Deadline: December 9, 2022
Contact: Carlos Alonso Nugent, Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University
Email: carlos.nugent@vanderbilt.edu
Guaranteed ASA-Sponsored panel at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9–12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
Ever since Lawrence Buell drew his famous distinction between “first-wave” and “second-wave” ecocriticism (2005), the standard story about the field has been one of diversification: if ecocriticism emerged in the 1990s as the study of white nature writing, it evolved in the 2000s and 2010s by engaging different genders, sexualities, races, ethnicities, classes, castes, and more. A quick glance at a journal issue or a conference program proves that this story is true enough. But while it is clear that ecocriticism has come to include a far wider range of human communities, it is harder to characterize how the field has interacted with these communities’ intellectual traditions—and in particular, harder to characterize how the field has drawn on, departed from, and otherwise related to ethnic studies.
With the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) convening a conference on the theme of “reclaiming the commons,” this panel explores what readers of William Cronon might call “uncommon ground.” While recognizing the indissoluble interdependence of all-too-human communities and more-than-human environments, the panel hopes to reckon with (un)productive frictions across ecocriticism and ethnic studies. Among other things, it asks, how have these fields coevolved, and how have they worked at cross purposes? Around what places, periods, or issues have they developed mutually transformative dialogues, and in what contexts have they continued in isolated monologues? Insofar as ethnic studies can be separated into subfields—Black studies, Latinx studies, and so on—which have played particularly pivotal roles in ecocriticism, and which have been pushed aside? Why?
To answer these and other questions, this panel welcomes many possible presentations. Some might describe the divergent institutionalization of ecocriticism and ethnic studies, in which the former receives support even as the latter comes under attack. Others might develop theoretical and/or meta-critical discussions of the two fields, advancing arguments about how and why they have (not) worked together. Still others might turn to actual scenes of socio-ecological struggle, using texts, images, or other media to illuminate the uncommon ground among two fields central to life on our precarious planet.
Please send 300-word abstracts to carlos.nugent@vanderbilt.edu by Friday, December 9. Please note that since this panel is co-sponsored by the American Studies Association, it has a guaranteed place on the program of ASLE/AESS.
Posted on October 19, 2022
