As climate change progresses, the human commitment to sustainability becomes increasingly urgent. We find, however, that while statistics and reports are essential to foundational climate literacy, storytelling– particularly those within fiction genres– can provide accessible and influential insight into the complex and entangled relationships between the human body, human-made infrastructures, non-human life, culture, and colonialism. Last year’s MLA highlighted a few separate sessions that featured discussion of, for instance, gothicism, ecology, ecocritical literature, or various other fiction genres. This session reconsiders the different urgencies and priorities of these panels; we then go on to apply each panelist’s own individual research to these issues, in order to build a cohesive dialogue around such topics. As far as individual examples are concerned, each of our panelists support and frame their arguments with a specific, related work of eco-literature fiction. Taken together, these arguments will enable a broader discussion of the ability of eco-fiction to build and exemplify complex discussions of human-environmental relationships.
To ensure lively discussion, we have a total of three panelists, each with 15-minute paper presentations. This panel is committed to having speakers who are individuals of diverse cultural, academic, regional, and identity-oriented backgrounds to curate an inclusive discussion on different experiences and aspects of climate narratives.
Our first panelist will be Professor Jason Haslam, presenting “The Horrors of Green Utopias”. Haslam analyzes two works of gothic literature – Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) with and VanderMeer’s Borne (2017). Both of these works focus on “green energies”: renewable, efficient energies that are represented as symbiotic with the natural environment. In these works, attempts to control such energies only unleash uncontrollable terrors. Hawthorne’s patriarchal, extractive Romanticism presents this terror as a feminine, chaotic disruption of the “natural order,” a transformation the postmodern weird of VanderMeer seems to celebrate as an anti-capital force. Even VanderMeer’s decentering of the human, however, replicates anthropocentric thinking, allowing us to attend to how Global North renditions of green energies can in fact repeat the very logics of petroculture.
The second paper– “Ecogothic Zombies: Humans as Part of the Environment” – will be offered by Keaton Nara. This paper examines how Paul W. S. Anderson’s Resident Evil (2002) redefines eco-zombie narratives by positioning human biology as an environmental force within a wholly artificial setting. While Resident Evil resonates with traditional eco-zombie critiques of the exploitation of bodies, labor, and nature, this paper’s unique analysis explores how the film extends these anxieties by situating the undead apocalypse within a corporate-built underground facility-- an atypical but significant setting for environmental commentary. With a foundation in ecogothic theory, metaphor studies, and classic zombie films, Nara argues that the film suggests that the capitalistic exploitation of humans is inherently an exploitation of nature itself. Ultimately, Resident Evil reframes and challenges traditional concepts of the "environment", speculating how technology and humanity might also join nature as an unpredictable and uncontrollable force in ecogothic literature.
For our final presentation, we will feature Priyanka Sharma’s work titled “Unproductive Wastelands: Extractivism, Dispossession, and Indigenous Environmentalism in Northeast Indian Borderlands”. This paper investigates what the environment means to the local and Indigenous communities in Northeastern India through an analysis of Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches (2022) and The Quint’s documentary How a Village In Meghalaya Fought Against Uranium Mining (2021). Drawing on decolonial frameworks by environmental humanities scholars such as Max Liboiron and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, among others, this paper highlights how extractivism continues to perpetuate postcolonial violence and dispossession, rendering Indigenous lands as “unproductive wastelands.” Literature, documentary media, and archival materials will together foreground the lived realities of borderland communities, especially in the era of the global climate crisis.
These three presentations all build on developing an intercultural conversation on how various climate fictions provide insight on the complex relationships between humanity and nature, challenging our definitions of these terms to evolve alongside our dialogue.