The Smell of Risk

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hsuan L. Hsu
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Justice ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Environmental Risks ◽  
Critical Race Studies ◽  
Indigenous Plants ◽  
Material Ecocriticism ◽  
Environmental Materials ◽  
Racial Discourses

The Smell of Risk considers the capacities of olfaction as a tool for sensing and staging modernity’s differentiated atmospheres and their associated environmental risks. Focusing on American literature and art from the 1890s to the present, the book considers how smell stages the pathways through which environmental materials enter and interact with bodies in detective fiction, naturalist novels, environmental illness memoirs, environmental justice narratives, and olfactory art. These texts reframe modernization as a regime of differential deodorization that relocates bad air and its associated noxious odors to vulnerable spaces and populations even as it derecognizes olfaction as a mode of embodied knowledge. The Smell of Risk brings insights from the fields of material ecocriticism, sensory studies, atmospheric geography, and critical race studies to bear on diverse contexts of atmospheric disparity, including Latinx communities exposed to freeway exhaust and pesticides, Asian diasporic artists’ responses to racial discourses about Asiatic odors, and writings that explore the atmospheric devastation of settler colonialism and the olfactory capacities of Indigenous plants.

scholarly journals Environmental justice, settler colonialism, and more-than-humans in the occupied West Bank: An introduction

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Irus Braverman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
West Bank ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
The West ◽  
The Core ◽  
Waste Concrete

Our special issue provides a first-of-its kind attempt to examine environmental injustices in the occupied West Bank through interdisciplinary perspectives, pointing to the broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts within which they occur and to their more-than-human implications. Specifically, we seek to understand what environmental justice—a movement originating from, and rooted in, the United States—means in the context of Palestine/Israel. Moving beyond the settler-native dialectic, we draw attention to the more-than-human flows that occur in the region—which include water, air, waste, cement, trees, donkeys, watermelons, and insects—to consider the dynamic, and often gradational, meanings of frontier, enclosure, and Indigeneity in the West Bank, challenging the all-too-binary assumptions at the core of settler colonialism. Against the backdrop of the settler colonial project of territorial dispossession and elimination, we illuminate the infrastructural connections and disruptions among lives and matter in the West Bank, interpreting these through the lens of environmental justice. We finally ask what forms of ecological decolonization might emerge from this landscape of accumulating waste, concrete, and ruin. Such alternative visions that move beyond the single axis of settler-native enable the emergence of more nuanced, and even hopeful, ecological imaginaries that focus on sumud, dignity, and recognition.

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliana Chow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Natural History ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Nineteenth Century American Literature ◽  
Writers Of Color ◽  
Environmental Survival ◽  
Theories Of Evolution

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History illuminates how literary experimentation with natural history provides penumbral views of environmental survival. The book brings together feminist revisions of scientific objectivity and critical race theory on diaspora to show how biogeography influenced material and metaphorical concepts of species and race. It also highlights how lesser known writers of color like Simon Pokagon and James McCune Smith connected species migration and mutability to forms of racial uplift. The book situates these literary visions of environmental fragility and survival amidst the development of Darwinian theories of evolution and against a westward expanding American settler colonialism.

Environmental Justice, Political Ecology, and the Three Bodies of a Mohawk Community

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Hoover
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Community Based

The first chapter introduces the Superfund process, and describes how concepts and theories around environmental justice and political ecology need to be framed with an understanding of settler colonialism to be applied to Native American communities. This introduction also describes the community based methods from which this project was born, and lays out the three bodies (individual, social and political) through which Akwesasro:non responses to topics throughout the book are framed

Global China in 21st-Century Asian American Literature

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunny Xiang
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
English Language ◽  
Mainland China ◽  
Chinese American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Chinese Characters ◽  
Complex Relation ◽  
Chinese Descent

Contemporary English-language prose and poetry writers, primarily of Chinese descent, are employing a range of stylistic strategies and exploring increasingly diverse themes in their representations of China and Chineseness. Through these representations, these contemporary writers build on, adapt, and contest a historically complex relation between “global” and “China” within an American imaginary. Twenty-first-century literary novelists and poets raise many questions about this relationship. These literatures of and about “Global China” both extend from and depart from, a “Chinese American” literary tradition. For instance, writers such as Jenny Zhang, Sharlene Teo, and Wang Weike are reworking long-standing narrative tropes such as intergenerational strife and transforming conventionally ethnic genres such as the autobiography. Contemporary literary works also take more heterogeneous approaches to referencing the United States and even “the West” more generally. And, unlike a prior tradition of Chinese American literature, these works open us to consider multiple kinds of China that far exceed the putative origin point of Mainland China (the most famous instance is Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians, which features Singaporeans of Chinese descent). On the flip side, representations of “Global China” may lack representations of identifiably “Chinese” characters (for instance, Rachel Khong’s Goodbye Vitamin). In other cases, Chinese characters may be relegated to a role, or Chineseness may be insignificant to a story’s plot. New themes and topics are emerging, most notably adoption, biraciality, mental health, and return-to-Asian journeys. Finally, the literatures of Global China include robust outgrowths of genre literature, ranging from speculative fiction to detective fiction. Writers of genre fiction include Ovidia Yu and Ted Chiang.

