Environmental Justice in Ethnic American Literature - (Ecocritical Theory and Practice) by Petr Kopecký & Douglas A Vakoch & Jan Benes (Hardcover)

About the Book

Addressing issues from slow violence, transcorporeality, food and reproductive justice or agrarianism and employing a wide range of ecolinguistics approaches, this volume brings to the fore a diversity of literary responses by African American, Latinx, Asian American, and American Indian writers to environmental injustices and their impact.

Book Synopsis

Environmental Justice in Ethnic American Literature focuses on a wide range of conceptions, depictions, and issues of environmental (in)justice found in African American, Latinx, Asian American, and American Indian literature to provide a panorama of ethnic peoples, regions, and cultures affected by disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards and racial discrimination, now exacerbated by the effects of climate change. Specifically, the volume highlights the capacity of literature and literary criticism to help uncover the causes and consequences of instances of environmental injustice and their impact. The chapters analyze a diverse selection of voices and texts, which underscore how the literary imagination of ethnic American writers captures, in contrast with official statistics, impersonal data and the reports compiled from them, the tangible and often inescapable problems of communities struggling against environmental racism. The issues addressed in the volume range from slow violence, transcorporeality, food and reproductive justice, to agrarianism, while utilizing theoretical lenses such as ecofeminist paradigms or innovative applications of ecolinguistic methods to poetry. Overall, the monograph brings to the fore a diversity of literary responses to environmental racism and calls for environmental justice.

Review Quotes

"At a time of planetary-scale ecological crisis, Environmental Justice in Ethnic American Literature is an urgent call to consider the Indigenous, Black, Latino, and Asian American voices that narrate this crisis from within. At the same time an important scholarly endeavour and a call for solidarity across geographical and cultural divides, Petr Kopecky and Jan Benes's edited monograph assists in the important work of turning ecocriticism into a vehicle for social justice. By doing so, it brings attention to often marginalized and dismissed American stories of unfolding environmental upheaval, while also helping to shift the field of ecocriticism away from the Euro-American perspectives that have long been predominant within the discipline." --Johan Höglund, professor of English, Linnaeus University, author of the American Climate Emergency Narrative: Origins, Developments and Imaginary Futures

About the Author

Petr Kopecký is associate professor in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Ostrava.

Jan Benes is assistant professor of American and British Literature at the University of Ostrava.