on topics like science and narrative, environmental affect, and the nonhuman in literature has been published in journals such as American Imago, ISLE, and SubStance.

 

 

Marc Delrez

University of Liège

Marc.Delrez@uliege.be

A Sense of Blaze: Solastalgia in Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020)

 

This paperwill look at Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020), with a view to addressing the philosophical and political possibilities – and limitations – of a brand of apocalyptic fiction recording the profound ethical disorientation of the citizens of industrialized nations.

 

Marc Delrez (MA Adelaide; PhD Liège) teaches literatures in English at the University of Liège, Belgium. His research interests include Janet Frame, New Zealand literature, and Australian studies. He has written extensively on contemporary Australian fiction, and his interest in the work of Richard Flanagan, on which he has published two articles, goes back a long time. He is a former Chair of EASA (European Association for the Study of Australia).

 

Marie Herbillon

University of Liège

Marie.Herbillon@uliege.be

Behrouz Boochani's Not So Pacific Islands in No Friend But the Mountains: Debunking Australian Myths, from Spatial Misrepresentations to Simplistic Pacific Solutions

 

This presentation will investigate how Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian journalist who was detained on Manus Island, debunks the environmental myth of the island as an idyllic space in No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018).

 

Marie Herbillon lectures in the English Department of the University of Liège, Belgium. A member of Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherche en Études Postcoloniales (CEREP), which she currently co-directs, she has completed a PhD entitled “Beyond the Line: Murray Bail’s Spatial Poetics'' and published articles in international journals such as Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature. She is also the new general editor of the Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia (JEASA). Her research interests include postcolonial (particularly Australian) literatures, spatial studies, ecofeminism, autobiographical studies, trauma studies, cultural history, translation studies and intermediality. Her current research project addresses the themes of history and migration in J.M. Coetzee’s late fiction.

Poetic Imaginaries of Extractive Violence and Black Feminist Registers of Repair

Our 90-minute panel constitutes three scholars from South Africa who will present two artistic interventions and a critical paper. They are Dr Uhuru Phalafala, Jolyn Phillips and Dr Bibi Burger. Phalafala is a poet and author of the forthcoming book length poem Mine Mine Mine (Nebraska Press, 2023), which follows the death of poet’s grandfather during a historic juncture in 2018 when a silicosis class action lawsuit against the mining industry in South Africa was settled in favour of the miners. It addresses racial capitalism and brings together histories of the transatlantic and trans-Indian slave trades, of plantation economies, and of mining and prison-industrial complexes.

Jolyn Phillips is the author of the book length Afrikaans-language epic Bientang (2020), in which she speculatively elaborates on the scant historical documentation about the indigenous woman Bientang, so-called “last of the Khoi strandlopers” (literally ‘beach walkers’). Phillips imagines Bientang’s existence on the South African South Coast, as well as her interaction with the coloniser Lord Montagu and the interpreter, Klaas, and how this interaction transforms her and the nonhuman world around her. 

Philips and Phalafala will engage in conversation about crafting personal histories of extractive violence, while Burger brings their imaginative work into dialogue with theorisations around the extractive and carceral logic that underpins and binds the colonial and capital; the space of the ocean, the beach, the slave ship, the mine and the prison in South African history. She will investigate how Bientang and mine mine mine represent the ways in which this logic is entangled with the extraction of the South African earth and its oceans.

 

Panel convened by:

Uhuru Phalafala

University of Cape Town

uphalafala@sun.ac.za

 

Bibi Burger

University of Stellenbosch

bibi.burger@uct.ac.za  

 

Bibi Burger (PhD, University of Stellenbosch) is a lecturer in the School of Languages and Literatures at the University of Cape Town. Her research interests include contemporary South African literature, gender studies and ecocriticism. She is currently working on a monograph on how whiteness informs Afrikaans feminist literature. She is a regional editor of Tydskrif vir Letterkunde: A Journal for African Literature and co-editor of the Afrikaans feminist newsletter Turksvy.

 

Uhuru Phalafala

Uhuru Phalafala (PhD, University of Cape Town) is a lecturer in the English department at Stellenbosch University. Her forthcoming books are a monograph on former national poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile; Mine Mine Mine, a mythopoetic epic on the migrant labour system; Bloved & Bloomd, a meditation on the political uses of love in radical community-making. She is a records collector with ongoing projects in the field of the black sonic.

 

Jolyn Phillips

University of the Western Cape

jolyn.phillips46@gmail.com

 

Jolyn Phillips is a writer, poet, composer, singer and activist. Her 2016 debut collection of short stories, Tjieng Tjang Tjerries, received critical praise and won the NIHSS Prize for best fiction. In 2017 she published Radbraak, a collection of poetry in Afrikaans, which won the 2018 UJ Prize for best Afrikaans debut. In 2020 she published the collection Bientang, which she subsequently adapted for the stage. Bientang received the Eugène Marais prize. She is currently graduating from the University of the Western Cape with a PhD in creative writing and a lecturer at the University of Johannesburg.

 

 

 

Environmental Postcolonial Formalism

This panel explores new possibilities for the relationship between postcolonial literatures and environmentalism in the wake of literary criticism’s “new formalism”. Composed of three interlocking papers, it builds a tripartite analysis of, and intervention into, postcolonial ecocriticism through formalist readings of key literary and theoretical works. At its heart, this panel argues that new formalism offers a productive opening for the rejuvenation of postcolonial critique, and that postcolonial literature has the potential to shift the terms of new formalist debate.

 

In the wake of works by Caroline Levine (2016) and Anna Kornbluh (2019), critics have identified an emerging meta-critique of literary criticism that proposes a new turn to form (Kramnick and Nersessian 2017; Fluck 2019). Although there are crucial differences between Levine’s new formalism and Kornbluh’s political formalism, they both set out to counter contemporary criticism’s fetishisation of fragmentation, its desire for deconstruction, and its foregrounding of formlessness as the escape route out of the trappings of power.

 

Intriguingly, though, postcolonial critics have been advocating a turn to form for at least twenty years. Gayatri Spivak (2003), Deepika Bahri (2003), Eli Park Sorenson (2010) and, more recently, Elleke Boehmer (2018), have each cast the aesthetic as vital to postcolonial studies, albeit in different ways. Yet, for each of these thinkers form remains curiously conservative, demanding less of a turn than a return. These critics either practice a new critical exegesis that gestures toward form’s indeterminability (deconstruction), graft formal analysis onto socio- political commentary (new historicism), or locate form’s meaning in postcolonial readership (reader-response). In short, attempts to construct a “postcolonial formalism”, in Natalie Melas’s words (2007), have often relied upon tired if not retrograde categories of the 1980s theory wars that remain rooted in modernist theories of fragmentation. How, then, might postcolonial formalism a twenty-first century conjuncture of sea-level rises and global heating?

 

This panel reorients discussion towards form as an explanatory category.

 

Panel convened by:

 

Ryan Topper

Western Oregon University

topperr@mail.wou.edu

 

 

Ryan Topper

The Problem of Form: Amos Tutuola’s Environmental Gothic

 

This paper lays out the stakes of a postcolonial formalism. By focusing on the combination of Western and indigenous forms in postcolonial representations of environmental degradation, he reflects on the need for a new formalism in navigating the relationship between literary texts and postcolonial environmental justice.

 

Ryan Topper is Associate Professor of English at Western Oregon University. He is currently finishing a book on cultural trauma and animism in African literature.

 

Arthur Rose

University of Exeter

A.Rose@exeter.ac.uk

The Limits of Form: Shame and J.M. Coetzee

 

This paper returns to the new formalist source. Tracking the new formalist arguments about explanation, judgment and critical idiom, he reckons with the stylistic demands of writing a postcolonial ecocriticism that attends to form.

 

Arthur Rose is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, where he contributes to the Wellcome Trust funded Shame and Medicine Project. He is author of Literary Cynics: Borges, Beckett, Coetzee (2017) and Asbestos–The Last Modernist Object (2022).

 

Dominic O’Key

University of Sheffield

d.okey@sheffield.ac.uk

Recognising Form: Aminatta Forna’s Animals

 

This paper consolidates and complicates the panel’s new formalist position by moving beyond the anthropocentrism that too often bedevils both postcolonial and new formalist criticism to focus on the role of animals in the postcolony.

 

Dominic O’Key is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sheffield. His first book, Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature: Narrating the War Against Animals, came out with Bloomsbury in 2022.

 

 

 

 

Environmental Displacements: Form, Genre, and Audience

Climate change is likely to increase displacements across the Global South, as hotter temperatures contribute to desertification and droughts. This panel explores how climate-induced displacement brings with it the reinforcement of settler colonial domination as well as a rise in anti-immigration authoritarianism, whereby forced migration is treated as a ‘national security’ concern by wealthy nations in the Global North (Miller 2017; Malm and the Zetkin Collective 2021). In doing so, we take up Rob Nixon’s neglected provocation in Slow Violence (2019) that ecocriticism has been reluctant to engage with the environmental impacts of US foreign policy. In discussing novels and films that stage the relationship between the climate crisis and displacement, we examine how cultural perspectives confront the colonial and neocolonial contexts underpinning internal and global migration and the dominant narratives concerning climate refugees.

 

The panel’s three papers focus on narratives that resist Orientalist or determinist explanations of climate-induced displacement and foreground the historical and political causes of migration (Selby, Daoust and Hoffmann, 2022).

 

Together, these papers show how literary and artistic perspectives allow us to attend to neglected experiences of internal and global displacement, highlight the environmental impacts of colonialism, and foreground alternative environmental imaginaries. In doing so, they help to enable a reorientation of the climate conversation away from rhetoric that stokes immigration panics and towards environmental justice. 

 

Panel convened by:

 

Matthew Whittle

University of Kent

M.Whittle@kent.ac.uk

 

 

Matthew Whittle

Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) and John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019)

 

The paper analyses Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) and John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019) to examine how an eco-dystopian imaginary is ‘Janus-faced’. On the one hand, it has the capacity to shock Anglophone readers out of apathy, paralysis, and inaction and incite a supranational response to climate change; on the other, dystopian narratives are also mobilised by governments to legitimise national isolationism, the strengthening of militarised borders, and ‘Hostile Environment’ immigration policies.

 

Matthew Whittle is a Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent. His forthcoming co-authored book is Global Literature and the Environment: Twenty First Century Perspectives (Routledge). 

 

Sophia Brown

Freie Universität Berlin

sophia.brown@fu-berlin.de 

El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise (2021)

 

The paper looks to El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise (2021), analysing its reception as a novel about the 'migrant crisis' and Syria's war, while foregrounding how El Akkad narrates the intersection of this contemporary context with climate change and histories of colonialism and violence. Brown locates the novel within cli-fi debates and in comparison with American War to reflect on the expectations of the Anglophone literary marketplace when it comes to both climate fiction and Arab authors.

 

Sophia Brown is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin as part of the PalREAD project, where she is completing a monograph on Palestinian life writing.

 

Hannah Boast

University College Dublin

hannah.boast@ucd.ie

Palestine+100, the films of Larissa Sansour, and Vivien Sansour’s Palestine Heirloom Seed Library

 

The paper brings together literature, art, and cultural projects to foreground Palestinian experiences. Boast engages with Nixon’s notion of ‘displacement without moving’, which names how communities are left ‘stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable’. An analysis of the short story collection Palestine+100, the films of Larissa Sansour, and Vivien Sansour’s Palestine Heirloom Seed Library enables an examination of Palestinian artistic resistance to the environmental impacts of Israel’s ongoing colonial project. 

 

Hannah Boast is Ad Astra Fellow and Assistant Professor at University College Dublin, and author of Hydrofictions: Water, Power and Politics in Israeli and Palestinian Literature (EUP 2020).

 

 

 

 

Individual papers

 

 

Pauline Amy de la Bretèque

Université Paris 8

pauline.amydelabreteque@gmail.com

 

Monoculture narratives: Writing colonization through stories of opium and sugar cane

Centuries of European colonization have profoundly changed nature and landscapes throughout the world because of the great number of plants that were transplanted from one continent to another but also because the colonial project was grounded on the extraction of natural resources. The involvement of colonial powers in agriculture and the appeal of huge economic profits often led to the imposition of monocultural modes of production. This agricultural system of monocropping has had strong social but also environmental impacts on local populations until today. While this intensive mode of farming allowed colonial powers to get high yields from the land, they impoverished and enslaved colonized populations and destroyed their environment.

This presentation will examine two types of monocultures whose histories intersect: sugar cane and opium. Though they were cultivated in different geographical areas (sugar cane in the Caribbean and in the Pacific and opium mostly in India), sugar cane and opium both contributed to British colonial expansion, had similar intoxicating consequences on the land on the local populations, and their cultivation led to massive emigration from India to the sugar colonies.

This paper will focus more specifically on the literary representations of these crops in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008), Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), and the poems on sugar cane by Grace Nichols. I will argue that these literary works give us a new perspective on colonization through the (hi)stories of opium and sugar cane, and reveal the combined violence of colonial and botanical conquest. This presentation will first examine the link between colonial domination and the expansion of monoculture. It will show that colonization profoundly changes the relationship between humans and nature and inevitably leads to the alienation of colonial populations from their lands. It shall then explore how these monocultures have shaped colonial landscapes. It will finally try to show that these literary works also reveal the existence of modes of resistance that unsettle the monocropping system and refuse the mechanization of nature.

 

Pauline Amy de la Bretèque is an ATER at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. She holds a Ph.D. in anglophone studies from Sorbonne University, and her thesis is entitled: "Towards a feminine poetics of creolization: Caribbean and diasporic approach of the literature of Jean Rhys, Paule Marshall, Michelle Cliff, Olive Senior and Jamaica Kincaid". Her research interests include postcolonial literatures, gender and ecocriticism. She is the author of several publications, the most recent of which are “Creolization as Cultural and Poetical Rebirth in ‘Arrival of the Snake-Woman’ by Olive Senior”, Commonwealth Essays and Studies 44.1 (2022) and “’L’île qui se répète’ : imaginaires insulaires dans l’œuvre de Paule Marshall”, in Vivre et écrire les insularités : les défis de patrimoines culturels en mutation, Françoise Morcillo, Catherine Pélage et Mayumi Shimosakaï (eds), Orléans: Paradigme (2021).

 

Susan Andrade

University of Pittsburgh

sza@pitt.edu

 

Making visible a genealogy of environmentalism and history

Moving historically, this paper explores the way three female-authored novels from southern and eastern Africa speak to questions of ecology and justice.  I begin with The Grass is Singing (1950) by Doris Lessing, wherein environmental stakes seem at cross-purpose with the central driving questions of race and gender. Concern for the environment is tied to a weak male character; recognition of the need to preserve the land is a relatively recent interpretive move. In The Conservationist (1974) by Nadine Gordimer, both land ownership and racial justice are central components, though the text seems silent on the moral questions it raises. Only recently has this novel visibly become part of ecocritical attention. While Dust (2014) by Yvonne Owuor makes a compelling case for a fuller telling of the story of a multi-ethnic Kenya, a shift of the reading lens allows one to perceive how historical and ecological events are interconnected and influence each other. 

 

 

Susan Andrade recently retired from the English department at the University of Pittsburgh.  She is the author of The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958-1988 (Duke UP, 2011), a coeditor of Atlantic Cross-Currents/Transatlantiques (AWP, 2001), and the editor of a special issue on African fiction in Arabic, English, French and Portuguese in the journal, NOVEL (2008).  She serves on the editorial boards of Research in African Literatures and ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature.

 

John C. Ball

University of New Brunswick

jball@unb.ca

 

Gun Island v. Blaze Island: Improbability, risk, and eco-cosmopolitanism in two recent climate-change novels

Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019) and Catherine Bush’s Blaze Island (2020) both respond to Ghosh’s appeal in The Great Derangement (2016) for realist literary fiction to more actively and urgently incorporate the improbable to do justice to the present and future risks of climate change, a crisis Bush has called “both real and hyper-real.” Both novels feature activist scientists, watery landscapes, unprecedented storms, and unlikely coincidences, and both are inspired by centuries-old romances: the “Gun Merchant” legend that Ghosh’s characters perceive influencing extraordinary current events, and The Tempest’s intertextual structuring of Bush’s plot. However, with Gun Island spanning three continents and two years and Bush limiting her setting to a small Canadian island over two days, the authors take contrasting approaches to what Ursula Heise calls for in environmentalism and, by extension, eco-themed literature: ways of imaginatively negotiating local place with planetary space “from a globalist environmental perspective” (9), which can underpin a much-needed “eco-cosmopolitan awareness” and sense of responsibility for human and nonhuman others (59). Drawing on Heise (2012) and recent work on risk, precarity, and cosmopolitanism by Emily Johansen (2022), this paper compares the novels through three guiding questions. First, to what degree are their relatively privileged protagonists’ actions motivated by and potentially beneficial to the lives of precarious others and at-risk local, regional, and planetary environments (a question of environmental justice)? Second, how do their narrative forms facilitate or limit readerly awareness of the complex spatio-temporal scales at which the climate crisis happens – its unsettling combination of imperceptible gradualism and apocalyptic catastrophism – and do the improbabilities baked into these narratives support or detract from their

imaginative engagement with climate change’s high-stakes risks and uncertainties (questions of genre and impact)? Third, in whom (human/non-human) and/or what (natural/cultural/technological/political) is power to address the crisis located (a question of agency)? 

 

John C. Ball is professor of English at the University of New Brunswick in Canada. He is author of Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (University of Toronto Press 2004) and Satire and the Postcolonial Novel (Routledge 2003), and of many articles and book chapters on postcolonial and Canadian literature. A long-time editor of the journal Studies in Canadian Literature, he has published environmentally themed work in ARIEL and Commonwealth Essays and Studies; his current research addresses questions of risk and responsibility in 21^st-Century postcolonial novels.

 

 

Shefali Banerji

University of Vienna

shefali.banerji@univie.ac.at

 

Making a difference: Marginalised identities, spoken word poetry and environmental justice in the UK

“We are shaking and waking and breaking indifference We are quaking and taking and making a difference”

-     Lemn Sissay

 

Spoken word and performance poetry has been historically overlooked in both scholarly discourse and the literary world. However, this has not prevented poets of colour from utilising this form as a widely preferred artistic medium. In fact, one may argue that the very cause of the form’s disregard by the elitist literati can be pinned down to its accessibility, its democratic nature, its countercultural roots, and its popularity amongst the marginalised. This paper, in this regard, traces the close ties between postcolonial environmental justice, marginalised identities and the politics of poetic activism in British Spoken Word poetry. From Lemn Sissay’s collaboration with Water Aid to Zena Edward’s work in ‘Equity in Community Arts and Environmental Justice Training’, how do poets of colour engage in the ecocritical discourse, performing the urgency for climate action, on stage? How does spoken word poetry provide a platform to engage with and educate the public on the global ecological and climate crisis, how do poets of colour active in the performance scene shed light on the colonial legacy of environmental exploitation, and how does the critical dismissal of/disengagement with spoken word as a “serious” artform bring to the forefront the highbrow imperialistic tendencies of academia? These are some of the questions I will answer, drawing on a postcolonial critical framework for poetry performance and literary analysis, focusing on the poetry and performance of Black British poets Lemn Sissay and Zena Edwards, in my presentation.

Shefali Banerji is a poet-performer from India, currently a PhD student at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna, working on the ERC project “Poetry Off the Page”. She completed her MA in English at the University of Calcutta, with a special focus on Postcolonial Studies, following which she engaged in doctoral-level research on British- Caribbean literature at Trinity College Dublin for a year. Her wider research interests include Postcolonial Theory, Modern and Contemporary Poetry (print and stage), and Gender & Queer Studies.

 

 

Gabriela Alexandra Banita

University of Bologna / Université Sorbonne Paris Nord

gabriela.banita2@unibo.it

 

To write or not to write? The ethical implications of writing about the devastation of the Niger Delta from the perspective of the transnational writer

Within postcolonial ecocritical discourse, Oil on Water (2001) is a seminal work by the renowned Nigerian writer Helon Habila. Placeable in the context of petroculture, the novel sheds light on the impact of oil extraction on the Niger Delta. In doing so, the author appends himself to the lineage of the written testimonial tradition denouncing the despoliation and devastation of Ogoni land, whose most well-known representative is the writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, murdered by the Abacha dictatorship. Yet, apart from the decades that divide the two authors, a difference of utmost importance distinguishes them: their ethnicity and life context. While Saro-Wiwa was a member of what Nixon (2011) dubs the micro-minority of the Ogoni and devoted a critical portion of his life to the fight for an ante litteram ecological justice of the region, Habila is part of what has problematically been labelled as the third generation of Nigerian writers; he is a spokesperson of the third world, who investigates the legacy of modernity’s dark side but lives and publishes in the Global North. Not only that, Oil on Water’sembryo consists of a script for a movie explicitly commissioned by a British film company. Notwithstanding the author’s initial hesitation triggered by the fact that he is not from the region, he ends up writing the script that he later metamorphoses into the abovementioned novel. Nevertheless, Habila renders visible the ethical implication of his choice by representing the Delta at the level of the narrative. Through an aesthetic analysis of the novel, the present paper explores the ploys the author resorts to in order to avoid superseding his voice onto those of the people whose lives are imbricated in the fight for survival. Drawing from Lazarus’s reflections on representation (2011) and Nixon’s analysis of the role of the writer-activist (2011), I will conclude that Habila takes advantage of his popularity to unravel the environmental destruction of the Delta while simultaneously criticising his own appropriation of the position of ecological activists.

 

Gabriela Alexandra Banita is a cotutelle doctoral candidate in World Literature and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Bologna and the University Sorbonne Paris Nord. Interested in migration, postcolonial studies and literature as well as decolonial thinking, she works on a thesis focusing on the topos of return in contemporary Nigerian literature. During the summer semester 2021/2022, she taught African literature at the University Sorbonne Paris Nord and is currently an editorial assistant for the academic journal From the European South at the University of Padua. She published an article –"The Cosmopolitan’s Other through the Cosmopolitan’s Gaze: Refugee Representation in Helon Habila’s" Travellers", – in De Genere-Rivista di studi letterari, postcoloniali e di genere.

 

Robin Bellingham

Deakin University

r.bellingham@deakin.edu.au

 

Toward decolonial reimaginings of the life/non-life binary, working with the vitality of gold

This presentation probes the assumption in colonial-capitalist modernity that there is a clear and meaningful distinction between Life and Non-life. It considers the value and application of reimagining the Life/Non-life distinction in school curricula, to support ecological justice. The presentation draws on the Indigenous view and decolonial argument that this distinction is a fundamental problem for our capacity to engage ethically and caringly with the more-than-human world (Povinelli, 2016; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2021; Van der Tuin, 2022).  The belief that there is a distinction between that which is Life and that which is Non-life assists in organizing the world in ways that preserve colonial and biopolitical power (Povinelli, 2016) and that rationalize acts of injustice, violence and destruction, especially, but not only, against supposedly Non-life phenomena. For example, the Life/Non-life distinction helps to distance and destroy human-place kinships and to preserve the entitlement to harness, extract and degrade the vitality of “others” including substances that have economic value in modernity. 

However, this way of organizing nature is reaching its end. I work with the vitality of gold to assist in considering the implications of the Life/Non-life distinction for ecological injustice, and in reimagining this distinction. Specifically, I consider the ‘Golden Triangle’, situated on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in Victoria, Australia, which during the Gold Rush indicated an area of several major gold extractions. I draw from a methodology incorporating materiality (Barad, 2003), place-kinship (Poelina et al., 2022) and a diffractive reading (Van der Tuin, 2016) of gold and Golden Triangle literature and narratives. To some, gold in the Golden Triangle signified an inert objectawaiting extraction. But it can be understood differently to be, like all else, neither definitively living nor non-living but existing in ecological relations co-producing regenerations, degenerations and metamorphoses which can, if we are attentive, tell us something about how ecologies rebalance, redistribute, care, and turn away from, certain ways of life (Povinelli, 2016). I propose ways that ecologically situated substances such as gold could be addressed in school curricula, to support interdisciplinary learning about differing Indigenous and colonial understandings of ‘Life’ and ‘nature’ and their implications, and learning from and with local ecologies.

 

Robin Bellingham teaches and researches in Education, Pedagogy and Curriculum at Deakin University in Melbourne. Her work explores how education and methodologies can respond to pressing problems of modernity such as educational and political disempowerment and disengagement, the ongoing effects of colonization, and ecological crisis. She draws on textual methodologies, different writing genres, and on critical, posthumanist, and decolonial perspectives.

 

 

Arunima Bhattacharya

Edinburgh Napier University

a.bhattacharya@napier.ac.uk

Anthropology, time, and island ecologies in two novels of the Andaman Islands

This paper will read two novels, Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing (2018), and Glorious Boy (2020) by Aimee Liu, narratives set in the Andaman Islands, on the Bay of Bengal. It discusses how the novels play off the anthropological scientific documentation and interpretation of the complex socio-ecology of these islands and their indigenous forest tribes against the use of narrative time and form derived from local indigenous understanding of time and community mediated through a spiritual and generational experience of the island ecology (Christopher J Lee, Haruki Eda and Anjali Nerlekar in Stephens and San Miguel 2020).

Reading the contexts of the Second world war, the Japanese occupation of the islands, and the post-independence consolidation of the Indian nation state, this paper investigates how the island communities are represented in relation to mainland India through an archipelagic politics of existence and imposed seclusion in contrast of the mainland mobility networks (Glissant 1997; Kerrigan 2011; Butcher and Elson 2017; Mealor and Schwyzer 2017; Stephens and San Miguel 2020).Aimee Liu’s Glorious Boy delves into the anthropological methods of colonial ethnography, documenting experience of a different way of life, in which the protagonist compares it to, ‘entering a time capsule’. On the other hand, Swarup’s novel Latitudes of Longing (2015) approaches the complex history of the islands by translating its political and ecological issues across the scalar differences in geological time which manifests as tsunamis and earthquakes that characterise the islands’ climate vulnerability (McGrath and Jebb 2015; Pippa Marland 2021) I will trace and interpret how the novel introduces literary and aesthetic possibilities of translating deep time and planetary history into the cultural modes through which we process crisis socially and emotionally, given that both novels are written by women (McClintock, Mufti, and Shohat’s Dangerous Liaisons 1997; and Donna J. Haraway’s concept “multi-species entanglement” (2007).

Through this paper, I will explore how the novel form offers a reading of the themes of survival of oceanic indigenous life systems within the mainland oriented conceptions of sovereignty, territoriality and “progress,” that draw on imperial legacies inherent in the postcolonial nation state’s view of island ecologies.

 

Arunima Bhattacharya is Lecturer in English at Edinburgh Napier University. She has recently completed a three-year postdoctoral research assistantship on a AHRC funded project titled, The Other from Within: Indian Anthropologists and the Birth of a Nation at the School of History in the University of Leeds. She has completed her PhD in English Literature from the University of Leeds and was awarded the Anniversary Fellowship at Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. She is the co-editor of Literary Capitals in the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave 2022) She is currently finishing her first monograph on ‘Calcutta Handbooks’ in British India. She cocurated the ‘Curating Discomfort’ intervention at the Hunterian Museum (Glasgow).

