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

This special issue of the European Journal of English Studies addresses the dislocation of bodies (human and non-human), concepts, cultures, and goods across borders of various kinds not just in relation to notions of mobility, but with special attention to their interaction with their surrounding environments. By adding global or even planetary concerns to traditionally more local investments, recent trends in ecocriticism have also globalised the field itself, diminishing the hegemony of the Anglo-American academics who had dominated the first phase or ‘wave’. A focus on ecology and dislocation brings to the fore that not only migrating humans and animals are ‘in motion’ but that the same is true for the larger environments in which they live. The essays cover a range of genres, from poems to novels to scientific essays. They discuss film alongside traditional ecocentric narrative such as Walden, or use postcolonialism as an angle or combine Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology with a more recent focus on the role of the body in the act of perception. Things, places, human and non-human animals, as well as plants, are constantly on the move in these essays; as identities migrate, so do concepts and words.