Friday, 7 January 2022: 5:15 PM-6:30 PM
Marquis 14 (Marriott Marquis)
Ecocriticism, Cheryll Glotfelty argues, is “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (1996: xvii). In light of the ongoing issues affecting humans in the era we call the Anthropocene, something more than a relationship between literature and the environment is needed to reach a wider swath of people. Specifically, we need to find a way to reach those who deny climate change and its far-reaching effects. Using ecopsychology as a critical lens to explore texts may be a way through this conundrum. In contrast to ecocriticism, ecopsychology is the study of the relationship between human beings and their physical environment – human-nature kinship. Important theoretical texts in the movement include Theodore Roszak’s early treatise, The Voice of the Earth (1996), Peter H. Kahn and Patricia Hasbach’s Ecopsychology: Science, Totems, and the Technological Species (2012), and Andy Fisher’s second edition of Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life (2013 [2002]). Practical texts are becoming prolific and include Nick Totton’s Wild Therapy: Undomesticating Inner and Outer Worlds (2011), Martin Jordan and Joe Hinds’ Ecotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice, Roger Duncan’s Nature in Mind (2018), and Megan Delaney’s Nature is Nurture: Counseling and the Natural World (2020).
This kinship between humans and their ecosystems is present in Children’s and Young Adult literature spanning at least the last 150 years. Emphasizing the importance of nurturing our human kinship with the nonhuman world, this panel brings together three scholars of Children’s and Young Adult literature to explore the importance of human-nonhuman kinship in texts for young people. Presentations will be a maximum of 20 minutes each, leaving 15 minutes for discussion.
Marie Bertrand’s “Anima Mundi and the Animal Story: Recovering One’s Ecological Self in The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle” takes us back 100 years to the vet whose relationships with animals were earned as he painstakingly learned different animal languages to communicate with them. Bertrand draws on ecopsychology to show how the children’s animal story, in particular Hugh Lofting’s The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, may be categorized as green literature through raising the young reader’s awareness about environmental issues. Bertrand’s choice to focus on the second book of the series is informed by Paul Shepard’s claim “that our psychological development inherently calls for childhood immersion in wild nature” (qtd. in Fisher 8). Indeed, the narrator, Tommy, relates his outdoor education and his subsequent apprenticeship with the non-traditional doctor. If, like the doctor, we want “the polar bear to have their playground to themselves as long as possible” (Lofting 125), then we must teach children to regard their own playground as a ground that should be cared for rather than played with.
Kathleen Forrester’s “Reading Toward Queer Relational Ontologies with Picturebooks: Jillian Tamaki’s They Say Blue and Maya Christina Gonzalez’s Call Me Tree” brings our attention to the visual portrayal of human kinship with the environment. Forrester’s presentation draws on Donna Haraway’s natureculture thinking and on theorizations from queer ecology to look to these two picturebooks. She explores them as imaginative sites for noticing and theorizing alternative models of relationality that trouble bounded individualism and elevate chosen, non-genealogical, and cross-species kin. Forrester elaborates an epistemology of queer worlding (Haraway) in which humans become attuned to a multiplicity of worlds through imaginative and embodied acts of becoming with other nonhuman entities such as trees. She argues that these “non-environmental” picturebooks can be read in such a way that the reader is moved beyond humanist fantasies of “saving the world” through isolated heroics, toward a relational and ecological philosophy of multispecies care, justice, and survival.
Finally, Jesus Montaño will playfully interact with the fantastic and speculative as a way to engage young readers in serious conversations about multispecies kinship in “Save the Chupacabras: Environmentalisms, Social Justice, and Kinship in Latinx Youth Literature.” Montaño uses a lens of Latinx Environmentalisms to bring a decolonial imperative that centers racism and coloniality as the obstacles to overcome if we are to move towards kinships that are sustainable. To accomplish this reading, he uses texts such as The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie (Frederick Luis Aldama; illustrator Chris Escobar); The Chupacabras of the Río Grande (Adam Gidwitz and David Bowles; illustrator Hatem Aly); Paola Santiago and the River of Tears (Tehlor Kay Mejia); and Summer of the Mariposas (Guadalupe García McCall).
This kinship between humans and their ecosystems is present in Children’s and Young Adult literature spanning at least the last 150 years. Emphasizing the importance of nurturing our human kinship with the nonhuman world, this panel brings together three scholars of Children’s and Young Adult literature to explore the importance of human-nonhuman kinship in texts for young people. Presentations will be a maximum of 20 minutes each, leaving 15 minutes for discussion.
Marie Bertrand’s “Anima Mundi and the Animal Story: Recovering One’s Ecological Self in The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle” takes us back 100 years to the vet whose relationships with animals were earned as he painstakingly learned different animal languages to communicate with them. Bertrand draws on ecopsychology to show how the children’s animal story, in particular Hugh Lofting’s The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, may be categorized as green literature through raising the young reader’s awareness about environmental issues. Bertrand’s choice to focus on the second book of the series is informed by Paul Shepard’s claim “that our psychological development inherently calls for childhood immersion in wild nature” (qtd. in Fisher 8). Indeed, the narrator, Tommy, relates his outdoor education and his subsequent apprenticeship with the non-traditional doctor. If, like the doctor, we want “the polar bear to have their playground to themselves as long as possible” (Lofting 125), then we must teach children to regard their own playground as a ground that should be cared for rather than played with.
Kathleen Forrester’s “Reading Toward Queer Relational Ontologies with Picturebooks: Jillian Tamaki’s They Say Blue and Maya Christina Gonzalez’s Call Me Tree” brings our attention to the visual portrayal of human kinship with the environment. Forrester’s presentation draws on Donna Haraway’s natureculture thinking and on theorizations from queer ecology to look to these two picturebooks. She explores them as imaginative sites for noticing and theorizing alternative models of relationality that trouble bounded individualism and elevate chosen, non-genealogical, and cross-species kin. Forrester elaborates an epistemology of queer worlding (Haraway) in which humans become attuned to a multiplicity of worlds through imaginative and embodied acts of becoming with other nonhuman entities such as trees. She argues that these “non-environmental” picturebooks can be read in such a way that the reader is moved beyond humanist fantasies of “saving the world” through isolated heroics, toward a relational and ecological philosophy of multispecies care, justice, and survival.
Finally, Jesus Montaño will playfully interact with the fantastic and speculative as a way to engage young readers in serious conversations about multispecies kinship in “Save the Chupacabras: Environmentalisms, Social Justice, and Kinship in Latinx Youth Literature.” Montaño uses a lens of Latinx Environmentalisms to bring a decolonial imperative that centers racism and coloniality as the obstacles to overcome if we are to move towards kinships that are sustainable. To accomplish this reading, he uses texts such as The Adventures of Chupacabra Charlie (Frederick Luis Aldama; illustrator Chris Escobar); The Chupacabras of the Río Grande (Adam Gidwitz and David Bowles; illustrator Hatem Aly); Paola Santiago and the River of Tears (Tehlor Kay Mejia); and Summer of the Mariposas (Guadalupe García McCall).
Organizer:
Heidi A. Lawrence
Presider:
Heidi A. Lawrence