George Handley | Brigham Young University (original) (raw)
Books by George Handley
Lowell L. Bennion: A Mormon Educator, 2023
Literature and Ecotheology: From Chaos to Cosmos, 2024
The Economy of the Creation (chapter 3), 2021
The book is a series of essays on Latter-day Saint environmental values. This chapter is an explo... more The book is a series of essays on Latter-day Saint environmental values. This chapter is an exploration of the intersection between environnmental ethics, economics, and Latter-day Saint creation theology.
Climate Change Scepticism: A Transnational Ecocritical Analysis, 2019
A chapter, authored by George Handley, from a co-authored transnational ecocritical study of clim... more A chapter, authored by George Handley, from a co-authored transnational ecocritical study of climate scepticism in the UK, the US, and in Germany and France. This chapter covers the grounds for climate scepticism as manifested in popular American cultural imagination and in conservative Christian theology.
Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, 2015
This book examines current trends in scholarly thinking about the new field of the Environmental ... more This book examines current trends in scholarly thinking about the new field of the Environmental Humanities, focusing in particular on how the history of globalization and imperialism represents a special challenge to approaches to environmental issues. Essays in this path-breaking collection examine the role narrative can play in drawing attention to and shaping our ideas about long-term environmental problems such as climate change, militarism, deforestation, toxicity, and agricultural resource management. The volume explores implications for defining a postcolonial approach to the environmental humanities, especially in conjunction with current thinking in areas such as political ecology and environmental justice. Spanning regions such as Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific Islands, essays by founding figures in the field as well as new scholars expand the geographical and historical contours of ecocriticism by examining how writers have imagined the environment, providing vital new perspectives on how ecological change can be traced to globalization and a history of colonialism. It moves beyond literary studies to a more interdisciplinary discussion of the importance of narrative to our understanding of environmental concerns. At the heart of this is a conviction that a thoroughly global, postcolonial, and comparative approach is essential to defining the emergent field of the environmental humanities, and that this field has much to offer in understanding critical issues surrounding the creation of alternative ecological futures.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Dipesh Chakrabarty
Introduction: A Postcolonial Environmental Humanities Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan
Part I: The Politics of Earth: Forests, Gardens, Plantations
1. Narrativizing Nature: India, Empire,and Environment David Arnold
2. "The Perverse Little People of the Hills:" Unearthing Ecology and Transculturation in Reginald Farrer’s Alpine Plant-Hunting Jill Didur
3. Bagasse: Caribbean Art and the Debris of the Sugar Plantation Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
4. Writing a Native Garden?: Environmental Language and Post-Mabo Literature in Australia Susan K. Martin
Part II: Disaster, Vulnerability, and Resilience
5. Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies Anthony Carrigan
6. Nuclear Disaster: The Marshall Islands Experience and Lessons for a Post-Fukushima World Barbara Rose Johnston
7. Island Vulnerability and Resilience: Combining Knowledges for Disaster Risk Reduction Including Climate Change Adaptation
Ilan Kelman, J.C. Gaillard, Jessica Mercer, James Lewis, and Anthony Carrigan
Part III: Political Ecologies and Environmental Justice
8. The Edgework of the Clerk: Resilience in Arundhati Roy’s Walking With the Comrades Susie O’Brien
9. Filming the Emergence of Popular Environmentalism in Latin America: Postcolonialism and Buen Vivir Jorge Marcone
10. Witnessing the Nature of Violence: Resource Extraction and Political Ecologies in the Contemporary African Novel Byron Caminero-Santangelo
Part IV: Mapping World Ecologies
11. Narrating a Global Future: Our Common Future and the Public Hearings of the World Commission on Environment and Development Cheryl Lousley
12. Oil on Sugar: Commodity Frontiers and Peripheral Aesthetics Michael Niblett
13. Ghost Mountains and Stone Maidens: Ecological Imperialism, Compound Catastrophe, and the Post-Soviet Ecogothic Sharae Deckard
Part V: Terraforming, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene
14. Terraforming Planet Earth Joseph Masco
15. Climate Change, Cosmology, and Poetry: The Case of Derek Walcott’s Omeros George B. Handley
16. Ordinary Futures: Interspecies Worldings in the Anthropocene Elizabeth DeLoughrey
Full text here: https://www.book2look.com/embed/9781317574316
Oxford University Press, 2011
The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolon... more The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolonial literature, this volume offers rich and suggestive ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing from texts from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific Islands and South Asia. Turning to contemporary works by both well- and little-known postcolonial writers, the diverse contributions highlight the literary imagination as crucial to representing what Eduoard Glissant calls the "aesthetics of the earth." The essays are organized around a group of thematic concerns that engage culture and cultivation, arboriculture and deforestation, the lives of animals, and the relationship between the military and the tourist industry. With chapters that address works by J. M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Zakes Mda, and many others, Postcolonial Ecologies makes a remarkable contribution to rethinking the role of the humanities in addressing global environmental issues.
