Download or read book American Indian Literature Environmental Justice and Ecocriticism written by Joni Adamson and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although much contemporary American Indian literature examines the relationship between humans and the land, most Native authors do not set their work in the "pristine wilderness" celebrated by mainstream nature writers. Instead, they focus on settings such as reservations, open-pit mines, and contested borderlands. Drawing on her own teaching experience among Native Americans and on lessons learned from such recent scenes of confrontation as Chiapas and Black Mesa, Joni Adamson explores why what counts as "nature" is often very different for multicultural writers and activist groups than it is for mainstream environmentalists. This powerful book is one of the first to examine the intersections between literature and the environment from the perspective of the oppressions of race, class, gender, and nature, and the first to review American Indian literature from the standpoint of environmental justice and ecocriticism. By examining such texts as Sherman Alexie's short stories and Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead, Adamson contends that these works, in addition to being literary, are examples of ecological criticism that expand Euro-American concepts of nature and place. Adamson shows that when we begin exploring the differences that shape diverse cultural and literary representations of nature, we discover the challenge they present to mainstream American culture, environmentalism, and literature. By comparing the work of Native authors such as Simon Ortiz with that of environmental writers such as Edward Abbey, she reveals opportunities for more multicultural conceptions of nature and the environment. More than a work of literary criticism, this is a book about the search to find ways to understand our cultural and historical differences and similarities in order to arrive at a better agreement of what the human role in nature is and should be. It exposes the blind spots in early ecocriticism and shows the possibilities for building common groundÑ a middle placeÑ where writers, scholars, teachers, and environmentalists might come together to work for social and environmental change.
Download or read book Converging Stories written by Jeffrey Myers and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that in US literature, discourse on the themes of race and ecology is too narrowly focused on the twentieth century and does not adequately take into account how these themes are interrelated. This study broadens the field by looking at writings from the nineteenth century.
Download or read book The Ecological Other written by Sarah Jaquette Ray and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2013-05-16 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book engages recent scholarship on trans-corporeality, disability studies, and environmental justice. Ray argues that environmental discourse often frames ecological crisis as a crisis of the body, therefore promoting ecological health at the cost of social equality. Ray urges us to be careful about the ways in which we construct “others” in our arguments to protect nature.
Download or read book The Middle Place written by Kelly Corrigan and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2008-01-08 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Middle Place is about calling home. Instinctively. Even when all the paperwork -- a marriage license, a notarized deed, two birth certificates, and seven years of tax returns -- clearly indicates you're an adult, but all the same, there you are, clutching the phone and thanking God that you're still somebody's daughter." For Kelly Corrigan, family is everything. At thirty-six, she had a marriage that worked, a couple of funny, active kids, and a weekly newspaper column. But even as a thriving adult, Kelly still saw herself as George Corrigan's daughter. A garrulous Irish-American charmer from Baltimore, George was the center of the ebullient, raucous Corrigan clan. He greeted every day by opening his bedroom window and shouting, "Hello, World!" Suffice it to say, Kelly's was a colorful childhood, just the sort a girl could get attached to. Kelly lives deep within what she calls the Middle Place -- "that sliver of time when parenthood and childhood overlap" -- comfortably wedged between her adult duties and her parents' care. But she's abruptly shoved into a coming-of-age when she finds a lump in her breast -- and gets the diagnosis no one wants to hear. And so Kelly's journey to full-blown adulthood begins. When George, too, learns he has late-stage cancer, it is Kelly's turn to take care of the man who had always taken care of her -- and show us a woman as she finally takes the leap and grows up. Kelly Corrigan is a natural-born storyteller, a gift you quickly recognize as her father's legacy, and her stories are rich with everyday details. She captures the beat of an ordinary life and the tender, sometimes fractious moments that bind families together. Rueful and honest, Kelly is the prized friend who will tell you her darkest, lowest, screwiest thoughts, and then later, dance on the coffee table at your party. Funny, yet heart-wrenching, The Middle Place is about being a parent and a child at the same time. It is about the special double-vision you get when you are standing with one foot in each place. It is about the family you make and the family you came from -- and locating, navigating, and finally celebrating the place where they meet. It is about reaching for life with both hands -- and finding it.
