George Handley
Brigham Young University, Comparative Arts and Letters, Faculty Member
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Postcolonial Studies, Ecocriticism, Alejo Carpentier, Derek Walcott, Ecocriticsm, Comparative American Studies, and 13 moreEcotheology (Environment), Environmental Humanities, Humanities, Southern Studies (U.S. South), Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, Mormonism, Mormon studies, Literary Theory, Post-Colonialism, Caribbean Literature, Climate Change, and Anthropocene edit
The book is a series of essays on Latter-day Saint environmental values. This chapter is an exploration of the intersection between environnmental ethics, economics, and Latter-day Saint creation theology.
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A chapter, authored by George Handley, from a co-authored transnational ecocritical study of climate scepticism in the UK, the US, and in Germany and France. This chapter covers the grounds for climate scepticism as manifested in popular... more
A chapter, authored by George Handley, from a co-authored transnational ecocritical study of climate scepticism in the UK, the US, and in Germany and France. This chapter covers the grounds for climate scepticism as manifested in popular American cultural imagination and in conservative Christian theology.
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The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolonial literature, this volume offers rich and suggestive ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing... more
The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolonial literature, this volume offers rich and suggestive ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing from texts from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific Islands and South Asia. Turning to contemporary works by both well- and little-known postcolonial writers, the diverse contributions highlight the literary imagination as crucial to representing what Eduoard Glissant calls the "aesthetics of the earth." The essays are organized around a group of thematic concerns that engage culture and cultivation, arboriculture and deforestation, the lives of animals, and the relationship between the military and the tourist industry. With chapters that address works by J. M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Zakes Mda, and many others, Postcolonial Ecologies makes a remarkable contribution to rethinking the role of the humanities in addressing global environmental issues.
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An Environmental Memoir
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Perhaps there is no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation, and settlement than the Caribbean. Theorists such as Edouard Glissant argue that the dialectic... more
Perhaps there is no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation, and settlement than the Caribbean. Theorists such as Edouard Glissant argue that the dialectic between Caribbean "nature" and "culture," engendered by this unique and troubled history, has not heretofore been brought into productive relation. Caribbean Literature and the Environment redresses this omission by gathering together eighteen essays that consider the relationship between human and natural history. The result is the first volume to examine the literatures of the Caribbean from an ecocritical perspective in all language areas of the region.
In its exploration of the relationship between nature and culture, this collection focuses on four overlapping themes: how Caribbean texts inscribe the environmental impact of colonial and plantation economies; how colonial myths of edenic and natural origins are revisioned; what the connections are between histories of biotic and cultural creolization; and how a Caribbean aesthetics might usefully articulate a means to preserve sustainability in the context of tourism and globalization. By creating a dialogue between the growing field of ecological literary studies, which has primarily been concerned with white settler narratives, and Caribbean cultural production, especially the region’s negotiation of complex racial and ethnic legacies, these essays explore the ways in which the history of transplantation and settlement has provided unique challenges and opportunities for establishing a sense of place and an environmental ethic in the Caribbean.
The volume includes an extensive introduction by the editors and essays by Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen, Trenton Hickman, Shona Jackson, LeGrace Benson, Jana Evans Braziel, George B. Handley, Renee K. Grossman, Isabel Hoving, Natasha Tinsley, Helen Tiffen, Hena Maes-Jelinek, Heidi Bojsen, Ineke Phaf-Reinberger, Eric Prieto, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, as well as interviews with Walcott and Raphaël Confiant. It will appeal to all those interested in Caribbean, literary, and ecocritical studies.
In its exploration of the relationship between nature and culture, this collection focuses on four overlapping themes: how Caribbean texts inscribe the environmental impact of colonial and plantation economies; how colonial myths of edenic and natural origins are revisioned; what the connections are between histories of biotic and cultural creolization; and how a Caribbean aesthetics might usefully articulate a means to preserve sustainability in the context of tourism and globalization. By creating a dialogue between the growing field of ecological literary studies, which has primarily been concerned with white settler narratives, and Caribbean cultural production, especially the region’s negotiation of complex racial and ethnic legacies, these essays explore the ways in which the history of transplantation and settlement has provided unique challenges and opportunities for establishing a sense of place and an environmental ethic in the Caribbean.
The volume includes an extensive introduction by the editors and essays by Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen, Trenton Hickman, Shona Jackson, LeGrace Benson, Jana Evans Braziel, George B. Handley, Renee K. Grossman, Isabel Hoving, Natasha Tinsley, Helen Tiffen, Hena Maes-Jelinek, Heidi Bojsen, Ineke Phaf-Reinberger, Eric Prieto, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, as well as interviews with Walcott and Raphaël Confiant. It will appeal to all those interested in Caribbean, literary, and ecocritical studies.
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Although there are many reasons for Christian skepticism regarding climate change, one reason is theological in nature, and therefore, requires a theological solution. This essay explains the theological grounds for climate change denial... more
Although there are many reasons for Christian skepticism regarding climate change, one reason is theological in nature, and therefore, requires a theological solution. This essay explains the theological grounds for climate change denial and for a compromised understanding of the power and creativity of human agency. Drawing inspiration from the ecotheological implications of postcolonial poetics, it seeks to offer revised conceptions of the atonement and the fall and of what it means to read both scripture and nature. The aim is to offer a more resilient Christian theology that can inspire agential creativity in the age of the Anthropocene.
