[This is a new graduate-level course I'm trying this fall.]
It's no secret that nations
in the Global South are on the front lines of climate change, especially with
respect to access to food and clean water, exposure to dangerous storms and
flooding, and the threat of associated civil unrest. Inequities between rich
and poor countries are likely to exacerbate climate change harms in ways that
are only just beginning to be understood. To begin with, millions, if not
billions of people are in the Global South live in low-lying areas that are
likely to face the brunt of rising waters and may be displaced. Millions are
also in regions facing an increased likelihood of catastrophic droughts, heat
waves, and tropical cyclones. And yet, powerful countries, even those that have
joined the Paris Climate Accord, have been extremely slow to take action: is
apathy towards climate change an example of ‘first world’ privilege? What are
the historical conditions that led us to this point? And what might be some
viable solutions to the current impasse? How to persuade people who are
invested in not recognizing the threat? The humanities -- and works of
literature in particular -- might play an important role in doing the cultural
work of communicating the urgency of the problem, imagining alternative
futures, and, perhaps, changing minds to galvanize the social resolve to effect
change and move towards global environmental justice.
These topics are being
discussed by a growing range of critics, some described as postcolonial critics
and theorists, others primarily associated with ecocriticism, including Amitav
Ghosh (The Great Derangement), Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Rob Nixon (Slow Violence), Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others.
We’ll
read a selection of their work to get oriented and develop a conceptual toolkit
as well as a working vocabulary, including familiarity with the following
terms: Colonialism,
Imperialism, Postcolonial (as historical period and as method),
Postcolonialism, Ecocriticism, Ecofiction, Climate Fiction, Anthropocene, Greenwashing,
Petrofiction, and others. This course is
designed to serve as an introduction to key concepts and terms in both Postcolonial Theory and Ecocriticism, as well as the
prospects for bringing these two fields together to develop a global and
inclusive way of thinking about environmental justice. We’ll start by posing the two fields separately and attempt to get a sense
of foundational concepts as well as the various ways each field might be seen
as a little slippery and porous.
Alongside these critical
and theoretical interventions, we'll explore a range of works of fiction by
writer-activists like Arundhati Roy, Helon Habila, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and
Indra Sinha. In addition, we’ll discuss texts that might not neatly fit either
the ‘postcolonial’ or the ‘ecocritical’ category, including Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, and N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season.
I’ve
divided the course into four units, with two novels per unit:
● Petrofiction: two visions of
the extractive economy in Nigeria
● Indigenous
Americas/Decolonial Alternatives
● Political Violence and
Embodied Resistance in India
● Speculative Ecofictions
We’ll
start the “Petrofiction” unit with a novel not usually understood as such, E.M.
Forster’s Howards End (1910). This is
a novel set entirely in England, and usually understood as a turn-of-the-century
(fin de siècle) text, or a text of
early modernism. But it is worth a closer look, both for its critique of
industrial capitalism in England, and for the ways it gestures towards the
extractive economics of British colonialism in Nigeria.
Forster’s account of a
‘garden’ England also links back to the Romantic origins of much modern western
environmental thinking, and as such seems like a good place to start our work.
Against Forster, we’ll look at a recent novel by the Nigerian novelist Helon
Habila, Oil on Water (2010), in which
a pair of journalists travel into the oilfields in central Nigeria to try and
locate a kidnapped white woman who is being held by anti-government militants.
While in this unit we’ll also take some time to discuss the legendary Nigerian
writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, in a chapter from Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence.
The
“Indigenous Americas/Decolonial Alternatives” unit contains two somewhat
unlikely texts, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008)
and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic
(2020). Morrison’s book looks back at the early days of the English
presence in North America, a moment when the distinctive American race
formation (founded on slavery and anti-Black racism) was still emergent. In
this novel, Morrison is very interested in how early English settlers perceived
the climate and spaces of North America, as well as in how indigenous people
understood what was happening as their territory and way of life was being
displaced. Moreno-Garcia’s novel is a page-turner clearly influenced by the
Anglo-American Gothic tradition, but it has some interesting ecological elements
(fungi play a role…) as well as an engagement with legacies of settler
colonialism and northern (American) economic dominance. In connection with Mexican Gothic, we’ll take a little
detour into ‘harder’ science, with two chapters from a recent book on fungi by
Merlin Sheldrake called Entangled Life. Finally,
for this unit, we’ll introduce the concept of the “decolonial alternative” as
theorized by Walter Mignolo -- a way of thinking about settler colonialism in
North America that takes elements from postcolonial theory but also reworks
some concepts to make them more directly relevant to thinking about indigenous
forms of resistance.
The
third unit, “Political Violence and Embodied Resistance in India,” will involve
two novels, one a classic of postcolonial ecofiction (Indra Sinha’s 2007 novel Animal’s People), while the other,
Arundhati Roy’s Ministry of Utmost
Happiness, might fit this concept a little more approximately.
Sinha’s
novel deals with the aftermath of the horrific Union Carbide chemical disasterin Bhopal, India, which took place in 1984. Between 4000 and 8000 people were
killed in the initial release of a poisonous gas at an American-owned chemical
plant, but more than half a million people were exposed to toxic levels of the
chemicals at the plant, with severe disabling effects. What might justice look like for the survivors of that disaster, in
light of the power multinational corporations hold over global political
alignments, and in light of the general weakness and corruption of the Indian
state? Roy’s 2017 novel was her first work of fiction in almost twenty years.
It deals with a broad swath of Indian political history over the past two
decades, a time where the author herself has become a bold and prolific critic
of both rich western countries (especially with respect to the prosecution of
the “War on Terror”) and her own government (where she has become especially
well-known for her involvement in resistance to government policies that lead
to the displacement of poor and indigenous communities). This novel is also
notable as being the first major Indian novel that I know of with a transgender
protagonist; South Asia has its own culturally specific trans communities,
which we will also learn a little about via critical readings.
Finally, we’ll look at some of Roy’s ecological polemics as well as Rob Nixon’s
chapter on Roy’s emergent status as an influential “Writer-Activist” through
both her fiction writing and her nonfiction essays.
The
final unit, on “Speculative Ecofictions,” will feature two books that might or
might not really belong in this course. N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season (2015), the first in her hugely influential
“Broken Earth” trilogy, imagines a world on the brink of a catastrophic
environmental event. The event appears to be cyclical (hence the title), and an
artifact by a powerful wizard (referred to as an “orogene” in the novel). The
novel brings together ideas common to fantasy fiction (i.e., humans endowed
with special powers), ecofiction (the idea of the natural world as a living and
dynamic field), and critical race & disability studies (how do we treat
those who are different?). This novel represented a breakthrough for a work of
science fiction written by a Black woman, winning the Hugo Prize in 2016.
I'd also like to look at least part of Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent
novel Ministry for the Future (2020).
Robinson is an established science fiction writer with an impressive track record of writing climate-related science
fiction. This book begins with the author imagining a catastrophic heat event
in north-central India and gives prominence to the perspective of inhabitants
of poor countries in a near-future set of climate events (he even uses the word
“postcolonial” within the novel to
describe their point of view!). I particularly wanted to consider this novel
because, alongside the apocalyptic theme, there are also many moments where the
author suggests possible solutions and responses the world might take, both at
the level of large-scale state and international institutions, and on a more
autonomous, decentralized level.
So
yes, we’ll end with what I think will be two speculative works that are both
very aware of imminent catastrophic changes but also contain a modicum of hope.
(And hope turns out to be very important for all of us: too many people
sometimes fall into paralysis linked to the prevalence of climate pessimism. If we can’t do anything to stop it, why
bother?)
