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Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures

Author: Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2022-08-31

Total Pages: 425

ISBN-13: 0824893514

In this anthology of contemporary eco-literature, the editors have gathered an ensemble of a hundred emerging, mid-career, and established Indigenous writers from Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and the global Pacific diaspora. This book itself is an ecological form with rhizomatic roots and blossoming branches. Within these pages, the reader will encounter a wild garden of genres, including poetry, chant, short fiction, novel excerpts, creative nonfiction, visual texts, and even a dramatic play—all written in multilingual offerings of English, Pacific languages, pidgin, and translation. Seven main themes emerge: “Creation Stories and Genealogies,” “Ocean and Waterscapes,” “Land and Islands,” “Flowers, Plants, and Trees,” “Animals and More-than-Human Species,” “Climate Change,” and “Environmental Justice.” This aesthetic diversity embodies the beautiful bio-diversity of the Pacific itself. The urgent voices in this book call us to attention—to action!—at a time of great need. Pacific ecologies and the lives of Pacific Islanders are currently under existential threat due to the legacy of environmental imperialism and the ongoing impacts of climate change. While Pacific writers celebrate the beauty and cultural symbolism of the ocean, islands, trees, and flowers, they also bravely address the frightening realities of rising sea levels, animal extinction, nuclear radiation, military contamination, and pandemics. Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures reminds us that we are not alone; we are always in relation and always ecological. Humans, other species, and nature are interrelated; land and water are central concepts of identity and genealogy; and Earth is the sacred source of all life, and thus should be treated with love and care. With this book as a trusted companion, we are inspired and empowered to reconnect with the world as we navigate towards a precarious yet hopeful future.

An Island in the Stream

Author: David Taylor

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-07-15

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1498599176

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An Island in the Stream, a collaboration between Cuban and American writers and scholars, is a diverse collection of ecocritical and literary responses to the natural environment in Cuba and to Cuban environmental culture.

Satin Island

Author: Tom McCarthy

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2015-02-17

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1101874686

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Short-listed for the Man Booker Prize From the author of Remainder and C (short-listed for the Man Booker Prize), and a winner of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, comes Satin Island, an unnerving novel that promises to give us the first and last word on the world—modern, postmodern, whatever world you think you are living in. U., a “corporate anthropologist,” is tasked with writing the Great Report, an all-encompassing ethnographic document that would sum up our era. Yet at every turn, he feels himself overwhelmed by the ubiquity of data, lost in buffer zones, wandering through crowds of apparitions, willing them to coalesce into symbols that can be translated into some kind of account that makes sense. As he begins to wonder if the Great Report might remain a shapeless, oozing plasma, his senses are startled awake by a dream of an apocalyptic cityscape. In Satin Island, Tom McCarthy captures—as only he can—the way we experience our world, our efforts to find meaning (or just to stay awake) and discern the narratives we think of as our lives.

Writing the Earth, Darkly

Author: Isabel Hoving

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-02-08

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1498526764

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Why do we find so many references to nature and the environment in the many Caribbean literary texts that try to come to terms with the contemporary age of globalization? Even when these novels and poems do not seem to be concerned with environmental issues at all, they abound with fragrant, creepy or dark references to flowers, insects, trees, gardens, and mud. This book discusses a range of Anglophone and Dutch-language Caribbean literary texts to propose an answer. It shows that some writers evoke nature to question oppressive notions of what is natural, and what is not, when it comes to race, gender, and desire. Other writers choose to counter the destructive dichotomies of wildness/order, nature/culture, nature/human that marked colonialism. Instead, they represent the environment as a field of interconnectedness, marked by intense semiotic interaction, in which human beings are also implicated. But writing about nature can also be a means to reconnect with the very foundations of life itself. In the most dramatic cases, references to nature evoke an extra-discursive space that then functions to subvert existing discourses. That space may even mark the site of the annihilation of discourse, or of the self. These texts suggest that, in times of globalization, it is only the dark, queer turn to matter that will free the path to imagining human existence in a new way. The book’s proposal to understand some of these fascinating texts as an effort to relate to the mind-baffling, explosive real is inspired by postcolonial trauma theory, posthumanism, and new materialism. However, Caribbean literature is a layered practice, that does much more than merely explore the world’s materiality. It works simultaneously as cultural critique, counter-discourse, and as the manipulation of affect. This book therefore brings together ecocriticism with Caribbean and postcolonial studies, the study of globalization, trauma theory, the study of gender and sexuality, posthumanism and new materialism, to bring out the full complexity of these wise texts. Thus, it hopes to show its readers their extraordinary innovative potential.