 

Somdatta Bhattacharya

IIT Kharagpur

somdatta@hss.iitkgp.ac.in

Colonial paradise gone wrong: Reading The Girl From Nongrim Hills through an ecocritical lens

Postcolonial ecocriticism focuses on social ecology and its tensions, and considers nature in the contexts of human uses, built environments and degraded landscapes. The present paper is situated at the intersection of postcolonial ecocriticism and crime fiction studies. Heather Worthington, in Key Concepts in Crime Fiction argues that crime fiction often represents the “perceived realities of crime and its connection with city living” (Worthington, 2011). Since the late-twentieth century, postcolonial crime fiction is increasingly set in different cities around the world, weaving together local specificities with the global context. Such texts grapple with the relationship between crime and the environmental crisis in these rapidly urbanising spaces. This paper will engage with Ankush Saikia’s The Girl from Nongrim Hills (2013), a novel set in the North East of India, in the town of Shillong, the capital of the picturesque and troubled Indian state of Meghalaya. Through its portrayal of the claustrophobia of built spaces, the dense population of people with varied histories, and the urban topography of this town, the text narrates an environment of increased contamination and pollution – themes central to the genre of crime fiction. The noir environment of this rain drenched, achingly beautiful hill-town at the cusp of mindless neoliberal changes can only look back with nostalgia at an “unsullied” “tribal” past. While the protagonist, Bok, traverses through the city and its outskirts, the readers are taken through a maze of contested terrains, complicated by arms trade and its myriad concealed routes, unscrupulous politicians with their vote-buying tactics, extortionists with their desperate methods, and their effects on the ‘natural’ environment. The paper will analyse how the novel narrates the colonial origins of the ecological devastation of Shillong and its dramatic consequences for the present. It will also reflect on how urban anonymity and environmental precarity complicate ideas of criminality, legality and justice in this noir narrative.

 

Somdatta Bhattacharya has a PhD in English Studies from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kharagpur, West Bengal, India. In the past, she has also taught at institutions such as the University of Hyderabad and BITS Pilani, India. Her research interests are rooted in areas of urban cultures, social theories of space and spatiality, crime fiction, city in literature, Indian writing in English, gender and South Asian popular culture, and she has taught, published, presented and supervised extensively in these areas. She has also been an investigator in multiple government and privately funded projects on the Indian urban underclass. Her most recent area of interest is plant humanities.

 

Kathie Birat

Université de Lorraine

kathie.birat@wanadoo.fr

Forests and the future: Environmental justice and postcolonial fictions of the forest

As revealed by a recent controversy concerning tree cover in the city of Minneapolis (USA), trees can potentially be found at the center of questions of environmental justice. Areas of the city with the least tree cover were found to have suffered from other forms of discrimination, a discrepancy that was recently brought to the attention of municipal authorities. This anecdote reflects the growing importance of trees and forests in discussions of the social and human impact of climate change, a discussion that has been rendered more complex by philosophical, social and even legal questions that have been raised concerning the place of the nonhuman in its relation to the human. A recent article in Le Monde (“Penser et agir dans un monde en feu”) quoted Christopher Stone’s influential book, Should Trees Have Standing ? (2010 [1972],), considered to be the first work to have raised the question of the legal status of forests.

In a postcolonial context, the question of forests and the role they have played is inflected, like those concerning other natural elements, by the tension between deep ecology’s view of nature as purity, often associated with American visions of the wilderness, and postcolonialism’s preoccupation with history and human environments. In the Caribbean, as Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert has pointed out, forests were the place “where the violence of colonial environmentalism left its most profound mark” (2011, 100). The works of numerous writers from the region—those of Wilson Harris, Edouard Glissant, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, to name only some of the most obvious examples, explore the impact of colonialism on the natural environment.

The increasing urgency of the threat to natural environments represented by climate change is producing a new generation of “forest fiction,” the most notable (in terms of visibility) being the American novelist Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018), an ambitious attempt to fictionalize the emerging vision of trees as symbols of the invisible connections that characterize ecosystems. Postcolonial fiction has also taken up the threat to forests in diverse ways that reflect the complex relation of forests to ways of life and cultural values, as can be seen in Uzma Aslam Khan’s representation of the impact of the Forest Laws on the life of the nomadic populations of Pakistan in Thinner than Skin (2012) or Amitav Ghosh’s study of the situation of the Indian mangroves in The Hungry Tide (2004). In The Rain Heron (2022) by Robbie Arnott, from Tasmania, the loss of trees is one aspect of the degradation produced by climate change in a post-apocalyptic world, while in the Jamaican Nalo Hopkinson’s speculative fiction, Midnight Robber, the “daddy tree” provides survival and connection on a planet far from a spoiled earth.

Taking my cue from Jennifer Wenzel’s remarks about the “particularly literary mediations” appropriate to fiction concerned with the environment (“The texts we read make their interventions not as empirical evidence of ecological crisis nor as ready-made blueprints for action…”[2011, 151] ) but also from Susie O’Brien’s remarks about the prevalence of the tragic mode in postcolonial fictions of the environment (2001, 151) and Rob Nixon’s call to “reimagine the prevailing paradigms” (2011, 257) I propose to examine the aesthetic alternatives available to postcolonial writers in their attempt to engage in what Rob Nixon calls “aesthetic activism”  (2011, 249) in relation in particular to forests. My hypothesis is that the justice which can be envisioned in literary terms requires a rethinking of the modes and genres of literary expression in the “battle of narratives” (la bataille des récits) which, according to the article in Le Monde about the fires in Southwestern France, has been set off by the challenges of climate change.

 

Kathie Birat is Emeritus Professor of Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean literatures at the University of Lorraine. She has published numerous articles on American, African-American and Afro-caribbean writers, with particular emphasis, as far as the Caribbean is concerned, on the works of Caryl Phillips, Fred D’Aguiar, Sam Selvon and David Dabydeen. She edited a special edition of Commonwealth Essays and Studies devoted to Caryl Phillips in 2017. Among her recent publications are “Making Sense of Memory in the Writings of the Caribbean Diaspora: Sam Selvon’s London Calypso,” which appeared in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55.6 (2019) and « Le ‘point d’intrication’ :  écriture, oralité; langage écrit et langage parlé dans la littérature de la Caraïbe anglophone. L’exemple de Sam Selvon », published in Pratiques: Oralités/littératies  (no. 183-184, 2020). An article on Mohale Mashigo, “Liminal Figures of Futurity’: Mohale Mashigo’s Use of Speculative Fiction in Intruders” appeared in Commonwealth Essays and Studies in 2021.

 

Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia

University of Aveiro

msbiscaia@ua.pt

Follow his endangered nose: The postcolonial animal in Lawrence Norfolk’s ThePope’s Rhinoceros

In the preface to Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals and the Environment, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin make a strong claim supporting postcolonial ecocriticism as a field of the Environmental Humanities which through literature add “historical depth, cultural specificity” and ethical perspective to human and non-human relations. Postcolonial ecocriticism approaches the literary text as an interventionist discourse and as a mediating measure. Many studies on zoocriticism have in the meantime followed and in the Introduction to The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature, Susan McHugh, Robert McKay and John Miller point out the “rich scope both for learning about [animal encounters] through literature’s lens and for forms of textual interpretation—historical; materialist; queer; feminist; colonial—that find literary meaning always embedded in social context” (2018).

This presentation will discuss Lawrence Norfolk’s The Pope’s Rhinoceros where the non- human is approached as a postcolonial animal (P. Armstrong) with powerful political value. Issues of species endangerment and extinction are directly related to policing the animal body as an exoticised and subalternised subject. In this instance, a rhino is sent to Pope Leo X by King Manuel I of Portugal in 1515 in the hope to gain the upper hand in the Treaty of Tordesillas question, a landmark in imperial expansion. The ship sank off the coast of Genoa and the rhinoceros drowned. The instrumental value of this non-human animal ranks at the level of its political and scientific importance and, as such, has also captured the imagination of visual artists passively (A. Dürer) and affectively (W. Ford), the latter in an arctivist vein. This non-human, an animal slave (M. Spiegel, C. J. Kim, S. Best), has been abducted and fated to a life of forced migration, nomadism and ultimately death. Issues of agency and representation will be raised regarding the rhinoceros as well as other animals. Attention will also be given to the hunt of the fantastical animal (the Rumour Beast) as Christian monks ravage the rainforests of West Africa in their mission to find the desired rhinoceros.

Ultimately, and using the suggested critical tools, I aim to examine the contribution the novel makes, as a piece within the genre of Literary Animal Studies, to the current discussion regarding the necropolitical consequences of imperialism on non-human animals, conservation and multispecies justice.

 

Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia holds a doctoral degree in Literature (2005). She has published extensively in domestic and international journals and is the author of the book Postcolonial and Feminist Grotesque: Texts of Contemporary Excess. She also co-edited the collection of essays Intercultural Crossings: Conflict, Memory, Identity. She has been increasingly interested in Critical Animal Studies and has presented numerous papers in international conferences on related issues ranging from queer animality, food studies, advertising and national identity, feminist and postcolonial intersections. She has published among others “Loving Monsters: The Curious Case of Patricia Piccinini’s Posthuman Offspring” (2019) “What Comes After the Woman: Becoming Plant in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian” (2019), and “Of Mice and Women: Gendered and Speciesist Violence in Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Martyrdom’” (2022). In 2022 she was an invited guest speaker for the postgraduate course Animals and Society held by the Social Sciences Institute, University of Lisbon.

Currently she teaches at the University of Aveiro, Portugal.

 

 

Teresa Botelho

Nova University of Lisbon

tdbs@fcsh.unl.pt

 

Toxic transnational encounters and the vulnerable body:  Writing environmental justice in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021)

When Amitav Gosh asked, in his 1992 influential essay “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel”, why the predatory practices of petro-imprerialism   had produced no literary works of relevance, with the exception of Abdul Rahman Munif´s Cities of Salt (1984), he characterized that transnational  relationship imposed by powerful corporations on vulnerable communities as reeking “of unavoidable overseas entanglements” marked by thousands of dead civilians and children and all the troublesome questions that lie in their graves”, covered by regimes of  nondisclosure and   legal  impunity” (30), a description that could apply to other regimes of toxic transnational encounters characterized by risk outsourcing  that, as Rob Nixon (2011) discusses, offload  onto the world’s poorest countries a heavy environmental burden from which they rarely profit.

Since Gosh’s reflections, that void has been replaced by a rich corpus of literary narratives that give center stage to the transnational exploitation of resources and environmental destruction that characterizes industrial neo-colonialism, weaving together the changes imposed on local social landscapes and on their natural environments, through the lenses of a postcolonial environmental justice approach.

The paper will discuss the narrative strategies used in two twenty-first century novels that give visibility to these hidden-in-plain view  economic unequal relationships; Indra Sinha’s Animal´s People (2007), which  reimagines the repercussions of the 1984 Bhopal pesticide factory leak that killed thousands in India, and the novel How Beautiful We Were (2021) by the Cameroonian writer Imbolo Mbue, which explores scenarios of toxic resources and embodied degradation caused by oil spills in a nameless African country. It will specifically concentrate on the narrative strategies chosen in both novels to render intimate and knowable an environmental degradation that developed slowly across time, by investing in the trope of somatic vulnerability, and on landscapes of resistance though which they imagine the responses of the affected communities to the aggressive negligence of corporation-government alliances, protected by invisible networks of power.

 

Teresa Botelho is Associate Professor of American Studies at The Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, NOVA University of Lisbon. She is a member of the research group Mapping Utopianisms (CETAPS) and convener of the research strand American Intersections at CETAPS. She is also a member of the Challenging Precarity Global Network, and of Rihua: Red Iberoamericana De Humanidades Ambientales She has published extensively on African American culture and literature, Arab-American literature, theater and drama, literary satire and dystopian fiction. Her current interests include refugee literature, environmental justice and climate change fiction. Her most recent publications include: “How Do We Laugh About This? Literary Satire in Trump Times,” American Literature in the Era of Trumpism: Alternative Realities, ed. Dolores Resano, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022 and “Teaching Post-Black Aesthetics and the Coming-of-Age Novels of Danzy Senna and Colson Whitehead in Portugal: Reconsidering the Gap,” Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom: Teaching and Texts, ed. Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sue Norton, Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

 

Siobhan Brownlie

University of Manchester / Le Mans Université

siobhan.brownlie@univ-lemans.fr

Robert Sullivan as evolving decolonial ecopoet

This paper examines four collections of poems by Aotearoa New Zealand poet Robert Sullivan: Star Waka (1999), Voice carried my family (2005), Shout Ha! To the Sky (2010), and Tūnui/Comet (2022). Our focus will be on evolution in the poetry from the perspective of decolonial ecology in a settler country. Decolonial ecology acknowledges past injustices as a result of colonial actions, as well as looking to processes for going forward (Ferdinand). A theme repeated in a number of Sullivan’s poems is the past and continuing damage done to both nature and the indigenous people, the Māori, by colonisation. But the poetry goes beyond this to provide a more complex picture. In one poem, it is acknowledged that the coming of the Māori to Aotearoa New Zealand also resulted in ecological damage in the form of extinction of native animal species; the spiritual resilience rather than subjugation of the ancestors is emphasized; and a world perspective is taken on climate change and pollution as the result of ‘coloniality’ (Walsh & Mignolo) in a broad sense. A noticeable feature of Sullivan’s poetry is the increasing use of the Māori language. The poet himself has mixed origins, both Māori and European. The greater use of the Māori language in recent work symbolizes a renewed affirmation of indigeneity and its decolonial claims for re-existence of a Māori worldview that embodies respect for nature as the origin of human ancestry and spirituality. The poems express thus the entanglement of nature and culture, and the human and non-human. How then is this worldview of reciprocity and inter-relations to co-exist with very different Western views of scientific superiority and extractivism, how can incommensurable epistemologies live together (Ferdinand)? With regard to the past aspirations and actions of his mixed ancestry, in Star Waka the poet proposes an uneasy juxtaposition, whereas in Tūnui/Comet, his Irish and English ancestry is respectfully folded into the Māori concept of whakapapa. This suggests that reparation and restoration (Jackson) that are simultaneously indigenous and ecological must involve strong engagement with Māori outlooks.

 

Siobhan Brownlie is an honorary research fellow in the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies at the University of Manchester, UK, and she teaches at Le Mans Université, France. A specialist in Intercultural Communication, she has published three monographs in the areas of memory and intercultural studies. Dr Brownlie was born and grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her current research focuses on investigating concepts of decolonial ecology in relation to Aotearoa New Zealand, encompassing both literary and non-literary texts.

 

 

Simran Chadha

Delhi University

simranchadha@dsc.du.ac.in

 

Ecocriticism in the novel of terror: A case study of Romesh Gunesekera and Mirza Wahid

In the subcontinent or the Global South which is now the preferred term of address, Sri Lanka and Kashmir have regularly made it to news headlines and academic discussions on account of the armed conflicts transpiring therein. This paper entails a comparative study of the Sri Lankan-born novelist Romesh Gunesekera and the Kashmiri-born novelist Mirza Wahid in terms of their response to the environmental damage caused by chemical warfare. While each of the two novelists draw on a unique narrative aesthetic to tell their stories of human pain and trauma, how do they connect this violation to the landscape and lend their voices towards expressing the irreparable damage caused to the environment? A delicate reef protecting the land from the ravages of the Indian ocean in one case, and the fragile Himalayan eco system on the other. How is ecocriticism woven into their narratives so as not to stand out like a pedantic homily, and what do textual description of the devastated landscape tell us about the state of civilization wherein death and destruction reign supreme?  Does the landscape work like a metaphor or does it align itself with a futuristic sci-fi vision predicting the future of humankind? These are some of the questions I will be considering in this paper. The texts I propose to discuss are Reef and Heaven’s Edge by Gunesekera and The Collaborator by Mirza Wahid.

 

Simran Chadha (Phd) is Assistant Professor at Delhi University. She teaches English literature or literatures in English at a Delhi University college. Her research interests include post-colonial south Asian literature, cinema studies and gender studies.

        

 

Sibendu Chakraborty

Charuchandra College,University of Calcutta

sibenduu@gmail.com

 

In search of environmental justice: Performing postcolonial ecocriticism in Wesley Enoch’s and David Milroy’s Aboriginal theatre

Environmental justice for the Indigenous people of Australia constitutes in calibrating ways of postcolonial resistance against colonial means of degrading the native environment engineered by thoughtless plunder and inequitable distribution of natural resources. Since colonial imperialism has a direct relationship with large-scale environmental destruction, the relationship between the biotic and abiotic factors occupies the cornerstone in investigating the modes of decolonisation contingent with ‘postcolonial ecocriticism’ and ‘green ecocriticism’. Drawing upon Zapf's idea of ‘cultural ecology’ that symbolically explores the interconnectedness between cultural and natural phenomenon/processes and energies, the proposed paper will look to scrutinise the performance of ecocritical strategies that can be traced in Wesley Enoch’s play, The Story of the Miracles at Cookie’s Table and David Milroy’s Windmill Baby. While Maryrose Casey restricted herself to exploring the spiritual role of the land/earth in these plays, the proposed paper hopes to critically engage with the performance of half-memories and visions across different periods of time. Being located in Stradbroke Island, Enoch’s play centres around a totemic birth-tree that has been cut into a table that Cookie and her family have managed to claim and hand down through successive generations. The ecocritical performance centred on locating the significance and strength of stories that weave their way into the sentient landscape claiming, altering and transforming the webbed relationship between ‘songlines’ and their incarnations in contemporary society and culture. While revealing the concerns for recovering Indigenous knowledge/history and ecological and cultural manifestations, the Aboriginal plays simultaneously look to perform the deep custodial and spiritual relationship between the sentient landscape and the Aboriginal people through the performance of stories and ‘songlines’. Echoing Aileen Moreton-Robinson, D.B. Rose and B. Pascoe's concern with recovering Indigenous knowledge embedded in environmental epistemology, Enoch and Milroy’s theatre perform ecospirituality viewed through the lens of postcolonial ecocriticism.

Sibendu Chakraborty, an Assistant Professor of English at Charuchandra College (affiliated with the University of Calcutta), was awarded the Australian Studies Fellowship (Junior) by Australia India Council in 2012 to work on his research area at Monash University, UNSW, QU, ANU and UWA. He was also awarded the prestigious Haskel Grant for presenting a research paper at the Annual ACLA Conference held at Brown University, USA. He also presented a paper on ‘Contemporary Aboriginal Theatre’ at the PSA Annual convention held at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. His recent publication includes an essay titled “Locating Indigenous Sovereign Spaces: Race and Womanhood in Romaine Moreton's Poetry”, published in Claiming Spaces: Australian Women's Writing, edited by D. Das and S. Dasgupta (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). He has edited a book titled, Theatre, Margins and Politics with Dr Arnab Ray that is scheduled to be published by Routledge in November 2022.

Antara Chatterjee

Indian Institute of Science Education and Research

achatterjee@iiserb.ac.in

 

Eco-precarity: Conflict and environmental crisis in Malik Sajad’s Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir

This paper intends to examine the graphic novel Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir (2015) by Malik Sajad to uncover the articulation of a Kashmiri narrative located at the intersections of conflict, trauma, the environment and memory. Reading the novel through the frameworks of crisis, precarity and justice, both human and environmental, the paper aims to examine whether and how the graphic narrative mode becomes a medium of critique, and seeking restitution and justice.  

 

Sajad’s work delves into the the everyday lived realities of one of the most troubled and contested spaces of postcolonial India, the Kashmir valley, marked by decades-long insurgency, militancy and represssive militarisation. Reminiscent of Spiegelman’s Maus, Sajad’s novel depicts the violence-torn Kashmiri as the endangered hangul (Kashmiri stag), while non-Kashmiris are represented as human. The hangul is an endangered species of Kashmiri deer on the verge of extinction, whose habitat is destroyed by the protracted conflict in Kashmir, territorial and political in its origins, but human and ecological in its effects. Sajad’s ‘ecological lens of narration’[2] evokes a ‘planetary consciousness’[3] revealing the interlinked predicament and devastation of humans and non-humans in a conflict zone.

 

In this complex conjoined narrative, the non-anthropocentric yet anthropomorphic figure of the humanoid hangul reveals the entangled vulnerablities of the Kashmiri embodied subject and the Kashmiri environment. Through the representation of the Kashmiri ‘human’ as the endangered hangul, displacing an anthropocentric representation, Sajad’s novel not just points to the dehumanization of the Kashmiri in conflict-ridden Kashmir, but simultaneously reveals its enormous ecological costs. ‘The anthropomorphic representation of Kashmiris as hanguls [thus] enables Sajad to simultaneously query the relative valuation of human life vis-à-vis that of the animal, and the mutual degradation […] of both human and animal in a zone of emergency’.[4] It is these intersecting intricacies that my paper intends to examine.

 

Antara Chatterjee is Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Bhopal, India. Her research interests include South Asian literatures, Partition studies, trauma and memory studies, and environmental and medical humanities. She has published in South Asian Review, Humanities, Photographies (forthcoming) and in edited collections The South Asian Short Story (Palgrave) and Science Fiction in India: Parallel Worlds and Postcolonial Paradigms (Bloomsbury). She has co-edited and contributed a chapter to the book Pandemics and Epidemics in Cultural Representation (Springer 2022). She has received grants and fellowships from the University Grants Commission, India, the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Charles Wallace India Trust, the Indian Council of Historical Research, the 1947 Partition Archive and Tata Trusts. She was Strauss Visiting Fellow at the Cedars-Sinai Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles in 2022.

 

Nilanjana Chatterjee

Durgapur Government College

nil325@gmail.com

 

Eco-alterity and Indigenous Naga food utopia for the dystopic world: Reading Easterine Kire

Eco-alterity, during the ongoing sixth mass extinction, is the only ecologically meaningful way of critiquing the existing knowledge systems wherein agents of environmental disaster are considered as the ecological ‘others.’ In this context, the unique indigenous knowledge of the ecological ‘selves’--disregard of their geographical locations (Global North/Global South)—are to be deciphered and disseminated: The present dystopic world of violence, poverty, ecological devastations are rooted in food injustice (Shiva’s Who Really Feeds the World?; Making Peace with the Earth: Beyond Resource, Land and Food Wars; Staying Alive), engendered by unsustainable ways of food productions, processing, and distribution. The present study, therefore, theorizes eco-alterity and identifies agents of global food war as the ecological ‘others’ and argues that indigenous ecological natives are the ecological ‘selves’ who engage in sustainable ways of feeding the world by preserving peace and harmony. In so doing, the study seeks to make visible the sustainable ways of preserving food utopia--as suggested by Shiva in Who Really Feeds the World? (valuing ‘Agro-ecology’; maintaining ‘living soil’ and ‘biodiversity;’ localising indigenous food; and restoring women’s practices of ‘feeding’ the world)—in the writings of Easterine Kire. The oral narratives of the indigenous Naga people, archived by Kire in her Anglophone novels, are powerful (but embedded) repertoires of unique everyday practices, rituals, traditions, taboos, and belief system that value eco-ethical food security. The indigenous Naga food security systems have survived, mythical (inter-tribal or intra-tribal) and historical wars (the Battle of Khonoma, Naga participation in World War I, and the Battle of Kohima) and yet there are no (mythical or historical) documentations of community food starvation. The study might provide a blueprint for retrieving the indigenous food utopias of the ecological natives beyond geographical binaries (for our earth is one) by undertaking eco-sensible readings of existing indigenous oral narratives of the world that have been conveniently repressed by agents of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon).  

Nilanjana Chatterjee, Assistant Professor of English at Durgapur Government College (West Bengal, India), completed her Doctoral thesis titled, “House as Space in the Fiction of Contemporary Women Writers of Indian Subcontinental Diaspora” in 2016 from the University of Burdwan. She has co-edited Re-theorising Indian Subcontinental Diaspora: Old and New Directions (2020) for CSP and Covid-19 in India, Disease, Health and Culture: Can Wellness be Far Behind? for Routledge (2022 forthcoming). She has authored Reading Jhumpa Lahiri: Women, Domesticity and the Indian American Diaspora (2022) for Routledge, and book chapters titled “Women and Natural Resource Management in Naga Folktales and ‘Peoplestories’: Situating Easterine Kire’s Fiction” (2022) for Rowman & Littlefield and “‘stand aside death…today is my day’: Contextualizing the Naga Esotericism in Easterine Kire’s Novels” (2022, forthcoming) for Routledge. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0955-3480

 

Sayan Chattopadhyay

Indian Institute of Technology

sayanc@iitk.ac.in

Untranslatability as environmental justice: Planetarity, sacredness, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s translation of Mahasweta Devi’s “Pterodactyl”

This paper explores Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s concept of planetarity as an attempt to bring into dialogue the complexities of literary translation and the ethical responsibility to perform environmental justice. Spivak coined the term “planetarity” in 1997 to critique and disrupt the kind of activism that “translates” ecological concerns into a discourse about sustainable resource management geared towards the optimal functioning of the neoliberal world centred in the Global North. Spivak’s planetarity is a plea to recognise and preserve the notion of untranslatability while thinking about environmental justice on a global scale which does not exclusively cater to the needs of international capital but also takes into account the world’s aboriginal peoples and their relationship with nature. At the heart of planetarity is this attempt to grapple with the alterity of the aboriginal people’s relationship with nature without translating it to the benefit of capitalist consumption. Spivak refers to this special relationship as “sacred” not in any specific religious sense but to set it apart from the reason-based approach to ecology pivoted on the idea of human custodianship of the natural world that informs capitalism. Planetarity, therefore, refers to the strategy that Spivak adopts to engage with the aboriginal idea of “sacred nature” that cannot be readily translated using the reasoning of capitalist consumption. My paper traces this strategy through attending to Spivak’s project of translating Mahasweta Devi’s Bangla short story “Pterodactyl”. I show how Spivak’s reading of this particular story plays a crucial role in her theorisation of planetarity and the moot questions that it poses: How does one think environmental justice for the aboriginal world without first incorporating it within the logic of globalised capital?

 

Sayan Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He received his doctorate degree from the University of Cambridge in 2014. He served as the DAAD guest professor at the University of Heidelberg in 2022 and was the recipient of the 2010–2013 Smuts Cambridge International Scholarship. His research has been primarily in the area of Indian middle-class self-fashioning and its literary manifestations. He has published a number of articles in leading scholarly journals. He is also the author of the book Being English: Indian Middle Class and the Desire for Anglicization (Routledge, 2022).

 

 

 

Phoebe Chetwynd

Royal Holloway, University of London

Phoebe.Chetwynd.2021@live.rhul.ac.uk

Transgressive consumption: Animality and intersectionality in Joseph D’Lacey’s MEAT

The anthropogenic climate crisis calls for fresh engagement with human consumption of meat, both in terms of its material environmental cost and in terms of the way in which it symbolises the constitution of the human as separate from and superior to the nonhuman. Further, “the human” cannot be understood as monolithic: the consumption of meat intersects with the uneven distribution of the effects of the climate crisis, with food insecurity and with the precarious and minoritized labour forces in industrial animal agriculture.

These questions surrounding the intersection of the human and the nonhuman are brought to the fore in Joseph D’Lacey’s MEAT (2008), a dystopian novel in which the town of Abyrne breeds humans en masse to be eaten by the rest of the population. Much of the critical literature argues that the depiction of humans in the position of livestock animals in industrial animal agriculture successfully illuminates the problems of anthropocentrism, factory farming and meat-eating. However, I argue that introducing an intersectional perspective to animal studies complicates these readings of the text.

