Reclaiming Militarized Lands
Virtual panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
This panel welcomes discussions on the environmental consequences of the U.S. imperialist military activities (with a focus in the Pacific region) on the off-limits sites of military bases, of war zones, of weapon testing, storage, and disposal and nearby lands. The U.S. military has left a severe environmental legacy accompanying its military operations: nuclear weapon tests on the Hawaiian islands, waste disposal in the Pacific Ocean, and military bases in South ...
Decolonizing Utopia: Configurations of the Commons in Modernity
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
The idea of the commons evokes egalitarian, democratic, utopian notions of shared resources and good governance. But while there have been many attempts to imagine versions of the commons in modernity, the modern commons has often been conceptualized on the back of settler colonial or colonial state formations or organizations (whether left or right). Because it turns on the question of collective land and resource management, re-envisioning ...
The Intersectionality of Colonialism, Imperialism, Capitalism, and Ecofascism with the Climate Crisis
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
Environmental disasters along with lack of resources and global recession are increasingly rendering many parts of the globe inhabitable and forcing the displacement of billions of people. While large corporations and the global north – directly responsible for the climate crisis– refuse to take responsibility for the ecological breakdown, a narrative casting the blame on vulnerable and marginalized communities has been reemerging. In their attempt to “reclaim ...
Botany, Sexuality, (Un)Commonality
Deadline extended to December 12
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
What are the possibilities—and limitations—of investigating commonalities between the plant and the human for discovering new forms of trans, nonbinary, and genderfluid sexualities? How might the study of vegetal forms of agency trouble the very notion of sexual subjectivity as something that originates inside an individual, rather than its environment? Given the role of botany as both a sexual and colonial science, how ...
An Uncommon Exclusion: Human/More-than-Human Alliance in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
Sponsored by the Oecologies Research Group
Past and present criticisms of enclosure risk affirming its setting of more-than-human life against human society and space. In scorning post-Conquest forest law, for example, one eleventh-century chronicler castigates William the Conqueror for having “loved the forest animals as if he were their father.” Through the unjustly queer filial bond of “deorfrith” (deer forest; game protection), the irate writer suggests, the king ...
Reclamation in the Coming Age of Critical Minerals
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
Sponsored by the Energy Humanities Interest Group
As part of the ASLE Energy Humanities Interest Group, this two-panel series will explore the limits and possibilities of reclamation for the pursuit of more socially and ecologically just futures. The reclamation of extractive landscapes can take many forms. From discrete processes of rehabilitating boreal forests to soil remediation and wetland and stream restoration, reclamation as an umbrella concept most often ...
Commons in Conflict: Decolonising, Decommissioning, and Retrieving Infrastructures of the Capitalocene
Virtual panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons” July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
Organised by Dimitra Gkitsa (University College London), Katerina Genidogan (Leuphana University Lüneburg), and Maria Alexandrescu (University of Sheffield)
The commons has reemerged in the West as a concept and set of practices in struggles against neoliberal practices. However, in non-western contexts, the commons have had a more troubled and sometimes violent history, tied to colonial expansion, racial capitalism, and capitalocenic extractivism. Taking existing, abandoned, ongoing, and future ...
Enclosing the Commons: Resistance and Rebellion in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
Sponsored by the Oecologies Research Group
Between 1066 and the nineteenth century, the practice of enclosure transformed the economy and ecology of England, as lands traditionally held in common were, through a variety of processes both formal and informal, transformed into private property. Implicated in the development of capitalism and the Agricultural Revolution, the enclosure movement has had a profound influence on how land use is conceptualized and ...
Beyond Scholarship ‘As Usual’
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
Ecocriticism and the environmental humanities have always been problem-oriented fields. In the field-defining The Ecocriticism Reader (1996), Cheryll Glotfelty notes “Our temperaments and talents have deposited [ecocritics] in literature departments, but, as environmental problems compound, work as usual seems unconscionably frivolous. If we’re not part of the solution, we’re part of the problem” (xx-xxi). Twenty-six years later, the environmental problems mentioned by Glotfelty have indeed compounded. The ...
Beyond A Common Future
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9–12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
“By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already ended,” the poet Franny Choi writes. “It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending world spun in its place.” Thinking alongside Choi’s depiction of ending and ongoing times, we turn our attention to the art and communities and labor that emerge when the future is called into question. How does futurelessness ...