Recent scholarship in ecocriticism and environmental thought have criticized the whitewashing of the environmental movement and the privileging of white and middle/upper-class voices. Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011) has been an influential text for thinking through how marginalized people have suffered, in both urban and rural spaces, from infrastructural and environmental choices stemming from racism, classism, and its intersections. In the edited collection Latinx Environmentalisms (2019), Vázquez et al. argue that many Latinx activists have not seen the label of 'environmentalist' as relevant, as their concerns were less with conserving nature and more with decolonial and racial political movements. For example, contributors reexamine the work of the Young Lords Party and Cherríe Moraga as part of a tradition of Latinx environmental thought. Sarah Wald (2016), for instance, has documented the alternative food movement and its clear concern with not only the exploitation of land but also of farmworkers. Kimberly Ruffin’s Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions (2010), similarly traces a history of ecological thinking in Black American literary traditions, including speculative fiction (ex. Octavia Butler). This panel seeks to enter the robust conversations occurring within Black and Latinx literary and cultural studies on environmental racism and environmental justice, examining oral, written, and digital media.
Anthony Gomez III’s presentation considers “olfactory ecologies,” examining how smell has been used to segregate communities of color and compromise bodily and mental health. He uses Latinx residents’ testimonies to demonstrate how scent can be reclaimed in the environmental fight for the future. Sage Gerson’s examines Black sci-fi and fantasy author N.K. Jemisin’s “Emergency Skin,” arguing that the novelette’s insistence on indispensability as the more generative inverse of and/or an alternative to the species-level framing of the concept of the Anthropocene offers readers powerful narratological tools for unsettling, countering, and reframing entrenched cultural and historical myths. Anthony Shoplik’s presentation argues that African American modernist Jean Toomer’s Cane is an act of both environmental and cultural conservation and laid the foundation for Toomer’s later, more explicit ecological and environmentalist writings. Jason de Lara Molesky’s presentation examines speculative new media representation of Louisiana. No art form explores the conjunction of corporate power, ecological distress, and energy production more powerfully than video games, He analyzes how Norco, an indie point-and-click adventure by Geography of Robots, evokes the surrealism of refinery towns and draws on the region’s deep histories of racial and environmental protest, so players can affectively inhabit the unjust energy systems driving current crises.
The panel includes a diversity of voices through ethno-racial identity (2 white and 2 Latino presenters), academic rank (1 graduate student, 1 assistant professor, and 2 incoming assistant professors), and the institutions which they represent, ranging from the art school Rhode Island School of Design to larger research institutions like the University of Oklahoma. While we sought gender parity on the panel, one of our original panelists had to pull out for another opportunity.
The panel will be in a traditional presentation style, with four speakers presenting for 12-15 minutes, and 15-20 minutes left for Q&A.