Jill Didur

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.

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 approaches to environmental issues. Essays in this path-breaking collection examine the role narrative can play in drawing attention to and shaping our ideas about long-term environmental problems such as climate change, militarism, deforestation, toxicity, and agricultural resource management. The volume explores implications for defining 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, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific Islands, essays by founding figures in the field as well as new scholars expand the geographical and historical contours of ecocriticism by examining how writers have imagined the environment, providing vital new perspectives on how ecological change can be traced to globalization and a history of colonialism. It moves beyond literary studies to a more interdisciplinary discussion of the importance of narrative to our understanding of environmental concerns. 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.

CONTENTS
Foreword by Dipesh Chakrabarty
Introduction: A Postcolonial Environmental Humanities Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan

Part I: The Politics of Earth: Forests, Gardens, Plantations
1. Narrativizing Nature: India, Empire,and Environment David Arnold
2. "The Perverse Little People of the Hills:" Unearthing Ecology and Transculturation in Reginald Farrer’s Alpine Plant-Hunting Jill Didur
3. Bagasse: Caribbean Art and the Debris of the Sugar Plantation Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
4. Writing a Native Garden?: Environmental Language and Post-Mabo Literature in Australia Susan K. Martin

Part II: Disaster, Vulnerability, and Resilience
5. Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies Anthony Carrigan
6. Nuclear Disaster: The Marshall Islands Experience and Lessons for a Post-Fukushima World Barbara Rose Johnston
7. Island Vulnerability and Resilience: Combining Knowledges for Disaster Risk Reduction Including Climate Change Adaptation
Ilan Kelman, J.C. Gaillard, Jessica Mercer, James Lewis, and Anthony Carrigan

Part III: Political Ecologies and Environmental Justice
8. The Edgework of the Clerk: Resilience in Arundhati Roy’s Walking With the Comrades Susie O’Brien
9. Filming the Emergence of Popular Environmentalism in Latin America: Postcolonialism and Buen Vivir Jorge Marcone
10. Witnessing the Nature of Violence: Resource Extraction and Political Ecologies in the Contemporary African Novel Byron Caminero-Santangelo

Part IV: Mapping World Ecologies
11. Narrating a Global Future: Our Common Future and the Public Hearings of the World Commission on Environment and Development Cheryl Lousley
12. Oil on Sugar: Commodity Frontiers and Peripheral Aesthetics Michael Niblett
13. Ghost Mountains and Stone Maidens: Ecological Imperialism, Compound Catastrophe, and the Post-Soviet Ecogothic Sharae Deckard

Part V: Terraforming, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene
14. Terraforming Planet Earth Joseph Masco
15. Climate Change, Cosmology, and Poetry: The Case of Derek Walcott’s Omeros George B. Handley
16. Ordinary Futures: Interspecies Worldings in the Anthropocene Elizabeth DeLoughrey

Full text here: https://www.book2look.com/embed/9781317574316

After conferences in Montpellier, Poitiers and La Réunion (France, 2015, 2016 and 2018), as well as Kolkata (India, 2018) and Purchase (NY, USA, 2019), this is the 6th opus of this conference cycle in Montreal, Concordia University. An “ecotone” initially designates a transitional area between two ecosystems, for example between land and sea. The “Ecotones” program (2015-2020) is a cycle of conferences which aims to borrow this term traditionally used in geography and ecology and to broaden the concept by applying it to other disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. An “ecotone” can thus also be understood as a cultural space of encounters, conflicts, and renewal between several communities. This interdisciplinary conference will more specifically focus on colonial and postcolonial port cities as ecotonic dialectics between places and non-places.

Commonly understood, a port is the site where ships’ passengers enter or exit, and cargo is loaded or unloaded. Thus, it represents the flow of people and exchange of goods, in the age of sail, as well as in the contemporary globalized world. The unbounded space of the port offers opportunities to explore “discontinuous histories” of port cities, and “its interfaces with the wider world” (Gilroy 1993), as a site that decentres the nation through its slippery flows. In addition, port cities anchor urban development around shipping routes and international trade. Ports of call offer the hope of safe harbours for migrants, a refuge in a storm, or alternatively a vulnerable site for colonial concessions or gateways that must be regulated or controlled. Ports are also passages of communications. In computer networking, a port is a nodal point of communication through which data flows, a portal to information. Lastly port cities occupy that liminal space between land and water, an in-between ecotonic zone of transition.

Ports are often referred to as nonplaces – gateways subject to global forces that historically shaped trans-oceanic connections, expansion into hinterlands, and crossroads of historical and contemporary encounters. Nonplaces within cities are commonly perceived as liminal locations reduced to their function of transportation or commercial nodes, or as locations that crush the sense of individual empowerment. But artists, writers, critics and researchers have depicted them as multiple, paradoxical spaces, where new possibilities arise and new cultures emerge. Nonplaces may produce social flows and networks that are not only a defining feature of our “super-modernity”, but also, in the longue durée of urban and semi-urban dynamics, a matrix for identity formation, cultural transitions and environmental adaptation.

Port cities, however, are also placed. Cities such as Georgetown in Guyana, Shanghai, Liverpool, Calcutta, Dar es Salaam, Nantes, or Montreal among many others, may be viewed through longstanding geographic imaginaries, linguistic collectivities and/or colonial and postcolonial histories, suggesting an ongoing struggle over who ‘claims’ the city (in Montreal’s case, unceded territory), and gestures towards political, social, or economic insecurities apparent in the spatial configurations of urban life, with implications that potentially destabilize national narratives. For example, as an island in the Saint Lawrence River, the city of Montreal is not only connected to multiple elsewheres through migration, but also through trade. The Saint Lawrence opens on to the Atlantic ocean through which flowed a long-standing trade in bauxite from towns in the Caribbean to Quebec (following circuits laid by imperialism). Thus, ports shape material channels of profit and power, as well as modes of resistance that occur around these networks of control.

