Playing with Chat GPT (OpenAI): Write a paper...

 A lot of folks in my networks have been chatting about OpenAI / ChatGPT -- the latest GPT-3 release. Based on the examples I've been seeing, the coherence level has increased dramatically from previous releases, such that I probably wouldn't be able to distinguish a paper that was substantially written by an AI if a student were to submit it. 

Here, for instance is the entirety of the prompt I submitted to ChatGPT:

Write a paper on postcolonial ecocriticism using Amitav Ghosh's Gun Island And here is the text it generated:

Introduction Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island is a novel that explores the intersection of postcolonial ecocriticism and climate change. The novel follows the story of Deen, a Bengali-American antiques dealer, as he embarks on a journey to uncover the truth behind a mysterious gun-shaped island in the Sunderbans. Along the way, Deen encounters a variety of characters who are all affected by the effects of climate change and the legacy of colonialism. Through these characters, Ghosh examines the ways in which postcolonial ecocriticism can be used to understand the current environmental crisis. This paper will explore the themes of postcolonial ecocriticism in Gun Island, with a particular focus on the ways in which Ghosh uses the novel to critique the legacy of colonialism and its effects on the environment. The Legacy of Colonialism One of the major themes of Gun Island is the legacy of colonialism and its effects on the environment. Ghosh uses the novel to explore the ways in which colonialism has shaped the environment of the Sunderbans, a region of India that was once part of the British Empire. Throughout the novel, Ghosh examines the ways in which colonialism has impacted the environment, from the destruction of mangrove forests to the displacement of local communities. He also examines the ways in which colonialism has shaped the current environmental crisis, highlighting the ways in which the legacy of colonialism has contributed to the current climate crisis. Postcolonial Ecocriticism Ghosh uses the novel to explore the concept of postcolonial ecocriticism, which is the idea that the current environmental crisis is inextricably linked to the legacy of colonialism. Throughout the novel, Ghosh examines the ways in which colonialism has shaped the environment of the Sunderbans, highlighting the ways in which the legacy of colonialism has contributed to the current environmental crisis. He also examines the ways in which postcolonial ecocriticism can be used to understand the current environmental crisis, exploring the ways in which the legacy of colonialism has shaped the current environmental crisis and the ways in which postcolonial ecocriticism can be used to address the current environmental crisis. Conclusion In conclusion, Gun Island is a novel that explores the intersection of postcolonial ecocriticism and climate change. Through the story of Deen, Ghosh examines the ways in which colonialism has shaped the environment of the Sunderbans and the ways in which postcolonial ecocriticism can be used to understand the current environmental crisis. The novel serves as a powerful critique of the legacy of colonialism and its effects on the environment, highlighting the ways in which the legacy of colonialism has contributed to the current environmental crisis and the ways in which postcolonial ecocriticism can be used to address the current environmental crisis.

There are clearly still some glitches here -- a student who submitted this as-is would probably not get an 'A' -- and I would have several question marks and "redundant phrasing" comments in the margins. But it's definitely both impressive and a little concerning how good this is.  

Global Cinema: Notes (Introducing Key Terms)

These are from lecture notes for a course I regularly teach called Global Cinema. -AS Key Terms and Ideas:

• Global South
• Developing World
• Postcolonial world
• Third World
• National Cinema
• Star Sytem / Celebrity Culture: Connected to National Cinema
• Academy Awards as a branch of the American National Cinema

 

I should start with a disclaimer: the terminology we’ll be using is an art, not a science.

To begin with, let’s take a stab at defining what we mean by the “Global South,” a phrase I used in the description for this course.  Geographically, we are referring primarily to Africa, Asia, and Latin America -- but, more specifically, regions within those continents that are less economically advanced. Thus, when we say “Global South,” within Asia we are thinking more of South Asia and Southeast Asia, and less of economically developed countries like Japan and South Korea. 

This is a loose geographical and cultural map -- I decided to include Korean cinema in this course even though South Korea is clearly economically highly developed. But the dialogue with western cinema is pretty intense and important in Korean cinema, and our unit on Bong Joon-Ho will line up pretty well with our other units. (It helps that Bong’s films are especially interested in representing the tension between rich and poor within Korean society.)

 

1922: The Year in African American Poetry

The theme of the Modernist Studies Association annual conference this year (happening next week) is "Making Modernism: 1922 100 Years On."  I am not going to be in Portland this year, but I did have some thoughts to share on the topic of 1922; perhaps the post below is the conference talk I would be giving if I were there.

