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Ecological Holism and Affirmative Biopolitics in John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown

ABSTRACT This article aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of John Steinbeck’s early and largely neglected novel To a God Unknown (1933) by focusing on its assimilation of contemporary organicist philosophy. Most scholars agree that the central drama of the novel hinges on the opposition between nature and society, or the polarized attitudes of connection and control derived from this divide. They differ strongly, however, in their interpretation of the trajectory of the protagonist, who commits suicide to save his parched land during a long drought. While some critics suggest that the protagonist’s suicide constitutes a sacrificial act that symbolizes his close bond with nature, others read his death as a futile act that ultimately reveals misguided settler attitudes. Foregrounding Steinbeck’s engagement with the bio-philosophies that he encountered during his formative years in California, this article offers a reading that reconciles these opposed positions. Pointing attention to Steinbeck’s strong indebtedness to the work of zoologist Carl Emerson Ritter, who tried to derive a progressive political program rooted in biological science, I argue that To a God Unknown dramatizes the inevitable interpenetration – rather than the polarity – of society and natural processes. I conclude by reflecting on the ways the novel might illuminate what Roberto Esposito has referred to as “affirmative” biopolitics, biopolitics geared toward the expansion of the commons, in the framework of Anthropocene studies today.

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Haunted by Waters: American Literature, Global Hydropolitics, and Environmental Justice

ABSTRACT Edward Abbey’s literature, particularly his popular novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), marks a turning point in American environmental(ist) writing, particularly because of its radical approach to environmental protection. However, Abbey’s so-called ecosabotage was often problematic and limiting in its failure to extend beyond a white, ableist, and cis-heteronormative perspective. Laguna Pueblo Indian writer Leslie Marmon Silko provides a useful corrective to this in her 1991 novel Almanac of the Dead. Similar to Abbey’s works, Silko’s Almanac laments the modification and, in many cases, destruction of the rivers of the American West. Yet Silko, unlike Abbey, brings to her protest novel an invaluable intersectional perspective, asserting that the most significant environmental protests of the future will arise when marginalized, global, Indigenous communities come together in the name of environmental justice. My conclusion turns to international environmental activists – for example, Chinese journalist Dai Qing and Indian writer Arundhati Roy – who are resisting the damming of their nations’ rivers. Like Silko, these writers offer much-needed glimmers of hope as they show us that the only way to cope with increasing environmental precarity is to work together beyond antiquated borders and binaries.

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‘We are of One Ecology’: How Indigenous Pacific Islander Poetics Map Anthropogenic Climate Change

ABSTRACT While activists, scientists and even politicians have sounded the alarm regarding anthropocentrically-fueled climate change for decades, there is still cause for hope. Indigenous peoples, particularly coastal peoples, have been engaging with the effects of climate change and working to mitigate them for decades, often using traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK. Kyle Powys Whyte, Zoe Todd and other Indigenous scholars working in the environmental sciences, environmental humanities and Indigenous studies more broadly have explored and documented how various Indigenous communities are refusing displacement from this latest crisis caused by colonization. This essay examines the work of several Indigenous Pacific Islander poets whose experiences as both Indigenous peoples and island dwellers provide unique and important insights into the ongoing discussions of anthropogenic climate change. Craig Santos Perez (CHamoru), No‘u Revilla (Kanaka ʻŌiwi [Hawaiian]), Kathy Jetnñil-Kijiner (Marshallese) and Brandy Nālani McDougall (Kanaka ʻŌiwi [Hawaiian]), who live and write from the Pacific Islands explore climate change both as a global event and as the result of a long line of ecological violences that have exploited Indigenous peoples and their lands. Yet, their poems often highlight how kinships with one another and the environment can provide hope in this time of seeming hopelessness.

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Hope in the Fractures: Mary Oliver’s Ecopoetics of Attention

ABSTRACT The American poet Mary Oliver (1935–2019) has been long acknowledged as dedicating her oeuvre to celebrating the beauty of the natural world. Importantly, however, her ecopoetry is also devoted to the themes of death and grief. While not specifically engaged with the climate crisis, her work’s dedication to the role of hope and attention and the task of staying with what is fractured in the human–nonhuman relation, lends itself to ecological concerns. Recent scholarship has explored Oliver’s ecopoetry as interlacing the field of care with that of ecological thinking, and studies in affect with that of environmental humanities. Taking an ecopsychoanalytic approach, my essay explores five of Oliver’s ecopoems – ‘Invitation’ (2008), ‘When Death Comes’ (1992), ‘In Blackwater Woods’ (1983), ‘Wild Geese’ (1986), and ‘Spring Azures’ (1992). By creating a dialogue between Sara Ahmed’s ‘Affective Economies’ (2004) and Sally Weintrobe’s work on ‘split internal landscapes’ (2013) and, in turn, engaging these two theoretical approaches with selections from Oliver’s work, her poems can be read as drawing humans into the wild possibilities of paying attention to the nonhuman world and doing so at levels both psychical, socio-political and ecological.