Perhaps there is no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of hu... more Perhaps there is no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation, and settlement than the Caribbean. Theorists such as Edouard Glissant argue that the dialectic between Caribbean "nature" and "culture," engendered by this unique and troubled history, has not heretofore been brought into productive relation. Caribbean Literature and the Environment redresses this omission by gathering together eighteen essays that consider the relationship between human and natural history. The result is the first volume to examine the literatures of the Caribbean from an ecocritical perspective in all language areas of the region.
In its exploration of the relationship between nature and culture, this collection focuses on four overlapping themes: how Caribbean texts inscribe the environmental impact of colonial and plantation economies; how colonial myths of edenic and natural origins are revisioned; what the connections are between histories of biotic and cultural creolization; and how a Caribbean aesthetics might usefully articulate a means to preserve sustainability in the context of tourism and globalization. By creating a dialogue between the growing field of ecological literary studies, which has primarily been concerned with white settler narratives, and Caribbean cultural production, especially the region’s negotiation of complex racial and ethnic legacies, these essays explore the ways in which the history of transplantation and settlement has provided unique challenges and opportunities for establishing a sense of place and an environmental ethic in the Caribbean.
The volume includes an extensive introduction by the editors and essays by Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen, Trenton Hickman, Shona Jackson, LeGrace Benson, Jana Evans Braziel, George B. Handley, Renee K. Grossman, Isabel Hoving, Natasha Tinsley, Helen Tiffen, Hena Maes-Jelinek, Heidi Bojsen, Ineke Phaf-Reinberger, Eric Prieto, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, as well as interviews with Walcott and Raphaël Confiant. It will appeal to all those interested in Caribbean, literary, and ecocritical studies.
Papers by George Handley
Religions, 2020
Although there are many reasons for Christian skepticism regarding climate change, one reason is ... more Although there are many reasons for Christian skepticism regarding climate change, one reason is theological in nature, and therefore, requires a theological solution. This essay explains the theological grounds for climate change denial and for a compromised understanding of the power and creativity of human agency. Drawing inspiration from the ecotheological implications of postcolonial poetics, it seeks to offer revised conceptions of the atonement and the fall and of what it means to read both scripture and nature. The aim is to offer a more resilient Christian theology that can inspire agential creativity in the age of the Anthropocene.
Literature and Belief , 2019
The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History, 2019
Epilogue in the collection of essays, The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Morm... more Epilogue in the collection of essays, The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History, edited by Jedidiah Rogers and Matthew Godfrey
Modern Fiction Studies, 2018
This essay focuses on the ways in which the film’s adaptation of the Noah story borrows from Jewi... more This essay focuses on the ways in which the film’s adaptation of the Noah story borrows from Jewish Apocrypha and Midrash and then performs its own contemporary form of midrash in order to address the relevance of religion in the Anthropocene. I outline that relevance and demonstrate how the film seeks to temper anthropocentrism and render it serviceable in the Anthropocene through its use of the figure of Noah as a kind of second
Adam. Aronofsky’s film explicitly engages with the concerns of contemporary ecotheology in order to suggest that it is not enough
for humankind to develop passion for the more-than-human world;
we must also reinvigorate faith in humanity. And this faith must acknowledge and persist in light of the evidence of human depravity
that the climate crisis lays bare. Ultimately, the film implies that fighting for the planet and against the ravages of environmental degradation is not merely a struggle for ecological health but a postsecular struggle for human meaning and the viability of the humanities in a vast, complex, and often unjust cosmos.