1922 is an apt topic, though it seems important to flag that to a great extent that year is pivotal within the framework of white modernism -- it's the year of the publication of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the first complete edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. All three monumental works are, to be sure, worth celebrating and revisiting. But there were others writing and publishing in 1922 as well. Most readers will know lines like these, from The Waste Land:

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

How many readers will be equally familiar with the following lines from Langston Hughes, also from 1922? 

The Belgians cut off my hands in the Congo.

They lynch me now in Texas. ("The Negro," published in The Crisis, January 1922)

Whose version of 1922 still centers our narrative of early 20th-century literature? 

As I have been working on African American poetry for the past few years for various digital collections, I've come to see 1922 as an important year in African American literature as well, though in truth the term "modernism" does not always seem relevant to those conversations. Indeed, at the time the worlds of African American literature and that of white modernism were quite separate (segregated?), with only a few people connecting them (one of them might be William Stanley Braithwaite, who often published white and Black authors together in his yearly installments of the Anthology of Magazine Verse; another might be Carl Van Vechten). 

Here, I would like to explore 1922 as a fairly important year for African American poetry, not in relation to "modernism" or the Anglo-American canon, but internally, as part of a conversation among Black poets, editors, and readers. (I am trying to keep things brief here so I won't go too deep into why I think this is an important framing. For a good, detailed overview of African American poetry in this period, see Lauri Ramey's A History of African American Poetry [Cambridge UP, 2019])

For NAVSA Seminar: "Thinking Justice Across the Imperial Divide: Narrating Anglo-India"

I've organized a seminar for the NAVSA (North American Victorian Studies Association) conference that is coming up next week in Bethlehem. The seminar is called "Thinking Justice Across the Imperial Divide: Narrating Anglo-India." I've asked participants to briefly introduce their research interests in the topic; below is my own account.


* * *

I wasn’t trained primarily as a Victorianist – and indeed, I’ve never been to a NAVSA before! – so my status here as facilitator might seem a little unusual. But I have, I hope, a couple of good reasons for organizing this seminar.

One is that the various digital projects I’ve been working on for several years have all circled around a concept that I think most people in the room will intuitively grasp – the implications of the Archive Gap on our understanding of cultural history. We have an extraordinary imbalance between the voices of British writers, journalists, and state-preserved documents and those produced by Indian colonial subjects. That imbalance influences our slant on major historical events, the language we might use to describe those events (i.e., whether 1857 was a “Mutiny” or a “War of Independence”), and even whether a given event should even be deemed “major.”

Specifically in the classroom and working to present open-access materials in digital format, I’ve been interested in the question of whether and how we can use digital collections as frameworks for trying to rebalance the narrative and tell a version of literary history (and perhaps just history) that is more equitable and inclusive. Perhaps we don’t need to center the white / British narrators of Empire as much as we have? Could we conceive a version of 19th-century Indian literature/history that centered Indian voices? (Would we start by calling it something other than the “literature of the British Raj” ? How does “British-occupied Indian literature” sound?)

The Kiplings and India started out as something a little different, but over time it became a project focused on some of those questions. I’ve also been working on a ‘corpus’ of Colonial South Asian Literature (1853-1923), which essentially aims to collect everything available online into a single folder, the good, the bad, and the ugly (in effect: everything from Krupabai Sattianadhan, to Flora Annie Steel, to Talbot Mundy)

Another issue, which will probably be well-known to people who have worked in this space, is that the Indian voices we can most readily access tend to be upper-caste Indian men. Women are few and far between in the print culture, and lower caste and Dalit voices are nearly absent. In my own work, I have not made much progress on inclusivity with respect to caste (I am curious about work others have been doing along those lines), though it is definitely possible to bring the voices of more 19th-century Indian women to the table.




Starting Points: the Kiplings; periodical studies

Admittedly, the questions I’ve just put forward are not at all where I started out – my point of entry into this material was Rudyard Kipling, specifically the India-based stories, Kim, and of course The Jungle Book. Edward Said’s rather appreciative account of Kim in Culture and Imperialism, and terminology from postcolonial theory helps make sense of the discomfort one feels about Kipling as a writer fascinated with India as a site of adventure, hidden knowledge, and esoterica, who also seems to feel – from the beginning! – a deep contempt for actual Indian people. Charles Allen’s book Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling (2007), gives a richly detailed account of Rudyard Kipling’s Indian experiences, especially his early experiences working at the Civil & Military Gazette of Lahore and his emergent career as a fiction writer publishing stories with A.H. Wheeler’s Indian Railway Library publishing company.

