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Embracing a rich diversity of voices, this volume seeks to explore
the different facets of Anthropocene naturecultures in the desert
biomes of the Global South and beyond. Essays in this collection
will articulate issues of desertification, indigeneity and
re-inhabitation in narratives that thread together Tibet, China,
Australia, India, South Mexico, South Africa and Brazil in all
their richness and complexity. Re-imaging the desert figure’s
rich biodiversity, this book presents new ways to envision the
human relationships to natural ecology and mindful accountability,
tracing complex narrative connections and challenging hegemonic
norms of its role in the co-construction of identity, affect, and
gender. Essays also aim to engage in an intertextual conversation
with colonial genres that influence the popular conception of these
spaces, moving beyond the usual tropes to forge a topographically
informed desert identity and posit a ‘natureculture’ ecosystem
based on the interpenetration of landscape, culture, and history.
This volume includes literary exploration of environmental
injustices, analyzing motifs of deforestation, land degradation,
falling crop production, toxic man-made chemicals, and extractivist
practices linked to various social and economic stressors and
gradients in economic and political power. This diverse volume will
provide a significant contribution to desert humanities from the
Global South, responding to the pressing problems of the
Anthropocene and employing place-based ecocritical frameworks that
help us imagine a sustainable way of life.
Ecocriticism and environmental communication studies have for many
years co-existed as parallel disciplines, occasionally crossing
paths but typically operating in separate academic spheres. These
fields are now rapidly converging, and this handbook aims to
reinforce the common concerns and methodologies of the sibling
disciplines. The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and
Environmental Communication charts the history of the relationship
between ecocriticism and environmental communication studies, while
also highlighting key new paradigms in information studies, diverse
examples of practical applications of environmental communication
and textual analysis, and the patterns and challenges of
environmental communication in non-Western societies. Contributors
to this book include literary, film and religious studies scholars,
communication studies specialists, environmental historians,
practicing journalists, art critics, linguists, ethnographers,
sociologists, literary theorists, and others, but all focus their
discussions on key issues in textual representations of
human-nature relationships and on the challenges and possibilities
of environmental communication. The handbook is designed to map
existing trends in both ecocriticism and environmental
communication and to predict future directions. This handbook will
be an essential reference for teachers, students, and practitioners
of environmental literature, film, journalism, communication, and
rhetoric, and well as the broader meta-discipline of environmental
humanities.
Bringing together two parallel and occasionally intersecting
disciplines - the environmental and medical humanities - this
field-defining handbook reveals our ecological predicament to be a
simultaneous threat to human health. The book: * Represents the
first collection to bring the environmental humanities and medical
humanities into conversation in a systematic way * Features
contributions from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives
including literary studies, environmental ethics and philosophy,
cultural history and sociology * Adopts a truly global approach,
examining contexts including, but not limited to, North America,
the UK, Africa, Latin America, South Asia, Turkey and East Asia *
Touches on issues and approaches such as narrative medicine,
ecoprecarity, toxicity, mental health, and contaminated
environments. Showcasing and surveying a rich spectrum of issues
and methodologies, this book looks not only at where research
currently is at the intersection of these two important fields, but
also at where it is going.
Ecocriticism and environmental communication studies have for many
years co-existed as parallel disciplines, occasionally crossing
paths but typically operating in separate academic spheres. These
fields are now rapidly converging, and this handbook aims to
reinforce the common concerns and methodologies of the sibling
disciplines. The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and
Environmental Communication charts the history of the relationship
between ecocriticism and environmental communication studies, while
also highlighting key new paradigms in information studies, diverse
examples of practical applications of environmental communication
and textual analysis, and the patterns and challenges of
environmental communication in non-Western societies. Contributors
to this book include literary, film and religious studies scholars,
communication studies specialists, environmental historians,
practicing journalists, art critics, linguists, ethnographers,
sociologists, literary theorists, and others, but all focus their
discussions on key issues in textual representations of
human-nature relationships and on the challenges and possibilities
of environmental communication. The handbook is designed to map
existing trends in both ecocriticism and environmental
communication and to predict future directions. This handbook will
be an essential reference for teachers, students, and practitioners
of environmental literature, film, journalism, communication, and
rhetoric, and well as the broader meta-discipline of environmental
humanities.
Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development takes stock of cultural
and environmental contexts in many different regions of the world
by exploring literature and film. Artists and scholars working in
the social ecology, environmental justice, and postcolonial arenas
have long recognized that as soon as we tug on a thread of
"ecodegradation," we generally find it linked to some form of
cultural oppression. The reverse is also often true. In the spirit
of postcolonial ecocriticism, the studies collected by Scott
Slovic, R. Swarnalatha, and Vidya Sarveswaran emphasize the
impossibility of disentangling environmental and cultural problems.