Download or read book The Environmental Justice Reader written by Joni Adamson and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2022-02-08 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the First National People of Color Congress on Environmental Leadership to WTO street protests of the new millennium, environmental justice activists have challenged the mainstream movement by linking social inequalities to the uneven distribution of environmental dangers. Grassroots movements in poor communities and communities of color strive to protect neighborhoods and worksites from environmental degradation and struggle to gain equal access to the natural resources that sustain their cultures. This book examines environmental justice in its social, economic, political, and cultural dimensions in both local and global contexts, with special attention paid to intersections of race, gender, and class inequality. The first book to link political studies, literary analysis, and teaching strategies, it offers a multivocal approach that combines perspectives from organizations such as the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice and the International Indigenous Treaty Council with the insights of such notable scholars as Devon Peña, Giovanna Di Chiro, and Valerie Kuletz, and also includes a range of newer voices in the field. This collection approaches environmental justice concerns from diverse geographical, ethnic, and disciplinary perspectives, always viewing environmental issues as integral to problems of social inequality and oppression. It offers new case studies of native Alaskans' protests over radiation poisoning; Hispanos' struggles to protect their land and water rights; Pacific Islanders' resistance to nuclear weapons testing and nuclear waste storage; and the efforts of women employees of maquiladoras to obtain safer living and working environments along the U.S.-Mexican border. The selections also include cultural analyses of environmental justice arts, such as community art and greening projects in inner-city Baltimore, and literary analyses of writers such as Jimmy Santiago Baca, Linda Hogan, Barbara Neely, Nez Perce orators, Ken Saro-Wiwa, and Karen Yamashita—artists who address issues such as toxicity and cancer, lead poisoning of urban African American communities, and Native American struggles to remove dams and save salmon. The book closes with a section of essays that offer models to teachers hoping to incorporate these issues and texts into their classrooms. By combining this array of perspectives, this book makes the field of environmental justice more accessible to scholars, students, and concerned readers.
Download or read book Teaching North American Environmental Literature written by Laird Christensen and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From stories about Los Angeles freeways to slave narratives to science fiction, environmental literature encompasses more than nature writing. The study of environmental narrative has flourished since the MLA published Teaching Environmental Literature in 1985. Today, writers evince a self-consciousness about writing in the genre, teachers have incorporated field study into courses, technology has opened up classroom possibilities, and institutions have developed to support study of this vital body of writing. The challenge for instructors is to identify core texts while maintaining the field's dynamic, open qualities. The essays in this volume focus on North American environmental writing, presenting teachers with background on environmental justice issues, ecocriticism, and ecofeminism. Contributors consider the various disciplines that have shaped the field, including African American, American Indian, Canadian, and Chicana/o literature. The interdisciplinary approaches recommended treat the theme of predators in literature, ecology and ethics, conservation, and film. A focus on place-based literature explores how students can physically engage with the environment as they study literature. The volume closes with an annotated resource guide organized by subject matter.
Download or read book Listening to the Land written by Lee Schweninger and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For better or worse, representations abound of Native Americans as a people with an innate and special connection to the earth. This study looks at the challenges faced by Native American writers who confront stereotypical representations as they assert their own ethical relationship with the earth. Lee Schweninger considers a range of genres (memoirs, novels, stories, essays) by Native writers from various parts of the United States. Contextualizing these works within the origins, evolution, and perpetuation of the “green” labels imposed on American Indians, Schweninger shows how writers often find themselves denying some land ethic stereotypes while seeming to embrace others. Taken together, the time periods covered inListening to the Landspan more than a hundred years, from Luther Standing Bear’s description of his late-nineteenth-century life on the prairie to Linda Hogan’s account of a 1999 Makah hunt of a gray whale. Two-thirds of the writers Schweninger considers, however, are well-known voices from the second half of the twentieth century, including N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Vine Deloria Jr., Gerald Vizenor, and Louis Owens. Few ecocritical studies have focused on indigenous environmental attitudes, in comparison to related work done by historians and anthropologists.Listening to the Landwill narrow this gap in the scholarship; moreover, it will add individual Native American perspectives to an understanding of what, to these writers, is a genuine Native American philosophy regarding the land.