What Allen shows us is that the newspaper was Kipling’s first publication venue and in many ways his experience as a journalist gave him the opportunity to gain a broad education about the lives and cultures of British colonial India. Kipling published much of his early poetry in the Lahore-based newspaper The Civil & Military Gazette as well as the short stories that would later be compiled as Plain Tales from the Hills. Kipling’s family was also of course a factor – it didn’t hurt that his father, John Lockwood Kipling, was also a veteran of British India with longstanding columns published weekly in multiple newspapers over many years. Rudyard also had a gifted literary sister, who co-authored short stories with him (several of the short stories in Plain Tales as originally published in the CMG were actually authored by her). And the four Kiplings living in Lahore put together eccentric collections of verse and short stories in 1884 and 1885 – Echoes and Quartette. (Not entirely coincidentally, Rudyard used the CMJ’s printing press to self-publish those early collections!)

However, the key factor in the advent of Rudyard Kipling’s career – what made his career different from his father’s or his sister’s – really seems to be his engagement with Anglo-Indian newspapers. So one takeaway might be that the areas of inquiry followed by Priti Joshi in her recent book Empire News are especially important.

Frustrations with the Kiplings: the case of Rukhmabai

As I worked on a digital collection of materials related to the Kiplings (with a team that included Sarita Mizin, who is here with us today), I became frustrated with the gaps and biases I saw in their accounts.

For example. Throughout the 1880s, many Anglo-Indians seemed preoccupied with the Rukhmabai case. Rukhmabai was a Marathi woman who had, as per custom in India at the time, been entered into an unconsummated marriage by her parents at age 11. As she reached maturity, she (with the support of her stepfather) sued to have the marriage rendered void under English law. The initial judgment in the Bombay court went in her favor, though a later judgment went against her, citing the gap between English law and Hindu law. (Ultimately, her husband agreed to relinquish his claim on the marriage after Rukhmabai’s family paid him off. Rukhmabai would later study medicine in London, and return as one of India’s first western-trained practicing physicians who were women.)

The case involved a number of players, including English-educated Indian lawyers, English missionary educators who had taught Rukhmabai, as well as Anglo-Indian journalists like Rudyard Kipling who covered the case with a strong bias for Rukhmabai’s claims and against Hindu marriage practices. In terms of British colonial history, the case pointed to the confusing gray area that existed between Indian religious practices and traditions and the increasing emphasis on English legal and social norms in British India. The case later led the British to implement a new Age of Consent Act in 1891. The constellation of issues raised falls nicely into Gayatri Spivak’s ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ dynamic, and might also be seen loosely as an echo of the earlier 19th century debates about the practice of Sati that have been discussed by historians like Antoinette Burton and Lata Mani, among many others.

Out of all this, it became clear to me is that if one only reads what Rudyard Kipling has to say (essentially parroting the official British line: that Hindu child marriage is barbaric), one is missing many important facets of the story. Helpfully, in this case, Rukhmabai herself authored a number of important documents supporting her claims and position. But there are others too, including other Indian voices not widely cited. In the end, we made a partial collection of different primary accounts of the Rukhmabai case and collected them here. (Sarita Mizin wrote the biographical note and summary.)

[We could, in truth, go further – one thing our work lacked is representation of the issue from newspapers written in Indian languages. My sense is that it’s in those venues that one would find stronger criticism of the British perspective on the case.]

Another point of frustration I experienced was the absence of significant coverage of the many famines that occurred in British India during the second half of the 19th century. The most significant of these being the Madras Famine of 1876-1878, which may have killed as many as 10 million people. Lockwood Kipling was writing regular columns for the Allahabad Pioneer throughout this period while living in Lahore, and scarcely mentions the famine.

Just at the beginning of Rudyard’s career – and again in response to popular outrage, there is a major shift in how the British colonial state would handle famines – new famine codes were introduced in 1883, as was a famine insurance fund. Rudyard had a couple of brief pieces in the CMJ dealing with some of these policy shifts; later, he alluded to famine policy in his short story, “The Enlightenments of Pagett, MP.” His later (post-India) story “William the Conqueror” dealt with famine more directly. (I later published an article in South Asian Review dealing with these questions: “Beyond the Archive Gap: the Kiplings and the Famines of British India”)

But in various ways, all of these accounts are frustrating and incomplete – none of them give any indication that Rudyard Kipling understands the human costs of famine on Indian people. Instead, it’s background – for a romance between two white colonials, or for political point-scoring against soft-hearted liberals (“Pagett, MP”).