The images of mass human suffering invoked by these novels call to mind the “dreaded comparisons,” that is to say, the highly controversial comparisons between factory farming and slavery or the Holocaust. I will draw on the work of Claire Jean Kim (2015), Bénédicte Boisseron (2018) and Sunaura Taylor (2016) to ask how depictions of humans in the position of livestock animals may use the suffering of human minorities simply as a vehicle to focus on the nonhuman. I will also explore how such an instrumentalization of human suffering risks foreclosing on possibilities of re-imagining the human, the animal and the relationships between the two.

Phoebe Chetwynd is a second year PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London, supervised by Ruth Cruickshank and Danielle Sands. Her research focuses primarily on relationships between the human and the nonhuman through the prism of food studies. Her doctoral thesis explores different visions of the future of meat in contemporary francophone and anglophone dystopian literature.

 

 

Joan Chia-en Chiang

National Taiwan University

r09122024@ntu.edu.tw

Rising islands: The video poetics of Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna

In what Elizabeth DeLoughley (2019) calls salvage environmental discourses, the environmental plights of islands such as the Marshall Islands and Greenland are often made to allegorize a disastrous planetary future. Iconic harbingers of an uninhabitable Earth, the trope of allegedly sinking islands and dying polar bears tells an easily digestible narrative of ecological crisis. In this paper, I seek to complicate this narrative by examining artist-activists Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s and Aka Niviâna’s video poetics. In Rise (2018), Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna collaboratively attempt to build an Indigenous eco-cosmopolitanism (Heise 2016) that collapses the orderly foreground and background integral to the worlding of modernity (Morton 2013). In Anointed (2018), Jetñil-Kijiner retools a Marshallese legend to forge untidy connections between island spaces often too cleanly isolated in critiques of U.S. nuclear colonialism, the Marshall Islands and Japan. I seek to identify the logic of partition critiqued in both video poems as one and the same: it is a racialized logic legitimizing what Traci Brynne Voyles (2015) calls the wastelanding of Indigenous territories. To develop this approach, I will screen short clips of these video poems. I will then analyze how Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna critique the wastelanding of the Marshall Islands and Greenland. Their texts, I suggest, demand witness to the protracted violence of global warming and nuclear colonialism. In other words, I will read Anointed and Rise as experiments with poetics that should matter for members of EACLALS concerned with “Imagining Environmental Justice in a Postcolonial World,” with particular attention to the Pacific and Greenland as sites of critique.

 

Joan Chia-en Chiang is a MA student in the Graduate Institute of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Taiwan University. She is currently working on an MA thesis analyzing the work of Marshallese poet, educator, and activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, reading her work at the intersections of postcolonial and ecocritical theories.

 

Shriya Dasgupta

Pondicherry University

0504shriya@gmail.com

Oyeshi Ganguly

Institute of Advanced Sustainability Studies

gangulyoyeshi2021@gmail.com

‘Jungle Chorab Nahi’ (We will not leave our forests): Locating the Indian Adivasi in postcolonial environmental movements

This paper explores the Indian tribals' attempt to resist environmental exploitation and preservation of their forest-centric culture. Drawing on the representative artistic expressions of such subaltern environmental justice movements, the paper attempts a comparison between its colonial and postcolonial portrayals in South Asian literature. Resource exploitation acts as an indirect causal pathway in the tribal recruitment to the Maoist movement, which traces its roots to the colonial Indian Land Acquisition Act of 1894 and the Criminal Tribes Act which declared indigenous forest-dwelling communities (Adivasis) as habitual criminals.

 

This paper interrogates the link between natural resource scarcity and India’s ‘single biggest internal security threat’. The first section traces the genesis of environmental protection among natives to precolonial times through the analysis of the deification of forests in the mangalkavya tradition. The second section focuses on the colonial exploitation of tribals, the true custodians of the forest', through the review of regional literature- Mahasweta Debi’s Aranyer Adhikar (1977), Sanjay Bahadur’s Hul Cry Rebel (2013) and Bhagabati Charan Panigrahi’s Shikar (1935)- fictional accounts of the anti-colonial forest rights movements.The depiction of the postcolonial environmental movements have been analyzed using Neelima Sinha’s Red Blooms in the Forest (2013), Ushakiran Atram’s Motyarin (2017), and Mahasweta Debi’s Draupadi (1978, translated by Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak). It is argued that participation of the tribal communities in the radical left Naxalite-Maoist insurgency elucidates the renewed importance of viewing the continuity of state-sponsored environmental degradation and climate migration as a consequence of the ‘industrialization’ policies in one of Asia’s most mineral-rich yet drought-prone zones, which coincides with the Maoist Red Corridor.

 

The paper concludes that the present-day Maoists disguising themselves as guardians of the forest can be traced to the British-era tribal revolts aimed at the protection of forest resources from alien exploitation. The oneness of Adivasi identity with the forest, the popular culture depiction of their evolving relations with outsiders reflected in the perception of non-Adivasi authors, and armed resistance as tools to secure environmental justice are themes explored in this paper.

Shriya Dasgupta is currently pursuing Master’s in Politics and International Relations at Pondicherry University, India and graduated from the Department of Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, India. She is the co-founder of Agnijug Archive, a digital archive that aims to document, preserve, and share oral histories of the Bengal revolutionaries and the anti-colonial resistance that they espoused.She has interned with The Telegraph in Schools, Times of India and The Indian Express and has worked on the Encroachment of East Kolkata Wetlands.She has authored a chapter titled History of Women in the Indian Foreign Service for the book Women and Gender Equality in India (ISBN 9789383930) and co-authored a paper titled “The Schoolchildren’s Anti-Colonial Rebellion: Looking Back at the Chittagong Armoury Raid of 1930”, to be published in the Itihasology Journal Volume II in January 2023.

Oyeshi Ganguly is an Indo-German Young Leaders Forum Scholar currently pursuing her Master’s in International Affairs at the Hertie School, Berlin. She has attended the International Summer School on Climate Migration, organized by the Department of Development Studies, SOAS University of London. She has obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the Department of International Relations, Jadavpur University, India. She currently works as a Student Assistant, for the ‘Industrial Decarbonisation Strategies’ research group at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) at Potsdam, Germany. As a climate activist, she previously interned with Greenpeace, Fridays for the Future and Green Crusaders India. Her areas of interest include climate migration, intersectionality between sustainability and gender, environmental movements in the Global South, energy and climate policies in postcolonial societies.

 

Dominic Davies

City, University of London

Dominic.Davies@city.ac.uk

Graphic Capitaloscenes: Drawing infrastructure as historical form

In the age of the Capitalocene (Moore 2015), where the capitalist world-system operates as a geological and earth-shaping force, physical infrastructures such as pipelines, railways, roads, and mine heads have become material expressions of not merely developmental or global but planetary histories as well. If the concept of the Capitalocene emphasises the embeddedness of capitalist acEvity in the reproducEon and decimaEon of the web of life, this paper explores what it calls graphic “capitaloscenes” – graphic narraEves that draw infrastructure as a material expression of capitalism’s historical development. Elsewhere, I have spoken of comics’ “infrastructural form” to describe how their own visible narraEve infrastructure – guLers, borders, grids – makes them adept at drawing out the poliEcs and histories that are solidified into our built environments (Davies 2019). By bringing this to bear on visual texts concerned with capitalism’s resource fronEers, this paper suggests first, that graphic narraEves are able to stage extracEve infrastructures as historical forms, and second, that their own graphic form is itself historically conjoined to the current moment of crisis in the Capitalocene.

The paper offers three examples in support of its argument, each of which revolves around the extracEon of fossil fuels: Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land (2020), Pablo Fajardo’s Crude, A Memoir (2021), and Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022). Sacco’s graphic narraEve documents the consequences of the fracking in Canada’s Northwest Territories; Fajardo’s interrogates Texaco’s decimaEon of boreal forest in Ecuador’s Amazonian oil fields; and Beaton’s explores the infrastructural lives of labourers in the extracEon industry in Alberta’s tar sands. In conclusion, the paper argues that by staging infrastructure as historical form, these graphic capitaloscenes also bring insurgent indigenous and labour relaEons into view – collecEve movements that offer a weighty counterpoint to the accumulaEve appeEtes of the Capitalocene.

 

Dominic Davies is Senior Lecturer in English at City, University of London, where he is also the director of the BA English programme. He is the author of Imperial Infrastructure and Urban Comics (Routledge 2019), along with several book chapters and journal arEcles on the relaEonship between infrastructure, culture, and comics. He is also the co-editor with Elleke Boehmer of Planned Violence (Palgrave 2018) and with Candida Ricind of DocumenFng Trauma in Comics (2020). With Professor Ricind, he is currently co-authoring Graphic Refuge: Visuality and Mobility in Refugee Comics, which is forthcoming with Wilfred Laurier UP in 2023. His first trade book, The Broken Promise of Infrastructure, is also forthcoming in 2023 with Lawrence & Wishart.

 

Asis De

Mahishadal Raj College

ademrc@gmail.com

Extractivist colonial economy and environmental justice in Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse and The Living Mountain

Since the publication of The Hungry Tide (2004), Amitav Ghosh tirelessly reiterates in his literary works and public addresses the issues of climate change and environmental justice. A novelist with a preference for the ‘forgotten’ histories of South and South-East Asia and a ‘global thinker’ (as Foreign Policy magazine called him in 2019), Ghosh has recently experimented with literary genres like parables and fable in the post-pandemic years to uphold his anxiety of belonging at a time of planetary crisis. His two recent books – The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021), for which he allots the subtitle “Parables for a Planet in Crisis,” and the latest slim volume, which he names The Living Mountain: A Fable for Our Times (2022), add substantially to Ghosh’s literary corpus on the issues of eco-injustice, planetary catastrophe and moral lessons associated with the environment.

       In this proposed paper, I would explore Ghosh’s ideas of the ‘resource curse’ and ‘terraforming’ in relation to the extractivist model of colonial economy and the plights of human beings and also the nonhuman lives which matter essentially in restoring environmental justice in this alarming time of climate crisis. I would show how Ghosh weaves words within the parabolic structure of The Nutmeg’s Curse to restore the “nonhuman voices” to his stories “as the prospect of planetary catastrophe comes ever closer” (NC, 257), and how the cautionary tale of The Living Mountain conceptualizes an indigenous, symbiotic relationship between the nonhuman nature and human beings emphasizing a lesson of animist spirituality. It is interesting to note that in The Living Mountain, Ghosh endows the mountain with life and even as an entity that “has been trying to teach” (LM, 35) human beings the “old ways” (LM, 34) of life. The nutmeg and the mountain are not simple metaphors for resource repositories, but stand for a ‘living’ eco-cultural system. Finally, I like to show how in both these works, Ghosh critiques the systematic violence of the Western profit economy on the environments of settler-colonial locales.

Asis De is an Associate Professor, Head of the Department of English and the Director of the Research Centre in Humanities and Social Sciences at Mahishadal Raj College, India. He teaches Indian Literature in English, Postcolonial Literatures, Dalit and Tribal Literatures, Cultural Studies and Diasporic Literatures in Post Graduate level since 2010. In a number of publications and conference presentations in Asia (India, Nepal and Bhutan), Africa (Egypt and South Africa), the United States and Brazil, and in Europe (Belgium, Germany, England, France, Scotland, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Austria), he has worked on academic areas like diasporic dislocation and migration, cultural identity, transnationalism, ecological humanities, kinship studies, and disability studies in Anglophone Asian, Caribbean, African and Australian literatures. He has completed two Minor Research Projects (2017 and 2019) and one Major Research Project (2021) funded by UGC, ICSSR, and the Ministry of Education, Government of India. His latest volume entitled Amitav Ghosh’s Culture Chromosome: Anthropology, Epistemology, Ethics, Space (Cross/Cultures 216) has been published by Brill in 2022. He is life member of IACLALS and regular member of EACLALS, PSA, GAPS, SIEF, and MESEA. He has presented papers in the two previous EACLALS Triennial Conferences held in Oviedo (2017) and Cardiff (Online: 2021).     

 

 

Sarah Dimick

Harvard University

sarahdimick@fas.harvard.edu

 

Juvenilia and climate justice

Examining the Ugandan writer activist Vanessa Nakate’s A Bigger Picture: My Fight to Bring a New African Voice to the Climate Crisis (2021) in relation to other books written by young climate activists— including Greta Thunberg’s No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference (2018) and Jamie Margolin’s Youth To Power (2020)—this paper analyzes the wave of nonfiction prose emerging from and galvanizing the youth climate movement. It pays careful attention to genre, noting how young adult writers are retooling the memoir in light of precarious environmental futures. It asks what is revealed and obscured in theorizing these works as environmental juvenilia. But most crucially, it argues that the genre of the activist how-to manual is evolving alongside the youth climate movement. These manuals function as blueprints for climate organizing, as templates for the social infrastructure of the youth climate movement.

 

And yet, as portrayals of—and blueprints for—the youth climate movement, these books highlight rifts in the infrastructure of global climate action. Although all three books are authored by young adult women recognized as climate leaders, distinctions in citizenship, race, disability, and sexuality alter the reception of their writing. Taking the subtitle of Nakate’s book seriously, this paper scrutinizes which voices are amplified within the youth climate movement and the Anglophone writing emerging from it. Building on postcolonial ecocriticism and recent literary criticism on the publishing industry, I argue that this corpus of texts elucidates the inequal channels of activism, celebrity, and authorship emerging within the climate crisis. Global climate activism, especially as it enters the literary sphere, is beset by the same structures of power that plague global Anglophone publishing. Read collectively, Nakate, Thunberg, and Margolin illuminate the pitfalls of the global even as they insist on its necessity within activist climate writing.

 

Sarah Dimick is an Assistant Professor of English at Harvard University and an affiliate of the Harvard Center for the Environment. Her research, based in global Anglophone literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, focuses on literary portrayals of climate change and environmental justice. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Contemporary Literature, ISLE, Mosaic, and Post45: Contemporaries, and her first book, Unseasonable: Climate Arrhythmias in Global Literatures, is under contract with Columbia University Press.

 

 

Carole Ferrier

University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia

c.ferrier@uq.edu.au

 

Considering Indigenous women’s fictional depictions of struggles to defend their lands and cultures in what remains a postcolonising Australia still

Aileen Moreton-Robinson has urged that the term “Postcolonising” be used, rather than “Postcolonial”, to designate the context within which Indigenous people on their land (now known as the nation of Australia) have maintained opposition to the appropriation of their Country and culture, and their very bodies, by imperialism and colonialism—with the chains of Exclusion, Exploitation, and Extermination still far from being shaken off in more recent times. Indigenous peoples have faced destruction of land and water resources and sacred sites, in large measure caused by the activities of extractive industries (of mining, drilling, fracking, forestry), that can lead also to global heating, atmosphere pollution and species extinction.

This paper mainly deals with authors who resist continuing colonial oppression in Australia through producing literature. In fiction by Aboriginal women, the tone has often been one of a distinctive humour, irony and satire, that discreetly (or not so) dissects everyday racism and puts emphasis upon a laconic endurance and an ability to survive on no or little income (Monica Clare, Doris Pilkington, Ruby Langford, Vivienne Cleven). Among Aboriginal women novelists Alexis Wright is supreme, and many more, both urban and non-urban based  (including Sally Morgan, Melissa Lukashenko, Marie Munkara, Janine Leane and Claire G Coleman), are fighting off the legacy of past oppression and are perhaps being less tolerant about past silences regarding the extreme violence of the colonial project and its brutal implementation—through massacres (documented by Lyndall Ryan’s project), poisoning of issues of food and blankets, high levels of incarceration, frequent rapes of black women. These writers articulate also some of the wisdom to be found in Indigenous knowledge, and its epistemologies, cosmologies and spiritualities as paths to protect the planet.

Similarly, the visual artist Fiona Foley has worked for decades in a range of different art forms and in recent years has begun to write history documenting, for example,  the payment of Aboriginal workers in northern Queensland in (highly addictive) opium ash, and also the role of the Aboriginal Protectors, missionaries and nuns in the taking away of children (the “stolen generations”) and the control and removal of populations (Foley, Biting the Clouds 2020; Horror Has A Face, 2017). Ultimately this paper argues that these writers and artists highlight aspects of a continuing oppression, a postcolonising rather than a postcolonial state, and the aftermath of the extreme cruelty of the colonial regime, for which few reparations have ever been made.

Carole Ferrier is Emeritus Professor. She has taught women’s/gender studies and literature for 50 years, mainly at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. She has published 10 books and 150 articles and book chapters, and edited Hecate: A Women’s Interdisciplinary Journal for 45 years. One of her favourite activities is attending conferences, and EACLALS conferences have been, over decades, some of the best ones.

 

Megan E. Fourqurean

University of Leeds

en18mef@leeds.ac.uk

 

‘There will never be no more River’: The decolonial possibilities of Mami Wata in Los Angeles

The story of Los Angeles is inextricably rooted in histories of colonisation, environmental exploitation, and social injustice. This paper examines Chris Abani’s novel The Virgin of Flames through the intersection of violent cisgender heteronormativity, the development of the city of Los Angeles, and the concretization of the Los Angeles River. I argue that despite the novel’s bleak ending, the protagonist Black’s resistance lays the foundation for future possibilities of social and environmental justice rooted in global African knowledges. I begin with the relationship between the ‘settlement’ of Los Angeles and the forcible redirection of the River, culminating in the current state of economic and environmental injustice that characterises much of the city today. I then link this material history to Black’s own struggle with his identity and desire. Though Black seeks to resist colonial constructions of gender and sexuality, he ultimately fails in his rebellion. Like the city’s ongoing controversial efforts to ‘revitalise’ the Los Angeles River, Black cannot dissociate himself from the oppressive colonial framework that determines his way of being in the world. Black’s best intentions turn to violence, just as current River revitalisation projects present the risk of gentrification and displacement in historically marginalised Los Angeles neighbourhoods. Nonetheless there is still hope. Despite his ultimately unsuccessful end, I posit that Black’s innate reaching toward Afro-diasporic ritual and Mami Wata worship gestures toward potentially fruitful routes for decolonisation. Black turns to improvised Mami Wata worship as he challenges both the colonial gender binary and the city’s habitual human disregard for the Los Angeles River. In doing so, he embarks on an epistemological journey that foregrounds global African knowledges while contesting the city’s environmental and socio-economic injustices. I argue that Black’s attempted departure from Eurocentric ideology functions as a roadmap toward greater decolonial possibilities of epistemic and material liberation.

 

Megan E. Fourqurean is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leeds. Her research explores the intersection of gender identity, environment and endogenous religion in Nigeria and the diaspora. Her current doctoral thesis examines the political and theoretical possibilities of foregrounding the worship of Mami Wata, a global African water deity, as a lens for reading fiction from Nigeria and beyond. The selected texts for this project include Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta, The Virgin of Flames by Chris Abani, and Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi. In crossing and recrossing the Atlantic in their invocation of Mami Wata, these texts forge a literary, theoretical and materially enacted network of relations from which Eurocentric thought is conspicuously absent. The aim of this project is to draw out these transnational connections across texts and highlight the power of African and Afro-diasporic knowledges in reading literature beyond the boundaries of coloniality.

 

 

Gerald Gaylard

University of the Witwatersrand

Gerald.Gaylard@wits.ac.za

 

The eco-flaneur with “internal GPS”: The culture of greening the city in Ivan Vladislavić

Greening the city is usually understood to involve practical strategies, from energy sources to tree-planting to vertical farms to zero waste management. This is echoed in much of the academic research into this area, which has tended to focus on principles (Lehmann & Mainguy, Beatley & Newman, Kahn, Brantz & Dűmpelmann) and practical implementations (from new battery technologies to green lungs and rewilding). Whilst much can be done to encourage people to embrace these principles and practices, such as the 15 minute city, if these are to be sustainable attention also needs to be paid to lifestyle, psychology, and affect. In other words, sustainability requires a culture. What is the culture of sustainability? One artist who has explored such a culture is South African author Ivan Vladislavić. Located in the mining and industrial megalopolis of Johannesburg, Vladislavić might be said to poeticise greening the city, turning it into an artistic practice as well as a way of life. He does this via his creation of an eco-flaneur who cultivates a consciousness that connects body to place, context, and history. This broad-band proprioceptive consciousness, an “internal GPS”, allows him to create a sense of home in an often inhospitable place. This paper analyses the eco-flaneur and the possibilities for greening the city in Vladislavić’s Portrait With Keys and other works.

 

 

Gerald Gaylard is a Professor of English at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. His publications include After Colonialism: African Postmodernism and Magical Realism (Wits Press 2006), Marginal Spaces: Reading Ivan Vladislavić (Wits Press 2011), and At Home With Ivan Vladislavić: An African Flaneur Greens the Postcolonial City (Routledge 2023).

 

Silvia Gerlsbeck

University Koblenz-Landau

gerlsbeck@uni-landau.de

Ghostly environments and colonial revenants: Questioning ecological guilt and (in)justice in Guyanese speculative fiction

In Caribbean literature, environmental concerns have only recently attracted more attention, despite the Caribbean’s centrality to the development of a capitalist world order, ensuing ramifications for ecological systems, and thus the particular aptness of Caribbean literature to ecocritical readings. My paper takes its cue from this history of ‘belatedness’ (DeLoughrey 2011, 265) that marks ecocritical perspectives on Caribbean texts, especially as regards earlier works: it centres on selected novels by Guyanese authors and explores how these have anticipated and negotiated questions of ecological guilt as regards anthropogenic environmental change before its entrenchment in public discourse since the 1980s. Specifically, it looks at the particular aesthetics of representing environmental (in)justice, i.e. its manifestation in genre and narrative form, by enquiring into the manifestations of biospheric devastation and its disproportionate effect on the global South in form of the supernatural and speculative, which comprises non- or posthuman forms of agency, such as revenants, ghosts, or tricksters. Set against the backdrop of ecological restructuring in Guyana during what Michael Niblett has called the “longue durée of capitalist world-ecology” in the Caribbean (2016, 83), my paper takes its cue from the particular aptness of speculative fiction to address environmental issues.1 Works such as Wilson Harris’s Ascent to Omai (1970), Edgar Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute (1955) or Shadows Move Among Them (1951), or Jan Carew’s Black Midas (1958), I propose, uniquely blend forms of the Gothic, speculative, and science fiction with questions of responsibility for ecological exploitation, and in doing so also resonate with (contemporary) ideologies of economic growth and capitalist profit seeking. In thus entangling landscape with postcolonial subjectivity and processes of capitalist restructuring, I contend in particular, they offer a means to reflect on environmental (in)justice and responsibility by blurring the boundaries of victim and victor, and, in their self-reflexive engagement with questions of authorship, also on the responsibility of art and the artist in that regard.

 

Silvia Gerlsbeck recently completed her dissertation on the post-war Anglo-Caribbean Artist Novel, which rereads novels of the Windrush generation in light of their contribution to a renewed understanding of authorship, the role of the artist, gender, and genre, at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. In October 2022, she joined the Department of English Studies at the University Koblenz-Landau as a lecturer and research associate for anglophone Cultural Studies. Her recent publications comprise the edited volume The Male Body in Representation: Returning to Matter (Palgrave 2022; with Carmen Dexl) as well as articles on the intersection of aging and climate change in the work of V.S. Naipaul and on contemporary speculative Caribbean literature. Her research interest and teaching activities centre on black British and Caribbean culture and literature, masculinity, theories and representations of authorship and genius, ecocriticism, speculative fiction, and posthumanism.

 

Ana Cristina Gomes da Rocha

University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro

anacgrocha35@gmail.com  

 

Epistemologies of care: An ecopoetic conversation between Craig Santos Perez, Jamaica H. Osorio and Sia Figiel

Bearing in mind Epeli Hauʻofa concept of “a sea of islands” this paper proposes an ecocritical analysis of three poems written by three Indigenous authors, Craig Santos Perez (Chamorro-Guam) Jamaica H. Osorio (Hawai’i), and Sia Figiel (Samoa) published between 2016 and 2022 respectively. Together the poems create a relevant example of Indigenous ecocriticism that is overtly interacting with global flows of power and are simultaneously entangled with the struggles of many other Pacific islanders when it comes to topics such as ecological degradation, land occupation, mass tourism and militarization / nuclearization of Pacific island-nations. The poems to be analysed are “Green Washing and White Dollar Policy” (Jamaica H. Osorio), “Praise Song for Oceania” (Craig Santos Perez) and “In-Land-Ness” (Sia Figiel). The epistemologies of care that I am referring to are based on Indigenous ancestral knowledge and practices that are vessels of environmental ethics and honour Earth as an ancestor, as well as demonstrations of multiple forms of belonging in which human and non-human elements are symbiotically connected. Therefore, this paper problematises and critically questions the impact of global policies upon Indigenous communities as well as it presents examples of resistance that are generating transcultural movements in which contemporary Indigenous writers question the validity of globalised policies that had proven to be disruptive and harmful for their societies. Each of these authors presents challenging questions that trace environmental degradation back to the colonial encounter while demonstrating that their Indigenous societies developed complex and sustainable relationships with the environment, those that were disrupted by colonialism and subsequently imperialism and globalisation. Moreover, the voices of these writers resonate through waves of anger against the harm that has been inflicted upon ecosystems, and thus their poems are ways of denouncing injustices, and, to a certain extent, they seem to ensure cultural survival when assuming a strategic significance as counternarratives to the Americanisation of the islands. Consequently, my analysis of the poems aims at demonstrating that coalitions formed among Pacific Islander vividly respond to the imperial West and fiercely resist land occupation, and environmental degradation. Moreover, there is also an assumed critique to colonial / Western views of nature as a separate and empty object that exists to be exploited and to generate profit. In sum, the tapestry woven by the poems selected here highlights the importance of activism, education, care, and love as actions that simultaneously denounce multiple forms of “slow violence” against Indigenous cultures and generate decolonial discourses.

 

Ana Cristina Gomes da Rocha holds a PhD in Contemporary South Pacific Women’s Writing (Hawai’i, Tahiti, and Samoa) from the University of Vigo, 2021; and a Master degree in English Studies from the University of Aveiro, 2012. Member of BiFeGa and Bodies in Transit2 (research groups, University of Vigo). Currently, working as Assistant Professor at University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, Portugal.

Her research interests include: Gender studies; Indigenous feminism; Decolonisation; Postcolonial and Transnational literature; Pacific studies; Hawai’i and Native Hawaiian Culture/History; Tourism, Militourism and globalization; Ecology.

 

 

Tonisha Guin

Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur

tonisha@iitj.ac.in

 

From abject to opaque: Border dwelling in Bhadralok-Sunderbans dichotomies of agency/abjection

Across his writings on decoloniality and the Global South, Walter D. Mignolo argues the need to destabilise hegemonic, hierarchised systems of knowledge including locally-sustained hegemonic structures that borrow, and stabilise themselves in terms of knowledge systems rooted in the Global North. The bureaucratic and high cultural mainstream social imaginary in Bengal, India, dubbed bhadralok culture, both within the state machinery and in the more aesthetically worded cultural productions, is an arguably good illustration of this.