Possible topics:

• Circulations and hubs of ideas, migration, or commerce that linked cities across empire(s)
• Interactions and networks of mobile labour in port cities, the spatiality of encounters
• Cultural transitions or environmental adaptions in (post)colonial port cities at different historical junctures or across geographic locations
• Urban colonial heritage, and attendant linkages to global urbanism
• Memorializing of port city histories and the shaping of identities (including sexuality, race, gender, language, religious, migrant)
• Literary representations and/or Visualities of colonial or postcolonial urban flows
• Port cities as globalized past and/or migrancy of the present
• Regulation, control, and spatial division within (post)colonial port cities

Venue: Concordia University, Montréal, Canada
Dates: October 24-26, 2019
Language: English
Deadline for submitting proposals: April 5, 2019

After conferences in Montpellier, Poitiers and La Réunion (France, 2015, 2016 and 2018), as well as Kolkata (India, 2018) and Purchase (NY, USA, 2019), this is the 6th opus of this conference cycle in Montreal, Concordia University. An “ecotone” initially designates a transitional area between two ecosystems, for example between land and sea. The “Ecotones” program (2015-2020) is a cycle of conferences which aims to borrow this term traditionally used in geography and ecology and to broaden the concept by applying it to other disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. An “ecotone” can thus also be understood as a cultural space of encounters, conflicts, and renewal between several communities. This interdisciplinary conference will more specifically focus on colonial and postcolonial port cities as ecotonic dialectics between places and non-places.

Commonly understood, a port is the site where ships’ passengers enter or exit, and cargo is loaded or unloaded. Thus, it represents the flow of people and exchange of goods, in the age of sail, as well as in the contemporary globalized world. The unbounded space of the port offers opportunities to explore “discontinuous histories” of port cities, and “its interfaces with the wider world” (Gilroy 1993), as a site that decentres the nation through its slippery flows. In addition, port cities anchor urban development around shipping routes and international trade. Ports of call offer the hope of safe harbours for migrants, a refuge in a storm, or alternatively a vulnerable site for colonial concessions or gateways that must be regulated or controlled. Ports are also passages of communications. In computer networking, a port is a nodal point of communication through which data flows, a portal to information. Lastly port cities occupy that liminal space between land and water, an in-between ecotonic zone of transition.

Ports are often referred to as nonplaces – gateways subject to global forces that historically shaped trans-oceanic connections, expansion into hinterlands, and crossroads of historical and contemporary encounters. Nonplaces within cities are commonly perceived as liminal locations reduced to their function of transportation or commercial nodes, or as locations that crush the sense of individual empowerment. But artists, writers, critics and researchers have depicted them as multiple, paradoxical spaces, where new possibilities arise and new cultures emerge. Nonplaces may produce social flows and networks that are not only a defining feature of our “super-modernity”, but also, in the longue durée of urban and semi-urban dynamics, a matrix for identity formation, cultural transitions and environmental adaptation.

Port cities, however, are also placed. Cities such as Georgetown in Guyana, Shanghai, Liverpool, Calcutta, Dar es Salaam, Nantes, or Montreal among many others, may be viewed through longstanding geographic imaginaries, linguistic collectivities and/or colonial and postcolonial histories, suggesting an ongoing struggle over who ‘claims’ the city (in Montreal’s case, unceded territory), and gestures towards political, social, or economic insecurities apparent in the spatial configurations of urban life, with implications that potentially destabilize national narratives. For example, as an island in the Saint Lawrence River, the city of Montreal is not only connected to multiple elsewheres through migration, but also through trade. The Saint Lawrence opens on to the Atlantic ocean through which flowed a long-standing trade in bauxite from towns in the Caribbean to Quebec (following circuits laid by imperialism). Thus, ports shape material channels of profit and power, as well as modes of resistance that occur around these networks of control.

We seek papers that engage with these multiple formations of ecotone spaces within port cities, past and present. We encourage abstracts on topics such as (but not limited to):

• Circulations and hubs of ideas, migration, or commerce that linked cities across empire(s)
• Interactions and networks of mobile labour in port cities, the spatiality of encounters
• Cultural transitions or environmental adaptions in (post)colonial port cities at different historical junctures or across geographic locations
• Urban colonial heritage, and attendant linkages to global urbanism
• Memorializing of port city histories and the shaping of identities (including sexuality, race, gender, language, religious, migrant)
• Literary representations and/or Visualities of colonial or postcolonial urban flows
• Port cities as globalized past and/or migrancy of the present
• Regulation, control, and spatial division within (post)colonial port cities

We invite contributors to upload their proposals (a 250-word abstract, title, author’s name, a 150- word bio, and contact) to the conference website:
https://ecotones.submittable.com/submit/135822/ecotones-6-montreal

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Each presentation will be 20 minutes (followed by discussion time). A selection of papers will be considered for publication at the conclusion of the series of Ecotones events.

Ecotones 6 Organizing Committee
Jill Didur  (English, Concordia University) jill.didur@concordia.ca
Nalini Mohabir (Geography, Concordia University) nalini.mohabir@concordia.ca

Ecotones Program Coordinators
Thomas Lacroix (Maison Française, Oxford-CNRS) thomas.lacroix@cnrs.fr
Judith Misrahi-Barak (EMMA, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3)
judith.misrahi-barak@univ-montp3.fr
Maggi Morehouse (Coastal Carolina University) morehouse@coastal.edu