Returning to the River: The Cherokee Diaspora's Hydrospheric Connections

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsFantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis, by Julie Sze. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. 235 pp. US$26.95/£18.95 (paper).Shuge WeiShuge WeiThe Australian National University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The China Journal Volume 75January 2016 Published on behalf of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/683512 Views: 143Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

It may not be immediately obvious what legal subjectivity and its underlying assumptions have to do with the relationship between human rights and the environment.However, legal subjectivity is a, if not the, decisively important legal mediator of relations between law, humanity and environment. This chapter examines the centrality of legal subjectivity to an understanding of injustice in an age of climate crisis.

This research investigates the philosophical contributions of existentialism to understanding and addressing the global climate crisis. Drawing on the foundational ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and de Beauvoir, the study explores how existential themes - freedom, responsibility, and authenticity - offer tools for grappling with the ethical and existential dilemmas posed by ecological destruction. Existentialism’s emphasis on human agency is juxtaposed against the collective nature of environmental responsibility, revealing tensions between individual actions and systemic change. Central existential concepts, including the absurd and alienation, are analyzed to uncover their relevance in fostering ethical resilience and guiding action amidst the uncertainties of the Anthropocene. The study argues that existentialism challenges humanity to confront the climate crisis authentically, rejecting nihilism and embracing responsibility for the self and future generations. Through the lens of existential thought, the research underscores the imperative of aligning personal values with environmental ethics while advocating for systemic transformations that address the climate emergency. Existentialism’s focus on the individual’s ability to create meaning through deliberate choices provides a philosophical foundation for engaging with the moral complexities of climate justice and sustainability. The research concludes that existentialist philosophy not only critiques humanity’s historical failures but also offers a hopeful framework for constructing a meaningful response to the climate crisis. It calls for embracing the freedom to act in ways that promote sustainability and intergenerational justice, transforming despair into purposeful action amid an indifferent universe.

What is “critical” about critical theory? I claim that, to be “critical enough”, critical theory’s future depends on being able to handle today’s planetary climate crisis, which presupposes a philosophy of nature. Here, I argue that Axel Honneth’s vision of critical theory represents a nature denial and is thus unable to criticize humans’ instrumentalization as well as capitalism’s exploitation of nature. However, I recover what I take to be a missed opportunity of what I term as the early Honneth’s original ecological insight, which I reconstruct precisely as a philosophy of nature. Consequently, I identify what I describe as an ecological sensibility in Honneth. This refers to a bodily capability through which humans sensuously can resonate, communicate, and interact – and through that morally engage – with nature in its entire complexity. Furthermore, by virtue of this ecological sensibility, humans can recognize nature’s inherent moral value as a sensuously affected party. Then, the early Honneth’s original insight is recovered as a critical political ecology, which is needed facing today’s climate crisis.

Taking its point of departure in two contemporary Danish poets, Victor Boy Lindholm and Theis Ørntoft, the article discusses affective poetic responses to the climate crisis. The concepts of ‘eco-mourning’ and ‘climate-melancholia’ are examined in order to deliberate the possibility for human happiness in late modernism. Poems by the writers are analysed with Sara Ahmed’s theories on happiness and perspectives from posthumanist theory (Cary Wolfe) and Timothy Morton’s notion of dark ecology. It is argued that the teleology, autonomy and futurism that, according to Ahmed, is inherent to the promise of happiness, is rendered impossible by the climate crisis and accordingly problematized stylistically in some works of climate poetry. This leads to a discussion of the poetry of Lindholm and Ørntoft in relation to Freud’s theory on mourning and melancholia, which ends by concluding that Lindholm’s poetry can be seen as representative of a mourning that reproduces dynamics of desire in a dialectical oscillation between optimism and pessimism. In contrast, Ørntoft’s poetry marks a melancholy dispensation of the structures that this desire works within. The conclusion is that in an age of climate crisis, mourning can be seen as a problematic speculation in future and continuation of the structures of happiness and desire that produced the crisis to begin with, whereas melancholia is a mental mode that brackets out such dialectical thinking and promises of future happiness.

Fossil fuel corporations play a significant role in promoting their interests in schools and other educational institutions, a practice that has recently been labelled as ‘petro-pedagogy.’ But this role goes beyond the production of the pro-petroleum and anti-science corporate propaganda that tends to attract the most critical attention. In this article, I present a case study of the involvement of BP, one of the world’s largest fossil fuel corporations, in primary and secondary education in the United Kingdom. As practiced by BP, petro-pedagogy constitutes a core part of a corporate education reform network that, for the past decade, has focused on promoting a neoliberal model of STEM education in schools around the world. This model, based on corporate and capitalist interests, poses a significant threat to our collective efforts to tackle the global climate crisis.