This paper seeks to look at how the people and social geography of the Sunderbans figure within narratives from mainstream Kolkata-centric Bhadralok identity projects. To do so, it translates and examines two ghost stories for young adults by one of the most well-known names within the Bengali literary canon: Atin Bandpadhyay—“Atapurer Bhut” (“Atapur’s Ghost”) and “Atapurer Bagh” (“Atapur’s Tiger”)—to see how the uncanny is produced, otherised and identified with even as it is alienated within the liminal spaces in-between Bhadralok domains and the hinterlands of the Sunderbans— a delta encompassing the borders of Bengal, India, and Bangladesh. One of the most sensitive biospheres affected by industrial modernity and climate change, the Sunderbans are also home to some of the most marginalised, disenfranchised, refugee and climate migrant communities in India. A close reading of the stories shows how Timothy Morton’s deconstructive reading of “nature” and paradigmatic shift to the term “ecology” extends to people(s) inhabiting the locations too “natural” to be accommodated in discourses of bhadralok modernity. In the process, it examines how, like all constructions, thatof the bhadralok is inherently unstable and open to self-deconstruction. This paper traces the performativity of Atin Bandopadhyay's perpetually liminal authorial identity as simultaneously a bhadralok and a refugee from the Sunderbans area in India-Bangladesh borders, and links it to the ambivalences surrounding the surreal in his stories. In doing so, it argues that understanding these identity projects in terms of perpetual liminality or border dwelling is more productive than erstwhile Global South frameworks like that of Partha Chatterjee's relevant but too insular demarcations between civil society and political society. 

 

Tonisha Guin trained in English Literary and Cultural Studies. Tonisha Guin’s academic interests are identity studies, space studies, popular culture, decoloniality, knowledge systems in the Global South, and new media studies. She has studied at EFL University, Hyderabad. Her doctoral research looked at mainstream bhadralok identity formation around Barabazar, Kolkata, India. She is currently working on a project funded by the ICWT, the University of California in Irvine, exploring notions of normativity at the intersections of race, gender, and juridical-medical administration in colonial Kolkata. She joined the School of Liberal Arts, IIT Jodhpur, as an Assistant Professor in July 2022.

Kata Gyuris

Eötvös Loránd University

gyuris.kata@btk.elte.hu

 

Re-examining the Land in White South African writing – An ecocritical and gendered approach

As J. M. Coetzee explains in White Writing, there is a strong tradition in white South African fiction which focuses on the image of the farm, initially meant to epitomize the first Afrikaners’ heroic efforts of creating a pastoral environment for themselves and their descendants. The grander national narrative that incorporates these works is one of successful colonization as well as victory and perseverance over the harsh African landscape. On the other hand, several rewritings of the farm novel or plaasroman genre have been published recently, all focusing on dismantling this original narrative and on offering postcolonial, ecocritical and often gendered reinterpretations.

Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2004) focuses on the female experience of the farm and blends narratives of ageing, Afrikaner mythologies and the transgenerational dependence on the land. Last year’s Booker Prize winner, Damon Galgut’s The Promise similarly scrutinizes Afrikaner identity, which is deeply embedded in the burdened locality of the farm. My point of departure in this paper will be postcolonial ecocriticism’s contention that the nostalgia for pure landscape must be refused and that new pathways to interpretation must be sought out, including environmental considerations (Cilano and DeLoughrey). In both novels, the failure to reckon with the sweeping political and private changes time brings about allows the authors to reflect on the uselessness and the tragic ridiculousness of the land’s perceived ownership. The ecocritical reinterpretation of colonial histories goes hand in hand with a gendered perspective in both novels, accentuating how male and female attitudes to the nonhuman environment differ, with the latter making space for more holistic and less exploitational practices. In the paper, I will read these two novels together with the intention of delineating a common ground for history, gender and a new, ecocritical approach to the land that is focused on the future of the human and nonhuman environment, rather than its past.

 

 

Kata Gyuris earned her PhD in African Literature from Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, Hungary), where she is currently a lecturer at the Department of English. She researches contemporary Anglophone and Francophone African fiction with a keen interest in spaces and representations of human rights atrocities. She has published on J. M. Coetzee, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Doris Lessing among others. She is co-founder of the Narratives of Culture and Identity Research Group. She is currently working on transforming her dissertation into a monograph. More: https://elte-hu.academia.edu/KataGyuris

 

 

Doris Hambuch

United Arab Emirates University

hambuchd@uaeu.ac.ae

 

Water worship by Kayo Chingonyi and by Roberta Hill

In their contribution to the Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism (2022), Alice Loda and Antonio Viselli identify a link between translingual poetics and environmental justice concerns based on the fact that “translingualism facilitates the development of more open and all-embracing poetic subjectivities” (65). Such all-embracing subjectivities are key elements of what Sarah Nolan recognizes as a more recent development in ecopoetic theories, theories “that complicate the boundaries of the human and thus the nature/culture binary inherent in earlier studies” (87). This presentation seeks to exemplify Nolan’s claim through analysis of translingual texts from Kayo Chingonyi’s recent collection A Blood Condition (2021). The poems in this collection are framed by four texts which make their dedication to the Zambezi River God explicit in their title. The opening prose poem ends in a reference to “fisherfolk who swam before they could walk or talk because the river god would never let them sink” (1). The significance of this river spirit, Nyaminyami, is read alongside elements of animism in “These Rivers Remember” by Oneida poet Roberta Hill. The ways in which Chingonyi relies on Bembe and Hill on Dakota in their respective English poems that lend agency to rivers serves to support the connection between the two fields of study as established by Loda and Viselli. They ultimately point towards the insufficiency of a language that spread through imperialism for creative calls to environmental justice. The master’s language, in adopting Audre Lorde’s famous phrase, cannot repair the master’s damage.

 

 

Doris Hambuch is Associate Professor in the Department of Languages and Literature at United Arab Emirates University. Her publications include essays on Caribbean literature, ecocriticism, film analysis, and trans-cultural feminism. She edited special issue 6.2 of Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies on Caribbean cinema and issue 48.1 of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature on bridging divides via comparative literature. She is President of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association, and her current research focuses on polyglot art practices. She is the author of two chapbooks, All That Depends (2019) and Monsters (2021).

 

Felicity Hand

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

felicity.hand@uab.cat

 

People versus turtles and coral reefs:  The dilemma of the Chagos archipelago

The tragedy of the Chagos Islanders is the 50 year-old story of a displaced people, forcibly evicted from their homeland and resettled in Mauritius.  Diego García, the most populated of the Chagos Islands, was handed over to the Americans by the British to be used as a military base.  The community has suffered the pain of deportation and the prohibition of a legal recuperation of the homeland together with the added complication of the creation of a Marine Reserve and the suggestion that a return of the people would somehow harm the environment and provoke more climatic change on an already delicate ecosystem since it would ban fishing, their main livelihood. Using an environmental justice framework, which prioritizes concepts like self-determination, basic civil liberties, social equality and access to natural resources among other demands of disadvantaged peoples,  I claim that the creation of a Marine Reserve in the waters surrounding the Chagos archipelago by the British in their new invented colony, British Indian Ocean Territory, has been a ploy to prevent the people from ever returning to their homeland despite the 2019 United Nations resolution that demands the restitution of the islands to the Chagossians. Before the 1980s environmental concerns did not feature significantly on the global political agenda so the Chagossian tragedy was never inscribed as an environmental injustice. Even after the creation of the Marine Reserve, little or no protests from green parties or NGOs were heard even though their situation poses an interesting dilemma for ecologists.  It is a clear case of ecojustice - protection of the coral reefs and other examples of biodiversity - versus social justice – the right of the indigenous population to inhabit their land and use its natural resources as they see fit.  I draw on the 2021 graphic novel by Florian Grosset to illustrate my discussion. 

 

 

Felicity Hand is senior lecturer in the English Department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.  She teaches postcolonial literature and history and culture of Britain and the U.S.  She has published articles on various Indian Ocean writers including M.G.Vassanji,  Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown  and Lindsey Collen.  She is the co-director of the research group Ratnakara  http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/ratnakara   which explores the literatures and cultures of the South West Indian Ocean.   The group’s current project is: Rhizomatic Communities: Myths of Belonging in the Indian Ocean World  (PGC2018-095648-B-I00). Felicity is also the editor of the electronic journal Indi@logs. Spanish Journal of India Studies http://revistes.uab.cat/indialogs.

 

 

John C. Hawley

Santa Clara University

jhawley@scu.edu  

 

Postcolonial ecocriticism and the recovery of hope: Okri, Dangarembga, and the spiritual

In his acclaimed 2017 study, Naturalizing Africa, Cajetan Iheka focuses on what he calls an ‘aesthetics of proximity,’ the ‘entanglement of humans and other beings in African literary texts,’ and the ‘rehabilitated human located at the interstice with the nonhuman with all the rights and responsibilities to the nexus.’  Building on the work of Rob Nixon, Evan Mwangi, and Jane Bennett, the book interrogates human agency’s often unacknowledged limitations, and arguably runs parallel to religious studies based upon Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961).  Iheka writes, for example, about water’s symbolic role in some African cultures, as the home of supernatural beings, deities and gods, and emphasizes that “with that connection of the human and the divine, water takes on greater meaning and significance, a sacredness.’

One critic notes, ‘ What Iheka accomplishes in this book is the unmasking and foregrounding of the agential powers of the other-than-human.’  Iheka speaks of ‘the artificial borders created over time to separate us into humans and animals, developed and developing nations, first and third world, black and white, etc.’  Describing such borders as artificial again foregrounds the question of human agency, the artifice of imagining control over the uncontrollable, the domination of nature suggested by the command in Genesis to name creatures and in the process define them.  In this paper I intend to discuss the role of narrative in situating the human in nature, bolstered by Karen Armstrong’s Sacred Nature (2022), Greg Sarris’s Becoming Story (2022), and Byron Caminero-Santangelo’s Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa (2011).  I will contrast Ben Okri’s environmentalist fairy tale, Every Leaf a Hallelujah (2021) and Tsitsi Dangarembga’s stark This Mournable Body (2020), seeking hope even in an obscured nature. 

 

John C. Hawley is Professor at Santa Clara University, author of Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction, and other books, essays, and chapters in various books.  He is former President of the South Asian Literary Association, an executive board member of the African Literature Association, and a former head of the US chapter of ACLALS.

 

Victoria Herche

University of Cologne

victoria.herche@uni-koeln.de

 

Representations of slow violence in Anglophone coal mining fiction

“The first thing I saw was the slag heap. Big it had grown, and long, and black, without life or sign, lying along the bottom of the Valley on both sides of the river.”

(Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley 98) The rise of industrialized coal mining in the 19^th century is one of the most extensive legacies of Britain’s industrial and imperial era. The magnitude of its socio-environmental impact extends deeply into literature and culture. By discussing anglophone coal mining fiction of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, including works by Stephen Crane and Richard Llewellyn, texts that are well-known for their engagement with social justice, i.e. working conditions and miners’ strikes, this paper sets out to foreground in what ways these early mining texts just as much commit themselves to the negotiation of environmental justice. The ‘extractive view’, analogous to the colonial gaze, sees territories as commodities, rendering land as for the taking, and facilitates the reorganization of populations, plant and animal life into extractible resources for material and immaterial accumulation. This paper therefore proposes extractivism as a form of environmental imperialism that has caused an ‘environmentalism of the poor’ globally. According to Rob Nixon, representations of “slow violence” need to engage with a kind of destruction that erodes socio-economies, livelihoods, and subsistence in unhurried but steady processes. A major challenge posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence is representational; how to find arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects. The coal mining texts addressed in this paper – set in colonial times – investigate the need to find appropriate forms to imagine and represent the violence and environmental damage caused by the extractive industries – both in Europe and in formerly colonized territories. It will be argued that these texts explore not only the exploitation and unchanging conditions of the miners’ lives, but further give voice to non-human agents and the landscape itself, all caught up in a cyclical, predetermined life of slow violence.

 

Victoria Herche is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer in the English Department at the University of Cologne, Germany. She is the Public Relations Coordinator at the Centre for Australian Studies (CAS) in Cologne and assistant editor of Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies. Her first monograph is titled The Adolescent Nation: Re-Imagining Youth and Coming of Age in Contemporary Australian Film (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2021). Her research interests include Australian Literature and Film, Indigenous Studies, Post-Colonial Theory, Migration and Refugee Studies, Ecocriticism and Energy Humanities.

 

 

Gugu Hlongwane

Saint Mary’s University

Gugu.Hlongwane@smu.ca

Khondlo Mtshali

University of Kwazulu-Natal

khondloptm@gmail.com

The madman’s keys: New scrambles and routes to ecological justice in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were

There is something in African waters that has been stirring for quite some time, now. It is an energy both powering and leading ecocriticism. Joseph Conrad’s “rotten fence” of colonialism has been circumvented by epistemological infrastructures that refuse an Africa turned into the West’s playground, a Dakar rally. The proposed essay will explore the keys that Africans have at their disposal to unlock the formidable trap doors of the European Scramble. We argue for a new Scramble in Imbolo Mbue’s latest novel, How Beautiful We Were. Here, progress means to go mad rather than “civilized” in the search for more ethical, postcolonial ecologies highlighted in the exciting work of African scholars like Cajetan Iheka. In African Ecomedia, Iheka bemoans the West’s complicity in turning Africa into a “repressed and invisible factor… as the continent remains at the margins of intellectual discussions and geopolitics despite its major contribution to global modernity and the supply chain.” (6) Much like Mbue, Iheka calls for “a decolonial vision of the future that takes Africa seriously in tackling the planetary crisis” (10).

Mbue’s decolonial vision is one that wastes little time in plunging the reader into the middle of the mess and devastation wreaked by the poisonous and “slow violence” of Pexton, an American oil company in the village of Kosawa, located in an unnamed African country. With echoes of Helon Habila’s Oil on Water, Mbue not only puts a timer on the West’s impunity, attacking it by any means necessary, but she begins an honestly brutal discussion about the difficult and often-times deadly routes to the beauty of true freedom. Playing on Ayi Kwei Armah’s iconic novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Mbue suggests a pre-existing beauty maliciously distorted by colonial and neo-colonial thugs. But this is no nativist work. It is an ugly journey out of the West’s “endless wants.” Firebrand characters like Thula and the resounding voices of “mad” children, and their children, have the keys. Herein lies the beauty of the novel.

Gugu Hlongwane is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax. Her collection, Electric Fences and Other Stories, was published by Mawenzi House in 2016. She is currently working on a novel. Her articles, in the field of postcolonial theory and literatures, appear in Muziki: Journal of Music Research in Africa, African Identities, Journal of Black Studies, Alternation, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Studies in Canadian Literature, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Postcolonial Text and the Journal of Literary Studies. She is a Research Associate at the University of the Free State in South Africa.

Khondlo Mtshali is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Kwazulu-Natal. He has written on African literature and existential psychology, African political philosophy, and on the relationship between language and social transformation. Among other platforms, his publications appear in Muziki: Journal of Music Research in Africa, African Identities, Journal of Black Studies, Alternation, and Postcolonial Text.

 

Alfie Howard

University of Leeds

pt17ajh@leeds.ac.uk

 

Wendigo stories for a postcolonial world: Re-imaginings of an Indigenous figure

In traditional Algonquian belief systems, the wendigo is a manitou associated with hunger, greed, winter and cannibalism. The figure also appears in contemporary works of literature, film and television created by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers. In this paper, I examine the wendigo’s relation to capitalism, colonialism and environmental destruction, and I argue that wendigo narratives provide a useful way to explore the interplay between these forces, particularly in works written from an Indigenous perspective.

In Western culture, including urban legends, the wendigo is often seen as a monster of the wilderness – an idea that can be traced back to Algernon Blackwood’s 1910 short story ‘The Wendigo’, in which the being is described as ‘the Call of the Wild personified’. Other works by white artists, however, link the cannibalism of the wendigo to capitalism and the destruction of this (so-called) wilderness, such as Larry Fessenden’s 2006 film The Last Winter, which likens oil-drilling humans to wendigos. Meanwhile, Indigenous writers like Basil Johnston and Jack D. Forbes have used the wendigo to explore the relation between capitalist destruction and colonialism: Johnston (1996) narrates a tale of insatiable capitalistic wendigos arriving from abroad to pillage the North American continent, while Forbes (1979) identifies Western society as afflicted by a wendigo ‘disease’. Louise Erdrich’s 2012 novel The Round House further presents a gendered element of the wendigo’s racist violence. While wendigo narratives by white creators tend to sideline Indigenous characters and avoid the issue of colonialism in most cases, works by Indigenous writers often view the wendigo’s cannibalistic greed as inherently linked not only to environmental destruction but also to colonial exploitation.

 

Alfie Howard is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leeds, working in Postcolonial Studies and Environmental Humanities. He is based in the School of English, but his research spans many subject areas, including media studies, folkloristics and linguistics. His PhD project, which examines representations of animal speech in fiction, is part of the Leverhulme-funded Extinction Studies Doctoral Training Programme at Leeds. He was awarded a distinction for his MA by Research thesis, which examined representations of the wendigo in the works mentioned above and in other books, films and television shows. He is currently the PGR co-ordinator for the Environmental Humanities Research Group at Leeds.

 

 

Megan Jones

Stellenbosch University

meganj@sun.ac.za

 

Plastic: A comparative analysis of waste in South Asia and South Africa

My paper uses the oceanic trajectory of waste in the Indian Ocean garbage patch to think comparatively about waste production in South Asia and South Africa. A recent study by the University of Cape Town showed that more than half of the plastic bottles on South Africa’s eastern beaches have drifted from South Asia on the Agulhas current (Ryan, 2019). Accordingly, the paper will focus on the plastic bottle as an object that enables a transnational reading of environmental harm, as well as how contemporary writing and culture might reframe its meanings.

 

I begin by discussing Moshin Hamid’s 2013 How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, in which desire to be a successful producer and consumer of capital shapes the narrative. The novel tracks the progress of protagonist “You”, operating as a kind of universalist self-help guide for the aspirational entrepreneur. Although “You” fakes his way into affluence off the back of a recycled water scheme, his fall and loss of material wealth offers opportunity for redemption. In Hasim’s writing, waste, as repurposed plastic bottles or contaminated water, reveals capital’s threat to the integrity of subjects. The paper then turns to two South African texts; Makhosana Xaba’s poetry collection On the Alkalinity of Bottled Water (2019), which metaphorizes bottled water as indicative of national decay, and the iThemba (hope) tower in Troyeville, Johannesburg, built in 2017 out of plastic bottles by the artist r1 and local waste recyclers. Read alongside each other, the texts surface the structural inequalities that shape the creation, disposal and management of waste, signified by the plastic bottle. Simultaneously, they offer strategies of everyday living that have evolved among marginal communities and the ways in which they resist their economic and ecological effacement.

 

Megan Jones lectures English Literature at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Her most recent publications include, “Imagining the Migrant in 21^st Century Johannesburg”, The Cambridge Companion to the City in World Literature (forthcoming 2023); “Reading the Rubbish Dump as a Heterotopia in Neill Blomkamp’s District9”, Social Dynamics (2020) and “The Train as Motif in Soweto Poetry”, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2018). She is the author of Everybody is Here: Reading South Africa Through the 21^st Century Township, Routledge (in production 2023).

 

 

Munasir Kamal

University of Leeds

enmka@leeds.ac.uk

 

Bringing visibility to victims of slow violence: Three works on Kaptai Dam

This paper explores three creative works addressing the environmental injustice experienced by victims of Kaptai Dam in Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh. Bangladesh was a province of Pakistan when Kaptai Dam was constructed between 1957-1962. The dam displaced 100,000 people, mostly of the Indigenous Chakma nation. Among them, in the absence of sustenance, 60,000 were compelled to cross the international border to India or Burma in what is known as Bor-porong or “Great Exodus” among Chakmas. Families were divided and those displaced, internally or internationally, underwent tremendous hardships. Thus, the dam’s reservoir—Kaptai Lake—is called “Lake of Tears” by local Adivasis. However, their tears for long have remained invisible to the majority population of Bangladesh—the Bangalis, for whom Kaptai Lake is a tourist destination. The Chakmas who settled in Arunachal, India, in the aftermath of Kaptai Dam again face the possibility of eviction as they vie against their host community over limited resources. Neither India, Pakistan nor Bangladesh recognize these oustees of a dam built more than half-a-century ago as its citizens. However, three creative works from Bangladesh—Tanvir Mokammel’s documentary Karnaphulir Kanna (2005), Samari Chakma’s collection of memoirs Kaptai Badh: Bor-porong (2018), and Sudipta Chakma Mikado’s poem ‘Kaptei Godha’ (2020)—fight against the oblivion imposed on victims of Kaptai Dam. Mokammel uses his camera to capture the reconfigured landscape and the thoughts and emotions of its inhabitants, while Samari Chakma in several interviews reveals the trauma experienced by families separated across the border. Sudipta Chakma Mikado captures various aspects of the pre- and post-dam scenario. In a situation where national history excludes Adivasi history, these creative works—catering to general audiences as well as those particularly interested in CHT—rewrite history from an inclusive viewpoint, and appeal for justice for the forgotten victims of Kaptai Dam.      

 

Munasir Kamal is a PhD researcher in the Department of English, University of Leeds. She is a co-editor of the recently published Bangladesh Environmental Humanities Reader: Environmental Justice, Development Victimhood, and Resistance (Lexington Books, USA). Munasir has taught in the Department of English, University of Dhaka, for about a decade. She has organised seminars, conferences, and designed university courses connecting literary studies to social and environmental in/justice. She is particularly concerned about injustices meted out on the basis of ethnic and gender identity. The title of Munasir’s ongoing doctoral thesis is Creative Responses to Dams and Development: A Comparative Approach.

 

 

Melissa Kennedy

University College of Education of Upper Austria (PHOÖ) / University of Vienna

melissa.kennedy@univie.ac.at

 

Indigenous knowledge in/as environmental justice: The role of postcolonial studies

The past decade has seen a steady increase in western acknowledgement of Indigenous knowledges and philosophies. Aotearoa New Zealand’s most recent inclusion of Māori philosophical principles in governance celebrates Māori astronomy in Matariki, and is integrating Mātauranga Māori into university structures, while across the Americas, international law and local activism backs Indigenous custodianship and sustainable traditional practices in the Amazon, Central America (Hernandez), and North America (Wall Kimmerer), though legal justice on the national level often problematically lags behind. This increasing sensibilisation, promoted through environmental activism as well as in international academic movements to decolonise economics, science and the curriculum, seem to have no direct link with postcolonial literary studies. They are, however, similarly expressed through Indigenous voices insisting on the primacy of the language-culture-land nexus. Popular non-fiction, such as Xiuhtezcatl Martinez and the Earth Guardians’ activist speeches and music (We Rise 2017), and lyrical scientific writing from Bruce Pascoe (Dark Emu 2014), Jessica Hernandez (Fresh Banana Leaves 2020) and Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass 2013), may thus be read as forms of postcolonial writing that blend Indigenous and western language and narrative forms to explain cultural understandings of the human relationship with their environments. Such work expands what postcolonial fiction has been arguing for years: that subjective, affective storytelling modes “understand how to link people with the scientific concepts in a meaningful way” (Rangi Matamua 2020).

Drawing inspiration from and comparison with Tara June Winch’s The Yield (2019), a novel about the recuperation of language, land, and memory that performatively enacts the linguistic “cultural connection” (Winch 146) required in Australian legal appeals to Native Title, this paper looks through a postcolonial literary lens at the very real-world applications of Indigenous knowledge making headway in legal and political frameworks addressing the environment. The way they help bridge the western assumed gaps between objective and subjective; literal and figurative; factual and fictive, is crucial to envisaging ecological solutions and environmental justice today.

 

 

Melissa Kennedy is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the University College of Education of Upper Austria (PHOÖ) and Privatdozentin at the University of Vienna. Her work in literary economics takes a materialist economic approach to postcolonial literature. Her recent publications include the monograph Narratives of Inequality: Postcolonial Literary Economics (Palgrave 2017), and two co-edited volumes, Uncommonwealths in Postcolonial Fiction (Brill 2017) and a Special Issue of Interventions, “Islands of Persistence and Resistance” (Spring 2023).

 

 

Michelle Keown

University of Edinburgh

Michelle.Keown@ed.ac.uk

 

Imagining environmental justice in Micronesia: US colonial legacies, Indigenous Pacific praxis

The U.S. military is one of the largest polluters on the planet, with the Western Pacific region – including Micronesia – most severely impacted by exposure to the toxic substances generated by its technologies of war. After ‘liberating’ Micronesians from Japanese occupation during the Second World War, the U.S. exploited their islands as military colonies (administered under the UN-mandated Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands), establishing a string of military bases used as staging posts from which to initiate military conflicts around the world, and contaminating Pacific environments with nuclear fallout (including from the world’s first nuclear disaster, the 1954 BRAVO hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll); PCBs; pesticides and other chemicals used by the military.

 

The U.S. has consistently downplayed and concealed the environmental and social impacts of its military activity in the Pacific, but increasing numbers of indigenous authors and activists have revealed the toxic legacies of U.S. military imperialism within their oceanic environments and communities. This essay will explore a range of this eco-critical and creative work, focusing in particular on two poet-activists - Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner from the Marshall Islands, and Craig Santos Perez from Guåhan – and Hawaiian artist Solomon Enos. Jetñil-Kijiner and Perez explore, through various media - including videopoems, poemaps, elegies, response poems and critical essays – sites within their island homes that have been contaminated and irreparably damaged by US military violence, but are still rich with spiritual significance and site-specific oral histories. Enos has produced a graphic novel (Jerakiaarlap) which includes an adaptation of Jetñil-Kijiner’s antinuclear poem ‘Monster’, as well as his own futuristic ‘cli-fi’ composition positing biotechnological solutions to the existential threat posed by rising sea levels in the low-lying Marshall Islands (an environmental disaster that is compounding the ‘slow violence’ of the US nuclear legacy, as encroaching waves wash irradiated soil into the ocean).  Jetñil-Kijiner, Perez and Enos all contest hegemonic western figurations of the Pacific as ‘empty space’ by reasserting indigenous presence (with)in oceanic environments, using indigenocentric referential methodologies that bear comparison to Patrick Chamoiseau’s notion of the ‘trace-memoires’ (memory-traces) to be extricated from sites impacted by colonial epistemic and material violence.

 

Michelle Keown is Professor of Pacific and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is author/editor of various books focused on imperialism and indigeneity in the Pacific, including Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body (2005); Pacific Islands Writing: The Postcolonial Literatures of Aotearoa/New Zealand and Oceania (2007); and Anglo-American Imperialism and the Pacific (2018).  Between 2017 and 2020, she led a Global Challenges Research Fund (UK) project focused on the legacies of US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, working alongside Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Solomon Enos to produce the graphic novel Jerakiaarlap (2019); graphic adaptations of Kathy’s antinuclear poetry; and volumes of Marshallese children’s art and creative writing (see http://www.map.llc.ed.ac.uk).

 

Ursula Kluwick

University of Bern

ursula.kluwick@unibe.ch

 

Environmental (in)justice on the beach

The beach has been a key site for colonial encounters, right from what Stephen Greenblatt calls “the most famous of beginnings”, Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, with “the great adventurer on the beach unfurling the royal standard and taking possession of the New World” (52). But if this image of appropriation has become “fixed in the popular imagination” (Greenblatt 52), it is nowadays being joined by another littoral image: that of refugees arriving on Mediterranean beaches, exhausted or dead. This is just one example of how the beach continues to play a role in the long story of global inequality. For refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea, it is a potential point of entry into Europe; for European governments, it has become a border in need of strict policing.

