All four papers in our session are similarly attuned to this ethical charge in interrelated ways. Their reading of literary texts and periodicals articulates the grammar of exploitation of global South landscapes in ways that do not flatten these spaces. From early American gold rush, to petroleum and castor oil refinement in Barbados, oceanic debris in Taiwan, and hydropower projects in northern India, the panellists remain attentive to the distinctiveness of the local. Additionally, they also show how global South actors find ways to resist and rescript this continued devastation. Despite the different regional, linguistic, and formal contexts in which they are working, extraction and empowerment become shared alliterative metaphors in all their papers.
The session is part of a growing focus in global South literary studies to foreground environmental concerns. However, instead of centring on a particular site, such as archipelagoes or the hemispheric South, we deliberately chose papers that stage a conversation across diverse temporal and geopolitical locations. Additionally, we felt strongly about ensuring gender diversity and diversity of academic ranks in our panellists (graduate student, contingent faculty, tenured faculty, and pre-tenure faculty member at an international institution).
In “Ecologies of Urbanism: Environmental Displacements and Climate Migration in India’s Uttarakhand,” Sayantika Chakraborty (PhD student, University of Florida) studies the intertwined history of hydropower projects and climate migration in Uttarakhand, situated on the slopes of the Himalayas. She highlights the role that local media – the newspaper Garhwal Post and radio station “Mandakini ki Awaz 1” (“The voice of Mandakini”)/90.8 FM – play as the circulator of environmental knowledge in the community. Run by indigenous women, the radio station centres the ontological and living conditions of female climate migrants in Uttarakhand/India and frames them in the context of governmental interventions and rising ethno-nationalisms.
Kyle McAuley (VAP / ACLS Fellow, Seton Hall University) examines another community response in “George Lamming’s Liquids: Aqueous Ecologies and the Colonial Past in In the Castle of My Skin.” The inciting incident of Lamming’s novel is a flood that wreaks havoc on the protagonist G.’s village in colonial Barbados. But McAuley explores the novel’s other aqueous ecologies to claim that the dominant liquids are, in fact, petroleum and castor oil. He argues that the extraction and refinement of these liquids map a struggle between energy modernity and folk medicine, such that while petroleum modernity represents a forward technological movement, it also threatens to reinforce Barbados’s dependence on the British Empire.
Nienke Boer’s (Lecturer, University of Sydney) “Towards A Non-Extractive Gaze in the Global South Novel,” continues with the critique of extraction via C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020) and Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account (2014). Both novels locate their transnational subaltern figures in the early American landscape, thereby unsettling the reader’s expectations and representing non-extractive interactions with the environment. While these novels would not normally be considered as eco-fiction, Boer argues that they model a way of narrating the environment through protagonists globally displaced through processes of expansion and territorial acquisition, which makes them akin to other recent innovations, such as having an animal, arboreal, or insect narrator.
Finally, Stephen Levin (Associate Professor, Clark University) uses Kamau Braithwaite’s `tidalectics’ alongside Adorno’s Negative Dialectics to critique ecocritical vocabulary in his paper “Negative Tidalectics: Oceanic Selfhoods and the Trash Vortex in Wu Ming-Yi’s The Man with the Compound Eyes.” Terms such as the ‘oceanic’ and ‘the Commons’ carry the risk of reinforcing colonial modes of knowledge by displacing local notions of difference and legitimizing forms of expropriation. Using psychodynamic and materialist approaches to read Wu’s novel, Levin considers how to evoke narratives of loss—of extinction and disappearance—without reinforcing nostalgic longings for redemption and contiguity.