This article explores the concept "Anthropocene metabolism," which refers to how the metabolism of the human body has changed during The Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene with huge consequences for domesticated animals and wild nature. Furthermore, the article explores the conditions for the metabolic processes of the body and the natural resources that go into providing food for the planet's eight billion inhabitants. The infrastructure around the consumption of food is shown to have been made possible by a vast and globalized "Anthropocene arena," defined by a huge dependency on fossil fuels. The article thereafter explores the climate crisis as a hybrid crisis and argues that the shift to a plant-based diet could reduce the environmental impact of our global metabolism and thereby free agricultural land for re-wilding and reforestation, allowing for massive carbon capture. Finally, it is assessed how the reforestation of approximately 28 million square kilometers would be able to mitigate climate change.

This article apprehends a precarious moment when the queer and the tropics coincide to form a new fabric of sensing in this age of climate crisis. Queer and tropics are intimate, not only because both embody their inherent openness and fluidity, but also because each is woven closely by the corollary contradictions that besiege them, such as heteronormativity, capitalism, and environmental degradation. Within such an intersecting framework, this study critically engages with a selection of three works by the queer Filipino filmmaker Panx Solajes who attentively observes the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan (locally called Yolanda) in the Philippines, a tropical storm that occurred in 2013, and is still considered to be one of the strongest in modern records. Solajes’ post-typhoon films Balud (2014), Iskwater (2015), and Himurasak (2015) are experiments in the troubled tropics that configure a queer vision to engender a habitable and inclusive future through a coupling of human and nonhuman subjectivities. Thus, this post-Haiyan filmography relies on unconventional and resistant forms of queer visibilities that respond to the current climate crisis. Such filmic reading, therefore, can best emerge through allied histories of queer studies, the tropics, and the environment to harness discursive turns that offer alternatives from rigidly pessimistic and realist horizons of the future. This study commits to render visible a balance between the duty to remember and the agency to imagine a habitable future in this equatorial zone of the earth.

This report describes the education, research activities and productive dialogue that took place over a 3-day workshop at the Gesso Stura Natural Park (Italy, Piedmont Region). The project was coordinated by Prof. Eva Julia Lohse in collaboration with Prof. Margherita Paola Poto, and funded by the DAAD to establish and strengthen collaboration between the University of Bayreuth and the University of Turin. The workshop aimed to explore interdisciplinary, novel methods for (legal and political) water governance in the age of climate crisis. It investigated how co-production of knowledge can be used in environmental decision-making processes so as to reach better decisions based on a broader knowledge base, increase acceptance of protection measures by the public, and improve management of areas hit by severe droughts to guarantee access to water for communities. The workshop builds on the long-standing cooperation between the two principal researchers and their institutions regarding participation in environmental decision-making, sustainable development and water governance in Italy and Germany. This cooperation has been further developed by joint research on co-production of knowledge with indigenous and local communities to address the complex legal and social questions raised by the climate crisis.

A key tension at the heart of artisanal capitalism is the desire on the part of many makers to work ethically as well as generate an income, but does the world really need more ‘stuff’? Craft practice has long had as a central tenet a profound respect for materials and this sensibility continues to inform much craft practice today. So too do ideas of workmanship, of quality and building to last which also have rich and long traditions in craft practice and are all the more salient in the age of ‘fast fashion’, accelerating disposability and climate crisis. This chapter explores how makers are working to negotiate these tensions and possibly even become part of the solution not the problem.

This article responds to the recent call made in Sport in Society for scholarship that examines the social and political tensions of the age through cricket. Cricket is shown to be an international sport that emphasises the material, political and symbolic realities of the global climate crisis. Drawing on the concept of social futures, we argue that cricket is a significant site for the staging and perception of climate risks for worldwide audiences, and that a constellation of sporting, political, media and environmental actors are working to establish and communicate a new normative consensus about the game’s role in averting the worst impacts of climate change. As the evidence presented suggests, the urgency of these efforts is underpinned by the sport’s particular susceptibility to extreme heat, drought, rain and flooding, now and into the future.

As a research team formed of creative writing scholars and practitioners, we investigate climate change fiction, exploring the artistic and emotionally supportive possibilities of storytelling. In this article we explore the intersections between climate fiction and commercial romance fiction by analysing three case studies: Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Rachel Griffin’s The Nature of Witches and Aya de León’s Side Chick Nation. We examine the ways in which they explore, challenge and offer strategies for engaging with the climate crisis in an optimistic relationship-oriented genre, considering the complications of subgenre and positionality.

