Special Issue EJES: Dislocations and Ecologies (original) (raw)

Foreword: Ecocriticism in the Age of Dislocation?

Dix-Neuf, 2019

Anglophone environmental literary criticism has evolved within the bounds of regions and regionalism. Particularly during its early years, ecocriticism privileged local engagement with the natural world as a literary-activist mode. Recent approaches, however, emphasise translocal, transregional, and transnational frameworks. Moreover, intersections with studies of affect, ecofeminism, materiality, postcolonialism, risk, and other areas underlie the continuing theoretical diversification of ecocriticism. An Anthropocene Ecocriticism would confront the disorienting spatiotemporal scales of our age, resist longstanding local-global binarisms, place emphasis on the value of indigenous narratives, and embrace the environmental justice origins of the field.

Discursion and Excursion:" Poetry of Bodies, Place, and Landscape in the Ecocritical Movement

2016

My thesis project focuses on the current literary field of Ecocriticism, its historical transmutations, and the correlation of the pastoral genre, as one begins to understand current human understandings of “nature.” By applying a deeper understanding of the Deep Ecology movement, along with shifting understandings of the human and the non-human, specifically in our usage and attention to landscape and wilderness, I hope to explore the role that the aesthetic, and the function of the poem, can play a crucial role in the environmental movement. By building a foundational understanding of our cultural context and critical theories of Environmental criticism, I hope to illuminate the necessary ways that place, body, and language/perception all interact with each other to create a specific experiential moment of nature. This environmental epiphany can be modeled best in the poem that reflects the “thisness” of nature, as Hopkins calls it, and emphasizes the aura/essence of the land with...

Forward to nature? The ecological subject between dislocation and the decision

A common theme in environmentalist discourse laments a culture that has wandered too far from the guiding wisdom of the earth, and lost its way. ‘Back to nature’ suggests a return to some original state, as if an ecological subject lay suffocating under the weight of civilisation. I investigate the prospect that an ecological subject can short-circuit the post-political, technocratic approach to the environment, but take as my point of departure the discursive-turn repudiation of any unmediated access to nature. The Lacanian concept of discourse structured around master-signifiers, however, suggests nature does not lie outside of language but at its borders, and that ‘pre-discursive’ nature is a fantasy ameliorating the inadequacy of language to account for the real. While this annuls any possibility of a pre-discursive subject, far from condemning ecology as a site of political resistance it suggests that an ecological subject may be found in those spaces between discourses. An analytical schema of the relations between discourses of Nature and of Society (God and Nation, for example) is constructed to map those spaces. The schema has two dimensions: the structural relations between master-signifiers, and the historical emergence of new formations of relations. Subjects occupy the point between the dislocation of one formation and the emergence of another. By constituting nature as inherently valuable, the Nature discourses of Romanticism and modern environmentalism partially engender an ecological subject – but at the cost of perpetuating the nature/culture binary that forecloses rearticulatory alternatives. The discourse of Nature is the first ladder of ecologism’s ascendance, but only by kicking it out can it amplify the dislocation of the contemporary formation and produce the space into which an ecological subject can emerge.

a steering to homes, or Toward a Migratory Consciousness in Ecocriticism

Journal of Southeast Asian Ecocriticism, 2023

As of 2016, there are a recorded three million "documented" Filipinx migrants to countries all over the world. These growing numbers, increasing every year, have reflected the constantly changing landscape of the Filipinx identity-one that arguably has not yet been mapped with certainty due to years of oppression, colonisation, and, now, globalisation. These migrant Filipinx are often subjected to hardships and stereotypes that are perpetrated not only by their host countries, but also their fellow countrymen as well, which renders a major part of their experiences as a migrant "invisible." Thus, this paper challenges the preconceived notions of a migrant Filipinx via the "homes" they have remapped on new landscapes within and beyond the country. I argue that Filipinx migrants are creating new "routes and roots" that are both fostering a new Filipinx identity and steering back to the Filipinx identity as they navigate their ways onto new landscapes. Using Elizabeth DeLoughrey's critique of "tidalectics," which foregrounds "a dynamic method of geography that can elucidate island history and cultural production to provide frameworks that explore the complex and shifting entanglement between sea and land, diaspora and indigeneity, and routes and roots," I aim to analyse an ecopoem each from Merlinda Bobis and Charlie Samuya Veric that both complicate the geographies of a Filipinx migrant. My hope is that in doing so, the multiplicities of landscapes that the Filipinx migrant experiences are amalgamated in a new environmental culture

Beyond the Human Body: Claire Denis's Ecologies

Alphaville, 2014

This article explores the work of Claire Denis beyond the focus on the human body through which it is commonly read. Addressing Beau Travail (1999) and The Intruder (2004), I examine an ecological impulse that manifests itself through a nonanthropocentric detailing of the coexistence of body and landscape, and a nonhierarchical attentiveness to the distributed agencies of humans, animals and things. I draw here in particular on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of the crystal-image and on Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking of ecotechnics, as elaborated in his essay on The Intruder (a film inspired by Nancy’s autobiographical essay, L’Intrus). In Beau Travail, Deleuzian crystals of time draw attention to the nonhuman histories of the landscape. In The Intruder, this crystalline structure persists, reactivating traces of nonhuman pasts, while a focus on canine gestures and responses signals nonhuman perceptual worlds in the present. Deleuze’s “Desert Islands”, another text that shapes The Intruder, offers a further way of reading the film’s attentiveness to the nonhuman—an attentiveness that extends, as Nancy suggests, to a consideration of environmental crisis.

A New Paradigm: Postcolonial Ecocriticism and Trans-corporeality in Environmental Literary Discourse

This paper examines postcolonial ecocriticism theory and the concept of trans-corporeality as a new paradigm in environmental literary discourse at a period when the problematic interaction between man and environment pose a threat to the natural world. Postcolonial ecocriticism is a type of ecocriticism that addresses "concerns with conquest, colonization, racism, sexism along with its investments in theories of indigeneity and diaspora and the relations between native and invader, societies and cultures" while 'trans-corporeality' is a concept which decenters the human in place of the non-human in relation to objects, bodies, geographical systems, and the environment. To this end, the critical theory and concept deployed in this study will uncover the extent to which repressive human agencies, chemical toxins, pollution, technological progress, and other participants modify and negatively impacting the more-than-human world and marginalized people. This paper will demonstrate that postcolonial ecocriticism and transcorporeality are robust and viable tools to investigate regions across the globe which are currently depleting natural resources/landscapes, destroying species diversity, and injuring the fragile ecosystems through badly envisioned development projects.