Ecocriticism in Taiwan

Author: Chia-ju Chang

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2016-06-01

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1498538282

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Ecocriticism is a mode of interdisciplinary critical inquiry into the relationship between cultural production, society, and the environment. The field advocates for the more-than-human realm as well as for underprivileged human and non-human groups and their perspectives. Taiwan is one of the earliest centers for promoting ecocriticism outside the West and has continued to play a central role in shaping ecocriticism in East Asia. This is the first English anthology dedicated to the vibrant development of ecocriticism in Taiwan. It provides a window to Taiwan’s important contributions to international ecocriticism, especially an emerging “vernacular” trend in the field emphasizing the significance of local perspectives and styles, including non-western vocabularies, aesthetics, cosmologies, and political ideologies. Taiwan's unique history, geographic location, geology, and subtropical climate generate locale-specific, vernacular thinking about island ecology and environmental history, as well as global environmental issues such as climate change, dioxin pollution, species extinction, energy decisions, pollution, and environmental injustice. In hindsight, Taiwan's industrial modernization no longer appears as a success narrative among Asia's “Four Little Dragons,” but as a cautionary tale revealing the brute force entrepreneurial exploitation of the land and the people. In this light, this volume can be seen as a critical response to Taiwan's postcolonial, capitalist-industrial modernity, as manifested in the scholars’ readings of Taiwan's "mountain and river," ocean, animal, and aboriginal (non)fictional narratives, environmental documentaries, and art installations. This volume is endowed with a mixture of ecocosmopolitan and indigenous sensitivities. Though dominated by the Han Chinese ethnic group and its Confucian ideology, Taiwan is a place of complicated ethnic identities and affiliations. The succession of changing colonial and political regimes, made even more complex by the island’s sixteen aboriginal groups and several diasporic subcultures (South Asian immigrants, Western expatriates, and diverse immigrants from the Chinese mainland), has led to an ongoing quest for political and cultural identity. This complexity urges Taiwan-based ecoscholars to pay attention to the diasporic, comparative, and intercultural dimensions of local specificity, either based on their own diasporic experience or the cosmopolitan features of the Taiwanese texts they scrutinize. This cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic is a key contribution Taiwan has to offer current ecocritical scholarship.

The Value of Ecocriticism

Author: Timothy Clark

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-02-07

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 1107095298

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This book offers a brief, incisive accessible overview of the fast-changing field of environmental literary criticism in an age of global environmental threat.

Things of Darkness

Author: Kim F. Hall

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-09-05

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1501725459

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The "Ethiope," the "tawny Tartar," the "woman blackamoore," and "knotty Africanisms"—allusions to blackness abound in Renaissance texts. Kim F. Hall's eagerly awaited book is the first to view these evocations of blackness in the contexts of sexual politics, imperialism, and slavery in early modern England. Her work reveals the vital link between England's expansion into realms of difference and otherness—through exploration and colonialism-and the highly charged ideas of race and gender which emerged. How, Hall asks, did new connections between race and gender figure in Renaissance ideas about the proper roles of men and women? What effect did real racial and cultural difference have on the literary portrayal of blackness? And how did the interrelationship of tropes of race and gender contribute to a modern conception of individual identity? Hall mines a wealth of sources for answers to these questions: travel literature from Sir John Mandeville's Travels to Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa; lyric poetry and plays, from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest to Ben Jonson's Masque of Blackness; works by Emilia Lanyer, Philip Sidney, John Webster, and Lady Mary Wroth; and the visual and decorative arts. Concentrating on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Hall shows how race, sexuality, economics, and nationalism contributed to the formation of a modern ( white, male) identity in English culture. The volume includes a useful appendix of not readily accessible Renaissance poems on blackness.

Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction

Author: Heather Houser

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2014-06-17

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 0231165145

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The 1970s brought a new understanding of the biological and intellectual impact of environmental crises on human beings, and as efforts to prevent ecological and human degradation aligned, a new literature of sickness emerged. “Ecosickness fiction” imaginatively rethinks the link between ecological and bodily endangerment and uses affect and the sick body to bring readers to environmental consciousness. Tracing the development of ecosickness through a compelling archive of modern U.S. novels and memoirs, this study demonstrates the mode’s crucial role in shaping thematic content and formal and affective literary strategies. Examining works by David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Leslie Marmon Silko, Marge Piercy, Jan Zita Grover, and David Wojnarowicz, Heather Houser shows how these authors unite experiences of environmental and somatic damage through narrative affects that draw attention to ecological phenomena, organize perception, and convert knowledge into ethics. Traversing contemporary cultural studies, ecocriticism, affect studies, and literature and medicine, Houser juxtaposes ecosickness fiction against new forms of environmentalism and technoscientific innovations such as regenerative medicine and alternative ecosystems. Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction recasts recent narrative as a laboratory in which affective and perceptual changes both support and challenge political projects.

Perspectives on Ecocriticism

Author: Ingemar Haag

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2019-05-08

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1527534294

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This volume gathers together papers presented at the conference “Ecocriticism in the Nordic Countries; Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow” held in Västerås, Sweden, in 2017, organized by the research group Ecocritical Forum at Mälardalen University. The conference, which was an attempt to survey local ecocritical activities, transcended Nordic boundaries, engaging scholars from Europe and the United States. This expansion from the local to the global mirrors the subject of the conference: ecocriticism, a cross-disciplinary field of research in the intersection of environmental issues and cultural expressions. The chapters here engage with topical issues such as the Anthropocene, sustainability in education, and civilizational critique, as well as schools of thought such as materialism, dark ecology and animal studies. The contributions discuss several types of cultural expressions, including film and other visual media, university course design and Nordic, and English language novels and poetry. This volume will attract the interest of readers from a number of different backgrounds, both in the Nordic countries and internationally.