Indigenous stewardship as a lifeway1

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie Avalos
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
The World

As the decade closes, Indigenous peoples have re-emerged as a critical voice advocating not just for environmental justice but for an entirely different way of living and being with the world. As the descendants of the original inhabitants of lands now dominated by others, they are often entangled in ongoing struggles to protect their lands and sovereignty. Settler colonialism is now famously understood as a structure, not an event, meaning that colonial projects must be continually re-inscribed through discursive and juridical means in order to naturalize Indigenous dispossession. As a religious studies scholar, I am interested in the ways Native peoples in the United States operationalize religious action as an expression of refusal ‐ a refusal to acquiesce their religious lifeways and rights to their lands.

scholarly journals "Writing into the Rupture": Visual Selves in Mary-Kim Arnold’s Litany for the Long Moment

Meliora ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hana Rivers
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Asian American ◽  
The Body ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Roland Barthes ◽  
Asian American Literature ◽  
Critical Race Studies ◽  
Lyric Essay ◽  
Visual Elements ◽  
Asian American Identity

Multimedia texts are gaining more footing in the Asian American literary world, especially following Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s pre-eminent Dictee (1982). While lesser known, Mary-Kim Arnold’s Litany for the Long Moment (2018) is a highly referential lyric essay that employs visual elements, including personal ephemera, to consider the unrelenting complexities of Asian American identity. Analyzing Arnold’s formal intervention into Asian American literature through Francesca Woodman’s photography and Roland Barthes’ photography theory reveals that visual subjects are evasive and unknowable. Paradoxically, memorabilia has the power to rupture linear notions of time and cast into doubt what we know about past and present selves. Arnold’s engagement with the visual also extends to the body, and throughout the text she unsettles hegemonic constructions of gender and racial signification. Ultimately, an analysis of Litany for the Long Moment reveals that visual subjects rupture the concept of a stable self. Throughout this thesis, I draw from the fields of photography, poststructuralism, and critical race studies to argue that visual representation is not a sufficient mode of racial empowerment. Building off of Arnold’s claims about “writing into the rupture,” lack is not a closure, but an opening through which we can interrogate what it means to be a self.

scholarly journals Conclusion: Spiralling Forwards, Backwards, and Together to Decolonise Freshwater

2021 ◽  
pp. 463-482
Author(s):  
Meg Parsons ◽  
Karen Fisher ◽  
Roa Petra Crease
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Tribal Group ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Settler Societies ◽  
Key Dimensions ◽  
Justice Movements

AbstractIn this concluding chapter, we bring together our earlier analyses of the historical and contemporary waterscapes of the Waipā River (Aotearoa New Zealand) to consider the theory and practice of Indigenous environmental justice. In this chapter, we return to review three key dimensions of environmental justice: distributive, procedural, and recognition. We summarise the efforts of one Māori tribal group (Ngāti Maniapoto) to challenge the knowledge and authority claims of the settler-colonial-state and draw attention to the pluralistic dimensions of Indigenous environmental (in)justice. Furthermore, we highlight that since settler colonialism is not a historic moment but still a ongoing reality for Indigneous peoples living settler societies it is critically important to critically evaluate theorising about and environmental justice movements through a decolonising praxis.

Unsettling the Land

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Berne Burow ◽  
Sandra Brock ◽  
Michael R. Dove
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Indigenous Movements ◽  
Plantation Development ◽  
Multiple Ontologies

This article examines different ontologies of land in settler colonialism and Indigenous movements for decolonization and environmental justice. Settler ontologies of land operate by occluding other modes of perceiving, representing, and experiencing land. Indigenous ontologies of land are commonly oriented around relationality and reciprocal obligations among humans and the other-than-human. Drawing together scholarship from literatures in political economy, political ecology, Indigenous studies, and post-humanism, we synthesize an approach to thinking with land to understand structures of dispossession and the possibilities for Indigenous revitalization through ontological hybridity. Using two different case studies—plantation development in Indonesia and land revitalization in the Confederated Salish & Kootenai Nation—we further develop how settler and Indigenous ontologies operate on the ground, illuminating the coexistence of multiple ontologies of land. Given the centrality of land in settler colonialism, hybrid ontologies are important to Indigenous movements seeking to simultaneously strengthen sovereignty over territory and revitalize land-based practices.

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