General Introduction to Environmental Humanities in India The Ecocritical Discourse in Hindu Literature

The article offers a general overview of the ecological debate and Environmental Humanities in India. After an introduction on the legacy of Gandhian ecological thought and contemporary literature, the essay focuses on the most discussed themes of the Indian classical tradition, with particular references to sacred texts (Vedas, Puranas, the epics). The sum of this knowledge is placed on the recursive perspective of Indian time: as yugas change, new structures of social life arise, reformulating society and its environment in a more holistic and sustainable way. This would be possible without ever denying the responsibility we all have in maintaining that personal empathy towards the environment that is reflected in Indian classical texts.

The Role of Performance in Environmental Humanities: The Case of Joan Jonas’s Moving Off the Land II

This article explores the role of performance in Environmental Humanities by discussing Joan Jonas’s staging of Moving Off The Land II at Ocean Space in Venice as a case study. More specifically, the article shows that Moving Off The Land II and Ocean Space have created a space in which to practice environmental art illustrating how co-habiting ecosystems that we regularly fail to acknowledge should form part of how we construct our own presence.

Horizontality, Negotiation, and Emergence: Toward a Philosophy of Environmental History

In this article, I intend to creatively synthesize both the empirical findings and the theoretical formulations put forward by self-proclaimed environmental historians, as well as those by the scholars who preceded and influenced them. Establishing a dialogue with the broader field of Environmental Humanities, especially posthumanism, I propose three principles for writing environmental histories: horizontality, negotiation, and emergency. Horizontality refers to the inexistence of a given and absolute 'ground' for human life. We walk, build our houses, earn a living, and develop ideas and cultures, not on top of an ontological floor, but attending to and being attended by the bodies surrounding us, some of them animated and some not, some solid and some liquid and gaseous. To inhabit is to make oneself available to be inhabited. Mutual habitation weaves assemblages that are both the continent and the content of life. Negotiation alludes to the human conversation with a larger world, both animated and inanimate, about coexistence. Humans never get everything they want, just the way they want it, from their relationships with nonhumans. Though people rarely recognize this, the only way history can be made is through compromise with the rest of the biosphere. This means that humans are continuously becoming, as they and their activities couple themselves with other natural entities and their activities. Emergence, therefore, is the radical geo-historicity of all earthly things, whose character is never given beforehand but constituted as they make their way through the world.

Affect Theory and Breast Cancer Memoirs: Rescripting Fears of Death and Dying in the Anthropocene

Re-evaluating dominant cultural narratives around dying and death is central to new critiques of individualism and human exceptionalism. As conceptual tools for theorizing the end of the individual proliferate, the affective dimensions of this project are often overlooked, especially as they pertain to individual subjects. In contrast, a significant number of iconic queer and feminist thinkers have suffered breast cancer and written memoirs representing the subjective experience of confronting mortality. This article identifies the affective orientations towards one’s own mortality as missing from queer and feminist thinking on embodiment in the Anthropocene. As a remedy, the article reads several iconic feminist breast cancer memoirs – Sontag, Lorde, Sedgwick, Jain and Boyer – for their complex representations of affect, in particular fear, in relation to dying and death. Using the affect theory of Silvan Tomkins, this analysis contributes to critiques of cancer culture in medical humanities and of mortality and embodiment in feminist environmental humanities.

Analysing Plant Representation in Children’s Literature: The Phyto-Analysis Map

Recent biological research (Trewavas, 2003; Mancuso & Viola, 2013; Gagliano, 2018) has (re)demonstrated the variety and complexity of the adaptive behaviour of plants. In parallel with these findings, and in acknowledgement of the important role played by plants in the biosphere and climate of the planet, the representation of plants in philosophy, arts and literature has become an object of study within the environmental humanities. In response to the rapidly developing field of critical plant studies, the representation of plants in literatures for children and young adults are now accumulating. Even as the number of studies is increasing, there is as yet no cohesive framework for the analysis of plant representation in children’s literature. This article addresses this gap. Inspired by the Nature-in-Culture Matrix, an analytical figure that provides an overarching schema for ecocritical analysis of children’s texts and cultures (see Goga et al., 2018), this article presents an analytical framework for plant-oriented analysis, the Phyto-Analysis Map. This map has been developed with reference to central concepts from the field of critical plant studies, and its usefulness is elucidated through literary examples. Developed with children’s fiction in mind, the map also has potential application with children’s non-fiction, which often employs fictional textual techniques.

Religious Studies and the Values of Critical Humanism

This chapter proposes that a proper telos for the study of religion is Critical Humanism. Drawing on Aristotle and Charles Taylor, it explains how Critical Humanism provides a theoretical framework for studying religion and describes its mobile, liberal, dialogical, and inclusive aspects. Building on the ideas of Felski, Walzer, Rorty, and the environmental humanities, it notes how Critical Humanism places a premium on expanding the moral imagination and examines the connections between that idea and humanistic scholarship. That discussion leads into an account of four values to which the study of religion can be connected: post-critical reasoning, social criticism, cross-cultural fluency, and environmental responsibility. The chapter then describes four works in the study of religion that exemplify these values. Lastly, it summarizes the chapter’s arguments in response to the challenges posed by Weber’s view of science and Welch’s reckoning with the field’s “identity crisis” as described in chapters 1 and 2.