The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704-1894
By Louis Kirk McAuley. Edinburgh University Press, 2024.
At this critical juncture in which the biodiversity of planet Earth appears to be shrinking fast and furiously, Louis Kirk McAuley invites us to consider the ways in which particular unruly natures, including animals, plants and minerals, actively intervene in literature to decentre the human. Drawing upon invasion biology, in The Ecology of British and American Empire Writing, 1704-1894, McAuley offers transformative ecocritical interpretations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature and highlights the heterarchical nature ...
The Animist Imagination in East Asian Cinema
By Pao-chen Tang. Amsterdam University Press, 2025 (Open Access).
The Animist Imagination in East Asian Cinema proposes a new mode of filmmaking in contemporary East Asian cinema: the titular “animist imagination.” At a time when a changing understanding of personhood has increasingly granted nonhuman entities legal protections and status, the mode has emerged to imagine ecological co-flourishing between human characters and nonhuman entities.
At the core of the book are films by several directors at the forefront of East Asian cinema, including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Kore-eda ...
Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era
By Cara Judea Alhadeff, PhD. Eifrig Publishing, 2024.
Merging fictional and nonfictional worlds, Zazu Dreams: Between the Scarab and the Dung Beetle, A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era is a climate chaos adventure fable and resource encyclopedia that explores the relationships among cross-cultural spiritualities, socio-political diversity, and biodiversity. In his dreams, Zazu, an Arab-Jewish boy, travels the globe on a humpback whale, crossing vast time and space. Learning from scientists, healers, engineers, architects, philosophers, musicians, and artists, many of whom are refugees and ...
Reverent Flora – The Arabian Desert’s Botanical Bounty
By Diana Woodcock. Shanti Arts, 2025.
Reverent Flora: The Arabian Desert’s Botanical Bounty is a collection of poetry that catalogues the Arabian Desert’s critically endangered, disappearing flora while promoting caretaking of the earth. Living for two decades at the edge of the Arabian Desert, poet Diana Woodcock became most interested in local and global conservation issues, as well as in the environmental ethic of the Qur’an. In anticipation of the opening of Qatar’s UNESCO-sponsored Qur’anic Botanic Garden—the purpose of which is to maintain for ...
Everyday Ecofascism: Crisis and Consumption in American Literature
By Alexander Menrisky. University of Minnesota Press, 2025.
As challenges posed by climate change have intensified in the twenty-first century, right-wing figures in the United States and abroad have increasingly framed anti-immigrant, anti-Indigenous, and white-supremacist sentiments in terms of environmental survival. Everyday Ecofascism explores the insidious nature of this tendency, revealing how permutations of these perspectives in fact resonate across the political spectrum. Drawing on comparative studies of fascism writ large, Alexander Menrisky demonstrates that ecofascism is best understood not as a uniquely right-wing ...
Spectacle Earth: Media for Planetary Change
By Andrew Kalaidjian. University of Virginia Press, 2025.
What does it mean to watch a disaster unfold? Does exposure to a source of dread spur people to action or lull them into fatalism and complacency? Spectacle Earth is a lively and wide-ranging consideration of media engagement, passivity, and virtual environments in relation to ecological crises and climate change. The book begins by tracing the long trajectory of environmental aesthetics and natural sciences that have led up to the Anthropocene. It then looks at lessons ...
Eco-Performance, Art, and Spatial Justice in the U.S.
By Courtney B. Ryan. Routledge, 2024.
In Eco-Performance, Art, and Spatial Justice in the U.S., Courtney B. Ryan traces how urban eco-artists in the U.S. from the 1970s until today contend with environmental domestication and spatial injustice through performance. In theater, art, film, and digital media, the artists featured in this book perform everyday, spatialized micro-acts to contest the mutual containment of urbanites and nonhuman nature. Whether it is plant artist Moe Beitiks taking their ivy out for a jog, photographer Naima Green photographing ...
In Inheritance of Drowning
By Dorsía Smith Silva. CavanKerry Press, 2024.
In Inheritance of Drowning begins with the exploration of the devastating Hurricane María in Puerto Rico. Written with vivid imagery, these poems highlight the natural world, significant impact of hurricanes, and marginalization of Puerto Ricans. The collection also explores the multiple sites of oppression in the United States, especially the social and political injustices and intersections of race and violence. Dorsía Smith Silva’s powerful voice confronts the “drowning” of BIPOC communities as they are displaced, exploited, and ...
Regionalismo ensamblado: Cultura, ecología política y extractivismos en Latinoamérica (1930-1940)
By Gianfranco Selgas. Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2025 (Open Access).
Regionalismo ensamblado proposes a new conceptualization of Latin American cultural regionalism as a form of political ecology. The book presents the idea of region and regionalism as an assemblage of geographic spaces, social practices, and materialities, examined through the literary and discursive production of the 1930s and 1940s as an early form of socio-ecological knowledge.
The book provides a framework for analyzing the works of Enrique Bernardo Núñez, Carmen Lyra, and César Uribe Piedrahita in relation to ...
The Dominion of Flowers: Botanical Art & Global Plant Relations
By Mark Laird. Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2024.
Between 1760 and 1840, exotic plants were imported from across Britain’s empire and were lavishly depicted in periodicals and scientific treatises. Mark Laird’s provocative new book – part art history, part polemic – weaves fine art, botanical illustration, gender studies and previously unpublished archival material into a political and ethical account of Britain’s heritage, showing how plants were not only integral to English gardens of the Georgian and Victorian eras but also ...