An analysis of 1 Nephi 1 that argues that the foregrounding of the human personality of the autho... more An analysis of 1 Nephi 1 that argues that the foregrounding of the human personality of the authors and editors of the Book of Mormon demonstrates that the book's theology of revelation embraces rather than elides the role of the human imagination in accessing the divine.
Offers a theoretical understanding of what it means to read scripture in a theology of continuing... more Offers a theoretical understanding of what it means to read scripture in a theology of continuing revelation based on the particular phenomenon of repeated language, in this case of the Sermon on the Mount in 3 Nephi. The essay's theory is derived from Jorge Luis Borges's story, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote."
"[E]cocritics ought to start by acknowledging that the literature that most powerfully shapes att... more "[E]cocritics ought to start by acknowledging that the literature that most powerfully shapes attitudes and behaviors for the vast majority of humanity today comes from religious traditions and their interpretative communities. To insist that action on climate change requires an adoption of a radically new and competing worldview is to fight a losing battle. Ecocritics need to get religion, and I do not mean in the traditional sense of this turn of phrase. I mean they need to “get” it."
Lowell L. Bennion: A Mormon Educator, 2023
Literature and Ecotheology: From Chaos to Cosmos, 2024
The Economy of the Creation (chapter 3), 2021
The book is a series of essays on Latter-day Saint environmental values. This chapter is an explo... more The book is a series of essays on Latter-day Saint environmental values. This chapter is an exploration of the intersection between environnmental ethics, economics, and Latter-day Saint creation theology.
Climate Change Scepticism: A Transnational Ecocritical Analysis, 2019
A chapter, authored by George Handley, from a co-authored transnational ecocritical study of clim... more A chapter, authored by George Handley, from a co-authored transnational ecocritical study of climate scepticism in the UK, the US, and in Germany and France. This chapter covers the grounds for climate scepticism as manifested in popular American cultural imagination and in conservative Christian theology.
Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, 2015
This book examines current trends in scholarly thinking about the new field of the Environmental ... more This book examines current trends in scholarly thinking about the new field of the Environmental Humanities, focusing in particular on how the history of globalization and imperialism represents a special challenge to approaches to environmental issues. Essays in this path-breaking collection examine the role narrative can play in drawing attention to and shaping our ideas about long-term environmental problems such as climate change, militarism, deforestation, toxicity, and agricultural resource management. The volume explores implications for defining a postcolonial approach to the environmental humanities, especially in conjunction with current thinking in areas such as political ecology and environmental justice. Spanning regions such as Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific Islands, essays by founding figures in the field as well as new scholars expand the geographical and historical contours of ecocriticism by examining how writers have imagined the environment, providing vital new perspectives on how ecological change can be traced to globalization and a history of colonialism. It moves beyond literary studies to a more interdisciplinary discussion of the importance of narrative to our understanding of environmental concerns. At the heart of this is a conviction that a thoroughly global, postcolonial, and comparative approach is essential to defining the emergent field of the environmental humanities, and that this field has much to offer in understanding critical issues surrounding the creation of alternative ecological futures.
