ASLE 2021 Panel: Militant Ecologies
In her 1968 collection Revolutionary Letters, Diane di Prima issued an all-caps injunction: ‘BLOW UP THE PETROLEUM LINES.’ ‘[M]ake the cars / into flower pots or sculptures or live / in the bigger ones,’ she suggests, ‘why not?’ In the thick of multiple emergencies, the contemporary re-emergence of di Prima’s resonant question – ‘why not?’ – signals the environmental movement’s return to militancy and direct action, epitomized in Andreas Malm’s recent interrogation of this quandary in How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Framing ...
Special Session: Literary Urban Studies and Climate Futures (MLA 2022)
Special Session proposal for MLA 2022 Convention
This panel gathers papers that consider how literary urban studies might contribute to interdisciplinary scholarship on questions of equity, justice, and the material transformation of cities in the context of climate change, as they are expressed in the literature of any region worldwide or historical period. All cities are in the process of being unevenly and variously transformed by climate change. The World Bank estimates that Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia alone will generate 143 ...
“Ecocriticisms of the Américas” Interest Group Calls for Sponsored Panels for ASLE 2021
The “Ecocriticisms of Américas” interest group was founded in 2019 to gather and support ASLE members working on the Caribbean and Latin America. “Ecocriticisms of the Américas” will sponsor up to two panels at the 2021 virtual ASLE symposium, to be held asynchronously from July 26- August 6. See https://www.asle.org/stay-informed/asle-news/2021-virtual-conference-cfp/. Panels sponsored by the interest group must still apply for acceptance through the traditional ASLE channels, but sponsorship enhances the visibility of the panel at this large conference. To be considered for sponsorship ...