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Solarpunk and Alternative Social Imaginaries: Sarena Ulibarri’s Narratives of Radical Hope

ABSTRACT In the global climate crisis context, it is imperative to engage with the potentialities offered by hope as a critical category to invigorate the climate change discourse. Hope, as an affect, can mobilise collective imagination to effectuate alternatives to neoliberal hegemony. This paper explores the radical potential of hope, drawing on Laclau’s notion of emancipation, which reconceptualises hope as integral to envisioning a liberatory social imaginary in opposition to capitalist frameworks. Similarly, Mouffe’s articulation of the social imaginary underscores the role of hope as a passion that drives practices and discourses of identification, constituting political subjects distinct from those shaped by capitalism. Through an analysis of two Solarpunk narratives by Sarena Ulibarri, this paper examines how hope is mobilised through a collective will towards emancipation. The narratives under consideration, ‘The Spiral Ranch’ and ‘The Mushroom Farmer’s Network,’ depict characters trying to transcend the constraints of capitalism and an undesirable social order through practices of hope. These practices are initated through the passionate commitment of community members, as depicted in these narratives, to a collective ethos that eschews individualistic or profit-driven motives and aligns with the principles of a sustainable Solarpunk society. The ecologically sustainable farm and the ranch depicted in these texts represent pluralist collectivities that resist the individualising and totalising impulses characteristic of capitalist systems.

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Underlands, Oils, and Antarctica: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838)

ABSTRACT Edgar Allan Poe’s fictions have recently emerged to facilitate critical inquiry into a wide range of ecocritical and environmental concerns. This paper participates in these discussions by tracking the spectre of oil that haunts Robert Macfarlane’s proleptic understanding of Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’ (1841) and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Framing these texts as ‘premonitory oil-dreams’, Macfarlane suggests that they represent ‘Anthropocene works avant la lettre’ presaging the Petrocene’s globally expansive production of environmental and planetary ruin. Yet Macfarlane’s kerogenic interest in reading Poe “for oil depends on a critical method of thinking about the Anthropocene in putatively totalizing, global, or planetary terms, and in ways inimical to the apprehension of histories of extraction located in the South Atlantic and Southern Oceans nestled cocoon-like within Poe’s texts. If ‘memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair’ as Rebecca Solnit suggests, this paper proposes to re-read Poe’s Narrative ‘for the South’ in order to rehabilitate the neglected hinterlands of Southern oceanic worlds, histories, and memories. In this way, it responds to Solnit’s observation that ‘though hope is about the future, grounds for hope lie in the records and recollections of the past’, and that ‘a memory commensurate to the complexity of the past and the whole cast of participants … produces that forward-directed energy called hope’.

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“Beauty Is Not Optional”: Beauty, Hope, and Humanity in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT Against the backdrop of the Anthropocene, beauty might seem a marginal concern. Yet as the American writer and activist Terry Tempest Williams asserts, in a world of war, anthropogenic change, and environmental destruction, beauty is essential not only for environmental advocacy but also for human flourishing and well-being. Referring to Williams’s body of work, this paper links beauty to hope. Hope and beauty share a connection in that they both galvanize, inspire, and uplift. Contrary to critical understandings of entanglement in the Anthropocene, Williams reminds one of the hope and beauty that persist in a complex, troubled, and altered world. Despite crisis and fracture, beauty is found in relationships between individuals and phenomena. Drawing upon Elaine Scarry’s writings on beauty, the paper demonstrates the ethical and ecological dimensions of beauty in Williams’s work: its power to humble and quiet anthropocentric pride and to extend one’s recognition to non-human beings and objects. Consequently, although critics in the environmental humanities continue to be called to interrogate conceptions of human subjectivity to shift away from humanist criticism and concerns, writers such as Williams remind one that beauty entangles one in the world even as it empowers the self. Regardless of the pressures of the Anthropocene, Williams defends the salience of finding and creating beauty. Her works also demonstrate that it is hard to envision hope and possibility in the Anthropocene without access to beauty.

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Writing Stories of Anthropocene Extinction: Barbara Kingsolver’s Fiction and Nonfiction

ABSTRACT Humans are the most numerous big animals on Earth, deciding the fate of other species. As the massive geological force in the current epoch, the Anthropocene, human-driven alterations of the Earth’s environment take the form of a few dangerous trends: climate disruptions, species extinction, pollution of air, land, and sea, and growth of the human population. Barbara Kingsolver’s fictional works Prodigal Summer (2000) and Flight Behaviour (2012) are environment writings and narratives that foreground the current ‘Anthropocene extinction’ crisis. She recounts the stories of the coyote clan and the already extinct red wolf, the American chestnuts that became nearly extinct, the Monarchs changing their flight direction to more severe climate conditions, the booming trade of wildlife and pet animals, and numerous other species readily available for human consumption and use. Kingsolver’s writings amalgamate scientific knowledge with poetics and intersect the fiction and realities of global species extinction. The paper examines why exploring literary texts on species extinction is important and focuses on the storytelling mode of Kingsolver’s extinction narratives. This study also presents the texts as new narratives of hope presenting the affirmative visions of a sustainable future and the coexistence of human-nonhuman species.

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