American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship: Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global Commons

✍ Scribed by Joni Adamson, Kimberly N. Ruffin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 291
• Series: Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This collection reclaims public intellectuals and scholars important to the foundational work in American Studies that contributed to emerging conceptions of an "ecological citizenship" advocating something other than nationalism or an "exclusionary ethics of place." Co-editors Adamson and Ruffin recover underrecognized field genealogies in American Studies (i.e. the work of early scholars whose scope was transnational and whose activism focused on race, class and gender) and ecocriticism (i.e. the work of movement leaders, activists and scholars concerned with environmental justice whose work predates the 1990s advent of the field). They stress the necessity of a confluence of intellectual traditions, or "interdisciplinarities," in meeting the challenges presented by the "anthropocene," a new era in which human beings have the power to radically endanger the planet or support new approaches to transnational, national and ecological citizenship. Contributors to the collection examine literary, historical, and cultural examples from the 19^th century to the 21^st. They explore notions of the common—namely, common humanity, common wealth, and common ground—and the relation of these notions to often conflicting definitions of who (or what) can have access to "citizenship" and "rights." The book engages in scholarly ecological analysis via the lens of various human groups—ethnic, racial, gendered, coalitional—that are shaping twenty-first century environmental experience and vision. Read together, the essays included in American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship create a "methodological commons" where environmental justice case studies and interviews with activists and artists living in places as diverse as the U.S., Canada, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Taiwan and the Navajo Nation, can be considered alongside literary and social science analysis that contributes significantly to current debates catalyzed by nuclear meltdowns, oil spills, hurricanes, and climate change, but also by hopes for a common future that will ensure the rights of all beings--human and nonhuman-- to exist, maintain, and regenerate life cycles and evolutionary processes

✦ Table of Contents

American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global Commons
......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Contents......Page 8
List of Figures......Page 12
Foreword......Page 14
Acknowledgments......Page 20
Introduction......Page 22
Part I Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Citizenship and Belonging......Page 40
1 Zora Neale Hurston and the Environmental Ethic of Risk......Page 42
2 Haitian Soil for the Citizen’s Soul......Page 58
3 Intimate Cartographies: Navajo Ecological Citizenship, Soil Conservation, and Livestock Reduction......Page 71
4 Getting Back to an Imagined Nature:
The Mannahatta Project and Environmental Justice......Page 85
5 The Oil Desert......Page 97
6 Japanese Roots in American Soil: National Belonging in David Mas Masumoto’s Harvest Son and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s The Legend of Fire Horse Woman......Page 108
Part II Border Ecologies......Page 122
7 Our Nations and All Our Relations: Environmental Ethics in William S. Yellow Robe, Jr.’s The Council......Page 124
8 Preserving the Great White North: Migratory Birds, Italian Immigrants, and the Making of Ecological Citizenship across the U.S.-Canada Border, 1900-1924......Page 138
9 Boundaries of Violence: Water, Gender, and Development in Context......Page 152
10 U.S. Border Ecologies, Environmental Criticism, and Transnational American Studies......Page 165
11 Climate Justice and Trans-Pacific Indigenous Feminisms......Page 179
Part III Ecological Citizenship in Action......Page 194
12 Roots of Nativist Environmentalism in America’s Eden......Page 196
13 Wielding Common Wealth in Washington, DC, and Eastern Kentucky: Creative Social Practice in Two Marginalized Communities......Page 211
14 Climate Justice Now! Imagining Grassroots Ecocosmopolitanism......Page 225
15 The Los Angeles Urban Rangers, Trailblazing the Commons......Page 241
References......Page 258
Contributors......Page 280
Index......Page 284