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Epilogue in the collection of essays, The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History, edited by Jedidiah Rogers and Matthew Godfrey
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This essay focuses on the ways in which the film’s adaptation of the Noah story borrows from Jewish Apocrypha and Midrash and then performs its own contemporary form of midrash in order to address the relevance of religion in the... more
This essay focuses on the ways in which the film’s adaptation of the Noah story borrows from Jewish Apocrypha and Midrash and then performs its own contemporary form of midrash in order to address the relevance of religion in the Anthropocene. I outline that relevance and demonstrate how the film seeks to temper anthropocentrism and render it serviceable in the Anthropocene through its use of the figure of Noah as a kind of second
Adam. Aronofsky’s film explicitly engages with the concerns of contemporary ecotheology in order to suggest that it is not enough
for humankind to develop passion for the more-than-human world;
we must also reinvigorate faith in humanity. And this faith must acknowledge and persist in light of the evidence of human depravity
that the climate crisis lays bare. Ultimately, the film implies that fighting for the planet and against the ravages of environmental degradation is not merely a struggle for ecological health but a postsecular struggle for human meaning and the viability of the humanities in a vast, complex, and often unjust cosmos.
Adam. Aronofsky’s film explicitly engages with the concerns of contemporary ecotheology in order to suggest that it is not enough
for humankind to develop passion for the more-than-human world;
we must also reinvigorate faith in humanity. And this faith must acknowledge and persist in light of the evidence of human depravity
that the climate crisis lays bare. Ultimately, the film implies that fighting for the planet and against the ravages of environmental degradation is not merely a struggle for ecological health but a postsecular struggle for human meaning and the viability of the humanities in a vast, complex, and often unjust cosmos.
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An analysis of 1 Nephi 1 that argues that the foregrounding of the human personality of the authors and editors of the Book of Mormon demonstrates that the book's theology of revelation embraces rather than elides the role of the human... more
An analysis of 1 Nephi 1 that argues that the foregrounding of the human personality of the authors and editors of the Book of Mormon demonstrates that the book's theology of revelation embraces rather than elides the role of the human imagination in accessing the divine.
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Offers a theoretical understanding of what it means to read scripture in a theology of continuing revelation based on the particular phenomenon of repeated language, in this case of the Sermon on the Mount in 3 Nephi. The essay's theory... more
Offers a theoretical understanding of what it means to read scripture in a theology of continuing revelation based on the particular phenomenon of repeated language, in this case of the Sermon on the Mount in 3 Nephi. The essay's theory is derived from Jorge Luis Borges's story, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote."
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"[E]cocritics ought to start by acknowledging that the literature that most powerfully shapes attitudes and behaviors for the vast majority of humanity today comes from religious traditions and their interpretative communities. To insist... more
"[E]cocritics ought to start by acknowledging that the literature that most powerfully shapes attitudes and behaviors for the vast majority of humanity today comes from religious traditions and their interpretative communities. To insist that action on climate change requires an adoption of a radically new and competing worldview is to fight a losing battle. Ecocritics need to get religion, and I do not mean in the traditional sense of this turn of phrase. I mean they need to “get” it."
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An overview of Mormon beliefs about environmental stewardship, recent developments in Mormon thought, and an assessment of what contributions Mormon belief can make to the environmental crisis in the broader context of ecotheology. A... more
An overview of Mormon beliefs about environmental stewardship, recent developments in Mormon thought, and an assessment of what contributions Mormon belief can make to the environmental crisis in the broader context of ecotheology. A chapter in the recently published Rutledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology, eds Willis Jenkins, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim.
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Chapter from Living Cosmology: Christian Responses to the Journey of the Universe, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim. Orbis: Maryknoll, New York, 2016, pp. 289-299. Covers LDS theology of creation and its relevance to contemporary... more
Chapter from Living Cosmology: Christian Responses to the Journey of the Universe, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim. Orbis: Maryknoll, New York, 2016, pp. 289-299. Covers LDS theology of creation and its relevance to contemporary cosmology and the environmental crisis.
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Examines how Walcott's poem situates the crisis of climate change within the structures of the postcolonial struggle and how the poem's cosmological imagination seeks to provide an adequate response.
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An ecotheological reading of Malick's The Tree of Life
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... Ed.] Works Cited Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. Sugar and the Environment in Cuba. In DeLoughrey. 3350. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M., Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley, eds. Caribbean Literature and the Environment. Charlottesville: U... more
... Ed.] Works Cited Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. Sugar and the Environment in Cuba. In DeLoughrey. 3350. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M., Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley, eds. Caribbean Literature and the Environment. Charlottesville: U Virginia P, 2005. Foucault, Michel. ...
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Creative nonfiction essay about the death of a brother from suicide
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Suicide and Ecocriticism
A review essay on Elizabeth DeLoughrey's Routes and Roots and Sarah Casteel's Second Arrivals.
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A comparison of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Alejo Carpentier's Explosion in a Cathedral, specifically in light of the legacies of slavery
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A brief theorization of Comparative American Studies
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A brief comparison between Toni Morrison and Edouard Glissant and their theories of literature
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A comparison of testimonial language in Rigoberta Menchú and Rosario Ferré
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A theory of understanding American modern literature in a comparative and hemispheric context
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A theological exploration of the meaning of grace and the experience of "nothingness" as represented in Mormon theology and as explored by Adam Miller.
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Examines the theological roots of wilderness preservation in LDS belief and explores the tensions between individual rights and community values, particularly in light of the Cliven Bundy conflict.