Along those lines, the most powerful, personal Indian account of the Madras Famine I’ve found is by the influential reformer Pandita Ramabai – her essay, “Famine Experiences,” which describes the death of her parents and the way it shaped the early lives of her and her brother.

Summer Research Journal: African American Poetry 1870-1926

This year I've been working on what's turned out to be a rather large and unwieldy digital archive project, something I'm calling an Anthology of African American Poetry, 1870-1926. I started the project back in early January, and I've spent a good chunk of the summer of 2022 working on it as well. 

Why do this? First, I thought it might be useful to scholars and researchers to put all of these materials together in a single place. If you wanted to find all of the out-of-copyright poems you could by, say, Langston Hughes, it would be helpful to create a site where all of that is there and readily accessible. 

Second, after years of creating simple digital editions of various works by specific African American writers, I had come to feel that simply producing a series of disconnected "digital editions" was not all that effective. What often happens is that already-established and widely anthologized authors -- people like Claude McKay or Langston Hughes -- might be rendered slightly more visible or accessible via quality digital editions. But these projects don't change the conversation about the bigger picture, and they don't do much to make more marginal voices visible. And there are so many worthwhile voices whose names barely register with readers today! From the mixed-race (African American + indigenous) writer Olivia Ward Bush-Banks, to the World War I veteran poet Lucian B. Watkins, to Georgia Douglas Johnson.

On Academic Freedom and Civility -- introducing a Lehigh Faculty Forum event (2/16/22)

This panel came together in part because of some recent controversies on Lehigh’s campus, some of which were visible and received media coverage, while others were happening a bit more behind the scenes.

The controversies are actually nothing to be embarrassed about; I tend to think they serve as learning opportunities, both for students and for us as faculty. What do we really think about academic freedom? What can we or should we be able to say in our capacity as representatives of this institution? What’s the difference between what we say in our capacity as teachers and researchers, and what we might say in the public sphere – speaking as private individuals?

Finally, how do we preserve a sense of civility in our debates and disagreements, in light of growing external pressure to frame debates in only the most polarizing terms?

We’re hoping this will be the first of several conversations to address these questions, and I hope we’ll get into it with some specific case studies and examples. (If you have a topic you think we should cover and we don’t get to it tonight, let us know and it might happen the next go-round.)

 
We’re meeting at a strange time for both academic freedom and civility. Let’s start with civility – we just lived through four years of President Donald Trump! A leader who followed none of the old rules regarding how you talk about your political opponents or critics. He got away with calling Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” in a Presidential debate, with suggesting journalists who disagreed with him should be locked up, and a hundred other things. Can we really return to some semblance of normality after that? One of the disconcerting discoveries of these years has been the realization that there really are no 'grown-ups' out there in our political system who will keep the guardrails from coming off. Then again, maybe that means it's our job to model the behavior we'd like to see?

On the academic freedom question -- the debates have been coming fast and furious. On the one side, there are claims of professors being criticized (and sometimes disciplined) for using a potentially offensive term or politically incorrect language; there’s a good introduction to this phenomenon in The Atlantic, Anne Appelbaum’s “The New Puritans.”

On the other, since 2020 we’ve seen a large array of laws proposed by states designed to regulate what can be said in the classroom; ten states passed these so-called “anti-Critical Race Theory” laws in 2021. Of those, most were aimed at K-12 schools, though of the 10, Idaho, Iowa, and Oklahoma all passed laws last year that also place limits on academic freedoms in the college classroom. Many of the laws explicitly ban particular books, such as The 1619 Project, from being taught. More locally, school districts have been banning books left and right, including everything from the novels of Toni Morrison to Art Spiegelmann’s Holocaust memoir, Maus.

The state of Pennsylvania has an anti-CRT bill under active consideration right now HB 1532, that, though ambiguously worded, could ban college teachers – even at private universities – from assigning works that advocate for reparations for slavery or Affirmative Action. This proposed law also has a clause (several of the bills around the country have the exact same language) allowing for “private cause of action.” In other words, any resident of the state of Pennsylvania who was bothered by what might be taught at Lehigh could sue the university – you wouldn’t have to actually be a student here. Needless to say, if this bill becomes law, it will have a deep chilling effect.

