2. This panel seeks to examine the gendered, racialized ontological imperatives of Western metaphysics as they have adhered within the spatial ecologies within our contemporary environmental crisis, focusing specifically on the role and crucial importance of the humanities in the age of the anthropocene. Engaging theories of ecofeminism, postcolonialism, feminist geographies, animal studies, spatiality, and cultural studies, this panel seeks to bring together a genealogical analysis of patriarchy, colonization, environmental destruction, and the rhetoric of empire as embedded within our environmental present, focusing specifically on the concomitant influences of such predominant ecological feminist authors such as Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldua, Leslie Marmon Silko, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Alexis Wright, Charlotte Wood and others who have critically examined the relationship between gender, race, space, place, bodies, identity, the environment, and empire from within their writing. The focus of this panel is anchored around animating historically marginalized voices and perspectives in an effort to bring forth a powerful counter-narrative to the legacy of patriarchal empire and its devastating impacts on nature, women, and non-whites. This panel seeks to engage the many respective analyses of deeply influential feminist American, postcolonial and indigenous novels, specifically articulating the ways in which the ontological imperatives of patriarchal metaphysics illustrate the parallels between Western assaults against the body, against the land, as symptomatic of our current environmental crisis, illuminating one of the many ways that fiction teaches us about the world and human impulses.
3. A great body of scholarship within the environmental humanities, American studies, postcolonial ecologies, and ecocriticism has emerged in an effort to examine the impact of a quickly eroding global environment, and this panel is incredibly timely for intervening within this ongoing conversation. The panel is specifically informed by scholars such as Stacy Alaimo, Susan Hekman, Rob Nixon, Greta Gaard, Donna Harraway, Val Plumwood, Ania Loomba, Vandana Shiva, Simon Estok, Serpil Opperman, and other ecocritical/postcolonial ecological thinkers and writers. In addition, the scholars on this panel have respective publications on the concomitant relationship between the role of the humanities in the age of a dwindling ecologically tenable world picture. "Climate Change, Feminist Ecologies, and the Future of the Humanities" seeks to intervene within our current historical moment and leverage this multi-pronged theoretical and literary approach to connect the study of literature and feminist ecologies to the study of our environmental crisis, examining specifically the indissoluble interconnection between narrative, historiography, and discourse. Most importantly this panel seeks to centralize the importance of the humanities as a site of ongoing resistance and a facilitative, participatory forum in which marginalized cultures, perspectives, and identities may serve as a countercultural form of agency, resistance, and collaboration--both through literary analysis, theoretical inquiry, and historiographical inquiry.
4. The session will be comprised of 3 papers in which each presenter will offer a unique and rich perspective on this topic. Session presenters will be limited in time, allowing specifically for at least 15 minutes of unstructured discussion. The design of the panel is specifically predicated on facilitating important discussion around the importance of the humanities in the age of the anthropocene.