Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities

by Elizabeth DeLoughrey (editor), Jill Didur (Editor), Anthony Carrigan (Editor)

This book examines current trends in scholarly thinking about the new field of the Environmental Humanities, focusing in particular on how the history of globalization and imperialism represents a special challenge to the representation of environmental issues. Essays in this path-breaking collection examine the role that narrative, visual, and aesthetic forms can play in drawing attention to and shaping our ideas about long-term and catastrophic environmental challenges such as climate change, militarism, deforestation, the pollution and management of the global commons, petrocapitalism, and the commodification of nature. The volume presents a postcolonial approach to the environmental humanities, especially in conjunction with current thinking in areas such as political ecology and environmental justice. Spanning regions such as Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Australasia and the Pacific, as well as North America, the volume includes essays by founding figures in the field as well as new scholars, providing vital new interdisciplinary perspectives the politics of the earth; disaster, vulnerability, and resilience; political ecologies and environmental justice; world ecologies; and the Anthropocene. In engaging critical ecologies, the volume poses a postcolonial environmental humanities for the twenty-first century. At the heart of this is a conviction that a thoroughly global, postcolonial, and comparative approach is essential to defining the emergent field of the environmental humanities, and that this field has much to offer in understanding critical issues surrounding the creation of alternative ecological futures.

412 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2015

Reviews

[leni swagger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solely logging this, because Michael Niblett's essay "Oil on Sugar" was simply out of this world. Never in my life would I have thought that "petro-magic realism" and "saccharine-irrealism" could be so (weirdly) interesting, but here we are! Mind-boggling to see how Marx's commodity fetishism could be linked to "King Sugar" and Carribean literature



Note: To put it as normally as possible, I found the allusion to Marx's concept of granting physical things (i.e., sugar and oil) a higher importance, like its own character, or here, its own persona that haunts the narrative of stories set/written in colonial settings, highly fascinating. "Petro-magic realism" and "saccharine-irrealism" were discussed in terms of a reality controlled by oil and sugar and the pressure it brought to societies. I especially enjoyed his take on (ir)realism in Caribbean stories, as he states that stories set in plantations often deal with the dreamlike and surreal state of nature, as people believed that in settings where the people lacked autonomous control over the production of nature, this reality would thus appear enchanted (as it's controlled by an authoritative outside power).