While not all the authors explicitly invoke Karen Thornber's term
"ecoambiguity" or the concepts and terminology of postcolonial
ecocriticism, their articles frequently bring to light various
ironies. For example, the fact that Ukrainian environmental
experience in the twenty-first century is defined by one of the
world's most infamous industrial disasters, the Chernobyl nuclear
accident of 1986, yet Ukrainian culture, like many throughout the
world, actually cherishes a profound, even animistic, attachment to
the wonders of nature. The repetition of this and other paradoxes
in human cultural responses to the more-than-human world reinforces
our sense of the congruities and idiosyncrasies of human culture.
Every human culture, regardless of its condition of economic and
industrial development, has produced its own version of
"environmental literature and art"-but the nuances of this work
reflect that culture's precise social and geophysical
circumstances. In various ways, these stories of community and
development from across the planet converge and diverge, as told
and explained by distinguished scholars, many of whom come from the
cultures represented in these articles.
This new book is the second volume in a two-volume "mini-series"
devoted to representing diverse and innovative ecocritical voices
from throughout the world, particularly from developing nations
(the first volume, Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development,
appeared in 2014). The vast majority of existing ecocritical
studies, even those which espouse the "postcolonial ecocritical"
perspective, operate within a first-world sensibility, speaking on
behalf of subalternized human communities and degraded landscapes
without actually eliciting the voices of the impacted communities.
We have sought in Ecocriticism of the Global South to allow
scholars from (or intimately familiar with) underrepresented
regions to "write back" to the world's centers of political and
military and economic power, expressing views of the intersections
of nature and culture from the perspective of developing countries.
This approach highlights what activist and writer Vandana Shiva has
described as the relationship between "ecology and the politics of
survival," showing both commonalities and local idiosyncrasies by
juxtaposing such countries as China and Northern Ireland, New
Zealand and Cameroon. The two volumes of the Ecocriticism of the
Global South Series point to the need for further cultivation of
the environmental humanities in regions of the world that are,
essentially, the front line of the human struggle to invent
sustainable and just civilizations on an imperiled planet.
Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development takes stock of cultural
and environmental contexts in many different regions of the world
by exploring literature and film. Artists and scholars working in
the social ecology, environmental justice, and postcolonial arenas
have long recognized that as soon as we tug on a thread of
"ecodegradation," we generally find it linked to some form of
cultural oppression. The reverse is also often true. In the spirit
of postcolonial ecocriticism, the studies collected by Scott
Slovic, R. Swarnalatha, and Vidya Sarveswaran emphasize the
impossibility of disentangling environmental and cultural problems.
While not all the authors explicitly invoke Karen Thornber's term
"ecoambiguity" or the concepts and terminology of postcolonial
ecocriticism, their articles frequently bring to light various
ironies. For example, the fact that Ukrainian environmental
experience in the twenty-first century is defined by one of the
world's most infamous industrial disasters, the Chernobyl nuclear
accident of 1986, yet Ukrainian culture, like many throughout the
world, actually cherishes a profound, even animistic, attachment to
the wonders of nature. The repetition of this and other paradoxes
in human cultural responses to the more-than-human world reinforces
our sense of the congruities and idiosyncrasies of human culture.
Every human culture, regardless of its condition of economic and
industrial development, has produced its own version of
"environmental literature and art"-but the nuances of this work
reflect that culture's precise social and geophysical
circumstances. In various ways, these stories of community and
development from across the planet converge and diverge, as told
and explained by distinguished scholars, many of whom come from the
cultures represented in these articles.
The vast majority of existing ecocritical studies, even those which
espouse the "postcolonial ecocritical" perspective, operate within
a first-world sensibility, speaking on behalf of subalternized
human communities and degraded landscapes without actually
eliciting the voices of the impacted communities. Ecocriticism of
the Global South seeks to allow scholars from (or intimately
familiar with) underrepresented regions to "write back" to the
world's centers of political and military and economic power,
expressing views of the intersections of nature and culture from
the perspective of developing countries. This approach highlights
what activist and writer Vandana Shiva has described as the
relationship between "ecology and the politics of survival,"
showing both commonalities and local idiosyncrasies by juxtaposing
such countries as China and Northern Ireland, New Zealand and
Cameroon. Much like Ecoambiguity, Community, and Development, this
new book is devoted to representing diverse and innovative
ecocritical voices from throughout the world, particularly from
developing nations. The two volumes complement each other by
pointing out the need for further cultivation of the environmental
humanities in regions of the world that are, essentially, the front
line of the human struggle to invent sustainable and just
civilizations on an imperiled planet.
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