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 on: 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.
"Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities is a must-read for anyone interested in the roots of today's environmental crisis and possible solutions to it. This book brings an important international perspective to the emerging field of the environmental humanities and reenergizes familiar concepts such as the Anthropocene, resilience, and terraforming by placing them within imperial and postcolonial contexts. It also introduces new concepts to the environmental humanities conversation, such as postcolonial disaster studies and environmental theology. Surveying a broad range of cultural aesthetics, literary genres, and geographies, and deftly moving between global and local scales of inquiry, Global Ecologies and theEnvironmental Humanitiesoffers up a variety of exciting new methods for addressing the past, current, and future state of the world's environment." - Erin James, University of Idaho, USA
"This may well be the decade that environmental humanities move to the front and centre of critical theory. This expertly assembled volume by a trio of vibrant scholars shows why. Bringing together diverse issues of disaster management, commodity frontiers and economies of scale with those of literary genres, styles, and forms the contributors show once again that our world and our texts remain indispensible to one another." -Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Warwick University, UK
"Global Ecologies is destined to become a classic text in environmental humanities." - Tarique Niazi, University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Anthem EnviroExperts Review