            But the beach is also an important site in the context of global warming. Over the course of the last decades, coasts and shorelines have become increasingly vulnerable. Erosion and rising sea levels are only two of the many littoral effects of climate change, but they are among the most visible ones. The effects of rising sea levels, such as flooding, salinisation, and land loss, are rendering human habitats fragile or uninhabitable, and even though sea level rise threatens many regions around the world, its repercussions are most severe in the global south, where entire island states face submersion.

This paper combines a blue humanities perspective with a postcolonial one to explore how contemporary novels, ranging from Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004) and Gun Island (2019) via Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005) to Omar El Akkad, What Strange Paradise (2021), depict the myriad links between imperialism, colonial exploitation, and environmental injustice through their representations of the beach.

 

 

Ursula Kluwick is Senior Researcher in the research project “The Beach in the Long Twentieth Century”, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her main research interests include postcolonial studies, Victorian literature and culture, littoral studies, and the blue humanities. She is the author of Exploring Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction (Routledge 2012) and has published on the representation of water and the environment, for instance, in Green Letters and the Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. She has co-edited The Beach in Anglophone Literatures and Culture (with Virginia Richter, Ashgate 2015), and a Handbook of Sustainability (with Evi Zemanek, UTB 2019). Her monograph on Victorian Water Writing is forthcoming.

 

 

Elisabeth Knittelfelder

University of Vienna

elisabeth.knittelfelder@gmail.com

 

Water as archive: Towards a decolonial tidalectics in recent African fiction and artivism

Our relationship with water and to bodies of water such as oceans, rivers, or rain, has such a fundamental bearing on our understanding of what it means to be human, to be in this world, and to be in relation to each other as well as to the natural environment. Yet the prerogative to define the meaning of and access to bodies of water is held by those who have positioned themselves at the top of the colonial order of being, set apart from those defined as Other and from nature itself. This paper explores the complex entanglements of (bodies of) water and colonialism, indigenous epistemologies, and alternative ways of being from an Afrocentric point of view in recent African poetry, short fiction, and performance. Koleka Putuma’s poem “Water” (2017) offers a haunting insight into an acknowledgement of the sea as archive, while Idza Luhumyo’s short story “Five Years Next Sunday” (2021) gauges the Black female power to create and contain water against the White male thirst for domination. The research-based multi-media project “Lalela uLwandle” (2022) by the Empatheatre Collective meditates on our communal relationship with the ocean in the face of exploitation and resource extraction on the coasts of South Africa. These texts redefine the meaning of bodies of water, broaden the significance of wet matters, and offer ways of being otherwise through the aquatic and maritime imagination. Drawing on the works of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Astrida Neimanis, Rinaldo Walcott, and Desiree Lewis, this paper merges Black African feminist critique, decolonial thought, and environmental activism in a tidalectic (Kamau Brathwaite) reading of three artistic interventions in our relationship with water. In thinking with and in water, this paper embraces a more fluid understanding of the category of the human and our existence within the ‘non-human’ world.

 

Elisabeth Knittelfelder holds a PhD in English and American Studies from the University of Graz, Austria, and is an awardee of the Marietta Blau Scholarship. Her doctoral thesis carries the title Topographies of Cruelty: Radical Performances in South African and British Theatre. She spent extensive research periods at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa and at Potsdam University in Germany. She is currently an OeAW (Austrian Academy of Sciences) postdoctoral fellow at the English department at the University of Vienna in Austria. Her work exists at the convergence of literary studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, global feminism, decoloniality, Black studies, and dramaturgies of cruelty and trauma. Her current research explores the nexus of intersections between necrocapitalism, crisis, and violence towards aspects of (global) migration, environmental racism, and climate justice.

 

 

Eléonore Lainé Forrest

University of New Caledonia

eleonore.laine-forrest@unc.nc

To save the people and the land in

Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things

Using the tools of decolonial ecology (Ferdinand), this work undertakes to explore how Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015) brings the readers to feel the scandalous position (Brewster) experienced by ten very young women, forcibly imprisoned by patriarchal Hardings International in the middle of the Australian outback. The text’s strategy is to make them realise that these women’s condition is no different to what minorities, but above all Indigenous Australians, have endured since the time of colonisation, and that Australia remains a postcolonising nation (Moreton-Robinson). Rather than coming up with a miraculous solution, coated in a happy ending, the novel brings to light an alternative to the diktats and catastrophic cultural and environmental consequences of both Anthropos’s and Capital’s exterminating forces: the Chthulucene, as this notion is understood by Donna J. Haraway in Staying with the Trouble (2016). Following this chain of thoughts, the first part examines Wood’s portrait of Hardings International’s and more broadly the Plantationocene’s rejection of all sources of differences, but also obstacles to its modern ways of things. Particular attention will be paid to the novel’s constant evocation of the Australian soil’s exploitation by means of the prison/ex-sheep station or wheat farm setting. I will then focus on the way Yolanda and Verla, the two central characters, thumb their noses at the phallocentric world they come from, ironically making the bush where they were left to die, their centre; the inhuman way they were treated, the very reason to (re)connect with their animal selves. The last part will investigate the significance of Yolanda’s and Verla’s abandonment of the domineering English language for a telepathic mode, allowing connections between all of the Earth’s critters, but above all the importance of staying with the trouble (Haraway). They have rejected the Western cultures’ extractive ways at the expense of biodiversity, climate, and the soil’s fertility, and now hear the music of the dry brown land and understand the importance of sharing a common voice, relationally made, to save the land and its people.

 

Eléonore Lainé Forrest is a senior lecturer in Anglophone literatures presently working in New Caledonia. After starting her career at the Sorbonne, she joined the University of New Caledonia in 2013 where questions of decolonisation, belonging and identities not only constitute the heart of this university’s research, but resonate in all the other Oceanian nations. She recently published “Silent Revolutions in Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide” at TIR Editions (Rennes 2 University) and contributed different chapters (“Australian literature”; “Dreamtime”) to L’Australie, a book edited by Peter Brown (ANU) and dedicated to revealing the multiple faces of Australia.

 

 

Chiara Lanza

University School of Advanced Studies of Pavia / University of Ferrara

chiara.lanza@iusspavia.it    

For the land has eyes: Soils and bodies in Kathy Jetñil Kijiner’s poetry

In recent years, Marshallese poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner has increasingly entered academic debates. Working at the intersection of poetry, performance, reportage and activism, her art is a fitting example of both aesthetic and material engagements with the global, as well as local and patchy, environmental crisis. The ways in which she re-interprets her community’s local lore provide a link between the Pacific islands’ past and their uncertain present jeopardised by rising sea levels.

Going beyond Epeli Hau’ofa, who identified the ocean as the unifying element for Pacific islanders (1997), the present paper proposes to read some of Jetñil-Kijiner’s poems starting from human-soil relations. In particular, poems such as ‘Fishbone Hair’, ‘Hooked’, ‘Lidepdepju’, and ‘Tell Them’ (published in Iep Jāltok, 2017) will be discussed to explore how past and present catastrophes have reconfigured the islanders’ relationships with soils, rocks, and vegetation.

These relations are exemplified by their changing diets and imported foods, and by the dynamics of eating and being eaten (Chao, 2021) that play out through human and more-than-human bodies in the South Pacific region. Specifically, the human bodies portrayed by Jetñil-Kijiner could be interpreted as territories of transition that connect soil to ocean and past injustice to present precariousness. They might be compared with ecological ecotones that link not only ecosystems but also timescapes in an ecological continuum, while retaining their own specificities. In a 2015 article, Jetñil-Kijiner suggested that the land has eyes: people may ignore or forget, but soils bear the evidence of anthropogenic disturbance, exploitation, and slow violence. Her art could help to think through and with human-soil relations, and to reveal the extent to which such dynamics need to be questioned both locally and globally in order to achieve environmental justice.

 

Chiara Lanza is a Ph.D. candidate in Sustainable Development and Climate Change at the University School of Advanced Studies of Pavia (IUSS Pavia), Italy, and is currently hosted by University of Ferrara. She holds a master’sdegreeinModernLanguagesandLiteraturesfromtheUniversityofTurin.Hercurrentresearch projectfocusesonrepresentationsofendangeredenvironmentsandenvironmentalinjusticeinworksof literaturewrittenbycontemporaryAnglophoneandFrancophoneauthors.Inparticular,sheisinterestedin exploring human-soil relations, how they are mirrored in literary texts, and how literature, in turn, can inspire practices of soil care.

 

 

Klara Machata

University of Freiburg

klara.machata@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de

 

Imperial exploitation and toxic legacies in the island imaginaries of The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali

In recent decades, islands have become one of most prominent symbols for the manifold environmental, social and (geo)political concerns associated with the so-called Anthropocene. While islands have often been imagined as extremes, either as paradise or as prison, islands studies scholars criticise narrow tropes of isolation and stress that islands exist entangled within the vast multidimensional relations and temporalities of a transforming planet. In her 2019 historical novel The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali Uzma Aslam Khan shines light on the brutality and injustice in and outside of Kālā Pānī, a British colonial prison on the Andaman Islands. Set shortly before India’s freedom in 1947, the novel explores the immediate and violent consequences of British imperial rule and Japanese occupation for the different groups of people and non-human beings who inhabit the islands. Drawing on postcolonial ecocritical theory and island studies, I argue that Khan not only highlights the parallels between the exploitation of people, nonhuman beings and natural resources, but she further exposes the slow violence and toxic legacy of British and Japanese imperial ambitions. In contrast to the ‘static’ role that islands have long played in the Western imagination, Khan does not dismiss the physicality of the islands in favour of promoting metaphorical abstractions but explores how terrestrial and aquatic spaces were exploited and fundamentally transformed. These toxic legacies seem omnipresent, but violence and vulnerability differ between the island dwellers: convicts, their children, migrants and indigenous peoples, who all resist essentialist and homogenising construction as passive subjects. In this exploration of the many forms of colonial and environmental injustice, the islands emerge as part of complex and cross-cutting systems of local and global interaction and exploitation.

Klara Machata is a research associate and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Freiburg. She holds an advanced degree in geography and English language and literature. Her research explores the intersection of several disciplines within the environmental humanities: ecocriticism, postcolonial theory, and political and cultural geography. Her doctoral dissertation is concerned with space, place, and the Anthropocene in contemporary anglophone fiction.

 

 

Mattia Mantellato

University of Udine

mattia.mantellato@uniud.it

Re-imagining landscapes for a fair and partnership world in Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound

In 2000 the Caribbean writer, artist and Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott published Tiepolo’s Hound, one of his ultimate works, with the intent to re-write the story of the Antillean painter Camille Pissarro (commonly considered as a ‘French artist’) and propose an alternative and ‘caring’ way to bring into dialogue the shores of the Atlantic. In this complex and multimodal poem, which contains twenty-six of Walcott’s own paintings, the Caribbean author imagines a positive, environmental and “ecocritical” (Glotfelty & Fromm 1996; Garrard 2004) exchange between French and Caribbean landscapes mediated through the figure of Pissarro and his art, through the language of trees, the re-sketching of European figurative masterpieces and the depiction of unknown or erased stories. Through the arts, Walcott works on environmental ‘justice’ between continents, thus proposing a rhizomatic (Glissant 1996), creative and ecologically ‘fair’ wor(l)d that re-paints and dismantles the atrocities and legacies of the colonial past. In this paper I show how Walcott embraces a non-binary “partnership” perspective (Eisler 1987; Eisler & Fry 2019), in a continuum of forms that come from both European and Caribbean imaginaries and arts. Pissarro, one of the forefathers of the Impressionist movement, was able to bring to the fore Caribbean ‘colours’ while simultaneously allowing the French landscape to speak back through the ‘dialects’ of the West Indies. Walcott alter-ego, as ‘double’ of Pissarro, is in a constant quest for answers, both on the role of world artists, and on their authority to transform societies through the artistic medium. The final scope of the poem is to find out the ‘true’ representation of the dog, the hound the provides the title to the poem, in the acknowledgment that ‘environmental justice’ always depends on the way we interpret and interact with reality, in a constant remapping of socio-cultural and historical ‘truths’.

Mattia Mantellato holds a cum laude PhD (Doctor Europaeus) in English language and literatures from the University of Udine (Italy) and he is now a Post-Doctoral Fellow working on the project “English Caribbean Literatures of the Ocean: Eco-Feminist and Transdisciplinary Perspectives for a New Blue Aesthetic”. He researches and publishes on Derek Walcott’s work, World Literatures, English Literature, Performance/Dance Studies and Multimodal Studies. In 2022 he won the AISCLI Essay Prize for an article on José Limón’s The Moor Pavane, a ballet reworking of Shakespeare’s Othello & the UNIUD PhD Award. He is also a professional ballet dancer, choreographer and artist. He graduated from La Scala Ballet Academy in Milan. For seven seasons, he was part of the ensemble of the National Ballet Theatre of Prague (Czech Republic). He has performed in more than 10 countries in Europe, in China (EXPO 2010), at the Biennale of Venice and at Mittelfest.

 

Vandana Mathur

Deshbandhu College, University of Delhi

vmathur@db.du.ac.in

 

Killing me softly: Of murdered streams and ecosystems

The postcolonial state is in a frenzy to ace the ‘development’ bandwagon. However, as the burgeoning field of Ecocriticism foregrounds, the impact and the aftermath of mindless ‘development’ can no longer be ignored. With Pablo Mukherjee (2006), this paper posits that an understanding of the arts, literature or culture is impossible without considering the complex interplay of environmental categories such as land, habitat, water, migration with political categories such as state, society, conflict, etc. We have ignored these interrelations between ‘nature’ and ‘human society,’ the ‘human’ and the ‘non-human’ worlds, at the cost of a denuded, depleted, and devastated ecosystem. Environmental alarm bells notwithstanding, postcolonial and environmental studies, according to Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin (2010) are arguably compromised when it comes to challenging global capitalism, the institution that essentially propels imperial behaviours.

Water is the elixir of life. Yet, water wars don’t seem too distant in the future, a horror depicted in Ruchir Joshi’s novel The Last Jet Engine Laugh (2000). The old protagonist subsists on water capsules in this futuristic novel. Presumably, the present is less bleak. Or is it? What happens when dams are built, in the name of progress? What happens when industries, again a symbol of development, poison lakes and rivers? This paper analyses two narratives originally written in regional Indian languages, revolving around the displacement and dispossession that comes with the building of dams, and the pollution of a freshwater lake. Both the narratives, Dweepa (Island) (2013) by Na.D’Souza (trsl from Kannad by Susheela Punitha) and Softly Dies a Lake (2014)by Akkineni Kutumbarao (trsl from Telugu by Vasanth Kannabiran) blur the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Dweepa problematises the issue of submersion of land called for by the building of a dam. It not only displaces villagers, rendering them ‘developmental refugees,’ victims of ‘slow violence’ [Rob Nixon, 2011], but casts shadow on the protagonist’s interpersonal relationships. Softly Dies a Lake is a requiem for a lake, a lake that not only sustained a variety of flora and fauna, but breathed life into a host of villages peopled by close-knit communities. The narrative brings to life the Anthropocene debates, as the lake and its surroundings come alive through the eyes of a child interlocutor. This paper critically examines the turn given to the ecological concerns at hand by the respective writers. Dare one hope?

 

 

Vandna Mathur is Associate Professor at the Department of English at Deshbandhu College

University of Delhi. She holds a PhD on domestic space in Indian English Fiction. Her areas of interest include: Indian writing in English; Media studies; Culture studies; Interdisciplinary studies of space and place; Ecocriticism; Postcolonial studies.

 

 

Corinna McLeod

Grand Valley State University

mcleodc@gvsu.edu     

 

Ghostly justice: Haunting as environmental action in Edgar Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute and Agymah Kamau’s Flickering Shadows

This paper will explore how Edgar Mittelholzer’s novel My Bones and My Flute (1955) and Kwadwo Agymah Kamau’s novel Flickering Shadows (1996) draw on the history and folklore of haunting in the Caribbean to comment on the lingering environmental effects of colonialism. I argue that these novels contribute to the discussion of postcolonial eco-justice through their exploration of the relationships between haunting, environmentalism, and cultural memory. In My Bones and My Flute, a young artist is misled into believing he was commissioned to create paintings for a wealthy lumber merchant in the remote jungles of Guyana. The metafictional novel, involving a frame- story created from journals, is all the more powerful for the humor inflected into the tension-filled narrative as the characters must discover the origin of haunting flute music coming out of the depths of the jungle. The legacies of slavery, Dutch and British colonization, and the toll on the landscape itself become themes that foster the supernatural unease. Flickering Shadows (originally published under Kwadwo Kamau) tells the story of a fictitious Caribbean island. Residents of a neighborhood called the Hill, are left to struggle in the aftermath of colonization, even as the economic interests of the former colonizers continue to threaten their livelihood. The narrator is a semi- omniscient ghost who has lived and died several lifetimes on the island, and who participates in the struggle of the island community that seeks to maintain its identity in the face of foreign missionaries, a corrupt government, and finally the “development” of their lands: first for mining and then for a golf course. The ghost, who is the grandfather of one of the main characters, meddles in the affairs of his live descendants by replanting cultural memories that risk erasure through time, the destruction of landscape, and colonization. Together, these novels show how the metaphor of haunting highlights the immanent connection between people and place and illustrates the harm colonization does to both, even as it serves as a method to compare the processes of ecojustice and environmental justice.

 

Corinna McLeod is a Professor of English at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. Her areas of interest are British and Transnational Anglophone literature, Postcolonial literatures and theory, and ecocriticism. Her current research explores Caribbean literature and comparative mythology.

 

Kasia Mika-Bresolin

Queen Mary University of London

k.mika@qmul.ac.uk

Ordinary Caribbean futures in the meantime: Beyond a tropical apocalypse

This presentation formulates a joint postcolonial environmental humanities and eco-theology approach to imaginaries of ecological crises and futures, from the Caribbean as a starting point. The Caribbean is our future. Always ahead of time, the world’s first capitalist region (Mintz 1974) is showing and anticipating our global post-peak futures of complex crises. Most disproportionately hit by environmental crises, these small island states are the globe’s barometers of environmental changes (Kelman and West 2009), exposing the violence and complexity of ‘the Anthropocene.’ In response, environmental discourse and environmentalism have long adopted themes derived from Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (Skrimshire 2014) and continue to draw on apocalyptic imagery of future calamities. Still, environmental humanities have been slow to engage seriously with ideas of the divine (e.g., as present in one’s life and time) as key to one’s ecological vision (Chrulew and Szerszynski 2016). In the Caribbean itself, a region born out of catastrophe of slavery (Brathwaite 1999), apocalyptic views interweave with the utopian drive of the region’s art and literature (Ashcroft 2015). Drawing on Black thought and Caribbean poetics (Sharpe; Brathwaite; Welcome; McKittrick), and anthropological work on ordinary crises (Beckett 2022), the paper responds to the unequally unfurling environmental crisis and focuses on the ‘ordinary meantime’ to theorize lives lived beyond the hyperbole of ‘a tropical apocalypse’ (Munro 2015). Joining environmental humanities, eco-theology, and the Caribbean, the presentation echoes, the Guyanese poet, Martin Carter’s (1954), call:

I come to the world with scars upon my soul

wounds on my body, fury in my hands […]

To the world of to-morrow I turn with my strength.

 

Kasia Mika-Bresolin is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. Prior to that, she was a Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and held a postdoc fellowship at KITLV (The Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) in Comparative Caribbean Studies.

Her monograph, Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives: Writing Haiti’s Futures (Routledge 2019) uses narrative responses to the 2010 Haiti earthquake as a starting point for an analysis of notions of disaster, vulnerability, reconstruction and recovery. The monograph to concepts of hinged chronologies, slow healing, and remnant dwelling, offering a vision of open-ended Caribbean futures, full of resolve. Her publications appeared in Third Text, Modern and Contemporary France, Area, Journal of Haitian Studies, Moving Worlds, among others.

 

Maitrayee Misra

Central University of Odisha

maitrayeemisra1989@gmail.com 

The gardener’s calendar: Eco-injustice, Indigenous resistance and vigilant environmentalism in Siddhartha Sarma’s Year of the Weeds

“Gardening is waiting”, reflects the narrator in Siddhartha Sarma’s novel Year of the Weeds (2018), as the “good gardener waits patiently for the plant or flower to grow” (YW: 166). The patience required in cultivating a garden, in staying vigilant to protect the environment from the “weeds” and in securing environmental justice is the key on which Year of the Weeds holds its narrative charm.  Set in a village named Deogan in the Balangir district of western Odisha (an Indian state), Sarma’s novel tells the story of a gardener boy belonging to the Gond tribe, an indigenous community which resists the corporate aggression of a mining company in grabbing their lands. As allies of the mining agency in the activities of ecological exploitation, the state administration and the police prey on the indigenous Gond people. Sarma’s story is reminiscent of the ‘real-life’ Niyamgiri Agitation in Odisha led by the Dongria Kondh tribe who resisted the corporate giant Vedanta and finally turned victorious. This article will focus on the indigenous resistance against state-sponsored and corporate injustices meted out to the Gond community who refused displacement from their ancestral lands and fought for their rights over the hills and the jungle they inhabit. It is interesting to note how the idea of developing the ‘climate’ for corporate and foreign investment simultaneously destroys the ‘climate’ for environmental justice in vulnerable areas. In this paper, I would also dwell upon the tensions between the neocolonial exploitations of the global corporates and the struggle of the local and marginal people in securing environmental justice. Finally, the article will reflect on the role of the state which participates in the “slow violence” (Nixon 2013) against its impoverished indigenous population alongside tracing the Indian tribal model of the “environmentalism of the poor” (Guha and Martinez-Alier, 1997). 

Maitrayee Misra is an Assistant Professor (Guest faculty), at the Department of English Language and Literature, Central University of Odisha, India. Her research interest centers round the academic domains of Postcolonial Anglophone Literature and Culture Studies. Apart from India, she has published and presented papers in countries like the US, the UK, Germany, Spain, Austria, Nepal, Bhutan and Egypt. She is a life-member of IACLALS, and regular members of EACLALS, GAPS, PSA, CISLE and MESEA. She has presented papers in the previous two Triennial Conferences of EACLALS [held in Oviedo, Spain (2017) and Cardiff, the UK (2021)]. 

 

Michael Mitchell

Paderborn University

m.r.mitchell@talktalk.net

Wilson Harris and environmentalist traditions

It has long been recognized that Wilson Harris, through his unique knowledge of the natural world of the Guyanese interior and his exploration of Amerindian and Pre-Columbian beliefs and traditions, has shown how imaginative literature can interact with environmentalist concerns and recent developments in ecocriticism. However, it is less well known that Harris, in his recovery of more ancient traditions of Middle Eastern and European thought connected with Gnosticism, alchemy and the arts of memory, established a vibrant cross-cultural dialogue that opens new paths to transcend apparent paradoxes and enable a radical but non-confrontational approach to environmental justice. These alternative traditions led, for example, to ideas such as those of Rudolph Steiner and anthroposophic and biodynamic attitudes to the natural world and human interrelations with it. This paper will explore both of these aspects of Harris's work in his novels and critical writings and the traditions they connect with in order to investigate whether his insights can prove of value to future discussions of environmental issues.

 

Michael Mitchell is an honorary associate professor at the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick and a lecturer at Paderborn University, Germany. He taught English for many years in German secondary schools and published school textbooks. He is the author of Hidden Mutualities: Faustian Themes from Gnostic Origins to the Postcolonial and of numerous articles on Caribbean literature, particularly Wilson Harris. He is on the advisory board of the Ameena Gafoor Institute.

 

Durba Mukherjee 

Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur

durbamukherjee310@gmail.com

 

Is Samanth Subramanian’s Following Fish a literature of small things, or a postcolonial-ecocritical warning?

This paper analyses Samanth Subramanian’s travel narrative, Following Fish (2010) that explores the Indian coastal ecologies as portrayals of distinct locales with their individual historical, socio-cultural, political, and economic trajectories. In the process, the paper reads Subramanian’s representations of Indian coastal regions as unique localities that interrogate the notion of India as a singular entity in terms of socio-cultural, as well as, geo-political contexts. My close reading of the text would particularly focus on Subramanian’s portrayal of Goa as largely entangled within postcolonial modernity and as a struggling locale, seeking to sustain its ecology. Drawing from Graham Huggan’s and Arundhati Roy’s postcolonial-ecocritical writings and Partha Chatterjee’s criticism of the concept of a unanimous national progress, the paper situates Subramanian’s twenty-first-century textual reflection of the spaces as caught up between the notions of progress, vis-à-vis tourism and fishing as modes of development, and the havoc wrecked on them by the postcolonial market economy.

Further, the paper seeks to address the aesthetics of representation that Subramanian adopts in choosing to portray the coastal ecologies in the form of a journalistic travel memoir. The work critically examines the position of a literary writer/traveller, employing the form of journalistic prose, as a wary observer on his return to his country of origin. The paper analyses Subramanian’s strategic choice of the genre of travel memoir, which is only marginally accepted as literary, as a divergence in dealing with subjects that demand our immediate concerns. Further, in analysing Subramanian’s explicit effort to systematically outline the specificities of the Indian coastal spaces, the paper ponders upon the issue of the writer’s/traveller’s position in portraying the locales as deeply entrenched within the intersections of postcolonial market economy and ecological exigency.

 

Durba Mukherjee is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. She has submitted her thesis, titled “Literature of Return: Portrayals of Post-Independence India in the Travel Memoirs of Indian Middle-Class Returnees”. Her major authors are Santha Rama Rau, Ved Mehta, and Dom Moraes and her broader field of research includes Indian middle-class self-fashioning, postcolonial Indian Anglophone literature, travel writing, travel memoirs, and literature of return. She is currently employed as an assistant professor in the Department of English, Gokhale Memorial Girls’ College, Kolkata.

 

 

Indrajit Mukherjee

Nistarini College

perfectindrajit.mukherjee@gmail.com

 

Magical realism as a critique of environmental plunder through the Aboriginal Dreaming in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book

To Sigmund Freud, dream generally manifests wish-fulfillment. The notion of aboriginal dreaming arises from an envisioned utopian space by returning to the ancestral spirits, the wilderness, and the outback as the proper venue for realising its enormous value in the history of Australian literature. This ‘Dreamtime’ of the real Australians is to tame the bush and build a magnificent global civilisation based on peaceful social co-existence within the limits of natural law, free from the hustle and bustle of the modern megalopolis. Alexis Wright’s fiction The Swan Book (2013) brings to the fore the profound links between ongoing colonialism and climatic catastrophe via the ‘Indigenous Dream’, describing the grotesque gothic gloom of near-future times in Australia. The writer exemplifies how colonial domination, postcolonial power-politics, military dictatorships, totalitarian regimes, indiscriminate killings, and repression of her Indigenous community have led her to employ magical realism as a counter-argument to the Enlightenment notions of white Australian discourse. This article will seek to explore how this ‘defocalized’ narrative utilises the magical realism trope as a scathing critique of environmental pillage in an ostensibly postcolonial setting that aids in the perpetuation of colonialism. Through the theoretical lenses of Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of ‘rhizome’ and Selvamony’s pan-Indian concept of ‘tinai’, the final section of this paper will investigate how the magical realist fiction explains the fundamental principles of a non-hierarchical network in an Indigenous space that can negotiate between the humans and the non-humans within the narrative framework.

