Border Insecurity: Reading Transnational Environments in Jim Lynch’s Border Songs

This article applies an eco-critical approach to contemporary American fiction about the Canada-US border, examining Jim Lynch’s portrayal of the British Columbia-Washington borderlands in his 2009 novel Border Songs. It argues that studying transnational environmental actors in border texts—in this case, marijuana, human migrants, and migratory birds—helps illuminate the contingency of political boundaries, problems of scale, and discourses of risk and security in cross-border regions after 9/11. Further, it suggests that widening the analysis of trans-border activity to include environmental phenomena productively troubles concepts of nature and regional belonging in an era of climate change and economic globalization. Cet article propose une lecture écocritique de la fiction étatsunienne contemporaine portant sur la frontière entre le Canada et les États-Unis, en étudiant le portrait donné par Jim Lynch de la région frontalière entre la Colombie-Britannique et Washington dans son roman Border Songs, paru en 2009. L’article soutient que l’étude, dans les textes sur la frontière, des acteurs environnementaux transnationaux – dans ce cas-ci, la marijuana, les migrants humains et les oiseaux migratoires – jette un jour nouveau sur la contingence des limites territoriales politiques, des problèmes d’échelle et des discours sur le risque et la sécurité des régions transfrontalières après les évènements du 11 septembre 2001. Il suggère également qu’en élargissant l’analyse de l’activité transfrontalière pour y inclure les phénomènes environnementaux, on brouille de façon productive les concepts de nature et d’appartenance régionale d’une époque marquée par les changements climatiques et la mondialisation de l’économie

Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities

Although scholars in the environmental humanities have been exploring the dichotomy between “wild” and “built” environments for several years, few have focused on the field of disability studies, a discipline that enlists the contingency between environments and bodies as a foundation of its scholarship. On the other hand, scholars in disability studies have demonstrated the ways in which the built environment privileges some bodies and minds over others, yet they have rarely examined the ways in which toxic environments engender chronic illness and disability or how environmental illnesses disrupt dominant paradigms for scrutinizing “disability.”Designed as a reader for undergraduate and graduate courses, Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities employs interdisciplinary perspectives to examine such issues as slow violence, imperialism, race, toxicity, eco-sickness, the body in environmental justice, ableism, and other topics. With a historical scope spanning the seventeenth century to the present, this collection not only presents the foundational documents informing this intersection of fields but also showcases the most current work, making it an indispensable reference

Environmental Justice, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Local in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

This article analyzes Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead, drawing on insights from environmental justice ecocriticism and geographical theory. Ray argues that the novel offers an ethic of place that creates conditions for environmental justice. Her analysis focuses on a question that is fundamentally geographical: what kind of ethic of place is most likely to create the conditions for both environmental and social justice? Almanac offers a way of imagining place that moves beyond the tendency in environmental literary criticism to think in either global or local terms, and insists that the global and the local are dialectically related vis-à-vis colonialism. Thus Almanac offers what Rob Nixon calls a “transnational ethics of place,” what Ursula Heise calls “eco-cosmopolitanism,” or what geographer Doreen Massey calls a “global sense of place,” theories that account for global colonialism and planetary environmental justice while also promoting a strong sense of place rooted in responsibility to the land. Through its treatment of spatiality, the novel reveals the power and politics of unique places within broader global forces, while neither sentimentalizing nor rejecting the distinctiveness of place even as it recognizes the relationship between place and the networks and flows of colonialism and global capitalism. Ultimately, the novel eschews the “nation” as a basis by which to create sustainable human-nature relations, and recognizes that the histories and forces of diaspora, colonialism, and globalization—not overpopulation or resource scarcity, as conventional environmental thinking would have it—have produced the ecological problems we face today

Normalcy, Knowledge, and Nature in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

