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?

Garrard: Dwelling, Animals, and Futures

Spaceship Earth

In these last three chapters of Ecocriticism, what does Garrard explain or argue that you find to be the most compelling reason to study the environment?

Environmental tropes' imbrication with regimes of social control, such as Nazism and neocolonialism?

The value of literary critical skills to analyze and affect notions of the environment in the public sphere?

The importance of environmental literary studies especially in the face of postmodernism and late capitalism?

Garrard 

These are just a few ideas, but what struck YOU as the most compelling reason to be trained in ecocritical skills today?  And, while you're at it, what are those skills again? 



If you're interested in the full-length of that environmental humanities video featuring Garrard and others, of which we saw 10 minutes in class last week, here's the link: Environmental Humanities video featuring Garrard and others

Garrard's Ecocriticism: Defining the Field?

Garrard's Ecocriticism attempts to define the field of ecocriticism.  But the text is invariably organized and argued through Garrard's lens.

How would you define his approach to the field, and what aspects of his approach do you like or dislike?

For example, I really like the way he pairs readings of 'canonical' texts like Wordsworth and Thoreau with unconventional texts, like events.   I also like the way he frames ecocriticism's fraught relationship with science, and his gloss of the issues we raised about language on the day we read Gary Snyder.

Also, I like his definition of ecocriticism as a way of reading the world, and I like the organization of the book in "tropes" rather than chronology, or case studies, or other ways of organizing books.

What did you make of his unique organization?

Is this a good introduction to the field, or are you left wondering what he's missing?

Interesting Article on CCD

I ran across this today. This article isn't really related to any particular reading, but I thought it was kind of important. I've been hearing over the last few years about vanishing bee populations, colony collapse disorder. Apparently, three recent studies have figured out why. Here's a link to the article if you're interested:

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2012/04/09/mystery-of-the-disappearing-bees-solved/

Writing Contest-- Final Project Option

I love to make final projects in my classes opportunities for students to write for a broader audience and purpose than our class.  To that end, if I or you see anything that's worth considering writing for (instead of a final research paper), let's share those with each other.

Here's one from me.  It's a call for submissions for authors "under 30" about "coming of age after the end of nature."

This is precisely what we've talked so much about in class already-- 

If there's no "nature," what is there? 

Where does this leave your generation?



Read below. If you think it might be interesting to write for this purpose and on this topic, then use the final paper assignment in this class to do so, and we can work together on revising it.

Here are the details:

Call for Submissions:

Cosmic Outlaws: Coming of Age after the End of Nature
“When the wind and the grass are no longer part of the human spirit, … 
man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw.”  ~ Henry Beston

We are seeking essays, poetry, or fiction by writers age 30 and under 
for a literary anthology exploring changing human relationships with 
the natural world.  What are the challenges, fears, dreams, and sources 
of resilience of young writers—“Cosmic Outlaws” who have grown up on a 
fundamentally changing planet?

Submission Guidelines:

• Essays and short fiction up to 4,000 words
• Up to 3 poems
• Include your name, address, e-address and phone number and a brief 
bio with all submissions

Deadline:  December 31, 2012

Send submissions to both:

Julie Dunlap  juliejdunlap@earthlink.net /6371 Tinted Hill/Columbia, MD 
21045

and 

Susan A. Cohen  sacohen3@aacc.edu/40 Johnson Road/Pasadena, MD 21122

Thank you for your help in forwarding this call for submissions to your 
undergraduate and graduate students, colleagues, and friends.

Peace, Susan

Women Writing Nature: Gendered Interventions?

This week's readings come from an edited collection that asks, is nature writing gendered?

Do women notice some features of nature that men do not? Do women experience nature differently than men? What about the way they write about nature is gendered?

Whether that "difference" is understood as biological (i.e. women are more "in tune" with nature because they are inherently more "natural"), or as cultural (i.e. women are more cooperative), or as political (i.e. women are more likely to suffer environmental injustice), how do women intervene in thinking and writing nature?

The Culture of Nature: Alexander Wilson

Alexander Wilson "reads" landscapes as texts, much like we practiced reading pink flamingos as texts during week 1.

What do you think of how he organizes his book--- as "framed by two events, two places"? In the spirit of introducing ourselves to the field of ecocriticism, if we think of it as a way of looking at the world, what does Wilson's approach allow him to do?

What is similar and different between his arguments and Jennifer Price's?  Like Price, Wilson outlines lots of paradoxes or ironies within environmental discourse.  What are some of these?

If you were to examine a landscape or event in the way that Wilson does, to update his work and apply it to your own interests, what would you look at?

Pink Flamingos and the Cultural Politics of "Nature"

Price provocatively suggests that even though we'd all like to think that pink flamingos have nothing to do with nature, they in fact embody our relationship to nature because "Nature and Artifice" are "locked together absolutely in the same history" (113). In 2009, Madison, WI named the lawn ornament its official bird.

Plastic and Lawns: As American as Mom and Apple Pie....
The pink flamingo, as an emblem of American nature-artifice relations, is an extension of the American love of plastic and of lawns, arguably two of the most evil icons in the environmentalist imagination.

What are some ironies that the pink flamingo symbolizes? 
Is the pink flamingo potentially subversive? 
In what universe, that is, does Water's film Pink Flamingos operate as a class critique of elite and heteronormative views of nature? 
From a "queer ecocritical" perspective, why does the pink flamingo stand in for queer pride, and what does this have to do with nature?

Or do pink flamingos only "kill the ability to distinguish between art and life" (134), and therefore only "transgress" the boundary between the fake and the real (i.e. "nature")?

What does nature mean to me? Jennifer Price as the "Thoreau of the mall"

Our first reading this semester is from Jennifer Price's Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America.

The book is a great introduction to what it means to be an ecocritic. Sure, ecocritics analyze much more canonical "literature," from Beowulf and the Bible to Terry Tempest Williams and Edward Abbey.

 But I'm hoping to introduce you to ecocriticism more as a way of seeing the world around us than as a specialized set of practices beholden to expert scholars. Price is illustrative of this approach. She calls herself a "Thoreau of the mall," and argues that TV can tell us as much about nature as putting on a pair of hiking boots. She has a "deep uneasiness with entrenched American definitions of nature" (xvi), and the book mixes genres of personal narrative/nature writing and ecocriticism. As such, its audience is wider than most ecocritical scholarship.

 What do you think of the style/genre/audience of this text? Digestible distillation of complex concepts, or dumbed down drivel? 

If "Americans' most everyday encounters with the natural world take place through mass-produced culture" (xviii), we must take these encounters seriously.

What are some of the insights in Price's writing do you find particularly interesting?

Hello from me!

I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray, the teacher of this course. I am excited to use a blog as a primary assignment in our class. One purpose of the blog is to widen our audience and discussion beyond our classroom. So, whether you're a student or a reader, I hope you'll find the conversations here compelling, and feel free to comment. Blogs are also great because students are so immersed in media, and a blog helps bring the questions we discuss in class to bear on a wide range of media, texts, and other conversations. We'll use the blog posts to generate discussion in class, and to open new directions of inquiry that are not necessarily in the syllabus.