 

Indrajit Mukherjee (M.A., Gold Medalist) is an Assistant Professor of English at Nistarini College and is pursuing his doctoral research at the Department of English, Vidyasagar University. He has presented papers at AU, JU, BU, BHU, IIT Madras, IIT Patna, Presidency University, REIYL (Glasgow) and published widely in Film Studies, Postcolonial Literature, Modern Literary Theory, and Avant-Garde Theatre. His latest publications include “Disconsolate Homelands: (Re)turning to Lands Marked with Notional Departures in Chandani Lokuge’s Fictions” (The IACLALS Journal, 2022), “‘Where there is power, there is resistance’: Negotiating Resistance and Representation in Dinabandu Mitra’s The Indigo Planting Mirror’” (Routledge, 2022), “‘We Are All Cyborgs Now’: Disrupting Gender Identity through the Cyborg in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021), “Who Remembers those ‘Undocumented Minors’?: Locating the Genealogy of the Oppressed in Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends?” (Rupkatha Journal, 2021), and “Memories of Subjective and Objective Violence of Amritsar Massacre in Bali Rai’s City of Ghosts” (Vidyasagar University Department of English Journal, 2021). He has also co-edited a critical companion of Toni Morrison’s Beloved from Worldview.

 

Nibedita Mukherjee

Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University

nibedita.mukherjee@skbu.ac.in

 

Indigenous women sing for nature: Goddess myths of the Ajodhya Hills ecosystem

Indigenous communities, as per the 2011 census report, constitute nearly 8.6% of the total population and 11.3% of the rural population of India. These people have been the preservers of the Environment through the practise of an esoteric livelihood. As scientific evidence postulates, the Earth’s biodiversity is fast depleting and the world is facing a human-caused sixth mass extinction (Kolbert, 2014). This destruction of the atmosphere has made life extremely difficult for the Indigenous people who live and depend on nature for their existence. The Ajodhya Hills, a mountain-forest ecotopia is the home of Santals, Gonds, Lodhas, Kherias and Mundas for whom “staying alive”(Shiva 1988) has become extremely challenging.  Even more difficult is the life of their women who depend entirely on nature for food, water, fuel and fodder. But instead of succumbing to the environmental injustice brought about by industrialization, migration and quarrying they have retaliated constructively through rendition of folk songs and folk myths of Tusu and Bhadu who are reincarnations of Mother nature or Prakriti. The paper intends to reflect upon the different ‘Tusu’ and ‘Bhadu’ myths of  the Ajodhya Hills  area of West Bengal which sings of fruition and femininity of nature and thereby speaks of the need of preserving the atmosphere which is necessary for the continuation of life. Both Bhadu and Tusu are imagined to be female and therein they become representatives of Mother Nature. They are imagined to be lost or dead which leads to the singing of songs of remorse and pain. At a metaphorical level, therefore, they highlight the need to preserve nature and the violation of this norm leads to death and destruction. In the present age of media explosion people still find a solace in returning back to the songs of the soil – to them Nature becomes a daughter they love, a mother they revere. So the attempt to preserve her becomes a personal struggle, a struggle humanity must win inorder to survive.

 

Nibedita Mukherjee ( https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2638-253X)is a Professor in English at Sidho-Kanho-Birsha University, Purulia, India. She specializes in Feminist Studies, South Asian Literature and Shakespearean Drama. Prof. Mukherjee has five books to her credit: Gendering the Narrative: Gender Discourse and Indian English Fiction, Dynamics of Diasporic Identity in Commonwealth Literature, The Fictional World of Amitav Ghosh, Indian Theatre in English and Literary Feminism: Politics of Gender Identity and Authenticity and The Dark Forces in Shakespeare’s Plays. Prof. Mukherjee also has international teaching/learning experience. She went for a brief span to Seattle University, USA as she had received the USA State Fellowship Award (SUSI) funded by Dept of State, USA. She has served as the editor of two reputed journals namely Wesleyan Journal of Research: An International Research Journal  and Appropriations: Journal of the Dept. of English, Bankura Christian College.  She has worked with Teaching Learning Center, IIT Kharagpur as Research Collaborator and Subject Expert in a project titled “Graphic-Novel based  Pedagogy in Teaching Grammar in Schools” funded by MHRD. Presently she is also working on an ICSSR funded project titled “Folklores and Folkvoices: Preserving the Environmental Ethnospace”. She has authored a book chapter on “Ecofeminism in Assamese Literature” for Rowman & Littlefield in 2022. Presently, she is co-editing a book on Mahesh Dattani for the Bloomsbury publishing.

 

 

Francesca Mussi

University of Pisa, Independent Scholar

franci.mussi86@gmail.com

Indigenous fantasies of the apocalypse: settler-colonialism, kinship, and reciprocity in Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow

Originating from the Greek apocalypsis (revelation), the word apocalypse is associated biblically with the end of the world (or the end of time) and secularly with a very serious event resulting in destruction or damage on a catastrophic scale, such as war or environmental disaster. Greg Garrard highlights how apocalyptic rhetoric may play a crucial role in environmental discourses, as it is able to galvanise activists, «converting the undecided and ultimately, perhaps, of influencing government and commercial policy» (2011: 113). It should not surprise then that today discourses of climate change and environmental crises often acquire apocalyptic tones and have become central topics within the international political and cultural landscapes.

Engaging with the notion of the apocalypse, this paper asks: what does apocalypse mean for Indigenous peoples? As evidenced in the work of many Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, many Indigenous peoples do not approach the current ecological crisis as an impending, apocalyptic future to be dreaded but as something that they have already endured and continue to endure through past and present settler-colonial policies and mindsets (see Callison 2014; Watt-Clouter 2015). Potawatomi environmental justice scholar Kyle Whyte, for example, argues that “concepts and narratives of crises, dystopia, and apocalypse obscure and erase ongoing oppression against Indigenous peoples and other groups” (2018: 234). 

Intertwining Indigenous environmental justice, kinship, and the Anishinaabe concept of Mino-bimaatisiwin (living-well, McGregor 2018), this paper analyses Waubgeshig Rice (Anishinaabe)’s 2018 speculative fiction novel Moon of the Crusted Snow. This novel, as I argue, provides a way of reconfiguring the apocalypse as experiential rather than a metaphor for environmental future disasters, thus bringing to the fore the apocalyptic impacts of settler-colonial policies and worldviews on Indigenous communities and land relations. Ultimately, I show how fiction can be used as a decolonial tool to promote the revitalisation of Indigenous old ways, kinship values, and reciprocal relationships between humans and the land.

Francesca Mussi is an independent scholar, currently affiliated with the University of Pisa as “Cultore della Materia” (expert in the field) in English Literature. She has recently completed a Leverhulme ERC fellowship in the Department of Humanities at Northumbria University. She is currently working on a monograph examining how Indigenous fiction can complement or challenge the work carried out by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Her research interests also include postcolonial theory, gender studies, trauma studies, restorative justice, ecocriticism, and South African literature. Recent publications include her first book Literary Legacies of the South African TRC: Fictional Journeys into Trauma, Truth and Reconciliation (Palgrave Macmillan 2020) and the article“Land and Storytelling: Indigenous Pathways towards Healing, Spiritual Regeneration and Resurgence” (Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2021) available online at:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00219894211031716.

 

Aparajita Nanda

Santa Clara University

aparananda@berkeley.edu

Octavia Butler’s ecocritical antidote to “toxic” colonial/neo-colonial politics

Octavia Butler’s post-apocalyptic science fiction novels— Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents—involve the reader in environmental and social crises that are often the collateral damage of imperialistic colonization. Frederick Jameson lauds the ability of science fiction to “break through history in a new way” by looking at the future rather than the past. Butler picks up the theme of colonial oppression and subjugation in her parables of postcoloniality and presents us with a picture of environmental degradation and abjection brutally enforced by neocolonial policies of President Andrew Jarrett. Human exploitation takes its toll on the ecosystem as minorities are denied equitable access to natural resources. This paper argues that in the Parable novels Butler provides four imaginative tropes of environmental justice to counter the amoebic expansion of American neo-colonialism. Firstly, depiction of the “natural” in the novels offers an opportunity to think about the novel’s implicit references to indigeneity. Lauren Olamina, the protagonist’s, education in nature draws on Native American knowledge as Lauren, a black woman creates a commune named Acorn. In other words, Butler’s environmental justice in a postcolonial power-hungry world, comes through diversity, a racial inter-mix of shared knowledge to create a space of resistance. Secondly, by propagating the religion of Earthseed, a religion of action and change, Butler prioritizes human responsibility in a dynamic and constructive world. Earthseed totally undermines and dispenses with established religion, often a colonial tactic of power and control, that encouraged passivity in the believers duping them into a state of dysfunctionality. Thirdly, Lauren herself debunks any narrative of flight and exile, a colonial pattern for crime and punishment, as she emerges as a prophet on a pilgrimage. Finally, Lauren’s prophetic view of utopic possibilities entails a life in the stars as the new religion dismantles any discourses of competition, arrogance, power and eradication of the other, prime concepts that drive colonial thinking.

 

Aparajita Nanda is Chair, Department of Ethnic Studies and a recipient of a Visiting Associate Professorship to the University of California, Berkeley. Dr Nanda is also recipient of the Cedric Busette Memorial Award for her “outstanding contributions” to the Ethnic Studies Program, the David E. Logothetti Teaching Excellence Award and a Fulbright Faculty Teaching Award; she now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley and Santa Clara University. Her recent book publications include Black California, The Strangled Cry, Romancing the Strange, Ethnic Literatures and Transnationalism and God is Change: Religious Practices and Ideology in the Works of Octavia Butler. She has published several book chapters in edited volumes and her articles appear in peer-reviewed journals, including Callaloo, Ariel, and Subjectivity, while her academic treatises (by invitation) appear in Oxford African American Studies.

 

 

Mitia Nath

University of Massachusetts

mnath@umass.edu

 

“Slow violence” of the manmade famine in Bhabani Bhattacharya’s So Many Hungers

Bhabani Bhattacharya’s 1947 novel So Many Hungers, about a family driven to destitution during the Bengal famine of 1943, draws attention to colonial policies in Bengal that engineered the famine, which reportedly killed three to five million people.

My paper explores the relationship developed in the novel between colonial policies of the period, and the forms of “slow violence” (Nixon 2) set in motion by the famine. Focusing on the different forms of debilitation experienced by the family (from bodily, to economic, to affective) as it resists starving to death, I examine the novel’s weaving together of the political, economic, and the environmental in its depiction of the famine. The marked slowing down of narrative time and pace in the famine section of the novel allows for a closer engagement with hunger, and thus enables an imagination of the non-spectacular debilitation it causes. With food becoming scarce, and villagers scourging the earth for possible sources of sustenance, the novel stages a critical conversation between the human and the non-human, inquiring into the interspecies relationships that constitute the human. The idea of ingesting the unfamiliar and the disgusting that confronts the protagonists amid mass starvation, brings to the fore the less-visible sensory and affective aspects that inform human non-human relationships.

Lastly, I place the novel’s critique of the public-health crisis engendered by this famine in conversation with earlier colonial writing by Rudyard Kipling and Katherine Mayo, among others, that projected the colony as a public-health disaster zone, in need of colonial intervention. Such a conversation, I argue, not only offers a genealogy of colonial notions of public health, but also opens up further possibilities for questioning of the entanglements between health and the environment in the anthropocene.

Mitia Nath is a fifth year doctoral candidate in the English department of University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research focuses on literary constructions and significations of filth in early-twentieth-century Anglophone writing in India.  

 

Brendon Nicholls

University of Leeds

B.L.Nicholls@leeds.ac.uk

Indigenous poetry and environmental justice

My paper argues that the Maori poetry allows us to imagine land and sea ecologies through a reparative frame. Drawing on Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic work on reparation to the mother, I suggest that indigenous perspectives occasionally invert the usual priority of human development, placing environmental obligation prior to human cultural emergence. I focus especially on the presence of environmental discourses within the Maori Renaissance of the 1970s and 1980s, in which land and marine resources became crucial for strategizing political sovereignty, economic sustainability and cultural survival. The Maori foundation story of Rangi and Papa positions the mother as a source of sustainability, and is a key influence on Hone Tuwhare’s poem ‘Papa-Tu-A-Nuku.’ In Tuwhare’s rendering of the origin story, the land itself becomes a being that is responsive to and pleasured by attentive Maori activist presence during the 1975 land march. Tuwhare’s use of Maori ideas of ‘spiral time’ (see de Loughrey) mean that his environmental perspective does not understand nature as simplistically pristine and untouched. Instead, his representation of the land precomprehends the prior historical moment of 1954 American Castle Bravo nuclear test in the Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands – via an intertextual reference to Tuwhare’s earlier poem, ‘No Ordinary Sun.’ Poetry’s spiral temporality becomes an act of cultural memory that condenses human origins, nuclear destruction and activist reclamation within the very same articulatory statement. Multi-layered acts of indigenous long memory, I argue, offer a complex order of psychic identification that models how the global work of environmental justice might proceed.

 

Brendon Nicholls is Associate Professor of Postcolonial African Studies in the School of English, University of Leeds. He is author of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Gender, and the Ethics of Postcolonial Reading (Ashgate) and Nadine Gordimer's July's People (Routledge). He has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Research in African Literatures, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Cultural Critique, and New Formations. In 2022, he held the Hugh le May Fellowship at Rhodes University, South Africa.

 

Juan Ignacio Oliva

University of La Laguna

jioliva@ull.edu.es

Environmental justice for oceanic identities in Craig Santos-Pérez’s ecopoetry

Craig Santos-Pérez (a Chamorro citizen of the Pacific island of Guam, born February 6, 1980) is both an intellectual and an activist who speaks on behalf of the dangers of globalization that attack the core of his jeopardized identity, using a clear environmental message that revolves around the disasters of wild capitalism, neo-colonization and waste toxicity and contamination. Through his poetic production, Santos-Pérez includes examples of the islands of plastic trash that are forming in the oceans, as well as the toxic residues that are swallowed by fish and sea-mammals, thus forming part of the feeding chain of distinct Pacific habitats. He also elaborates on the dangers of touristification and gentrification for such small settings, making them devoid of their true identity and in the process of natural and spatial destruction due to market speculation and greed. Finally, his texts are concerned with the actual and real danger that global warming and climate change (caused mostly by the excesses of first world nations) bring to the coastal regions of flat territories, to the verge of making a lot of them disappear, swallowed by growing oceanic waters. All these toxic and environmental menaces are tackled, together with the way in which water imaginaries mould the identity of poets, like Santos, pivoting around an ambivalent sense of place –filled with both affect and disaffection, topophilias and phobias— and, above all, the awareness of living fragile paradises in urgent need of sustainability. For this purpose, a selection of social poems, such as “ars pasifika,” “Halloween in the Anthropocene, 2015,” or “Love in a Time of Climate Change,” among others, will be analysed under the lens of recent Ecomaterialist theories, such as Ecobodies, Permapoetry and Ecotones.

 

Juan Ignacio Oliva is Full Professor at Universidad de La Laguna (Tenerife, Canaries, SPAIN), where he teaches Postcolonial Anglophone Literatures with an interest in environmentally aware texts. He has recently co-edited Revolving Around India(s) (CSP 2019) and four monographs on “Indian Ocean Imaginaries,” “Indian Representations on Screen” & “Ecocriticism in English Studies” (RCEI 64/77/82/83), and edited The Painful Chrysalis. Essays on Contemporary Cultural and Literary Identity (Peter Lang 2011) and Realidad y simbología de la montaña (UAH 2012). He is presently head of La Laguna Centre for Canadian Studies and editor of RCEI (Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses). He was appointed president of EASLCE (European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment) in the period 2014-16; president of AEEII (Spanish Association of Interdisciplinary Studies about India), 2014-2019, and is currently president of the Spanish James Joyce Association (2019-). He forms part of GIECO (Grupo de Investigación en Ecocrítica-Franklin Institute-UAH) and Ratnakara (Indian Ocean-UAB) research groups.

 

 

Stephanie Oliver

University of Alberta

ssoliver@ualberta.ca  

Smell as relation: The scents of energy intimacy in the work of Warren Cariou

This paper is part of a larger project that investigates odours of extraction in literary representations of the Alberta oil sands, one of Canada’s – and the world’s – most notorious extraction projects. Writers often draw on the immersive, transcorporeal materiality of scents and their evocative ties to memory and emotion to map the oil sands’ ephemeral, yet impactful, environmental risks. Yet few literary critics investigate the significance of these scents in a sustained way. Building on nascent work on smell and petroleum aesthetics (Ghosh, LeMenager, Szeman and Boyer) and recent scholarship on decolonizing smell (Hsu) and settler atmospherics (Simmons), this paper examines how Warren Cariou, a Canadian writer, artist, scholar, and filmmaker of Métis and European descent, develops an olfactory aesthetic that interrogates the logic of resource extraction undergirding the settler colonial state. I examine how Cariou’s “An Athabasca Story” (2012) – a tale that imagines an encounter between an oil worker and Elder Brother, a spiritual being in Cree and Métis storytelling who teaches cultural values and kinship roles and responsibilities – challenges petromodernity’s emphasis on disembodied forms of forgetting that erase the “sensory knowledge of our ancestors” (LeMenager 173). Crystallizing ideas that he explores in his other writing, art, and scholarship (“Petrography,” “Tarhands,” “Aboriginal”), “An Athabasca Story” challenges the notion that bitumen is inherently toxic, suggesting instead that the problem lies in the toxic set of relations that transform ancestors into resources that are burned as fossil fuels. I argue that Cariou mobilizes the language of smell to represent what he calls “energy intimacy” – that is, a more ethical set of ethical relations with the earth and its human and nonhuman beings that is embedded in smell and other embodied sensory knowledges tied to sense of place and Indigenous ways of knowing that the extractive settler-colonial state seeks to erase.

Stephanie Oliver is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alberta’s Augustana campus, where she teaches Canadian, postcolonial, and diasporic literature. Her research interests include literary representations of smell and diaspora, writing about sensory encounters with oil, and the poetics and ethics of breathing in settler atmospheres. Her work has been published in Canadian Literature, Transformative Dialogues, and Teaching Innovation Projects. She is currently working on a manuscript about smell in recent Canadian literature and has work forthcoming in Living and Learning with Feminist Ethics and Poetics Today (University of Alberta Press) and a special issue of Canadian Literature on Poetics and Extraction.

 

Eugenia Ossana

University of Zaragoza

eossana@unizar.es

The desert: An ambivalent locus of capitalist domination and communal Re-imaginings in Nnedi Okorafor’s Noor (2021)

There is no gainsaying the ecological junction we are immersed in gradually reveals desertification as one of the many undesirable outcomes. Likewise, a similar process is oftentimes described in dystopian cli-fi contemporary literary fiction. In the present article, however, I will seek to demonstrate how Noor —an Afrofuturistic novel by Nnedi Okorafor— depicts a Janus-faced wasteland which prompts one to rethink the manyfold interactions between humans, the environment and technology. On the one hand, the trope of the desert mutates into the ‘Red Eye,’ an alleged source of clean energy which, with the assistance of cutting-edge technology, is repurposed into a tool to enforce unrestrained capitalist order along West Africa. On the other hand, the same hi-tech is ingenuously deployed to rebel against the established consumerist régime. Thus, the desert also brings forth a community built in the very vortex of the Red Eye —the Hour Glass. This ‘re-wilded’ village emerges as a rather idyllic landscape which defies the status quo. In order to shed some light on the nature of the ecological crisis depicted in Noor, I will examine the notions of ‘planetary entanglement’ and ‘envelopment’ put forth by the philosophers Achille Mbembe (2021) and Bruno Latour (2021). In addition, I will refer to the current acceleration and neo-imperialist phase of capitalism which mirrors the ideology concerns evinced in the literary work (Samir Amin, 2018; Mark Fisher, 2021; Byung-Chul Han, 2021). In furtherance of the analysis of group consciousness the fiction underscores, I will refer to African relational environmental ethics, and more specifically, to ubuntu philosophy as analysed by Munamato Chemhuru (2022). To wit, I will seek to show how Noor offers a West-African counter-cultural narrative of dissent and renewal.

Eugenia Ossana is currently a lecturer at the University of Zaragoza. She holds a PhD in Contemporary Nigerian Literature and MA degrees in Advanced English Studies in Contemporary Literature and Cinema and Secondary Education, both from the University of Zaragoza. She also has a Mass Media Production degree from the University of Córdoba, in Argentina. She has been a lecturer at the University of Distance Education (UNED), in Spain. Her main research interests include Decoloniality Theory from the Global Social South, contemporary West-African literature

—especially Nigerian, Cameroonian and Ghanaian— African-centred feminisms, ecocriticism as well as Africanfuturist narratives. Presently, she is a member of the research team “Literature Of(f) Limits: Pluriversal Cosmologies and Relational Identities in Present-Day Writing in English” from the University of Zaragoza.

 

Emma Parker

University of Keele

dremmaparker@gmail.com  

Contested seas and colonial settlement in Janet Frame’s The Rainbirds (1968)

In the third volume of her autobiography Janet Frame records her disgust at mid-twentieth-century Aotearoa/New Zealand being dominated by ‘talk of “reclaimed” land and “desirable” property’. For Frame, who had returned to her home country in 1963 after seven years in exile, it ‘felt like I was seeing a new kind of greed for whatever could be touched, measured, seen and priced’.

This paper explores how Frame’s fiction from the 1960s, particularly her novel The Rainbirds (Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room) addresses the twinned issues of environmental justice and colonial settlement. While her protagonist Godfrey Rainbird reiterates ‘how important it was […] to stake a claim in the earth and keep it’ other characters regard their coastal surroundings and wonder, uneasily, ‘who is the first owner, where is the origin of the dispute of possession?’. I read the novel’s satirical depictions of real estate development as a critical riposte to settler land rights. Here the novel’s setting, in a site of a coastal land reclamation, becomes key to its anti-colonial critique. The relational exchanges between human characters and their surrounding environment culminates, I argue, in a scene which reimagines the Treaty of Waitangi (1840) and the inscriptions of Māori moko signatures on this document. Through this depiction of colonial land theft, Frame brings the histories of Māori dispossession to bear on the suburban outskirts of twentieth-century Dunedin.

On the one hand, this paper addresses Frame’s complex and still-muted critical reception, which has led some critics to rightly warn that ‘the question of whether [she] can be considered a “postcolonial” writer is a vexed one’ (Keown 2007, 66). Yet by building on previous readings by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (2002), Rod Edmond (1995), and John McLeod (2004), I demonstrate how Frame’s writing can be productively read and reassessed through postcolonial scholarship, particularly that which explores environmental degradation in the South Pacific (Allen 2002, Keown 2009, Calder 2011). The Rainbirds offers a particular and salient commentary on the intertwined issues of settler occupation, Indigenous land rights, and environmental damage. By seeking alternatives to the structures of enclosure, settlement and property development emblematic of twentieth century Pākehā society, Frame’s fiction offers a still-relevant critique of habitation and ownership in contemporary settler contexts.

Emma Parker is Lecturer in Literature and Gender at the University of Bristol. She has previously held positions at the University of Keele, the Oxford Centre for Life Writing, and the University of Leeds, where she was awarded her PhD in 2020. Her articles on autobiography, women’s writing, and colonialism, have appeared in Critical Quarterly, Wasafiri, Auto/Biography Studies, and Life Writing. She is the co-editor of British Culture After Empire (MUP, 2023) and her monograph Contemporary Life Writing and the End of Empire is due out with Bloomsbury in 2023.

 

 

Anusuya Paul

St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)

Anusuya.paul28@gmail.com

Documentary media and petro-cultural discourse in a democracy: understanding environmental injustice through Baghjan Reels and Inside the Burning

Analysing and understanding the relationship that northeast India has with mainland India problematizes the idea of a nation and democracy. It has been highlighted that the region had a tenuous relationship with mainland India as it was connected to the sub-continent through a narrow corridor, often referred to as the chicken neck corridor. The chicken neck is the metaphor for the status accorded to northeast India, ever since India got its independence, and brings to the fore the issue of alienation faced by its people at different points of time owing to their physical features, linguistic differences and various cultural practices, which, of course, are beyond the scope of discussion in this paper. However, within the limited scope of this paper, I have tried to analyse how documentary media offers narratives of diverged attempts at recovery/reconciliation of afflicted communities resulting from man-made disasters. For this, I have chosen two documentaries Baghjan Reels (2022) and Inside the Burning (2021), which offer two different narratives of the Baghjan gas leak tragedy of Assam in 2020, affecting the environment and the community which lives in the surrounding area.

The two documentaries significantly offer a scope to understand how the progress of a nation pushes certain communities to the fringes of development portraying a paradox that questions the idea of a nation, nationality and modernism. To throw light on the way democracy is swept under the carpet of capitalism, I argue in this paper that the emerging petro-cultural trends have further alienating effects on the environment and people living in and around the public sector areas, especially in the regions which had already been stereotyped and marginalised post-independence. I have used the theoretical frameworks of energy humanities and environmental racism.  

 

Dr. Anusuya Paul completed her PhD in gender and performance from the Department of English, Central University of Hyderabad, Telangana and her M. Phil on women and writing from Dibrugarh University, Assam. She was the Managing Editor for Parivriddhi: An Annual National Refereed Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies (ISSN: 2394-9112) and the Assistant Editor of the journal for Social Change and Development (ISSN 0975-4016). She is also the Editorial Board member and reviewer of many academic journals. Her areas of interest include gender and performance, translation studies and ethnic conflict. Her translated play Urukha has been published by Sahitya Akademi. She has been a regular contributor to national and international peer-reviewed journals on language, literature and culture. She is working as an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous), Bangalore and has also offered a course titled Understanding Ethnic Conflict: the South Asian Experience.

 

Eva Ulrike Pirker

Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf

pirker@uni-duesseldorf.de

 

Art and discontent – Literary framings of narratives of growth: A reading of David Chariandy’s novel Brother

Environmental justice and social justice are inextricably linked, but are frequently pitted against each other. Too often, the interest of safeguarding the planet or the environment “provides the alibi for good global capitalism,” as G.C. Spivak argues (2015), and one of the most potent narratives underpinning the latter are narratives of growth. My contribution explores literary engagements with such narratives. Concepts of growth permeate modernity as powerful metaphors that propagate positivist notions of individual, societal and economic development, progress and expansion. This metaphorical use of concepts of growth is accompanied by efforts to contain and control actual processes of growth in nature and organic life.

With the rise of planetary and posthumanist thought and new forms of activism, positivist narratives of growth have once more come under scrutiny. But since potent myths tend to operate as invisible normative orders, critical analyses of narratives of growth are not simple or straightforward. Literary writing offers itself as excellent vehicle of access and critical lens to narratives of growth. In my paper I will briefly sketch the field and then offer a reading of David Chariandy’s novel Brother (2017). The novel engages with destructive myths of growth in a particular urban context, in which the apparently effective control and regulation of nature and organic life prove to be deceptive. In it, the effects of norms of growth on human/social life are placed in a complex analogy to human attempts to subjugate and control nature. The novel conjures and represents a world of experience that is replicated in neoliberally structured, postmigrant situations across the globe. I am interested in the ways in which Chariandy frames parallel lives and processes in a variety of shared spaces. Drawing attention to his politics of space and narration I explore how Chariandy’s characters, marooned in structures that are beyond their control, struggle in their attempts to ‘grow’, and I inquire into the implications of depicting their struggle in and through literary fiction. Literature, I argue in my reading of Brother, is more than a reflecting surface or container for social or cultural narratives, acting rather than reacting, and demanding that we read (both literary texts as well as our environment) in specific ways. In Chariandy’s case it allows a juxtaposition of different, and differently used, environments in which ‘organic’ growth is rendered difficult or replaced by synthetic expectations of adaptation. In endless replications of this process, humanity is cast as ‘organic’ resource, sorted into rationalised and policed categories of the ‘worthy’ and useful on the one hand and the worthless, or ‘detritus’ on the other. As readers implicated by similar processes in a variety of ways, we are left to deal with the effects the novel has on us. I shall therefore conclude my paper with some reflections on the relationship between literature and the worlds it dissects, describes and positions itself towards.   