CONTENTS
Foreword by Dipesh Chakrabarty
Introduction: A Postcolonial Environmental Humanities Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan
Part I: The Politics of Earth: Forests, Gardens, Plantations
1. Narrativizing Nature: India, Empire,and Environment David Arnold
2. "The Perverse Little People of the Hills:" Unearthing Ecology and Transculturation in Reginald Farrer’s Alpine Plant-Hunting Jill Didur
3. Bagasse: Caribbean Art and the Debris of the Sugar Plantation Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert
4. Writing a Native Garden?: Environmental Language and Post-Mabo Literature in Australia Susan K. Martin
Part II: Disaster, Vulnerability, and Resilience
5. Towards a Postcolonial Disaster Studies Anthony Carrigan
6. Nuclear Disaster: The Marshall Islands Experience and Lessons for a Post-Fukushima World Barbara Rose Johnston
7. Island Vulnerability and Resilience: Combining Knowledges for Disaster Risk Reduction Including Climate Change Adaptation
Ilan Kelman, J.C. Gaillard, Jessica Mercer, James Lewis, and Anthony Carrigan
Part III: Political Ecologies and Environmental Justice
8. The Edgework of the Clerk: Resilience in Arundhati Roy’s Walking With the Comrades Susie O’Brien
9. Filming the Emergence of Popular Environmentalism in Latin America: Postcolonialism and Buen Vivir Jorge Marcone
10. Witnessing the Nature of Violence: Resource Extraction and Political Ecologies in the Contemporary African Novel Byron Caminero-Santangelo
Part IV: Mapping World Ecologies
11. Narrating a Global Future: Our Common Future and the Public Hearings of the World Commission on Environment and Development Cheryl Lousley
12. Oil on Sugar: Commodity Frontiers and Peripheral Aesthetics Michael Niblett
13. Ghost Mountains and Stone Maidens: Ecological Imperialism, Compound Catastrophe, and the Post-Soviet Ecogothic Sharae Deckard
Part V: Terraforming, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene
14. Terraforming Planet Earth Joseph Masco
15. Climate Change, Cosmology, and Poetry: The Case of Derek Walcott’s Omeros George B. Handley
16. Ordinary Futures: Interspecies Worldings in the Anthropocene Elizabeth DeLoughrey
Full text here: https://www.book2look.com/embed/9781317574316
Oxford University Press, 2011
The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolon... more The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolonial literature, this volume offers rich and suggestive ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing from texts from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific Islands and South Asia. Turning to contemporary works by both well- and little-known postcolonial writers, the diverse contributions highlight the literary imagination as crucial to representing what Eduoard Glissant calls the "aesthetics of the earth." The essays are organized around a group of thematic concerns that engage culture and cultivation, arboriculture and deforestation, the lives of animals, and the relationship between the military and the tourist industry. With chapters that address works by J. M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Zakes Mda, and many others, Postcolonial Ecologies makes a remarkable contribution to rethinking the role of the humanities in addressing global environmental issues.
Perhaps there is no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of hu... more Perhaps there is no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation, and settlement than the Caribbean. Theorists such as Edouard Glissant argue that the dialectic between Caribbean "nature" and "culture," engendered by this unique and troubled history, has not heretofore been brought into productive relation. Caribbean Literature and the Environment redresses this omission by gathering together eighteen essays that consider the relationship between human and natural history. The result is the first volume to examine the literatures of the Caribbean from an ecocritical perspective in all language areas of the region.
In its exploration of the relationship between nature and culture, this collection focuses on four overlapping themes: how Caribbean texts inscribe the environmental impact of colonial and plantation economies; how colonial myths of edenic and natural origins are revisioned; what the connections are between histories of biotic and cultural creolization; and how a Caribbean aesthetics might usefully articulate a means to preserve sustainability in the context of tourism and globalization. By creating a dialogue between the growing field of ecological literary studies, which has primarily been concerned with white settler narratives, and Caribbean cultural production, especially the region’s negotiation of complex racial and ethnic legacies, these essays explore the ways in which the history of transplantation and settlement has provided unique challenges and opportunities for establishing a sense of place and an environmental ethic in the Caribbean.
The volume includes an extensive introduction by the editors and essays by Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen, Trenton Hickman, Shona Jackson, LeGrace Benson, Jana Evans Braziel, George B. Handley, Renee K. Grossman, Isabel Hoving, Natasha Tinsley, Helen Tiffen, Hena Maes-Jelinek, Heidi Bojsen, Ineke Phaf-Reinberger, Eric Prieto, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, as well as interviews with Walcott and Raphaël Confiant. It will appeal to all those interested in Caribbean, literary, and ecocritical studies.
