Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis

Planetary Precarity and Future Habitability
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-032-46879-2
Verlag: Taylor & Francis

Buch, Englisch, 274 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 535 g

Reihe: Routledge Studies in World Literatures and the Environment

Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis expands postcolonial precarity studies by addressing the current climate crisis and threats to the habitability of the planet from a range of ecocritical and environmental perspectives. The collection uses planetary thought-action praxis that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all forms of life in addressing the socioecological issues facing humanity: accelerating climate change, over-exploitation of natural resources, and the Global North–South divide. With reference to contemporary cultural productions, such praxis seeks to examine the ideas, images, and narratives that either represent or impede potential disasters like the so-called sixth extinction of the planet, that inspire the dismantling of carbon democracies arising in the wake of neoliberalism, and that address rising inequality with precarious conditions in the transition to renewable energy. The different chapters explore literary and visual representations of planetary precarity, identifying crisis-responsive genres and cultural formats, and assessing approaches to environment-re/making that call for repair, recovery and sustainability. In imagining future habitability, they deploy diverse critical frameworks such as queer utopias, zero-waste lifestyles, alternative ecologies, and adaptations to the uninhabitable. The collection tackles problems of global vulnerability and examines precarity as a condition of resilience and resistance through collective actions and solidarities and innovative constructions of the planet’s survival as a shared home. It engages with current postcolonial debates, uses intersectional methodologies, and introduces contemporary literary, visual concepts, and narrative types.

Zielgruppe

Academic and Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wilson, Janet M

Schmidt-Haberkamp, Barbara

Dwivedi, Om Prakash

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Inhaltsverzeichnis

INTRODUCTION

00        Janet  M. Wilson, Barbara Schmid-Haberkamp, and Om  Prakash Dwivedi:

The Anthropocene and the “weak planet”: framing postcolonial precarity ecocriticism

 

PART I

Planetary precarity and vulnerability

 

01.     Wai Chee Dimock: Precarious breath: The arts and sciences of oxygen

02.     Pramod Nayar: “One world or none”: Planetary nuclear precarity and anti-nuclear    cosmopolitanism

03.     Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández: Le Transperceneige (1982) and the Snowpiercers (2013; 2020) as post-apocalyptic cli-fis: (Im)Possible technologized habitats for the vulnerable posthuman Other

 

PART II

Revised Literary Genres and Visual Formats

 

04.     Klara Machata: Imagining planetarity in Vandana Singh’s speculative short fiction

05.     Chiara Lanza: Precariousness and resistance: Petro-despotism and the imaginative power of literature

06.     Jan Rupp: Planetary precarity in performance ecopoetry: Poems to solve the climate crisis?

07.     Scott Slovic: Toward critical self-reflection and a vigilant sense of precarity: Why read pandemic literature during a pandemic

 

PART III

Affective ecoprecarity: Relationality, resilience and resistance

08.   Stefan Benz: Of ecological critique and queer utopias: Nicky Drayden’s Escaping Exodus (2019)

09.  Sonja Frenzel: Women’s writing as eco-translation: The critical-creative edges of precarious presence in Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2020) and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Ada’s Room ([2020] 2023)

10.  Leonor María Martínez Serrano: Earth is Oikos: Peter Sanger on the vulnerability of the biosphere as life’s home

 

PART IV

Planetary repair and survival

 

11.  Aleks Wansbrough: Resisting precarity and planetary dysphoria with In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain

12.  Kanak Yadav: The precarious case of the zero-waste solution to the planetary problem

13.  May Joseph and Sofia Varino: Hydrosophy: Ecology, choreography, and multispecies precarity

Über Autor(innen)

Janet M. Wilson is Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK. Her research focuses on the diaspora and postcolonial writing of the settler colonies of New Zealand and Australia, literature and globalisation, pandemic fiction, transculturalism and transnationalism, and refugee writing. Her most recent publications are the coedited volume, New Zealand medievalism: Reframing the medieval (2024) and “Diaspora Screen Media”, special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing 60.2 (2024). She is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and co-founder and Chair of the global network, Challenging Precarity.

Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her main research interests are postcolonial studies and eighteenth-century British literature and culture. She is a member of the steering committee of the international network Challenging Precarity, and has co-edited the collections of essays Representing Poverty in the Anglophone Postcolonial World (Bonn University Press, 2021) and Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World (Brill, 2022). She is a member of the DFG-funded research training school Gegenwart/Literatur (Contemporary/Literature) and an elected member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Science, Humanities, and the Arts.

Om Prakash Dwivedi is Associate Professor of English literature at Bennett University, Uttar Pradesh, India. He is the author of Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English (2022), Tracing the New Indian Diaspora (2014), and co-author with Lisa Lau of Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English (2014). He is co-founder and vice-Chair of the global network, Challenging Precarity.