Eva Ulrike Pirker teaches Anglophone Literatures and Literary Translation at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, where she also coordinates the Centre for Translation Studies (ctsdus.hhu.de).  She has published widely in the field of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures. She is the author of Narrative Projections of a Black British History and Black History – White History (with B. Korte) and has co-edited several critical books, special issues and anthologies. Her textbook introduction entitled Approaches to Anglophone Literatures and Cultures will be published in 2023.

 

Jill Planche

Brock University

jillplanche@gmail.com

“Learning to breathe with the lungs of the world”: The potentiality of Gilles Deleuze’s affective relationships in Nwabisa Plaatjie’s 23 Years, a Month and 7 Days

We must reclaim the lungs of our world with a view to forging new ground. Humankind and biosphere are one. Alone, humanity has no future. Are we capable of rediscovering that each of us belongs to the same species, that we have an indivisible bond with all life? Perhaps that is the question—the very last—before we draw our last dying breath.

Achille Mbembe. “The Universal Right to Breathe.”

South Africa’s postapartheid milieu is bounded by imperialism and colonial capitalism that denied the most basic humanistic expectations and aspirations, leading to loss of “a vital resource to life,” with systems of laws and loss of land that changed people’s lives, “violating their material rights to substance” (Ramose). This paper brings a materialistic approach to ecocriticism that recognizes entanglement of human and environment, drawing on a contemporary feminist and decolonial geographies lens to look at space and its relationship with the human bodies that dwell in it, and adopting Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy. Eschewing dominant encoded spaces of traditional Western frameworks, Deleuzoguattarian geographical concepts of material systems and ontology of self-organizing systems of “flows of energy and matter, ideas and action” introduce immanence to exploration of all forms of intertwined grounding.

Specifically, Deleuze’s conceptualization of ‘minor’ (immanent) theatre creates new imaginations to think about being human in the world in relation with other things – human and non-human – that speak to Mbembe’s call for rediscovery. Theatre is the ultimate common space to challenge striated spaces of state and power to engage such questions as lost histories, lost land, slave heritage and racial inequity. Magnet Theatre engages these stories, improvising with language, bodies, space and movement to create an affective force. Their play, 23 Years, a Month and 7 Days, begins with a ritual celebration of water, the scarce and valuable resource of protagonist Nontyatyambo’s poverty-stricken hometown, Potters Field (etymologically the burial place for the unknown in earth that formerly provided rich material for pottery), as she leaves for university where she encounters the violent 2015 student protests against the colonial-capitalist status quo. The play implicates geographical space and social worlds – degradation of Potters Field and educational poverty – echoing Katherine McKittrick’s call to look at events that underline “the relativity of terrestrial space, the space of everyday life in all its scales.”

Jill Planche is an independent scholar and instructor (philanthropic philosophy and management, Toronto Metropolitan U, and humanities Brock U). Interests include: postcolonial literature; ‘minor’ theatre’s role in settler discourse; decolonizing knowledges; posthumanism; the Anthropocene; eco-criticism and social justice. Education: PhD English Literature (“In a Large Landscape”: The Resonance of Land and Landscape in the Literature and Art of South Africa. York U, 2007). PhD Interdisciplinary Humanities (The Larger Stages: The Becoming ‘Minor’ of South African Theatres. Brock U, 2020). Topic: Deleuze’s minoritarian conceptualization, feminist decolonial geography, contemporary South African theatre practice. Publications: “Recuperating Historical Narratives of Violence and Dislocation in Rehane Abrahams’ What the Water Gave Me,” in Forays into Contemporary South African Theatre, edited by Marc and Jessica Maufort (Brill/Rodopi, 2020). “‘A community of storytellers and translators’: Ubu and the Truth Commission seen through Deleuze’s language of emergence,” in JCDE (Journal of Contemporary Drama in English, 4:2, November 2016).

 

Alexandra Poulain

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

poulain.al@orange.fr

“Beyond the World’s End”: environmental counter-visuality and the plea for climactic justice in contemporary South African art

This paper explores how the works of contemporary South African artists counter the optimistic grand narrative of the Rainbow Nation which celebrates inclusiveness and reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa and makes visible ongoing colonial injustice in the form of unequal exposure to the consequences of climate change. Building on decolonial visual studies scholars Nicholas Mirzoeff’s and T.J. Demos’s engagements with issues relating to environmental justice, it unpacks the “countervisual” (Mirzoeff) strategies implemented in a selection of works by Wiliam Kentridge, Zanele Muholi, Michael McGarry, David Koloane, Moshekwa Langa, Athi-Patra Ruga and Buhlebezwe Siwani.

Alexandra Poulain is Professor of postcolonial studies at Sorbonne Nouvelle University. Her latest book, Irish drama, Modernity and the Passion Play was published by Palgrave in 2016. Her current project is on decolonial projects in South African contemporary art.

 

Chris Prentice

University of Otago

chris.prentice@otago.ac.nz 

One planet, many worlds: Questions of justice in reading Indigenous ‘environmental’ fiction

The English-language literary works of Indigenous writers in settler colonial societies such as Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand have consistently raised concerns around what, in western colonial terms, would be called ‘the environment’ or ‘ecosystems.’ These concerns have been inseparable from questions of political and cultural justice in relation to violent colonial acts against Indigenous peoples, including of expropriation of, or removal from, lands, waters, and other elements and beings of the more-than-human worlds with which Indigenous peoples are entangled. More recently, literary works have engaged with the global climate crisis, figuring local and far-reaching effects of this crisis in terms of Indigenous world views and cosmologies. In these works, questions of justice exceed the colonial nation-state framing within which questions of land, water, and other ‘rights’ have been negotiated; climate justice is a local, regional and global concern. At the same time, these literary works are widely read and discussed by non-Indigenous readers within and beyond the countries from which their writers originate. This paper addresses some critical tensions between environmental and postcolonial justice in relation to non-Indigenous readings of Indigenous-authored works. Specifically, at a time when non-Indigenous ‘western’ critics and readers are admonished to recognize the implication of the western world view in colonizing acts of (epistemological) violence, how can such critics and readers engage with these works in terms of their implications for both (local) postcolonial justice and (glocal/global) environmental concerns? As non-Indigenous readers encounter representations of climate-affected worlds from Indigenous ontological and cosmological perspectives, how might the stakes for both cultural and environmental justice be negotiated? Are they different stakes? Do they intersect or overlap? I pursue these questions with reference to novels by Waanyi writer Alexis Wright (Australia), and short fiction by Māori writers from Scorchers: A Climate Fiction Anthology (New Zealand), along with a range of critical and theoretical engagements with the challenge of postcolonial cross-cultural readings of ‘environment.’

Chris Prentice is an Associate Professor in English at the University of Otago, where she has taught and researched postcolonial literatures and theory. Her research has engaged with the question of how ‘culture’ signifies in encounters and relations between settler and Indigenous inhabitants of settler colonial societies such as Australia, Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. More recently her work focuses on environmental concerns, and on the challenges of navigating the stakes of postcolonial justice and those of the ‘glocal’ implications of climate, species, ecological, resource and environmental concerns.

 

Kritish Rajbhandari

Reed College

krajbhan@reed.edu

The smell of rain and timely disasters: Oceanic environments in South Asian fiction

Building on the recent work in Blue Humanities on the ocean as both interpretive and interactive medium (Melody Jue 2020; John Durham Peters 2015), this paper explores the intersections of the Anthropocene and postcolonial critique by reorienting South Asian texts toward their oceanic milieu. It examines how oceanic environments—specifically ocean-regulated atmospheric patterns such as rain, monsoon, and humidity on land—shape the narrative form and themes in South Asian novels. Analyzing the portrayal of the monsoon and storms in Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things (1997) and Preeti Taneja’s We That Are Young (2017), I trace the ways in which the Indian Ocean shapes these novels’ ecological poetics and politics. I argue that their South Asian setting brings not only the region’s unique history shaped by colonial and postcolonial processes, but also its unique environment regulated by the Indian Ocean to bear on the narrative trajectory of the novel. The ocean, thus, emerges as an agentive force and acts in conjunction with the (human) historical and cultural forces. Drawing on Ian Baucom’s (2020) characterization the Anthropocene as a moment when the distinction between human history and natural history has been collapsed and “swept away,” this paper will demonstrate how attending to ocean-regulated climactic patterns such as the monsoon illuminates the intersection between ecological poetics and subaltern politics in South Asian contexts.

 

Kritish Rajbhandari is Assistant Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College, Portland, Oregon, USA. His research interests lie at the intersection of South Asian and African literature, Indian Ocean cultures, postcolonial theory, and critical ocean studies. His publications can be found in Research in African Literatures, Comparative Literature, and The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature. He is currently working on a book project examining contemporary narratives of cross-cultural encounter, migration, and exchange in the Indian Ocean. Engaging with critical ocean studies and oceanic humanities, it raises aesthetic and epistemological questions about the representation of sea and history in Indian Ocean literatures.

 

Mathilde Rogez

Université de Toulouse

mathilde.rogez@univ-tlse2.fr

A South African New Jerusalem in a post-apocalyptic world? Environmental justice and the resurgence of the plaasroman in Deon Meyer’s Fever

Deon Meyer’s 2017 novel Fever has been acclaimed worldwide in particular for its rather eerie prescience: in a world struck by a pandemic caused by a Coronavirus the origins of which are perhaps to be found in bats, the novel has, since 2020, been avidly re-read for clues that may have been missed to prevent the world from coming to a sudden standstill. Literary critics have also commented upon its dystopic nature and its exploration of the links between ecology and technology (Cassinadri, forthcoming), while it also questions the place of man in the biosphere. Saving the planet may indeed mean not saving - or even sacrificing - mankind: human beings are seen as a scourge and an invasive, destructive species to get rid of if the Earth is to be saved. However, it seems that the utopia put forward by the - Afrikaner - protagonist has not been assessed in light of the tradition of pastoral narratives in South Africa, and particularly of its Afrikaans avatar, the plaasroman. Yet, the location chosen for this experiment, so near the notorious stronghold of Afrikanerdom, Orania, or the characters keen to cross the country on a pilgrimage to build a New Jerusalem in a post-apocalyptic, and supposedly, though not explicitly, post-apartheid South Africa, make the connection hard to be missed. This paper therefore offers to analyse the novel’s take on the genre of the plaasroman and try and reassess the way in which the environmental justice it seems to advocate combines with the enduring legacy of racial tensions at the tip of the continent.

 

Mathilde Rogez is a Senior Lecturer at the Université de Toulouse (CAS EA801), specializing in South and Southern African literature. She is the Commonwealth editor for Miranda and a member of the editorial board of Etudes littéraires africaines. She has recently co-edited The Suburbs: New Literary Perspectives (Fairleigh Dickinson) and The Legacy of a Troubled Past: Commemorative Politics in South Africa in the 21^st Century (Liverpool UP and PU Provence).

 

Moumita Roy

Jamia Millia Islamia University

cmoumitad@gmail.com

Expelled by nature: Maritime migration and climate affect in Amitav Ghosh

South Asian literature took a conscious ecocritical turn in the twenty-first century with rising awareness of global climate change. Amitabh Ghosh as a torchbearer to this discursive venture extrapolates culture, history, politics, parable, myth, metaphor, memory and migration to retrace dominant western footprints on the Global South.The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) is an unapologetic postcolonial indagation of the European capitalist enterprise and bio-colonial transcendence into indegenous and intact natural spaces. However, one has to look at his other fictional works to comprehend a sense of planetarity (Spivak) as antithetical to globalization manifested in creative expression.  This paper evokes ‘planetarity’ and the sense of affective relationship with the natural environment, tracing ecological refugees - their history and political rubric to mark an alarming rate of demographic shift. The Hungry Tide (2005), The Gun Island (2019), and Jungle Nama (2021)  among other works postulate upon the devastating climate crisis and submerging deltaic plains in South Asia.  The paper aims at making an interdisciplinary inquiry upon “derangement” (Ghosh), its adversaries and repercussions in the lives of marginalized climate refugees. Changing dynamics of the anthropocene and its dangerous self idolatry stewardess in a techno-centric global matrix compel us to revisit literary receptions to the impending cataclysm. The application of moral valuation and determination over carbon fundamentalism has breached the Global North and Global South between who is responsible vs ‘response-able’(Latour). The ability to sense emotion or biophilia with ecology as manifested in Dubai’s ‘Museum of the Future’,where one can touch and feel animals, know about their extinction dates in recorded DNAs - evokes a cognitive apparatus (Harraway) vs primitive Darwinian evolutionary instinct. South Asian postcoloniality is laden with ecocritical activism in reading and writing which lays the foundation for a critical global understanding of environmental affect. Exploring the various contours of postcoloniality, modernity, ethnic-religious eccentricities in understanding planetarity (Spivak) and the Anthropocene in ‘global south’ -its reception and adversaries in the deltaic belts such as Sunderbans (India) and Bangladesh. A comparative interdisciplinary approach embracing scientific innovations and literary criticism is fundamental in counteracting neo-imperialist projects on ecological habitats and redressing ruptured spaces in the age of ‘capitaloscene’ (Moore)

Moumita Roy is a PhD fellow at the University of Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.She is working on a thesis in Post-Partition Literature of Bengal and Assam.She has been an enthusiast in ecocriticism and literary climatology.She is a member of the IACLALS.She has worked with the ICSSR on Tribes in Transition, and has published works on folk ecology under Bhubaneswar Folklore Foundation .

 

Laëtitia Saint-Loubert

University College Dublin

laetitia.saint-loubert@ucd.ie

Dismantling the global literary Capitalocene from the Caribbean

This paper will present a comparative study of the contemporary Caribbean literary ecosystem. It will start by addressing colonial legacies and their impact on literary circulation and translation flows in the region. By focusing on cultural and literary initiatives that promote solidarity and a circular economy, the paper will show how these ongoing efforts work towards a more integrated and potentially more sustainable Caribbean literary ecosystem, despite a context of economic fragility, structural (inter)dependencies and fragmentation in the region.

These case studies will then serve as the basis of an alternative analytical model for Translation Studies, within and beyond the Caribbean. The paper will argue that a shift of episteme from gravitational models (Casanova, Heilbron & Sapiro) to what Kamau Brathwaite called a “circle culture” is very much needed to “dismantle” (Lorde) dominant paradigms and a disciplinary bias towards vertical, terrestrial and anthropocentric perspectives. In other words, the paper will argue that the Caribbean literary ecosystem and Caribbean Studies as a discipline are absolutely central to rethink the global literary Capitalocene (Moore).

 

Laëtitia Saint-Loubert obtained a PhD in Caribbean Studies from the University of Warwick. She is a practising literary translator and is currently working as an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin on a project entitled “Rethinking Translation Studies from Caribbean Meridians: Towards an Ecosystemic Approach”. Her research investigates twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean literatures in translation and focuses on bibliodiversity and non-centric modes of circulation for Caribbean and Indian Ocean literatures. Her first monograph, The Caribbean in Translation: Remapping Thresholds of Dislocation (Oxford, Peter Lang) was published in 2020, following receipt of the 2018 Peter Lang Young Scholars Award in Comparative Literature. She has translated works by Caribbean writers Michelle Cliff, Elizabeth Nunez, Gisèle Pineau and Roger Parsemain.

 

Jason Sandhar

Western University

jason.sandhar@uwo.ca

Animal’s lament: Deep adaptation and failed climate justice in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People

Postcolonial ecocriticism about Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) typically falls into two distinct, though not antithetical, camps. Some readers argue that the eponymous protagonist’s refutation of his humanity makes him an icon of ecological justice (Singh; Bartosch; Williams). Others assess how humanitarian characters like Elli the American doctor and Zafar, a passive resister, negotiate mistrust from the citizens of Khaufpur, Sinha’s fictional stand-in for Bhopal after the Union Carbide disaster (Johnston; Rickel). Most, if not all, of the scholarship cites Rob Nixon’s 2011 analysis of slow violence: long processes of environmental precarity in the global South triggered by neoliberal economics, transnational capital, and unscrupulous political actors. While responses to Animal’s People engage with its characters’ varied struggles for reparations amidst slow violence, those struggles’ failures have yet to be considered. This paper extends existing scholarship by arguing that the novel anticipates what Jem Bendell in 2018 called “deep adaptation,” the imperative to live (and, indeed, die) with ecological catastrophe not as a worst case scenario, but a process of societal collapse in which all of us, rich and poor, are already enmeshed. Putting Bendell in dialogue with Jack Halberstam, who suggests that failure offers surprising new ways to engage with dark times, I consider how the novel challenges us to resist climate catastrophe—and, by extension, neoliberalism’s worst impulses—after the catastrophe has already happened. By focusing on ecological injustice in the post-apocalyptic scenario of Khaufpur, I further propose that the novel urges us to consider how neoliberalism persists beyond the breaking point of our climate emergency. That is, climate advocates must envision struggles for justice in what Anna Tsing calls the “capitalist ruins,” a historical stage in which neoliberal actors continue abusing a planet they have already destroyed.

Jason Sandhar teaches postcolonial literature, literary theory, and cultural studies at Western University, situated on the traditional territories of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak and Chonnonton Nations (otherwise known as Western Ontario, Canada). Recent articles have appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Interventions. He is currently at work on a book, tentatively titled “Genres of the Unhuman: Species Precarity in Indian Literature.”

 

 

Asma Sayed

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

asma.sayed@kpu.ca

Jacqueline Walker

Kwantlen Polytechnic University

jacqueline.walker@kpu.ca

Solastalgia to sustainability: Reading environmental (in)justice in Canadian literature

In Canada, many writers, both Indigenous and settler, have raised concerns about climate change and the loss of traditional ways of living, not just as a result of the damage to the natural ecologies by unsustainable and unregulated industrialization, but also as a consequence of cultural colonization by Europeans. These writers and ecocritics focus on examining the human relationship with non-humans and the impact of human pursuits on ecosystems. Two such writers are Jenna Butler and Renée Sarojini Saklikar.

In this presentation, we will explore two literary texts: Butler’s Revery: A Year of Bees, and Saklikar and Mark Winston’s co-authored Listening to the Bees. These works critically acknowledge the role of humans in generating ongoing environmental destruction, especially the challenges they pose to collapsing bee populations. The works traverse scientific and literary disciplines to illustrate the central role bees play in maintaining environmental stability as well as the aesthetics of the natural world. The authors note how the neoliberal capitalist mindset, in its reign over the collective environment, endlessly desires constant, rapid pursuit of wealth through its obsession with what it considers market-bound “resources,” ultimately depriving all life of the natural world. Both the authors take into consideration a deep ecological approach whereby they question the neoliberal aesthetics that value economic progress at the cost of life – both human and non-human – leading to climate change and destruction. We analyze, using postcolonial ecocritical and critical hope theories, how the authors reject the settler-colonial, capitalist and extractivist agendas and the ways in which they encourage the readers to instead think biocentrically. We examine how the texts offer a pathway for moving beyond experiences of solastalgia (climate grief), presenting hope as a potential antidote to the psychological and environmental effects of our current socio-political arrangement.

Asma Sayed is the Canada Research Chair in South Asian Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on Indian Ocean Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Critical Race Studies, and South Asian diaspora in Canada. She is currently the past President of CAPS: the Canadian Association of Postcolonial Studies (formerly CACLALS, the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies) after serving as its President for 3 years (2019-22).

Jacqueline Walker is completing her dual major in English and political science at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada.

 

Astrid Schwegler-Castañer

University of the Balearic Islands

astrid.schwegler@uib.es

 

“At the back of our apartment there is a pig, sinking”: Desanitizing anthropocentric consumption in Shaun Tan’s Tales from the Inner City

Food plays a fundamental role in the picture book genre by enabling the articulation of abstract notions, many of which have ideological implications. Honeyman remarks that food in picture books is often used to create a “pacifying/passifying” (2007, 196) environment that aims to integrate the reader into the current global consumerist culture. Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) and Henrik Drescher’s The Boy Who Ate Around (1994), for example, instil in their child protagonist food rituals, which metonymically symbolise a commodity culture that is sustained by the colonialised and industrialised world order (Honeyman 2007). Contrastingly, however, the work of Asian-Australian author Shaun Tan is among those that interrogate the state of the contemporary world.

The environmental issues that appear in the background of his earlier works, which are centred on alienation as a human experience in society, take centre stage in Tales from the Inner City (2018). This paper will argue that Tan’s work questions the capitalist and colonial inclinations to objectify and consume the world’s natural resources, particularly its animals, without ethical regard. By analysing culinary extracts from several of the fantastical short stories of Tales from the Inner City, I will explore how the fantastical portrayal of animal consumption confronts the readers; how the magical combination of paintings and words in the form of illustrated short stories and poetry creates a dystopian urban world where “nature and natural elements [are] self-standing agents, rather than support structures for human action” (Huggan and Tiffin [2010] 2015, 13). This defamiliarizing shift in dynamics highlights and questions human self-centredness, and, as a result, the ideologies such as imperialism and capitalism that sustain themselves on objectifying processes. Most forms of racism, oppression and othering rest on the dehumanization of the other, which relies on the supposition that human beings are fundamentally distinct as well as higher than other species in the universal hierarchy. By critically examining this hierarchal framework and its conception of humanity, we can call into question the exploitation of animals and, consequently, that of what Plumwood calls the “animalised human ‘others’” (2001, 8).

 

Astrid Schwegler-Castañer is an assistant professor at the University of the Balearic Islands, where she has taught classes in the Department of Spanish, Latin and Classical Philology since 2014. In 2020 she completed her doctoral thesis on culinary discourses in the work of Asian-Australian authors. Her research, focused on the representation of foodways in literature and visual arts, has been presented at international conferences and resulted in publications in indexed international journals such as Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Feminist Media Studies. Currently she is a member of the R&D project “Romance for Change: Diversity, Intersectionality and Affective Reparation in Contemporary Romantic Narratives” (PID2021-122249NB-I00) funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe,” which started in October 2022.

 

Muneeza Shamsie

Independent Scholar

mshamsie@gmail.com

Beyond the Black Waters: Race, feminism, colonialism and ecology

This paper will explore the literary portrayal of ecological destruction exacerbated by conflicts of colonialism class, race, ethnicity and gender in Uzma Aslam Khan’s historical novel The Miraculous True History of Nomi Ali (2021), set in the British penal colony in the Andaman islands in the Bay of Bengal, beyond that forbidden region known in Indian legend as “Kala Pani” or Black Water.  Set between 1936-47, the novel includes the World War II Japanese occupation of the Andamans. The Japanese forces, fighting the British, are allies of the nationalistic Indian National Army led by Subhas Chandra Bose, but have no affinity with the local people. They contribute to its suffering, albeit in different ways to British, which speaks volumes for the politics of war, occupation and intervention, past or present.

            This paper will briefly comment on the link between Nomi Ali and Khan’s four previous novels, all of which also engage with history, mythology, antiquity, geology and nature. In Nomi Ali, the spectacular scenery is juxtaposed against ecological devastation caused by air-battles and bombs dropped on land and sea: it also explores the history of power and powerlessness there to accommodate colonial agendas. Khan captures the insidious manner in which colonialism ensures that the colonised are suborned into complicity and duly maltreat prisoners too, including the nameless, nationalistic, woman prisoner, 218-D, a fiery freedom fighter from Lahore.

            At the same time, the novel moves beyond colonialism and nationalism, through the individuals who forge relationships across race and community. This includes the children Nomi Ali, her brother, Zee, their Burmese friend Aye, the Japanese dentist Susumu Adachi and the Bengali farmer Shakuntala, daughter of Hindu and Christian parents, and married to an English official. Her knowledge of the land and the women she employs reflect themes which emerge in topical critical works such as Place and Postcolonial Ecofeminism by Shazia Rahman.

Muneeza Shamsie is literary journalist, editor, critic and bibliographer. She is the author of a literary history Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of Pakistani Literature in English and has received two awards, the Gold IPPY and the 2008 Bronze Foreword prizes in the United States for the Feminist Press edition of her anthology And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women.

She is an Area Editor of the online Literary Encyclopedia and Bibliographic Representative (Pakistan) for The Journal of Commonwealth Literature.  She is on the Advisory Committee of The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and the International Centre of Creative Writing in English at Kinnaird College, Lahore.

She has served as jury member for several literary awards in Pakistan and abroad and was regional chair (Eurasia) of the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009 and 2010.  She lives in Karachi and writes for Dawn and Newsweek Pakistan

 

Sandhya Shetty

University of New Hampshire

Sandhya.Shetty@unh.edu

Dying across the human/nonhuman border:  end of life/end of worlds

This paper carries the language of human sovereignty in relation to death and dying out of hospital, hospice, and home and begins to rethink ‘end of life’ with a keener sense that we live and die today in the era of the Sixth Extinction.  How do we think individual, local scale human death and dying and planetary-scale species dying in the same frame?  Does the fact of species extinction spoil our assumptions about the sovereign exercise of human wisdom and will in fashioning dignified, individual dying? What are the implications for multispecies communities of  animal extinctions, when the animal in question is integral to the local ecology of ritual mourning? This paper explores points of intersection where the divergent scales of human dying and species extinction touch each other, allowing us to bridge the concerns of the medical and the environmental humanities.

The writings of Atul Gawande and Siddhartha Mukherjee constitute points of departure for these reflections that include the possibility of an ars moriendi for our time sensitive to ecological loss.  Turning East, these South Asian-American physicians engagements with personal losses bring us into proximity with other kinds of endings:  the death of rivers and species. Their representations of the burning ghats on the Ganges provokes a rethinking of Western bioethics on dying well that centers a sovereign self. I point out that in South Asia ceremonial languages of dying are entangled in an animate web of human and nonhuman life.  On the Ganges and in metropolitan Bombay, rites for the dead in various religious traditions compel mourners to live both individual bereavement and ecological losses in immediate, non-abstract ways. Bodies floating in the toxic Ganga lesson us in other truths of dying absented from a bioethics that  hews to the biomedical episteme. Here human sovereignty is a more complicated matter  and the disappearing of species (vultures, crows) with material and symbolic significance are felt experiences rather than abstractly disturbing ecological events. Assertions of biomedicine’s limits need to recognize the heterogeneity of the subject of dying and ecologies of bereavement. It is not enough to improve the anthropological machine by debating the value of hospice and palliative care or autonomy over subjection.

Sandhya Shetty is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, where she teaches courses in postcolonial fiction and the medicine and literature. She has published on illness and nursing , colonial medical discourse, biopolitics, medicine and war, and fiction by Michael Ondaatje, Amit Chaudhuri, Earl Lovelace. She is currently completing a monograph on colonialism, medicine and literature. Her work can be found in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Diacritics, difference, Contemporary Literature, Medical Humanities, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East and elsewhere. Her essays have also been published in edited collections such as Uncommon Wealths in Postcolonial Fiction (Brill) Contemporary Physician Authors (Routledge), Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature (Ashgate) and others.

