The Environmental Humanities in anglophone literature and media

Rebecca Duncan

Rebecca Duncan is Associate Professor in Literature at Linnaeus University, where she is a member of the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, and coordinator of the Cluster for Ecology, Culture and Coloniality. She has published widely within the environmental humanities on the relationship between capitalism, colonialism and culture, with a focus on speculative forms, and is the co/editor of several collections: most recently, The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (2023) – winner of the Justin D. Edwards Prize – and The Cambridge Companion to World Gothic Literature, which is forthcoming in 2025. Rebecca is recipient of project grants from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2021-24) and The Swedish Research Council (2024-2027).

South African (Science) Fiction and Ecology: Boomerangs of Crisis and Form

Influential interventions in literary ecocriticism over the last decade have proposed that accelerating climate breakdown heralds the decline of realism, since realism is ill-equipped to grasp the increasingly catastrophic entanglement of our species in planetary systems. In the Anthropocene, the prediction goes, the future of the novel lies with science fiction.

This talk offers an alternative perspective on the contemporary rise of ecocritical science fiction, taking as a starting point the history of colonial exploitation and extraction that shapes actually existing global distributions of crisis. From this vantage, global socio-ecological turbulence represents not a new situation, but the expansion of conditions hitherto concentrated across the post/colonial world. If the contemporary rise of science fiction marks a response to planetary shifts in the present, then – I suggest – this development needs to be understood as the global manifestation of narrative forms and strategies that have emerged before, on colonial labour and resource frontiers.

To illustrate this argument, I consider two fictional engagements with South African gold mining: Masande Ntshanga’s Triangulum (2018) – a complex work of contemporary science fiction – and Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy (1946), usually addressed as a work of proletarian realism.  Written nearly a century apart, and differentiated by genre, these texts nonetheless make analogous moves beyond the realist register to figure bewildering social and environmental inequality around South Africa’s extractive frontiers. Read together, I suggest, they shed new light on the purported decline of realism: if science fiction represents the future of the novel, then this may have less to do with an Anthropocene consciousness, than with a catastrophe that is returning, following the trajectory a boomerang, from the peripheries of empire, to its cores.

Johan Höglund

Johan Höglund is Professor of English at the Department of Languages at Linnaeus University. His research focuses, among other areas, on how fiction narrates the ongoing planetary emergency. His new book is The American Climate Emergency Narrative: Origins, Developments and Imaginary Futures (2024). He is also the PI of the project “Future Food Imaginaries in Global Climate Fiction.” This project is funded by FORMAS, a Swedish research council for sustainability and studies how genre fiction set in climate-transformed futures imagines that human society will respond and adapt to the profound and imminent transformation of current food systems.

Tales of Violence and Extraction: Defining the American Climate Emergency Narrative

This talk critically investigates the assumption that climate fiction (cli-fi) is a new genre that provides roadways to more sustainable futures. Building on the world-ecology framework and using a world-literature perspective, it shows that much American cli-fi is in fact much more interested in the preservation of American capitalist modernity than in climate breakdown. As described in my book The American Climate Emergency Narrative (2024), this type of cli-fi can be traced back to the emergence of stories that promote violence and extraction as essential to the building of secure futures. The origins of American cli-fi are thus in early settler-colonial and plantation narratives, tales of adventurous yet catastrophic coal and oil mining, and science fiction stories about conflict over, or even with, the resources of the planet. Rooted in this material and literary history, much American cli-fi insists that the specific emergency it narrates can only be resolved by the very system that produced it in the first place. Thus, the vision of the future the American Climate Emergency Narrative produces is either one in which modernity is revitalized or where the entire world comes to a grotesque end.

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder

Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder is an assistant professor in the Department of English at the University of Iowa.  She is a scholar of twentieth and twenty-first century transnational American literature and culture. Her teaching and research interests include multiethnic literature and culture, (specifically African American and Latinx Studies), performance studies, women of color feminism, southern studies, and social movement activism. Her work has appeared in The Global South, The Cambridge History of the Literature of the U.S. South, PMLA, and various edited collections. Her first book, The Revolution Will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism, was published in October 2024.

Art/Work: Media Experimentation and Agricultural Justice

The civil rights movement contains many stories and actions beyond the main narratives of protest and voter registration. Grassroots activists and local people sought to reimagine their relationship to land and labor as part of the larger project of social change. In this talk, I present a little-known archive of intermedia activism emerging from the movement’s campaign of agricultural justice, which I discuss in my book, The Revolution will Be Improvised: The Intimacy of Cultural Activism. In the 1960s, the photography and communication department of the activist organization Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee worked alongside cooperative farmers to document their reforms to agricultural labor using unique repurposed media. I trace the impact of their intermedia documentary on other modalities of artistic expression and how creativity impacts the contemporary farming practices of Soul Fire Farm, an Afro-indigenous farming community committed to food justice.

Gina Caison

Gina Caison is the Kenneth M. England Professor of Southern Literature at Georgia State University. Her first book, Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies (2018) won the 2019 C. Hugh Holman Award. Her second monograph, Erosion: American Environments & the Anxiety of Disappearance, is forthcoming in fall 2024. She is the co-editor of Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television (2017) and Remediating Region: New Media and the U.S. South (2021). She teaches courses in American literature, Indigenous literatures, southern literatures, and documentary practices.

Gullies and Removals of the Plantation South

This presentation engages Katherine McKittrick’s concept of “plantation futures” to analyze the erosion site of Providence Canyon in Georgia alongside a close reading of the corresponding soil science and settler colonial logic embedded in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. To illuminate the connections between erosion and southeastern Indigenous Removal in the setting of Mitchell’s novel, this work draws from Charles Lyell’s two-volume A Second Visit to the United States of North America (1849). The presentation concludes with a return to a reading of Providence Canyon and the way 1930s boosters of the site attempted to rebrand the agricultural destruction as “natural” to increase area tourism. This analysis engages questions of how settler colonialism, the plantation economy, and ongoing white supremacy manifest in discourses of soil erosion.