Download or read book Almanac of the Dead written by Leslie Marmon Silko and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1992-11-01 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “To read this book is to hear the voices of the ancestors and spirits telling us where we came from, who we are, and where we must go.” —Maxine Hong Kingston From critically acclaimed author Leslie Marmon Silko, an epic novel about people caught between two cultures and two times: the modern-day Southwest, and the places of the old ones, the native peoples of the Americas In its extraordinary range of character and culture, Almanac of the Dead is fiction on the grand scale, a brilliant, haunting, and tragic novel of ruin and resistance in the Americas. At the heart of this story is Seese, an enigmatic survivor of the fast-money, high-risk world of drug dealing—a world in which the needs of modern America exist in a dangerous balance with Native American traditions. Seese has been drawn back to the Southwest in search of her missing child. In Tuscon, she encounters Lecha, a well-known psychic who is hiding from the consequences of her celebrity. Lecha's larger duty is to transcribe the ancient, painfully preserved notebooks that contain the history of her own people—a Native American Almanac of the Dead. Through the violent lives of Lecha's extended familiy, a many-layered narrative unfolds to tell the magnificent, tragic, and unforgettable story of the struggle of native peoples in the Americas to keep, at all costs, the core of their culture: their way of seeing, their way of believing, their way of being.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment written by Louise Westling and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This authoritative collection of rigorous but accessible essays investigates the exciting new interdisciplinary field of environmental literary criticism.
Download or read book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor written by Rob Nixon and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Groundbreaking in its call to reconsider our approach to the slow rhythm of time in the very concrete realms of environmental health and social justice.” —Wold Literature Today The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode. In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
Download or read book American Studies Ecocriticism and Citizenship written by Joni Adamson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors to the collection examine literary, historical, and cultural examples from the 19th century to the 21st. They explore notions of the common--namely, common humanity, common wealth, and common ground--and the relation of these notions to often conflicting definitions of who (or what) can have access to "citizenship" and "rights." The book engages in scholarly ecological analysis via the lens of various human groups--ethnic, racial, gendered, coalitional--that are shaping twenty-first century environmental experience and vision.
Download or read book Framing the World written by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2010-08-06 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: films. --Book Jacket.
Download or read book Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies written by Catrin Gersdorf and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2006 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies is a collection of essays written by European and North American scholars who argue that nature and culture can no longer be thought of in oppositional, mutually exclusive terms. They are united in an effort to push the theoretical limits of ecocriticism towards a more rigorous investigation of nature's critical potential as a concept that challenges modern culture's philosophical assumptions, epistemological convictions, aesthetic principles, and ethical imperatives. This volume offers scholars and students of literature, culture, history, philosophy, and linguistics new insights into the ongoing transformation of ecocriticism into an innovative force in international and interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies.
Download or read book Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies written by Salma Monani and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-05 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the intersections between the interdisciplinary realms of Ecocriticism and Indigenous and Native American Studies, and between academic theory and pragmatic eco-activism conducted by multiethnic and indigenous communities. It illuminates the multi-layered, polyvocal ways in which artistic expressions render ecological connections, drawing on scholars working in collaboration with Indigenous artists from all walks of life, including film, literature, performance, and other forms of multimedia to expand existing conversations. Both local and global in its focus, the volume includes essays from multiethnic and Indigenous communities across the world, visiting topics such as Navajo opera, Sami film production history, south Indian tribal documentary, Maori art installations, Native American and First Nations science-fiction literature and film, Amazonian poetry, and many others. Highlighting trans-Indigenous sensibilities that speak to worldwide crises of environmental politics and action against marginalization, the collection alerts readers to movements of community resilience and resistance, cosmological thinking about inter- and intra-generational multi-species relations, and understandings of indigenous aesthetics and material ecologies. It engages with emerging environmental concepts such as multispecies ethnography, cosmopolitics, and trans-indigeneity, as well as with new areas of ecocritical research such as material ecocriticism, biosemiotics, and media studies. In its breadth and scope, this book promises new directions for ecocritical thought and environmental humanities practice, providing thought-provoking insight into what it means to be human in a locally situated, globally networked, and cosmologically complex world.
