Commons in Colonization
Call for Papers for AESS 2023: Reclaiming the Commons – a joint event with the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).
This panel will explore how European colonization in the Americas as a whole transmitted Old World forms of commoning on diverse environments (land, water, woodlands, marshlands) to this continent during early modernity and how these commons as places and commoning as practices persisted or became extinct. The period under consideration will be the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. The panel will ...
Revolution, Reclamation, and Intersectional Ecofeminism
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
How do we use ecofeminism now, in moments of revolution or reclamation? Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s introduction to Material Feminisms as well as Alaimo’s work in Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space outline some of the tensions between ecofeminist thought and the divergent interests of environmental feminism, material feminism, and feminist science studies in their respective approaches to the natural world, the body, and materiality. ...
Rethinking Timescapes in the Gulf South
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
This panel sets out to frame the Gulf South as a space in which the forces of settler colonial plantations and their petrochemical afterlives have made linear time’s inadequacy especially apparent. We are interested in work that takes up the ways writers, artists, and performers in the Gulf South develop methods of resistance to settler colonialism in the Plantationocene by interrupting or disputing linear time. Our hope ...
Contaminated Futures
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
Contamination often refers to the risks and dangers of pollution. From oil spills to leaks at nuclear power plants to the release of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere, the modern industrial era has created numerous crises of safety for humans and the planet. In this sense, contamination is an urgent issue demanding our attention in the consideration of environmental futures. At the same time, the very idea ...
Forgotten Spaces: Race and Environment in the US South
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
The US South is often a forgotten space within ecocritical discussions, yet it provides fruitful ground for thinking about the commons. In 2019, in the first edited collection of essays on southern studies and the environment, Zackary Vernon notes that ecocritical attention to this bioregion might help “provide a way out of the limitations of thinking too locally or too globally,” in addition to bringing disenfranchised stakeholders ...
Representations of Home in Literatures and Cultures in English (Dis)locations: The Shifting Thematics of Home
School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES) 22-23 June, 2023
The ULICES Representations of Home research project addresses issues of identity and belonging in different geo-political, socio-cultural contexts of countries where English is or has become a language of communication.
Since its formation in 2013, the project has explored this theme as represented in literature, the visual arts and culture, but also from a social, political and historical perspective. The idea of home branches out in many ...
The Ecology of Dune
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons” July 9–12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
To anticipate the fall 2023 premiere of Denis Villeneuve’s completion of his film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, this pre-formed panel seeks papers that examine the ecology of the novel and/or adaptations of Dune. On Dune in 10,000 years, the planetary ecologist Liet Kynes hears the voice of his dead father reminding him that the “highest function of ecology is understanding consequences,” and that he “must cultivate ...