Literatures of Environmental In/Justice - Einzelansicht

Please purchase the following books (any edition is fine as long as it is in English) as soon as possible. They are required reading. All other texts will be made accessible on moodle.

• Helena María Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus
• Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves

Trigger warning: Please note that some of our course texts contain descriptions of physical violence and sexual abuse.

Many refer to our current times as the age of the Anthropocene, marked by the devastating effects of anthropogenic (human-made) destruction, of which polluted oceans, deforestation, mass extinction and climate-induced displacement are only a few examples. At the same time, such an approach that focuses on humans as a global, geological force runs the danger of homogenizing ‘the human’ in ways that obscures how both harms and responsibilities are unequally distributed: after all, not all humans in all parts of the world are implicated in and affected by climate collapse and environmental destruction in the same ways. How do we live in this contemporary moment differently and across differences, sharing certain experiences such as ‘sostalgia’ or ‘climate angst,’ while yet facing different risks and harms in our lives, and having different forms of agency available? Environmental catastrophes, furthermore, affect not only humans but also the more-than-human world, thus begging the question of multispecies forms of justice. It is through literature that we will interrogate how the effects of environmental crises are unevenly distributed along lines of race, gender, class, and citizenship, as well as across different species, and how these play out against the background of North American environmental and immigration politics as well as ongoing (settler) colonialism. We will trace how literary works engage in different ways with questions of justice: how do they portray interconnected forms of environmental injustice, both social and ecological injustice? How do they imagine forms of justice?

Students should be willing to engage with different text forms and genres, including prose, (video-) poetry and theory. They should be ready to approach the texts with curiosity and open-mindedness, to challenge and rethink their own assumptions, and to engage with each other in a shared process of learning.

Format: This class alternates between in-person (synchronous/live) classes on campus and online (asynchronous/at home) sessions on a biweekly basis. It therefore requires both in-class attendance and online participation. In order to allow for more in-depth discussions in class, and to hone in on their critical reading and writing skills, students are expected to work independently with materials provided for them in the asynchronous sessions.

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