scholarly journals The Arts, Environmental Justice, and the Ecological Crisis

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
The Arts

Performance Art, Performativity, and Environmentalism in the Capitalocene

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Chin Davidson
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Cultural Knowledge ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Feminist Art ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
European Colonization ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Eco Art

Since the late 20th century, performance has played a vital role in environmental activism, and the practice is often related to concepts of eco-art, eco-feminist art, land art, theatricality, and “performing landscapes.” With the advent of the Capitalocene discourse in the 21st century, performance has been useful for acknowledging indigenous forms of cultural knowledge and for focusing on the need to reintegrate nature and culture in addressing ecological crisis. The Capitalocene was distinguished from the Anthropocene by Donna Haraway who questions the figuration of the Anthropos as reflexive of a fossil-fuel-burning ethos that does not represent the whole of industrial humanity in the circuit of global capital. Jason W. Moore’s analysis for the Capitalocene illustrates the division between nature and society that is affirmed by the tenets of the Anthropocene. Scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer had dated the Anthropocene age to the industrial acceleration of the late-18th/mid-19th century but Moore points to the rise of capitalism in the 15th century when European colonization reduced indigenous peoples to naturales in their modernist definition of nature that became distinct from the new society. As material property, women were also precluded from this segment of industrial humanity. By the 20th century, the Euro-American system for progressive modernism in the arts was supported by the inscription of cultures that represented un-modern “primitivist” nature. The tribal and the modern became a postcolonial debate in art historical discourse. In the context of the Capitalocene, a different historiography of eco-art, eco-feminist art, and environmental performances can be conceived by acknowledging the work of artists such as Ana Mendieta and Kara Walker who have illustrated the segregation of people according to the nature/society divide. Informed by Judith Butler’s phenomenological analyses of performative acts, the aesthetic use of bodily-oriented expression (with its effects on the viewer’s body) provides a vocabulary for artists engaging in the subjects of the Capitalocene. In the development of performances in the global context, artists such as Wu Mali, Yin Xiuzhen, and Ursula Biemann have emphasized the relationship between bodies of humans and bodies of water through interactive works for the public, sited at the rivers and the shores of streams. They show how humans are not separate from nature, a concept that has long been conveyed by indigenous rituals that run deep in many cultures. While artists have been effective in acknowledging the continuing exploitations of the environment, their performances have also reflected the “self” of nature that humans are in the act of destroying.

Environmental Justice and Primary Prevention of Cancer: The Odyssey and Legacy of Lorenzo Tomatis

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Huff ◽  
Ronald Melnick
Keyword(s):  
Primary Prevention ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
History Of Medicine ◽  
Chemical Carcinogenesis ◽  
Professional Life ◽  
Social Injustice ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Physician Scientist ◽  
Prevention Of Cancer

Lorenzo Tomatis [1929–2007] devoted his private and professional life to the betterment of mankind. As a physician, scientist, and humanitarian he championed against the plight of social injustice and promoted the obvious benefits of primary prevention of diseases compared to treatments that prevent or delay disease progression, especially occupational cancers. An avowed student and scholar of literature, the arts, the history of medicine and science, and chemical carcinogenesis, he believed in and wrote about these issues throughout his storied life. Some of his achievements, with excerpts from his writings, especially on primary prevention and on social injustice, are highlighted herein.

Notes on Becoming a Comrade: Indigenous Women, Leadership, and Movement(s) for Decolonization

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 41-54
Author(s):  
Jaskiran Dhillon
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Indigenous Women ◽  
Gender Violence ◽  
Political Consciousness ◽  
Women Leadership ◽  
Indigenous Woman ◽  
The Arts

Written from the perspective of a non-Indigenous woman of color “standing with” Indigenous communities through politicized allyship, this article explores the politics of becoming a comrade to Indigenous peoples in their struggles for liberation in the settler-colonial present. Dhillon highlights key moments in the development of her political consciousness by centering the fundamental leadership, knowledge, and guidance of Indigenous women in decolonial activism and scholarship across a range of areas—including environmental justice, colonial gender violence, and the arts—that have been foundational to the anticolonial framework informing her scholarship and organizing.