This article analyzes Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, using a combination of both disability studies theory and ecocriticism.  The author argues that the novel’s main character, Christopher Boone, presents a social model of disability by challenging dominant society’s treatment of him as “not normal.” Christopher is ostensibly diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, although the novel never explicitly labels him as disabled in any way. Through Christopher’s views of nature, language, knowledge, and social constructions of disability, we learn that disability is an unstable category, and that dominant society can be disabling.  Importantly, though, Christopher’s critique of society is, as the author argues, fundamentally environmental. That is, Christopher’s views of language, knowledge, and even the more-than-human world itself are central to his destabilization of the category of disability. Christopher’s environmental sensibility and critique of society’s disabling qualities emerge primarily through his discussions of language, which he finds suspect because it distances humans from the world it describes.  Thus, the novel suggests that the disabling features of society that Christopher encounters are the same features that distance humans from nature, particularly through language.  Keywords: eco-phenomenology, ecocriticism, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Asperger’s Syndrome, nature, language, body, epistemolog

Environmental Justice, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Local in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

This article analyzes Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead, drawing on insights from environmental justice ecocriticism and geographical theory. Ray argues that the novel offers an ethic of place that creates conditions for environmental justice. Her analysis focuses on a question that is fundamentally geographical: what kind of ethic of place is most likely to create the conditions for both environmental and social justice? Almanac offers a way of imagining place that moves beyond the tendency in environmental literary criticism to think in either global or local terms, and insists that the global and the local are dialectically related vis-à-vis colonialism. Thus Almanac offers what Rob Nixon calls a “transnational ethics of place,” what Ursula Heise calls “eco-cosmopolitanism,” or what geographer Doreen Massey calls a “global sense of place,” theories that account for global colonialism and planetary environmental justice while also promoting a strong sense of place rooted in responsibility to the land. Through its treatment of spatiality, the novel reveals the power and politics of unique places within broader global forces, while neither sentimentalizing nor rejecting the distinctiveness of place even as it recognizes the relationship between place and the networks and flows of colonialism and global capitalism. Ultimately, the novel eschews the “nation” as a basis by which to create sustainable human-nature relations, and recognizes that the histories and forces of diaspora, colonialism, and globalization—not overpopulation or resource scarcity, as conventional environmental thinking would have it—have produced the ecological problems we face today

The ecological other: Indians, invalids, and immigrants in U.S. environmental thought and literature

xi, 233 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.This dissertation argues that a fundamental paradox underlies U.S. environmentalism: even as it functions as a critique of dominant social and economic practices, environmentalism simultaneously reinforces many social hierarchies, especially with regard to race, immigration, and disability, despite its claims to recognize the interdependence of human and ecological well-being. This project addresses the related questions: In what ways does environmentalism--as a code of behavioral imperatives and as a set of rhetorical strategies--ironically play a role in the exploitation of land and communities? Along what lines--class, race, ability, gender, nationality, age, and even "sense of place"--do these environmental codes and discourses delineate good and bad environmental behavior? I contend that environmentalism emerged in part to help legitimize U.S. imperial ambitions and support racialized and patriarchal conceptions of national identity. Concern about "the environment" made anxieties about communities of color more palatable than overt racism. Furthermore, "environmentalism's hidden attachments" to whiteness and Manifest Destiny historically aligned the movement with other repressive ideologies, such as eugenics and strict anti-immigration. These "hidden attachments" exist today, yet few have analyzed their contemporary implications, a gap this project fills. In three chapters, I detail nineteenth-century environmentalism's influence on contemporary environmental thought. Each of these three illustrative chapters investigates a distinct category of environmentalism's "ecological others": Native Americans, people with disabilities, and undocumented immigrants. I argue that environmentalism defines these groups as "ecological others" because they are viewed as threats to nature and to the American national body politic. The first illustrative chapter analyzes Native American land claims in Leslie Marmon Silko's 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead . The second illustrative chapter examines the importance of the fit body in environmental literature and U.S. adventure culture. In the third illustrative chapter, I integrate literary analysis with geographical theories and methods to investigate national security, wilderness protection, and undocumented immigration in the borderland. In a concluding fourth chapter, I analyze works of members of the excluded groups discussed in the first three chapters to show how they transform mainstream environmentalism to bridge social justice and ecological concerns. This dissertation contains previously published material.Committee in charge: Shari Huhndorf, Chairperson, English; Louise Westling, Member, English; David Vazquez, Member, English; Juanita Sundberg, Member, Not from U of 0 Susan Hardwick, Outside Member, Geograph

The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion In American Culture

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