Environmental Crisis and Human Rights - (Environment and Society) by Joyjit Ghosh & Samit Kumar Maiti & Sk Tarik Ali (Hardcover)

About the Book

This anthology of scholarly ecocritical essays offers varied and global perspectives on the representations of violations of human rights, .

Book Synopsis

Environmental Crisis and Human Rights: Literary and Cultural Representations engages with the human rights implications of anthropogenic environmental crisis through a critical reading of a wide spectrum of literary and cultural texts from different parts of the world. The Introduction and the eighteen theoretically informed essays included in the collection highlight how race, caste, class, gender and ethnicity contribute to and complicate human experiences of environmental degradation. The essays address a broad range of issues involving environmental human rights such as climate migration, climate injustice, resource extraction, neo-colonial intervention, politics of development, dam-induced displacement and the violation of the indigenous usufruct rights to the environment. The volume illustrates that the Anthropocene is not a unitary concept, rather a fractured discourse; and environmental crisis, far from being monolithic in nature, is determined by socio-economic particularities and cultural specificities of different human communities across the globe.

Review Quotes

"This important collection builds upon postcolonial and Global South ecocriticism of the past few decades in vividly reinforcing the idea that environmental crisis and human rights are inextricably bound together. In other words, whenever we talk about environmental crises, we must also keep human rights (and human suffering) in mind. The literary and cultural texts examined here beautifully and painfully illustrate the human impacts of climate change and other contemporary forms of environmental catastrophe."
Scott Slovic, Oregon Research Institute, coeditor of Ecocriticism of the Global South

About the Author

Joyjit Ghosh is Professor in the Department of English Literature, Language and Cultural Studies at Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West Bengal, India.

Samit Kumar Maiti is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Seva Bharati Mahavidyalaya, Kapgari, Jhargram, West Bengal, India.

Sk Tarik Ali is Assistant Professor in the West Bengal Education Service, and teaches in the PG Department of English, Hooghly Mohsin College, Chinsurah, Hooghly, West Bengal, India.