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Papers by george english brooks

Research paper thumbnail of "Bodies on the Border: (Re)materializing and Decolonizing Ecologies of Mobility in the Mexico-US Borderlands." Ecozon@ 13.2 (fall 2022): 58-76.

Ecozon@ 13.2 (The Postcolonial Nonhuman), 2022

Current human migrations and nonhuman extinctions on massive scales compel us to more carefully a... more Current human migrations and nonhuman extinctions on massive scales compel us to more carefully apply interspecies concepts of mobility to understanding the roles played by geopolitical borders, as well as the various, ongoing forms of colonialism that have produced and continue to perpetuate these borders. This essay applies bioregional, material, decolonial, and borderlands ecocriticisms to historicize prevention through deterrence enforcement measures in the Mexico-US border region, and discusses several significant entanglements of interspecies actors in migratory contexts, exploring a range of ways that nonhuman nature has been and continues to be deployed materially against migrants. In historicizing US enforcement tactics, the essay tracks the distribution of human agency from settler colonial, ethnonationalist, and neoliberal US policy makers, to armed paramilitary human bodies, then into structures of the built environment, and, finally, to the ways that agency is further diffused across complex webs of multiple kinds of human and nonhuman actors-plants, animals, landforms, watercourses, climate and weather conditions, and so on. While in some instances, nonhuman animals are deployed against migrant and other indigenous and mestizo people, in other multispecies entanglements, animals participate in the revelation and denunciation of state sponsored violence, leading to larger questions of the status of other nonhuman animals in the borderlands. The essay's primary focus is on illustrating the practical untenability of, and the severe harm done in, continuing to regard the borderlands from settler colonialist or human exceptionalist positionalities.

Research paper thumbnail of "Quisieron Enterrarnos: Recovering Bare Life in More-than-Human Immigrant Subjectivities." Aztlán 46.2 (fall 2021): 113-142.

Aztlán, 2021

Through the lenses of environmental humanities, decolonial thought, and new materialism, this ess... more Through the lenses of environmental humanities, decolonial thought, and new materialism, this essay considers expressions of interspecies and transnational solidarity and relationships of mutual interest and identification in certain strategic alliances between human and more-than-human communities. I argue that the literary works of Chicanx writers such as Oscar Zeta Acosta, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Alejandro Morales illuminate, open space for, and prefigure many of the more-than-human turns taken in the discourse of contemporary transnational migrant rights movements. The essay historicizes Western colonial hierarchies as the anthropocentric and speciesist bases for the racist, anti-immigrant discourse that has been publicly weaponized against immigrant people over the past half century. From there, it illustrates some of the productive struggles with and creative responses to the dehumanizing tendencies of this discourse and Mexico-US border enforcement. Although many of these examples occur in response to oppressive and often cruelly uneven valuations of life in the borderlands, I especially explore the creative, transformative, and often fearless decolonial expressions of individual and collective identity that these responses articulate.

Research paper thumbnail of “The Business of Heaven and Earth: Toponymy and the Imperial Idyll in the Domínguez-Escalante Journal of 1776.” Before the West Was West: Pre-1800 Western American Literature. Eds. Tom J. Hillard and Amy T. Hamilton. November 2014, U of Nebraska Press.

Research paper thumbnail of “Private Eyes and 'Little Helpers': Doormen, Gatekeepers, and Racial Mobility in Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely and Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress." Pacific Coast Philology 47 (fall 2012): 17-33.

Research paper thumbnail of “Writing Banana Republics and Guano Bonanzas: Globalization and Consumerism in the Composition Classroom.” Teaching Sustainability / Teaching Sustainably. Eds. Kirsten A. Bartels and Kelly Parker. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, December 2011: 86-96.

Research paper thumbnail of “Post-NAFTA Ecologies: Mechanical Tortoises and Flower-Picking Cholos in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper,” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, Global and Postcolonial Ecologies special issue 16 (September 2012): 59-76.

Book Reviews by george english brooks

Research paper thumbnail of No Country for Nostalgia: Review of Picnic in the Ruins by Todd Robert Petersen, Counterpoint Press, 2021.