The plan for tonight is as follows – we’ll start with about 45 minutes of faculty talking to one another, before opening the floor for audience questions and comments. We’ve asked faculty not to write down speeches, but rather to meditate on a series of questions related to academic freedom as it relates to their own work and their own experience as scholars and teachers.

For those on Zoom, we do have colleagues who will be reading comments posted in the chat; they’ll relay those questions and comments to us, and we’ll try to address them in turn.

2021: A Few Books I Read for Pleasure and Work

Below are a few books I read in 2021, with some very brief annotations. 

2021 was a year when I rediscovered my joy in reading genre fiction -- especially science fiction, mystery/detective fiction, and fantasy. The pleasure reading got me through some fairly dark and difficult stretches, especially the gloom and boredom of the 'Delta' and 'Omicron' waves... People who have known me for a long time will also see that there are some new ideas percolating with respect to research interests. Perhaps a future book project on extractive fiction & colonial modernity?

I also felt it would be helpful to list both pleasure reading and more serious literary fiction (i.e., books that I read with an eye towards the classroom -- or research). 

I think both are important! 

For pleasure (mostly)

Leigh Bardugo, Shadow and Bone Trilogy and Grisha Trilogy. I watched some of the Netflix fantasy series based on book one of Shadow and Bone (though the Netflix actually combines that series with Bardugo's Grisha series set in the same world). I thought, "maybe I would enjoy the books more?" And in fact, I did. These are essentially young adult, but the Russian culture orientation and world-building is compelling and the characters and plot are pretty satisfying, especially in the Grisha series. That said, the Netflix series has richly multicultural casting that is a plus from my perspective.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora. The ship has been moving towards its goal for many years; as it approaches a hopefully habitable planet, things suddenly start to go wrong. More generally, though: Interstellar colonization? Let's not. Maybe -- just maybe -- we should just take care of the planet we have? This book has a lot of the familiar 'hard' science fiction angles of other later KSR novels, including a serious consideration of AI. 

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Moon. Very enjoyable hard sci fi + political thriller imagining a (fairly realistic) scenario where China takes the lead in colonizing the moon. Also has a serious engagement with the internal complexities of the actually existing Chinese political system, and what life might be like in a total surveillance state. Again, a thoughtful consideration of the role of AI, both as a tool of the state (i.e., data mining and surveillance), but also as a possible tool for resistance. 

Kim Stanley Robinson, Fifty Degrees Below. Earlier KSR, book two in the "Capital" trilogy. Has more of a political thriller feel, though also with a strong climate change message. Imagining what winter in DC would be like if the Gulf Stream suddenly stopped & temperatures dropped to -50 F. 

Kim Stanley Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain. An early KSR entry in the "Cli Fi" genre. Book one in the "Capital" trilogy. I liked this one less than Fifty Degrees Below -- seemed a little elementary from the point of view of characterization as well as the science. You can pretty much go straight to book two. 

Harlan Coben, The Boy From the Woods. I read a profile of Harlan Coben in the New York Times, and was intrigued. I zoomed through this twisty ebook thriller in a couple of days and found it pretty satisfying. 

Harlan Coben, The Stranger. Another very smart Coben story with some interesting formal invention (i.e., the stranger who approaches people, seemingly at random, and tells them secrets about the people in their lives).

Harlan Coben, The Woods. What happened at summer camp back in 1994? Lots of entertaining twists and turns in this murder mystery thriller. 

Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire. Anne Rice died in December & I realized I had never read this. So I read it as an ebook in mid-December. I hadn't realized there was so much homoeroticism in Anne Rice (interesting! juicy!), but I was distressed by the way enslaved people were treated throughout the book. 

Chris Colfer, Land of Stories Series and Tale of Magic. My daughter read all of these multiple times and loves them with a passion. At some point over the summer, I also read through the whole series. So enjoyable! Much better in terms of the lessons about difference and 'otherness' than Harry Potter, I think. We also listened to a lot of the series on audiobooks while on various road trips last year; Colfer, a former star on Glee, reads them himself as audiobooks with wonderful energy. (A very clever inventive writer who's also an accomplished actor -- makes for brilliant audiobooks!)

For work/teaching (mostly): 

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Paradise, Love, God Help the Child, A Mercy, Home. I taught a class on Zoom in the spring of 2021 on Toni Morrison! I ended up creating a lot of materials for the class & worked with a graduate research assistant over the summer to develop a Scalar site that expanded considerably on those lecture notes. I had read most of Morrison's novels before at various points, but never so close together. And they really hold up! Obviously, the later novels are not quite as compelling as the first five novels, though they are all interesting and rewarding. 