Download or read book Fallen Forests written by Karen L. Kilcup and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1844, Lydia Sigourney asserted, "Man's warfare on the trees is terrible." Like Sigourney many American women of her day engaged with such issues as sustainability, resource wars, globalization, voluntary simplicity, Christian ecology, and environmental justice. Illuminating the foundations for contemporary women's environmental writing, Fallen Forests shows how their nineteenth-century predecessors marshaled powerful affective, ethical, and spiritual resources to chastise, educate, and motivate readers to engage in positive social change. Fallen Forests contributes to scholarship in American women's writing, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and feminist rhetoric, expanding the literary, historical, and theoretical grounds for some of today's most pressing environmental debates. Karen L. Kilcup rejects prior critical emphases on sentimentalism to show how women writers have drawn on their literary emotional intelligence to raise readers' consciousness about social and environmental issues. She also critiques ecocriticism's idealizing tendency, which has elided women's complicity in agendas that depart from today's environmental orthodoxies. Unlike previous ecocritical works, Fallen Forests includes marginalized texts by African American, Native American, Mexican American, working-class, and non-Protestant women. Kilcup also enlarges ecocriticism's genre foundations, showing how Cherokee oratory, travel writing, slave narrative, diary, polemic, sketches, novels, poetry, and expos intervene in important environmental debates.
Download or read book Keywords for Environmental Studies written by Joni Adamson and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-02-26 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces key terms, quantitative and qualitative research, debates, and histories for Environmental and Nature Studies Understandings of “nature” have expanded and changed, but the word has not lost importance at any level of discourse: it continues to hold a key place in conversations surrounding thought, ethics, and aesthetics. Nowhere is this more evident than in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies. Keywords for Environmental Studies analyzes the central terms and debates currently structuring the most exciting research in and across environmental studies, including the environmental humanities, environmental social sciences, sustainability sciences, and the sciences of nature. Sixty essays from humanists, social scientists, and scientists, each written about a single term, reveal the broad range of quantitative and qualitative approaches critical to the state of the field today. From “ecotourism” to “ecoterrorism,” from “genome” to “species,” this accessible volume illustrates the ways in which scholars are collaborating across disciplinary boundaries to reach shared understandings of key issues—such as extreme weather events or increasing global environmental inequities—in order to facilitate the pursuit of broad collective goals and actions. This book underscores the crucial realization that every discipline has a stake in the central environmental questions of our time, and that interdisciplinary conversations not only enhance, but are requisite to environmental studies today. Visit keywords.nyupress.org for online essays, teaching resources, and more.
Download or read book Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities written by Sarah Jaquette Ray and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2017-06 with total page 682 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although scholars in the environmental humanities have been exploring the dichotomy between "wild" and "built" environments for several years, few have focused on the field of disability studies, a discipline that enlists the contingency between environments and bodies as a foundation of its scholarship. On the other hand, scholars in disability studies have demonstrated the ways in which the built environment privileges some bodies and minds over others, yet they have rarely examined the ways in which toxic environments engender chronic illness and disability or how environmental illnesses disrupt dominant paradigms for scrutinizing "disability." Designed as a reader for undergraduate and graduate courses, Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities employs interdisciplinary perspectives to examine such issues as slow violence, imperialism, race, toxicity, eco-sickness, the body in environmental justice, ableism, and other topics. With a historical scope spanning the seventeenth century to the present, this collection not only presents the foundational documents informing this intersection of fields but also showcases the most current work, making it an indispensable reference.