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial. Edited by Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette Ray. Temple UP, 2019.

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2020

Scholars acquainted with recent turns in Latinx literary studies and environmental humanities wil... more Scholars acquainted with recent turns in Latinx literary studies and environmental humanities will be pleased to find this particular group of scholars involved in Latinx Environmentalisms. For well over a decade

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion, coedited by Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks. U of Utah P, 2018.

WAL: Western American Literature 55.1, Spring 2020, 99-101., 2020

Research paper thumbnail of Review of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú. Riverhead Books, 2018. WAL: Western American Literature 53.4, Winter 2019, 511-13.

Western American Literature 53.4. , 2019

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness, by Michael P. Branch. Roost Books, 2016. WAL: Western American Literature 51.4 (Spring 2017): 484-6.

In the introductory " Preamble " to his new book Raising Wild, Michael P. Branch explains his int... more In the introductory " Preamble " to his new book Raising Wild, Michael P. Branch explains his intent " to suggest a very different approach to how we conceive the relationship between wildness and domesticity " (xxvii). The book's fourteen essays explore the tensions between the wild and the domestic mainly from the vantage points of literary, historical, and place studies.

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Moments of Discovery: Natural History Narratives from Mexico and Central America edited, by Kevin Winker. UP of Florida, 2010. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18.1 (Winter 2011): 242-3.

In his preface to this collection of nonfiction narratives from the 1930s to 1990s, Kevin Winker ... more In his preface to this collection of nonfiction narratives from the 1930s to 1990s, Kevin Winker explains the book's intention to "capture some of the wonderment and history of biological exploration in Mexico and Central America" (xi). And in their coverage of over sixty years of experience in nine countries, the twenty selections presented here meet this aim with a remarkable regional and narrative variety. The collection presents various ecologies of these regions as well as a diverse group of individuals who have spent their lives studying these places and the species that live there. In the interest of moving science writing beyond cool, passive voice formality, the book also succeeds in turning "the lens around to study the observers" (xii).

Research paper thumbnail of "Bodies on the Border: (Re)materializing and Decolonizing Ecologies of Mobility in the Mexico-US Borderlands." Ecozon@ 13.2 (fall 2022): 58-76.

Ecozon@ 13.2 (The Postcolonial Nonhuman), 2022

Current human migrations and nonhuman extinctions on massive scales compel us to more carefully a... more Current human migrations and nonhuman extinctions on massive scales compel us to more carefully apply interspecies concepts of mobility to understanding the roles played by geopolitical borders, as well as the various, ongoing forms of colonialism that have produced and continue to perpetuate these borders. This essay applies bioregional, material, decolonial, and borderlands ecocriticisms to historicize prevention through deterrence enforcement measures in the Mexico-US border region, and discusses several significant entanglements of interspecies actors in migratory contexts, exploring a range of ways that nonhuman nature has been and continues to be deployed materially against migrants. In historicizing US enforcement tactics, the essay tracks the distribution of human agency from settler colonial, ethnonationalist, and neoliberal US policy makers, to armed paramilitary human bodies, then into structures of the built environment, and, finally, to the ways that agency is further diffused across complex webs of multiple kinds of human and nonhuman actors-plants, animals, landforms, watercourses, climate and weather conditions, and so on. While in some instances, nonhuman animals are deployed against migrant and other indigenous and mestizo people, in other multispecies entanglements, animals participate in the revelation and denunciation of state sponsored violence, leading to larger questions of the status of other nonhuman animals in the borderlands. The essay's primary focus is on illustrating the practical untenability of, and the severe harm done in, continuing to regard the borderlands from settler colonialist or human exceptionalist positionalities.

Research paper thumbnail of "Quisieron Enterrarnos: Recovering Bare Life in More-than-Human Immigrant Subjectivities." Aztlán 46.2 (fall 2021): 113-142.

