Environmental racism is a crucial concept through which scholars and other publics are engaging with COVID-19, climate change, urban housing, waste disposal, and other fields. This panel will showcase diverse, creative ways in which literary scholars and humanists are joining these conversations. The panelists link the concept of environmental racism to a range of methodologies, including close readings, archival research, and interdisciplinary conversations.
The term environmental racism traces to environmental justice struggles in the 1990s, and is vital to research and movements globally. Benjamin Chavis first defined environmental racism as “the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities. . . and the history of excluding people of color from leadership of the ecology movements.” Environmental humanists often use environmental justice as an umbrella framework that addresses race alongside other factors and movements for alternatives (e.g. David Pellow’s What is Critical Environmental Justice? and Julie Sze’s Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger). This panel puts sustained focus on environmental racism. It explores methods, archives, geographies, and theories for understanding the entanglements of systemic racism, ecological injury, and cultural production.
Each participant will speak for 15 minutes, leaving at least 15 minutes for discussion.
Many scholars have prosecuted airtight cases against environmental racism but have failed to see the less concrete forms of environmental unconsciousness— Carlos Alonso Nugent Nugent’s term for the frameworks that human groups use to ignore (and thereby intensify) their exploitation of more-than-human worlds. Nugent’s presentation focuses on the white modernists who congregated at Mabel Dodge’s Taos Salon, Georgia O’Keeffe’s Abiquiú home, and similar sites. Combining archival research with close readings (of Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House [1925] and Death Comes for the Archbishop [1927]), this presentation shows how the modernists tried to use Native and Latinx aesthetics to push back against environmental racism. By combining the environmental humanities with critical ethnic studies, this presentation proves that as the modernists associated the borderlands with authenticity and creativity, they made it harder for publics to respond to—or even recognize—capitalist dispossession and ecological degradation.
While Nugent illuminates modernist works that contribute to environmental racism, our next presenter Kathleen Field will explore literary refusals of racialized injustice. Hurricanes Katrina and María not only highlighted the environmental precarity of man-accelerated climate change but also illuminated the systemic, racialized inequality that grips the circum-Caribbean. This inequality and its subsequent coastal and archipelagic vulnerability are the result of centuries of unpayable debt imposed by the U.S. government on Black and colonized bodies and the lands they inhabit. Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel, Salvage the Bones , and Raquel Salas Rivera’s 2018 poetry collection, lo terciario/ the tertiary , function as fugitive works that refuse to “pay;” they work laterally, beneath the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, and insist upon a radical and subterranean form of improvised resistance without restoration. This comparison reveals a distinctly circum-Caribbean literary response to the ongoing catastrophe of anti-blackness, coloniality, and environmental racism in the Gulf South and Puerto Rico.
Our last panelist, Lawrence Chamunorwa, also provides a multi-sited, transnational reading, turning us toward how visions of the future interact with environmental racism. While anxieties about the future effects of contemporary global environmental problems persist, Africa, due to its problematic past of colonialism and slavery, continues to be severely haunted. Chamunorwa’s paper explores how African literature and film depict the interface of humans and nonhumans as fraught by systemic oppression— informed by the ideological vestiges of slavery and colonialism, in order to anticipate Africa’s future ecology. It focuses on Nigerian novelist Amos Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954), Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu’s film Pumzi (2009) and South African film District 9 (2009) by Neill Blomkamp. Drawing from a postcolonial ecocritical approach, Chamunorwa argues that although these works have some mutual points of contact, they mostly depict contesting ecologies. My Life and Pumzi have a utopian outlook in which the black body can be emancipated from the fetters of systemic oppression. In contrast, District 9 depicts a dystopic vision in which environmental racism persists.