Short description:

Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis expands postcolonial precarity studies by addressing the current climate crisis and threats to the habitability of the planet from a range of ecocritical and environmental perspectives. 

Long description:

Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis expands postcolonial precarity studies by addressing the current climate crisis and threats to the habitability of the planet from a range of ecocritical and environmental perspectives. The collection uses planetary thought-action praxis that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all forms of life in addressing the socioecological issues facing humanity: accelerating climate change, over-exploitation of natural resources, and the Global North?South divide. With reference to contemporary cultural productions, such praxis seeks to examine the ideas, images, and narratives that either represent or impede potential disasters like the so-called sixth extinction of the planet, that inspire the dismantling of carbon democracies arising in the wake of neoliberalism, and that address rising inequality with precarious conditions in the transition to renewable energy. The different chapters explore literary and visual representations of planetary precarity, identifying crisis-responsive genres and cultural formats, and assessing approaches to environment-re/making that call for repair, recovery and sustainability. In imagining future habitability, they deploy diverse critical frameworks such as queer utopias, zero-waste lifestyles, alternative ecologies, and adaptations to the uninhabitable. The collection tackles problems of global vulnerability and examines precarity as a condition of resilience and resistance through collective actions and solidarities and innovative constructions of the planet?s survival as a shared home. It engages with current postcolonial debates, uses intersectional methodologies, and introduces contemporary literary, visual concepts, and narrative types.

Table of Contents:

INTRODUCTION

00        Janet  M. Wilson, Barbara Schmid-Haberkamp, and Om  Prakash Dwivedi:

The Anthropocene and the ?weak planet?: framing postcolonial precarity ecocriticism

PART I

Planetary precarity and vulnerability

01.     Wai Chee Dimock: Precarious breath: The arts and sciences of oxygen

02.     Pramod Nayar: ?One world or none?: Planetary nuclear precarity and anti-nuclear    cosmopolitanism

03.     Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández: Le Transperceneige (1982) and the Snowpiercers (2013; 2020) as post-apocalyptic cli-fis: (Im)Possible technologized habitats for the vulnerable posthuman Other

PART II

Revised Literary Genres and Visual Formats

04.     Klara Machata: Imagining planetarity in Vandana Singh?s speculative short fiction

05.     Chiara Lanza: Precariousness and resistance: Petro-despotism and the imaginative power of literature

06.     Jan Rupp: Planetary precarity in performance ecopoetry: Poems to solve the climate crisis?

07.     Scott Slovic: Toward critical self-reflection and a vigilant sense of precarity: Why read pandemic literature during a pandemic

PART III

Affective ecoprecarity: Relationality, resilience and resistance

08.   Stefan Benz: Of ecological critique and queer utopias: Nicky Drayden?s Escaping Exodus (2019)

09.  Sonja Frenzel: Women?s writing as eco-translation: The critical-creative edges of precarious presence in Bernardine Evaristo?s Girl, Woman, Other (2020) and Sharon Dodua Otoo?s Ada?s Room ([2020] 2023)

10.  Leonor María Martínez Serrano: Earth is Oikos: Peter Sanger on the vulnerability of the biosphere as life?s home

PART IV

Planetary repair and survival

11.  Aleks Wansbrough: Resisting precarity and planetary dysphoria with In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain

12.  Kanak Yadav: The precarious case of the zero-waste solution to the planetary problem

13.  May Joseph and Sofia Varino: Hydrosophy: Ecology, choreography, and multispecies precarity