Aztlán, 2021

Through the lenses of environmental humanities, decolonial thought, and new materialism, this ess... more Through the lenses of environmental humanities, decolonial thought, and new materialism, this essay considers expressions of interspecies and transnational solidarity and relationships of mutual interest and identification in certain strategic alliances between human and more-than-human communities. I argue that the literary works of Chicanx writers such as Oscar Zeta Acosta, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Alejandro Morales illuminate, open space for, and prefigure many of the more-than-human turns taken in the discourse of contemporary transnational migrant rights movements. The essay historicizes Western colonial hierarchies as the anthropocentric and speciesist bases for the racist, anti-immigrant discourse that has been publicly weaponized against immigrant people over the past half century. From there, it illustrates some of the productive struggles with and creative responses to the dehumanizing tendencies of this discourse and Mexico-US border enforcement. Although many of these examples occur in response to oppressive and often cruelly uneven valuations of life in the borderlands, I especially explore the creative, transformative, and often fearless decolonial expressions of individual and collective identity that these responses articulate.

Research paper thumbnail of “The Business of Heaven and Earth: Toponymy and the Imperial Idyll in the Domínguez-Escalante Journal of 1776.” Before the West Was West: Pre-1800 Western American Literature. Eds. Tom J. Hillard and Amy T. Hamilton. November 2014, U of Nebraska Press.

Research paper thumbnail of “Private Eyes and 'Little Helpers': Doormen, Gatekeepers, and Racial Mobility in Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely and Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress." Pacific Coast Philology 47 (fall 2012): 17-33.

Research paper thumbnail of “Writing Banana Republics and Guano Bonanzas: Globalization and Consumerism in the Composition Classroom.” Teaching Sustainability / Teaching Sustainably. Eds. Kirsten A. Bartels and Kelly Parker. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing, December 2011: 86-96.

Research paper thumbnail of “Post-NAFTA Ecologies: Mechanical Tortoises and Flower-Picking Cholos in Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper,” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, Global and Postcolonial Ecologies special issue 16 (September 2012): 59-76.

Research paper thumbnail of No Country for Nostalgia: Review of Picnic in the Ruins by Todd Robert Petersen, Counterpoint Press, 2021.

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial. Edited by Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette Ray. Temple UP, 2019.

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2020

Scholars acquainted with recent turns in Latinx literary studies and environmental humanities wil... more Scholars acquainted with recent turns in Latinx literary studies and environmental humanities will be pleased to find this particular group of scholars involved in Latinx Environmentalisms. For well over a decade

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion, coedited by Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks. U of Utah P, 2018.

WAL: Western American Literature 55.1, Spring 2020, 99-101., 2020

Research paper thumbnail of Review of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border by Francisco Cantú. Riverhead Books, 2018. WAL: Western American Literature 53.4, Winter 2019, 511-13.

Western American Literature 53.4. , 2019

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness, by Michael P. Branch. Roost Books, 2016. WAL: Western American Literature 51.4 (Spring 2017): 484-6.

In the introductory " Preamble " to his new book Raising Wild, Michael P. Branch explains his int... more In the introductory " Preamble " to his new book Raising Wild, Michael P. Branch explains his intent " to suggest a very different approach to how we conceive the relationship between wildness and domesticity " (xxvii). The book's fourteen essays explore the tensions between the wild and the domestic mainly from the vantage points of literary, historical, and place studies.

Research paper thumbnail of Review of Moments of Discovery: Natural History Narratives from Mexico and Central America edited, by Kevin Winker. UP of Florida, 2010. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 18.1 (Winter 2011): 242-3.

In his preface to this collection of nonfiction narratives from the 1930s to 1990s, Kevin Winker ... more In his preface to this collection of nonfiction narratives from the 1930s to 1990s, Kevin Winker explains the book's intention to "capture some of the wonderment and history of biological exploration in Mexico and Central America" (xi). And in their coverage of over sixty years of experience in nine countries, the twenty selections presented here meet this aim with a remarkable regional and narrative variety. The collection presents various ecologies of these regions as well as a diverse group of individuals who have spent their lives studying these places and the species that live there. In the interest of moving science writing beyond cool, passive voice formality, the book also succeeds in turning "the lens around to study the observers" (xii).