1st Edition
Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis Planetary Precarity and Future Habitability
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.
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
Biography
Janet M. Wilson is emerita Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK. Her research focuses on the diaspora and postcolonial writing of the settler colonies of New Zealand and Australia, and on literature and globalisation, transculturalism and transnationalism, and refugee writing. Her most recent publication is the coedited volume, New Zealand medievalism: Reframing the medieval (2024). She is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, coeditor of Studies in World Literature (Ibidem-Verlag), and chair of the global network, Challenging Precarity.
Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her main research interests are Postcolonial Studies and eighteenth-century British literature and culture. She is a member of the steering committee of the international network Challenging Precarity and has co-edited the collections of essays Representing Poverty in the Anglophone Postcolonial World (Bonn University Press, 2021) and Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World (Brill, 2022). She is a member of the DFG-funded research training school Gegenwart/Literatur (Contemporary/Literature) and an elected member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Science, Humanities and the Arts.
Om Prakash Dwivedi is Associate Professor of English literature at Bennett University, Utter Pradesh, India. He is the author of Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English (2022); Tracing the New Indian Diaspora (2014); and co-author with Lisa Lau of Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English (2014).