Masturbatory Ecologies

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 30-59
Author(s):  
Jeremy Chow
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Justice Movements ◽  
The Erotic

This essay considers how environmentalism can be interwoven with discourses of sexuality and the ways in which sexuality can participate in environmental justice movements. By thinking with provocative, erotic media that highlight environmental degradation, it marries investigations of ecological crisis at the hands of deforestation and porn studies with two aims. First, it highlights the fraught relationship a pornographic video aggregator like Pornhub might share with feminist and queer epistemologies. Second, it emphasizes the ecosexual nature of environmental justice by way of Pornhub’s Give America Wood initiative (2014) and the documentary Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2014). While Goodbye Gauley Mountain and Pornhub are incommensurate in many ways, together they demonstrate how masturbatory ecologies enable a relationship with the environment that can be both active, as in the film’s offering, and passive, as with Pornhub’s, and thus constitute a “perverted” environmental justice through the experience and demonstration of sexuality. A perverted environmental justice envisions a broader framework that recognizes the potential to actively and passively participate in environmental social justice while also enfolding the environment into sexual arrangements. “Masturbatory ecologies” thus signifies a self-gratifying mode of environmentalism that harnesses the self, the body, and the erotic to foster positive environmental world building in apocalyptic times.

Environmental Governmentality

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Luke
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Social Injustice ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Democratic Action ◽  
Activist Movements

This chapter asks critical thinkers and activist movements to concentrate their efforts on mapping out how and why the essential tasks of government today pivot on the arts of exercising power in techno-economic forms in both “the ecology” and “the economy” to protect the environment, maintain order, and attain the good life through more effective governmentalizing actions. In turn, they must determine if such actions either attain democratic action and environmental justice or simply accentuate technocratic domination and social injustice. The chapter provides an overview of governmentality, as Michel Foucault developed this concept, and reevaluates his provisional notion of “milieux” as it relates to shaping the environmental governmentality that many accept as progressive green political action. It concludes by stressing the importance of political reflexivity and resistance to counter the managerial impulses behind environmental governmentality.

Occupy Climate: Social Movement-Building in Literature, Politics, and the Arts

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-103
Author(s):  
Stephanie LeMenager
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
Planetary Geology ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Movement Building ◽  
Mike Davis ◽  
Winona Laduke

Abstract New books by Shelley Streeby, Robert Marzec, and Ashley Dawson point the way toward a cultural criticism for the climate change era. In its own way, each seeks to change the methods of literary and cultural studies, to change the form of the academic monograph, and to encourage a just transition from the radically unequal and ecologically injured world of the now. All three can be seen as contributing to the social and academic movement known as Environmental Justice or Critical Environmental Justice. All three evoke, to some extent, earlier, experimental scholarly works influenced by or generative for the Occupy movement, writings by theorists and practitioners of tactical media like McKenzie Wark and Ricardo Dominguez, and such popular radical thinkers as Mike Davis, Rebecca Solnit, Naomi Klein, and Winona LaDuke. Finally, all three books emerge, somewhat unexpectedly, from literature departments, raising the question of what we mean by literary and cultural studies at this moment in the eclipse of humanism by planetary geology and posthumanist philosophical thought.

scholarly journals The Arts of Coexistence: A View From Anthropology

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Asu Schroer
Keyword(s):  
Human Dimensions ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Social Dimensions ◽  
Conservation Science ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Current Thinking ◽  
Disciplinary Field ◽  
Science Community ◽  
Alternative Approaches

In this perspectives essay, I propose some ways in which current thinking in anthropology might inform the emergent cross-disciplinary field of coexistence studies. I do so following recent calls from within the conservation science community (including this special issue), acknowledging that understanding human-wildlife coexistence in the fractured landscapes of the Anthropocene1 requires being open to alternative approaches beyond conventional frameworks of conservation science and management (see for instance; Carter and Linnell, 2016; Pooley, 2016; Chapron and López-Bao, 2019; Pooley et al., 2020). The essay suggests that relational (non-dualist) ways of thinking2 in anthropology, often building on Indigenous philosophy and expertise, may help ground coexistence studies beyond Euro-Western modernist conceptual frameworks—frameworks that perpetuate exploitative and colonial logics that many scholars from across academia view as being at the heart of our current ecological crisis (e.g., Lestel, 2013; van Dooren, 2014; Tsing, 2015; Todd, 2016; Bluwstein et al., 2021; Schroer et al., 2021). By proposing “relations” rather than objectified “Nature” or “wildlife” as the more adequate subject of understanding and facilitating coexistence in shared landscapes, I understand coexistence and its study first and foremost as an ethical and political endeavor. Rather than offering any conclusive ideas, the essay's intention is to contribute some questions and thoughts to the developing conversations of coexistence studies scholars and practitioners. It does so by inviting conservation scientists to collaborate with anthropologists and take on board some of the current thinking in the discipline. Amongst other things, I suggest that this will help overcome a somewhat dated notion of cultural relativism—understood as many particular, cultural views on one true objective Nature (only known by Science), a perspective that explicitly and implicitly seems to inform some conservation science approaches to issues of culture or the “human dimensions” of conservation issues. Ultimately, the paper seeks to make a conceptual contribution by imagining coexistence as a dynamic bundle of relations in which the biological, ecological, historical, cultural, and social dimensions cannot be thought apart and have to be studied together.

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