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

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.

Stories that Nourish: Minnesota Anishinaabe Wild Rice Narratives

Anishinaabe manoomin (wild rice) narratives maintain core aspects of Anishinaabe identity and epistemology, constituting Anishinaabe gikendaasowin (knowledge). Ranging from aadizokaanag to more contemporary dibaajimowinan, these narratives describe the close historical, spiritual, ecological, and material relationships between Anishinaabe communities and manoomin and demonstrate the importance to Anishinaabe self-determination of maintaining such connection. Manoomin feeds the people, and stories by Jim Northrup, Heid Erdrich, Linda LaGarde Grover, Gerald Vizenor, and Winona LaDuke, among others, propagate manoomin gikendaasowin, which supports Anishinaabe food sovereignty activism that seeks to protect and maintain manoomin and provide the nourishment that helps Anishinaabe communities to thrive.