Religions, 2020
Although there are many reasons for Christian skepticism regarding climate change, one reason is ... more Although there are many reasons for Christian skepticism regarding climate change, one reason is theological in nature, and therefore, requires a theological solution. This essay explains the theological grounds for climate change denial and for a compromised understanding of the power and creativity of human agency. Drawing inspiration from the ecotheological implications of postcolonial poetics, it seeks to offer revised conceptions of the atonement and the fall and of what it means to read both scripture and nature. The aim is to offer a more resilient Christian theology that can inspire agential creativity in the age of the Anthropocene.
Literature and Belief , 2019
The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History, 2019
Epilogue in the collection of essays, The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Morm... more Epilogue in the collection of essays, The Earth Will Appear as the Garden of Eden: Essays on Mormon Environmental History, edited by Jedidiah Rogers and Matthew Godfrey
Modern Fiction Studies, 2018
This essay focuses on the ways in which the film’s adaptation of the Noah story borrows from Jewi... more This essay focuses on the ways in which the film’s adaptation of the Noah story borrows from Jewish Apocrypha and Midrash and then performs its own contemporary form of midrash in order to address the relevance of religion in the Anthropocene. I outline that relevance and demonstrate how the film seeks to temper anthropocentrism and render it serviceable in the Anthropocene through its use of the figure of Noah as a kind of second
Adam. Aronofsky’s film explicitly engages with the concerns of contemporary ecotheology in order to suggest that it is not enough
for humankind to develop passion for the more-than-human world;
we must also reinvigorate faith in humanity. And this faith must acknowledge and persist in light of the evidence of human depravity
that the climate crisis lays bare. Ultimately, the film implies that fighting for the planet and against the ravages of environmental degradation is not merely a struggle for ecological health but a postsecular struggle for human meaning and the viability of the humanities in a vast, complex, and often unjust cosmos.
An analysis of 1 Nephi 1 that argues that the foregrounding of the human personality of the autho... more An analysis of 1 Nephi 1 that argues that the foregrounding of the human personality of the authors and editors of the Book of Mormon demonstrates that the book's theology of revelation embraces rather than elides the role of the human imagination in accessing the divine.
Offers a theoretical understanding of what it means to read scripture in a theology of continuing... more Offers a theoretical understanding of what it means to read scripture in a theology of continuing revelation based on the particular phenomenon of repeated language, in this case of the Sermon on the Mount in 3 Nephi. The essay's theory is derived from Jorge Luis Borges's story, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote."
"[E]cocritics ought to start by acknowledging that the literature that most powerfully shapes att... more "[E]cocritics ought to start by acknowledging that the literature that most powerfully shapes attitudes and behaviors for the vast majority of humanity today comes from religious traditions and their interpretative communities. To insist that action on climate change requires an adoption of a radically new and competing worldview is to fight a losing battle. Ecocritics need to get religion, and I do not mean in the traditional sense of this turn of phrase. I mean they need to “get” it."
An overview of Mormon beliefs about environmental stewardship, recent developments in Mormon thou... more An overview of Mormon beliefs about environmental stewardship, recent developments in Mormon thought, and an assessment of what contributions Mormon belief can make to the environmental crisis in the broader context of ecotheology. A chapter in the recently published Rutledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology, eds Willis Jenkins, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim.
Chapter from Living Cosmology: Christian Responses to the Journey of the Universe, ed. Mary Evely... more Chapter from Living Cosmology: Christian Responses to the Journey of the Universe, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim. Orbis: Maryknoll, New York, 2016, pp. 289-299. Covers LDS theology of creation and its relevance to contemporary cosmology and the environmental crisis.
Examines how Walcott's poem situates the crisis of climate change within the structures of the po... more Examines how Walcott's poem situates the crisis of climate change within the structures of the postcolonial struggle and how the poem's cosmological imagination seeks to provide an adequate response.
An ecotheological reading of Malick's The Tree of Life