 

Laura Singeot

Université de Reims

laura.singeot@gmail.com

Utopia and dystopia in Enclave by Claire G. Coleman: re-imagining social and environmental justice

Enclave (Claire G. Coleman, 2022) is a dystopic speculative novel, staging young Christine, living in a walled-city supposedly keeping its inhabitants safe from the climate crisis and its ensuing ecological disasters. In this community, depicted as a paragon of surveillance society, there seems to be no room for questions, until Christine herself starts wondering about her own conception of the city, the way it is built, and how she personnally engages with it. In her quest for knowledge, she will also consider what it means in terms of freedom and justice when she realizes that the servants she’s been accustomed to ever since she was born are the only brown-skinned people in the city who do not even have names. As her life and her status crumble after kissing one female servant, she finally discovers the world outside the city, another society resting on inclusivity in more than one way.

This paper aims at questioning the epistemologies of place at play in the novel, especially the two main man-built environments, which found the core social structures of the narrative. Indeed, one may argue that the two communities either embody dystopia, where Christine lives at the beginning of the novel, and utopia, which encompasses the world outside the walled city.

Resting on the division of space and its relation to time as theorized by David Harvey, Edward Soja’s work on « gated communities » and Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s development on the « abyssal line », this paper will question the very use of utopia in this piece of speculative fiction, not so much as shedding light on what should be achieved in contemporary Australian society but rather on the underlying traces of colonial history and how it underpins both social and environmental injustice.

Laura Singeot is an associate professor in cultural and visual studies at Reims University. She co-directed and co-wrote Carpentaria: The Law of the Land (Belin-CNED, 2021). She is interested in the representations of Indigeneity in contemporary Indigenous literatures from Australia and Aotearoa-New Zealand, from novels, to poetry, dystopic Young adult fiction and Sci-fi. She is also researching new museology and Indigenous visual art, especially digital and new media art, focusing on its integration into global networks of creation, curation and reception.

 

Rūta Šlapkauskaitė

Vilnius University

ruta.slapkauskaite@flf.vu.lt  

Maternal ecolects of violence and vulnerability in Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron

Much of the critical work in environmental humanities has been directed towards highlighting how pivotal the question of justice is to our understanding of the relationship between the human and the planetary in the current climate emergency (e.g. Nixon 2011; Wenzel 2019; Chakrabarty 2021). The present paper joins this intellectual effort by examining Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott’s genre-bending novel The Rain Heron (2020) in terms of its figuration of cruelty and care in the wake of a socio-ecological crisis. Read against the light of Christopher Hitt’s theorising about “the ecological sublime” and an eco-feminist reframing of motherhood, Arnott’s fiction heaves into view the moral implications inherent in the structural homologies between violence against the environment and violence against humans. The figure of the heron, in particular, embodies the planet’s moral and mnemonic agency, which conflates the genealogies of carnage and kindness through which the novel’s characters negotiate their relationships with the natural and social (dis)order. Ultimately, the narrative’s ethical thrust seems to derive from the troping of parenthood as a metaleptic site of love, cruelty, care, resilience, and hope, magnifying through the socially-inflected metonymic links, the nature-culture continuities that (re)shape the human subject into an ecological partner in the project of environmental recovery.

Rūta Šlapkauskaitė is an Associate Professor of English literature at Vilnius University, Lithuania. Her research interests include Canadian and Australian literature, neo-Victorianism, and environmental humanities. Among her recent publications are “An Ecology of the Hewn in Susan Vreeland’s The Forest Lover” in a collective monograph The Northern Forests co-published by the University of Tartu and Montreal’s Imaginaire Nord, “The He(A)rt of the Witness: Remembering Australian Prisoners of War in Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North” in Anglica: An International Journal of English Studies, and “Precariousness, kinship and care: Becoming human in Clare Cameron’s The Last Neanderthal” in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

 

 

Helene Strauss

University of the Free State

StraussHJ@ufs.ac.za

Breathing with trees: Towards decolonial embodied learning

This paper theorizes the work of decolonial embodied learning at the heart of an undergraduate seminar on “Affective Climates” that I have offered since 2020 at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Alongside recent scholarship on “embodied pedagogy” (Roxana Ng, Sheila Batacharya, Yuk-Lin Renita Wong) and “walking methodologies” in more-than-human worlds (Stephanie Springgay, Sarah Truman), the seminar intentionally stretches its engagement with the literary, cultural and theoretical mediation of environmental (in)justice in African contexts beyond the strictly discursive-cognitive. Drawing on my own training in conscious spiritual practices of embodied healing, and on recent work on the intersections between somatics and environmental/social justice (Prentice Hemphill, Bayo Akomolafe, Staci Haines, adrienne maree brown), the seminar tests affective-embodied methods of inhabiting the relational “indistinction” (Iheka) between human and nonhuman life/nonlife. Paying attention specifically to the “alterlives of chemical violence” (Michelle Murphy) in (South) Africa, we experiment with collective, embodied methods of rebuilding ancestral partnerships between people and land, and the stories that nourish these partnerships. As we read texts by creative writers, theorists and activists including Wangari Maathai, Gabeba Baderoon, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, Yvette Abrahams, Bernedette Muthien, and June Bam, we deliberately pause to connect text, body, and our campus environment through movement, meditation, call and response, and breath work. We do the latter, for instance, to affectively immerse the embodied mind within the phytochemical interdependencies required for planetary regeneration. I argue that the urgent work of decolonizing knowledge for students in contemporary South Africa cannot proceed without careful attention to the inescapable interdependence of body, mind, spirit, and environment. I regard this “web of reciprocity” (Kimmerer) as a central component of the classroom encounter.

Helene Strauss teaches in the Department of English at the University of the Free State. Her research interests include (Southern) African literature and audio-visual culture, feminist and queer aesthetic activisms, protest cultures, materialisms old and new, and embodied pedagogy.She serves on the Editorial Boards of the journals Cultural Studies, Ariel, English in Africa, and Journal of Literary Studies, and is the Vice-Chair of the Association for Cultural Studies. Recent major publications include the book Wayward Feeling: Audio-visual Culture and Aesthetic Activism in Post-Rainbow South Africa (University of Toronto Press); co-edited special issues of the journals Studies in Social Justice (in progress), Interventions, and Critical Arts; and a book titled Contemporary African Mediations of Affect and Access (Routledge), co-edited with Jessie Forsyth and Sarah Olutola. Her current research includes a collaborative international project on the decolonial work of reckoning, repairing, and reworlding called for by the planetary climate crisis.

 

Otilia Teodorescu-Stadler

University of Konstanz

otilia.teodorescu@uni-konstanz.de

 

“The natural condition of the world”?

This paper offers a reading of Dave Eggers’ 2020 novel The Parade as an allegory of colonial, imperialist, and capitalist Western expansion in developing countries with a focus on the consequences of environmental destruction. As Eggers points out, such practices not only irreversibly affect natural ecosystems and human existence in the areas of their implementation, but also, surprisingly, imply high risks and cause severe repercussions for the very agents that initiate them. Taking its cue from notions of “planned violence” in postcolonial contexts, (Boehmer and Davies 2018), the paper explores dimensions of loss caused by violence against the environment and emphasizes the effects of history on natural resources and implicitly on human lives. When Eggers imagines an unnamed international company (presumably Western) building a road that will advance through a war-torn landscape in an unnamed country (presumably from the Middle East) against all odds, questions arise as to the relationship between progress and “the natural condition of the world.” The paper will analyze Eggers’ novel with regard to the unfathomed hazards of postcolonial narratives of progress, post-war assistance, and economic development. It will show how the dynamics of imperialism can be intimately linked to forms of resistance, as when the ravaged environment (e. g. mined forests in the aftermath of war, contaminated water, ubiquitous plastic waste) strikes back to cause disease, withdraw life-sustaining resources, and ultimately jeopardize life itself. Arguably, The Parade functions as a warning against a spiral of violence that eludes human control, to shake its readers into awareness about more responsible ways to inhabit the world. This paper will therefore tackle the ethical dimension of ecological action and thought as well as the role literature can play in addressing the human imaginary toward increased empathy and environmental justice.

Otilia Teodorescu-Stadler is an Assistant Professor of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Following her studies in English and French Literature and Culture at the University of Iasi, Romania, in 2009 she received her PhD in North American Literature and Culture at the University of Konstanz with a comparative thesis titled: Re-Writing Love: North American Love Poetry of the Twentieth Century, which showed how literature played a major role in changing social, political, and cultural realities of the twentieth century in North America and elsewhere. As part of her PhD studies, she spent one year as a research fellow at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her work to date has focused mainly on North American Comparative Studies, African American and Caribbean Studies, Identity and Immigration Studies, and more recently on the Environmental Humanities. As a scholar she is interested in exploring the ways in which literature can make a change in mentalities and impact individual and collective behavior particularly in times of political, environmental, and cultural crisis.

 

 

Petra Tournay-Theodotou

European University Cyprus

P.Tournay@euc.ac.cy

Ecopolitics and the poetics of slow violence in Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were

[N]o social justice without environmental justice; and without social justice - for all ecological beings - no justice at all.

(Graham Huggan and HelenTiffin. 2007. Green Postcolonialism. Interventions, 9:1, 10)

In her second novel How Beautiful We Were published in 2021, the Cameroonian-American writer Imbolo Mbue addresses the devastating environmental and human consequences of Big Oil on a community in a fictional African setting.  This ecopolitical novel which has variously been referred to by reviewers as an epic, a saga or a parable offers a multi-generational polyvocal perspective from several of the central characters’ and the village’s children’s’ point of view covering a time-span of forty years.

Following the conference call’s lead, in this talk I wish to “investigate the power of narrative[s] (…) to evoke environmental injustice” and discuss the narrative strategies and dominant themes employed in the novel to depict the violent disruptions experienced by the environment and the members of the community. I am particularly interested in the power and possibilities of literary language and fictional renderings to offer interpretations of the violent relationships depicted in the novel.

While my reading will be guided by insights gained from the work of a number of postcolonial environmental critics, several of the concepts proposed by Rob Nixon in his 2011 study Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor have proven especially useful.  Most prominently, these include the central notion of ‘slow violence’ “a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon, 2011: 2), the idea of “stationary displacement” which suggests “the threat of displacement without moving” (19) and his discussion around the notion of the environmentalism of the poor; that is the impact of “resource imperialism” on “the world’s ecosystem people” (22) who depend on the environment to secure their survival.

More precisely, drawing on Rob Nixon’s concepts, in this talk I wish to explore issues such as the aesthetics of representation, the impact of colonial legacies and post-independence conditions, neo-colonial realities of toxic imperialism and their repercussions on cultural identity and environmental integrity.

 

Petra Tournay-Theodotou is Professor of English Literature at European University Cyprus in Nicosia, Cyprus. She has published widely on contemporary Black and Asian British literature with a special interest in the work of Caryl Phillips and Jackie Kay. Besides many book chapters in edited volumes, her work has appeared in leading journals such as Transition, Wasafiri, Kunapipi, and Atlantis. She further co-edited a special issue for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing titled “Britishness beyond the New Britain: British identities and the identity of Britain in recent black and Asian British Writing”. She has also published on literature about Cyprus written in English and is Assistant Editor of Cadences, A Journal of Literature and the Arts in Cyprus. From 2014-2017 she served as Secretary of EACLALS (European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies).

 

Elspeth Tulloch

Université Laval

Elspeth.Tulloch@lit.ulaval.ca

Articulating the ethics of beholding the Columbia River and its complex life relations in Fred Wah’s and Rita Wong’s beholden: a poem as long as the river

Once the site of the most prolific salmon runs in the world, the Columbia River flows some 2,000 kilometers from the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia through Washington and Oregon States into the Pacific Ocean. Home to numerous Indigenous peoples whose lifeways depended on the river’s abundant fisheries, the Columbia River Basin was subject to massive alternations following the overlay of the nation states of the U.S.A. and Canada on the First Peoples’ territories. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Columbia River was earmarked for hydroelectric development in the United States. The Grand Coulee Dam built between 1933-1944, resulted in the extinction of the salmon and the steelhead in the Upper Columbia River.

Now eighty years later, the river is heavily dammed, a major source of hydroelectric power not only for the Pacific Northwest as a continental region but for the United States as a whole. Fourteen hydroelectric dams clog its main stem (thirteen in the U.S.A. and three in Canada), not to mention the hundreds of dams serving other purposes in its massive river basin. Several populations of fish are now endangered or threatened. The Southern Resident orca that feeds on the collapsing Chinook salmon are also endangered. This is a classic case of the colonial unravelling of a complex ecosystem that was intermeshed with the Indigenous peoples, whose lives were irrevocably changed.

This paper will delineate the poetic, political, and environmental relational ethics informing Fred Wah’s and Rita Wong’s dual-voiced, image poem, beholden: a poem as long as the river (2018), a poem exposing the river’s “colonial appropriation.” Exploring what it means to be-hold rather than to take hold, the two non-Indigenous poets critically probe the settler-descendant rapport with the complex ecosystem of the river, its basin’s Indigenous inhabitants (some of whom were radically displaced, including the Sinixt who were stripped of their legal status), and its fatally disrupted fauna and flora. Assuming a non-hierarchical stance, signaled by the book title’s lack of capitalization and the flowing layout of the text’s innovative typographical design, they offer a lyrical reminder to those currently renegotiating the US-Canada Columbia River Treaty what a new, life-giving rapport might look like.

Elspeth Tulloch is an Associate Professor of Canadian and Comparative Literature in the Département de littérature, théâtre et cinema at Université Laval (Québec, Canada). Her research interests lie in ecocriticism, most particularly narratives of endangerment, extinction, and resilience, as well as in film adaptation.

 

Nanthanoot Udomlamun

Kasetsart University

nanthanoot.u@ku.th

Land and contagion: Reading K.M. Ariff’s Crisis (2014) for environmental justice in the Plantationocene

Oil palm plantations in Southeast Asia, which emerged under European colonialism in the 19th century, have expanded on a large scale to respond to global demand for oil palm biomass and crude and refined palm oil. Having shifted from rubber to oil palm plantation after independence, Malaysia has become the world’s largest producer and exporter of palm oil to the global market. The commercial profit of the palm oil industry has been evident and the past 25 years have seen a consistent rise in crude palm oil prices in the global market. Echoing the Plantationocene (Haraway, 2015), oil palm plantations are intricately connected to colonial history, global capitalism, and human and more-than-human entanglement in the plantation ecologies. The palm oil industry has been harshly criticised for land acquisition that has affected the livelihood of indigenous communities and biodiversity, the use of forced labour, and the Southeast Asian haze crisis. A Malaysian novel, Crisis (2014) by K.M. Ariff, set during the 1997-1998 East Asian financial crisis, can be read as a narrative of the domestic, regional, and global economy based on land and resource extraction. Ariff’s main characters cope with the changing environment resulting from the economic recession and development and extractivist discourses vocalised by foreign investors and facilitated by financial institutions and state agencies. This paper aims to delineate the Plantationocene and extraction in the novel to deconstruct the narratives of “lush green palm trees” and environmentally-friendly biofuel production that Ariff portrays along with his literary sketches of national parks. Those depictions are juxtaposed with colonial rubber plantation and the urban built environment in the novel. The main argument will be developed in line with a discussion on the contagious financial crisis that Ariff employs as his point of reference to ecological injustice in a neoliberal world.

 

Nanthanoot Udomlamun is a lecturer in English and Comparative literature at the Department of Literature, Faculty of Humanities, Kasetsart University in Bangkok, Thailand. She has past publications on memory, migration, and labours in postcolonial and diasporic literature. Her research interests lie in the areas of postcolonial theory and literature, environmental and energy humanities, and more-than-human theories. Her current research projects include “Re-thinking the planet in post-tsunami literature” and “Land and resource extraction in Southeast Asian literature”.

 

Suhasini Vincent

Université Paris 2-Panthéon Assas

Suhasini.Vincent@u-paris2.fr

 

Distribution, recognition and participation: The paradigm for eco-justice in Mahasweta Devi’s eco-critical writing

Fifty years ago in April 2023, the first Chipko protest saw tribal Indian women embracing trees to prevent logging of the Himalayan forests. The Chipko Movement got its name from the Hindi word ‘chipko’ meaning ‘to hug’ or ‘to cling to’. In this paper, I intend to unravel the tales of injustice inflicted on some forest tribes of India as documented by Mahasweta Devi in her stories and novellas: the Aagariyas, ancient Indian miners who have been reduced to the status of a pygmy race in “Little Ones”; the Adivasis, the natural guardians of forest flora and fauna who now face extinction in “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha”; the Shabars, forest children who have been stripped off their habitat by mainstream settlements in The Book of the Hunter. We shall explore how her fiction is not just an ethno-historical-fictional account; but is one propelled by the narrative sleight of hand of a writer activist. In colonial times, these tribal communities were perceived as ‘uncivilized’ with the colonial masters striving to bring ‘order’ over ‘chaos’. In today’s postcolonial context, these communities continue to be suppressed by governmental projects implemented in the name of common good. By weaving fact, fiction, folklore, and history, Mahasweta Devi’s documentation of the oral histories of the tribal communities in India serve as eco-narratives within the narrative. These eco-narratives have the dual role of emphasizing the eco-balance that exists between the forests and its people, as well as inspire eco-judicial activism. Despite the enactment of the Forest Rights Act of India (2006) that aims to protect forest-displaced persons in their ancestral lands, the Indian Supreme Court ruling in Wildlife First vs Ministry of Forest (2019), ordered the eviction of forest dwellers in sixteen states whose claims for tenure security on ancestral lands under the FRA (2006) had been rejected.  My paper shall thus consider how Mahasweta Devi’s eco-critical writing has underscored the need to reframe environmental justice by referring to David Schlosberg paradigm ‘distribution, recognition and participation’, where all stakeholders should partake in the distribution of environmental harm, recognize, and annihilate injury to voiceless actors who depend on the produce of the Earth for the daily sustenance, and participate in preserving and cherishing the Earth.

 

 

Suhasini Vincent defended her doctoral thesis on Experimental Writing within the Postcolonial Framework through a joint-supervision programme between the University of Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle and the University of Madras in 2006. Her research focusses on postcolonial Indian literature and on the relationship between Law and Literature in India. She is interested in ethical, political, legal, and environmental issues in postcolonial countries and has studied the works of writers like Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Yann Martel, Mahasweta Devi, Suniti Namjoshi, and Sudeep Sen from an ecocritical angle. By studying the legal scope of environmental laws, she links her domain of research and her field of teaching (Legal English). She is one of the co-authors of Glossaire de droit anglais: Méthode, traduction et approche comparative (2019) and wrote the chapters on Intellectual Property, Environmental Law, Human Rights, and Immigration. She is at present an Associate Professor at the University of Paris 2 – Panthéon Assas since 2007. 

 

Florian Wagner

Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena

florian.wagner@uni-jena.de

Disrupting the global: The planetary poetics of Kaie Kellough’s Magnetic Equator

The last few years have seen a shift from the global to the planetary as a critical-theoretical model in the humanities and the social sciences. It functions as an umbrella term that summarizes various propositions of rethinking and reconceiving how the human and the non- human interact in relation to the larger entity of the planet. Amy J. Elias and Christian Moraru have termed this the ‘planetary turn’. They identify a lack of critical paradigms with which to adequately respond to the complexities of living in the 21st century, and consequently, try to stake out a claim for the planetary, which is able to rupture the homogenizing cultural logic of globalization—meaning the imposition of neoliberalism's teleology of progress and economic growth. Taking this shift into consideration, my talk looks at the role of the poetic imagination and conceptualizes a planetary poetics as an aesthetic mode and an alternative paradigm by looking at Kaie Kellough’s Griffin-prize-winning Magnetic Equator (2019). Specifically, I look at the ways in which Kellough’s poetry is carefully attuned to the materiality of historical/colonial, global, environmental, and planetary forces. As a first-generation Guyanese-Canadian poet, Kellough writes and performs from within Canada’s troubled narrative of multiculturalism that is deeply embedded in the homogenizing structures of the global. On this level, Kellough examines the complexities of the black diasporic experience and confronts feelings of non-/belonging and in-betweenness through autobiography and by drawing from multiple post-/colonial archives. At the same time, however, his poetry goes beyond the global, transcending its spatial and temporal boundaries by foregrounding planetary processes and forces. Looking for instance at geologic deep-time and the vitality of the non- human world, his poems open up toward multiple temporalities and pluriversal epistemologies which resist the unifying tendencies of the global and enunciate positions of collective responsibility for the future of the planet and its human and non-human inhabitants. This, I argue, establishes a relational subject-planet position that fosters and encourages a sense of planetary being, of planetary futurity and possibility that emanates and radiates outward from the present moment.

 

Florian Wagner is a research associate at the Institute for English and American Studies at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, where he completed his M.A. in North American Studies in 2018. He is currently writing his PhD thesis entitled “Revisiting the Environmental Imagination: Planetary Poetics in Contemporary Canadian Poetry” (wt), in which he is reading contemporary Canadian (eco-)poetry through a planetary lens. His work is situated at the intersection of ecocriticism, Marxist/post-capitalist criticism, and postcolonial and decolonial theory.

 

 

Kerry-Jane Wallart

Université d’Orléans

kjwallart@yahoo.fr

Re-thinking landscapes, in Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place and Olive Senior's 'Boxed-In'

Edouard Glissant has often addressed the question of Caribbean landscapes by bringing attention to its agency and positionality ("impliqué dans une histoire, devenant lui aussi personnage parlant", Poétique de la Relation, Paris: Gallimard, 1990, p. 85). This paper intends to re-read two texts, Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place (New York: Plume, 1988) and Olive Senior's "Boxed-In" (in The Pain Tree, Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2015, pp. 118), through the double lens of unstable sight and of shifting perspectives, on the one hand, and of unexpected enunciations, on the other. While ecocriticism has brought to the fore a wide array of literary representations of devastations, including in the Caribbean, I suggest that accountability partly remains to be handled in the field - through the analysis of literature's ability to connect, associate, articulate and superimpose persons and institutions whose collusion can otherwise go rather unnoticed in a globalized but fragmented modernity. The exposition of corruption around an abandoned refinery, or car deals, in the Antigua of A Small Place, and of the hidden role played by foreign companies in the extraction of bauxite, in "Boxed-In" in Senior's Jamaica, call for critical interpretations that connect the vision of such extractions, and narrative modalities whose innovation connects the dots of derivational words (where "boxed-in" becomes bauxite, for instance). In their specific and respective ways, both authors imagine languages whose source of enunciation is diffuse and extended to non-living entities. 

 

Kerry-Jane Wallart is a Professor at the University of Orléans. She teaches Black Atlantic Studies and has published extensively on Caribbean, Canadian, African American and African writers. She has co-authored two volumes on Jean Rhys (Routledge 2022 and Bloomsbury 2020) and a volume on Jamaica Kincaid (Wagadu 2018). 

 

 

Briar Wood

New Zealand

drbriarwood@hotmail.com

Writing Ihumātao and poetic imaginations

This presentation will discuss toikupu-poetry written in support of the protest over land sales in Tāmaki Makaurau-Auckland. It is part of an ongoing study of the way poetry written in the Pacific continues to create awareness around environmental issues while simultaneously seeking the social and political justice of decolonization.

Controversy over the sale of land and intended building at Ihumātao in 2019 escalated into widescale protests in which the development company’s works were blocked by demonstrations. Poetry readings and performances were part of this critical response to the planned developments.

The whenua on the Manukau Harbour, had been occupied by Māori people for at least 800 years before it was stolen by the government in 1865 and sold to Pakeha farmers in 1867. Resold in 2016, a tangata whenua-led protest eventually succeeded in having the government buy out the purchasers as a prelude to returning the land to mana whenua.

Toikupu-poetry identifying Ihumātao as unjustly stolen whenua has appeared most recently in the publication Te Rito o Te Harakeke a collection of writing protesting the sale of Ihumātao land edited by a group titled Rangatahi o te Pene, in 2019.

Ihumātao is a site where multiple points of view converge, and conversations emerge about the significance of the history of the whenua.  ‘History here is … fine-grained, shifting and multi-layered.’ Shifting Grounds (2021).  Tangata whenua claims to rights of occupation and future decisions about what will happen to the land are often referenced in poems.

The paper will consider some of the whakarite – metaphors in the poetry, such as the way title of the collection references the popular song in which listeners are encouraged to protect the rito or inner shoots of the harakeke - flax plant, which signify the tamariki – children, who should be protected.

 

Briar Wood grew up in South Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Until 2012, she lived and worked in Britain, where she published poetry, fiction and essays.

Her Te Hikutū ki Hokianga, Ngāpuhi Nui whakapaka connects her with ecological concerns that emerge in recent collections Welcome Beltane (2012), Rāwāhi ( Anahera Press, 2017)  and A Book of Rongo and Te Rangahau (Anahera Press, 2022).

 

Julia Wurr

Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

julia.wurr@uni-oldenburg.de

Environmental injustice and the Plantationocene: Extractive reproduction and species thinking in Washington Black

Opening on a Barbadian sugar plantation in 1830, Esi Edugyan’s novel Washington Black (2018) exposes the racial capitalist devaluation of any life beyond that of imperial powers by negotiating environmental injustice against the backdrop of racist economies of extraction and reproduction as well as of anthropocentric and universalising notions of species thinking. Although the novel is set in the years preceding and following the Slavery Abolition Act from 1833, the text focuses less on this event, and instead foregrounds its protagonist’s growing up as a slave to unfold the slow violence (Nixon 2013) of the Plantationocene (Haraway 2015). By retracing its protagonist’s gradual understanding of how slaves and the non-human environment are subjugated in order to help reproduce the estranged kinship relations of the imperial British family, the novel criticises the extractive reproduction and anthropocentric species thinking on which racial capitalism is based – without however belittling the atrocities of chattel slavery and without reiterating the colonial dehumanisation of slaves. Instead of offering a “flattened multispecies conceptualization” (Davis et al. 2019) which neglects racial politics, Washington Black thus exposes the systemic and epistemic violence of both racist and speciesist premises in the Plantationocene. In order to do so, the novel does not only debunk  the trope of the grateful slave (Boulukos 2008) as an instrument of universalising yet racialised species discourse, but also modulates the genre conventions of the neo- slave narrative and the postcolonial bildungsroman into a plot which culminates in the protagonist’s recognising the environmental injustice committed in the pursuit of imperial knowledge as well as in the reproduction of imperial kinship relations, and in the plot’s prioritising of multispecies co-creation (Davies et al. 2019) over procreation. Thus negotiating the nexus between extractive reproduction, species thinking and environmental injustice in the Plantationocene, the novel manages to deconstruct imperial dichotomies between the human and the non-human as well as between allegedly superior human life and dehumanised slaves, and to serve as a reminder of how the damaging epistemologies which underlie environmental injustice are intricately connected with racial capitalism.

 

Julia Wurr is Junior Professor for Postcolonial Studies at the Institute for English and American Studies at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. Her doctoral research focused on Neo- Orientalist forms of Othering as well as on the Postcolonial Middle East and North Africa Region. The monograph, which explores the Neo-Orientalist commercialisation of the Arab uprisings in English, French and German language fiction, was published with Edinburgh University Press in 2022. In her current research project “Procreation and the Postcolonial”, she explores the aesthetic and ideological dimensions of stratified reproduction, natalism and anti-natalism in postcolonial texts and contexts.