N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Earth trilogy. I had read The Fifth Season a couple of years ago, but never read the entire series until this year, when I assigned Jemisin in my "Postcolonial Ecocriticism" class. I had earlier been thinking a lot about Jemisin's interesting approach to racism in the book, but my students got me thinking about what Jemisin is doing with queerness & gender roles, as well as the disability / superpower theme in the book. 

Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. I had of course started reading this when it first came out in 2017, but only finished it this year (when I assigned it in my grad class). It's not without its flaws, but it's also a very rich, thoughtful book. Interesting of course for its exploration of a trans woman / Hijra's experience, but also for the way it approaches political violence in contemporary India. 

Indra Sinha, Animal's People. I had read this when it was first published back around 2006-7, but revisited it this year while teaching "Postcolonial Ecocriticism." Sinha's novel is considered a classic account of the 1984 chemical spill in Bhopal, India -- perhaps the most important work of "postcolonial ecofiction" from South Asia. And there's no doubt that Sinha's public advocacy on behalf of the victims of that disaster was important and valuable. That said, the misogyny in this 'picaresque' novel was a little hard for some of my students to swallow. I respect what Sinha is trying to do, but I'm not sure I will teach it again. 

bell hooks, Outlaw Culture, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (with Cornel West), Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue (with Stuart Hall). bell hooks died in December, and I spent a couple of days revisiting some of her wonderful early essays; she was particularly smart and prescient on questions of race and representation in 1990s cinema I think. (Interesting to see that her criticisms of Spike Lee's Malcolm X back in 1992 are somewhat similar to her controversial critique of Beyonce's Lemonade from 2014!) I also read some of her later stuff for the first time, including the book of conversations with Cornel West, and the fascinating conversations she had with Stuart Hall (2018).  bell hooks was often surprisingly raw, but always honest and unfiltered. 

Kim Stanley Robinson, Ministry for the Future. Near-future climate fiction. Here Robinson is thinking about climate change with a truly global orientation. What will it be like in India? In east Asia? In Europe? I thought this was so thought-provoking, I ended up assigning it in my "Postcolonial Ecocriticism" class. Students did find it to be a tough read (at times a slog), but I thought the method was original and a step forward from earlier KSR novels like Fifty Degrees Below. 

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape our Futures. Really eye-opening accessible science-oriented nonfiction about mycology. Mushrooms are fascinating & much more important than most people think! Mushrooms could also solve a lot of our environmental problems if we decided to try and harness them.  

Jenny Offill, Weather. Minimalist climate fiction + upper middle class marriage drama + substance abuse plots. Beautifully done; read it in one sitting. 

Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind. I haven't taught this yet, but will. Another example of a text imagining a near-future apocalypse with a minimalist approach. It's not about the what and how of the end of the world, it's about how it affects the compelling characters Alam creates. Also read this very quickly (two sittings?). 

Sylvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic. Highly entertaining. I liked this so much I assigned it in my "Postcolonial Ecocriticism" class. The students also dug it & several wrote fascinating papers on it, looking at the mushroom/mycology angle, the postcolonial/decolonial angle, and all of the rich intertextual stuff in the book. 

Helon Habila, Oil on Water. Nigerian petro-fiction! An aging journalist and a young Turk are sent on a mission to talk to a militant group that has abducted a white woman, the wife of an oil executive. Habila gives us a portrait of the impacts of the oil industry in the Niger Delta, on the the people who live there as well as the ecosystem.

Richard Powers, The Overstory. Amazing first half of this much-praised work of climate fiction. The magic of old growth forests! The second half, involving extra-legal radical environmentalism, was less compelling. 

Torrey Peters, Detransition, Baby. The romantic lives of trans women in New York. I learned a lot about trans culture reading this. Well-constructed plot; sometimes a little too "first world problems"?

Ranjit Hoskote, The Atlas of Lost Beliefs. I had a student doing an M.A. thesis on Hoskote and Evie Shockley's poems. I really enjoyed exploring Hoskote's historical consciousness, especially of the intricacy and hybridity of the Indian Ocean experience under British colonialism. 

Evie Shockley, The New Black and A Half-Red Sea. I have known Evie Shockley since grad school, but somehow (criminally) hadn't actually read a lot of her poetry in book form since then; I'm happy to have corrected that now! I found the historical consciousness of A Half-Red Sea particularly powerful & compelling.