Perth is at a crossroad. A sprawling, low-density city, Perth is confronted with all the associated problems – car dependency, long commute times, large ecological footprint, growing transport costs and a myriad of health issues. In an age of climate crisis, energy vulnerability and high cost of living, Perth which is anticipated to grow to 3.5million people by 2050 can no longer afford suburban sprawl. A new model of growth is required, which is led by transport and urban consolidation, utilising Perth’s existing footprint and supported by light rail to create a more sustainable and affordable city. A consortium of 17 local governments is leading the way for a more sustainable future. Their approach incorporates light rail in inner and middle suburbs to create a ‘place based’ planning approach linking existing passenger rail stations with activity centres, and education hubs, combining this with housing diversity, that will create a more sustainable and affordable urban footprint. The approach aims to tackle the climate crisis by making transport more sustainable, helping to reduce the cost of living by reducing transport costs, and reducing Perth’s exposure to energy security as the supply of oil becomes ever more vulnerable in an increasingly unstable geopolitical climate.

“This Is the Nation’s Heart-String”Formal Education and the Cherokee Diaspora during the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries Gregory D. Smithers (bio) On March 10, 1881, the Cherokee Orphan Asylum Press published an editorial by Walter Adair Duncan. Duncan, the superintendent of the Cherokee Orphan Asylum between 1872 and 1884 and one of the leading Cherokee intellectuals of his era, offered heartfelt praise for the Cherokee Nation’s system of public education.1 At the time of Duncan’s editorial, the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory operated over one hundred day schools, a Cherokee male and Cherokee female seminary, and an orphanage.2 Duncan insisted that due to these institutions “no people in the world are better situated than the Cherokees.” He added that the true value of formal education lay in how it gave meaning to “national life.” As Duncan stated this point, “This [formal education] is the nation’s heart-string. It is the jeweled chord that binds the people together into a national whole, attaching them to one another, to home and to the land in which they were born.”3 Declarations of this nature highlighted two important realities for Cherokee people at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century. First, the Cherokees were a scattered people, exiled from their southeastern homeland by the forces of settler colonialism that culminated with the United States’ violent removal of Cherokee people to Indian Territory in 1838 and 1839. In the decades following removal, the Cherokees rebuilt their lives in the trans-Mississippi West, and throughout North America (and sometimes beyond). The exiled and scattered nature of the Cherokees, hallmarks of a diasporic people, saw [End Page 28] Cherokee leaders in Indian Territory value education as a means of connecting widely dispersed Cherokee individuals, families, and communities. Thus the second critical reality of the Cherokee people: its leaders—men like William Adair Duncan—valued formal education as a means of reimagining Cherokee identity: a nationalistic Cherokee identity that connected a diasporic people to a political homeland in Indian Territory.4 Historians of the Cherokee people—and Native Americans more generally—rarely view indigenous histories through the lens of diaspora. This is certainly true of the historical scholarship about the Cherokee people and the education system they developed. Scholars such as Devon Mihesuah and Marilyn Holt have focused on how the exiled Cherokees in Indian Territory, like the neighboring Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw, founded their own educational institutions in the trans-Mississippi West in the decades following the forced removals of the 1830s.5 For leading proponents of public education in the Cherokee Nation, the National Council’s support of a formal system of education played a vital role in raising “intelligent Cherokee children, trained for useful occupations, who love their country.”6 The expression of such nationalistic sentiments among the diasporic Cherokees in Indian Territory reached their highest pitch during the 1880s as Euro-American “sooners” and “boomers” carved out homesteads on the “Unassigned Lands” of Indian Territory. The growing populations of Euro-Americans in and around Indian Territory reinforced political calls for the termination of Native sovereignty and communal landholdings, and the divvying up of that land in individual allotments. The Dawes and Curtis Acts (1887 and 1898, respectively) ultimately paved the way for these shifts in American Indian policy to become a reality. For the Cherokees, severalty and allotment brought an end to Cherokee-run government, and, significantly, the loss of control over the public system of education deemed the “heart-string” of a dispersed people and a source of nationalistic pride in their trans-Mississippi homeland. Thus, by 1900 the Cherokee people’s institutions of education came under the control of “a Superintendent for the territory and a tribe supervisor, appointed by the US Government.”7 Unlike leaders of the Cherokee Nation in Indian Territory who set out to use education to inspire children with a nationalistic love for the Cherokee Nation, federal government officials aimed to erode such feelings and to instead use education to assimilate American Indians to white society by redirecting their nationalistic affections toward the United States.8 The Cherokee Nation’s loss of control over their own...

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