Slow Violence: Nixon and environmental justice

Rob Nixon's brand-new book is groundbreaking.  Elsewhere, he writes,

Literary and postcolonial studies have ignored the environmentalism that often only the poor can see

Why does he use the word "violence" to think about environmental problems?

How does he argue that temporality is a crucial lens through which to understand the "environmentalism of the poor"?

What structures prevent us from understanding and seeing environmental injustices over the long-term?

What new ways of understanding environmental problems is Nixon asking us to explore?

Long-lasting effects of the dropping of Agent Orange on Vietnam

"Slow violence" helps us think of externalized costs as a form of violence

Penguins are Good to Think Through

Post your thoughts on Ch. 5 & 7 here!

Why environmental cultural studies is important!

http://features.peta.org/VeggieLove/

Sturgeon's book makes a strong case for the importance of critically examining popular culture for its political implications.  There is no such thing as harmless, innocuous advertising, and the ones that use the ideology of "naturalization" are particularly problematic.  Why?  On what grounds does she make the case that popular culture is so important to examine, and do you agree?  Why are gender, race, and nation important lenses to examine cultural texts that use "nature"?

YOUR TASK:

In your blog, explore any or all of these questions by posting an image or cultural text that you analyze in a Sturgeonian way.  For example, Sturgeon might argue that the "veggie love" PETA advertisement campaign that I posted here trades on sexism to promote vegetarianism, a point that is heightened when we "meat our meat" (a pig) at the end of a series of thumbnail shots of the women we could choose to meet, which likens the women to the pig.  "Helping animals" (an ad inside the ad) seems totally consistent with the kind of objectification of women going on here.  I could unpack this further with closer analysis about the absence of racially non-white women in it...  Or is the whole thing ironic?  See where I'm going?  TRY IT!

Please post this week at the Being Caribou blog!

http://uasocob.blogspot.com

Queering Ecology and Greening Queer Politics

What a text!  Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson's collection is one of the most recent major contributions to ecocriticism, along with Alaimo's Bodily Natures and Nixon's Slow Violence.  The field has fully embraced--with lots of people kicking and screaming against it-- cultural studies, including queer theory, postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and media studies.  Queer Ecologies is testament to this kind of work, and certainly a fantastic barometer of the "state of the field."

In Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson's introduction, they describe the project as interested in how understandings of nature inform sexuality and how sexuality shapes both material nature and our understandings of nature.  They want to queer ecology and to green queer politics.

What does this mean?  Why is it important?

For the purposes of this post, please unpack an idea that you had never thought of before reading these chapters. Even though I am immersed in this scholarship (indeed, this book is making very similar arguments I make in my own book about the relationship between corporeal fitness and environmental discourse), many of the ideas I am reading in Queer Ecologies are blowing my mind!

I look forward to what jumps out and grabs you about the relationships between sexuality, desire, and nature explored in these pages...

Discourse, Nature, Power: Intemperate Rainforest

The end result of so much poststructuralist rethinking of "nature" leads us to this unanswerable quagmire: does nature exist? Bruce Braun's Intemperate Rainforest takes us in a whole different direction, showing that the implications of seeing nature as a discourse of power doesn't undermine nature itself, but rather seeks to make human relations between each other and with nature more ethical.   Nature may not be "innocent" and "pure," but seeing it as such has more to do with social justice than it has to do with critiquing nature itself, whatever that is. It's because of books like this that I am such an interdisciplinary theory-geek. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Braun is a geographer, but you can see in his work that he brings literary critical theory questions-- humanistic questions if you rather-- to bear on field research. That is, he engages Foucault, Haraway, and Bruno Latour (another theorist we should and could be reading in this class, but are not).  And his "texts" include eco-tourism operations, Emily Carr's paintings, television programming, 19th-century geological texts, 20th-century forestry maps, billboards, and national park promotional materials. This is an impressive range!

What is he saying about these forms of discourse?  
What's wrong with them?  
What is "nature" in all this, to Braun?  
And, most important, how might his insights be applied to your own observations about SE Alaska? 

Perhaps after reading his chapter on Clayoquot, you'll want to do a discourse analysis of this film: Fury for the Sound: The Women of Clayoquot: http://www.furyforthesound.org!

What are YOUR interests? Final Paper Initial Research Blog

What question or set of questions are you finding yourself most interested in, in our ecocritical readings and discussion?

For this assignment, go over your notes and the syllabus, and also look ahead to what's in store to read for the remainder of the semester. Do this to refresh your memory, or anticipate gaps we'll be filling in as a class.  From these discussions and past/future readings, what has stood out to you?

In your blog posts due October 10, in lieu of classes, please brainstorm what you might want to write about for your final paper.  Try posing a possible research question or two, and include texts from our class that you would like to use to explore your question(s).  What are some key terms you'll use to explore further in your research?  What is your research "plan of attack"?

Then, do some of that initial canvasing for scholarly articles, popular cultural texts, blogs, etc-- what are others saying about this idea?  Get a sense of the current discussion and literature about the idea, and report on it.  What are the results of your initial research?  Report on this in your blog post.

In sum, your assignment consists of several steps:

1) go over the syllabus and our class notes,
2) brainstorm ideas that stood out to you,
3) compose a possible research question or two,
4) outline a research plan,
5) do just an initial bit of that research, and
6) write about it on the blog.

This is in lieu of classes and readings next week, so it should offer a nice opportunity to take a step back and assess what you've learned, what compels you about the questions of the class, and articulate a plan to give you greater purpose in the class for the rest of the semester.   This will be a great way to stake your own claim in the work we're doing.

We'll be writing paper proposals with the results of this work, so consider this just the beginning...

Take a step back and survey the "landscape" of ecocriticism.  What do YOU see?