This book highlights the representation of the interface between nature and culture in literary texts, and argues that bioregional exegesis of indigenous literatures sensitizes us to place-based cultural nuances, and can contribute to alleviating the eco-cultural apartheid of the modern era. Though the bioregional concept has been in vogue since 1970s, it has not been adequately adopted into the field of literary criticism. This book is a comprehensive study on the concept of the bioregion, and is distinctive in three ways. Firstly, it argues that the bioregional concept, hitherto used as a socio-political tool, can be theorized as an ecocritical tool to employ when reading literary works. Secondly, it provides a detailed analysis of the concept of bioregion, marking out its characteristic features. Thirdly, in choosing to deal with Aboriginal plays, the book again exhibits its distinctiveness, in demonstrating how ecocritical concepts, which hitherto have focused primarily on prose fictional works, can be extended to magnify the scope of plays and performances.

Bioregionalism is an innovative way of thinking about place and planet from an ecological perspective. Although bioregional ideas occur regularly in ecocritical writing, until now no systematic effort has been made to outline the principles of bioregional literary criticism and to use it as a way to read, write, understand, and teach literature. The twenty-four original essays here are written by an outstanding selection of international scholars. The range of bioregions covered is global and includes such diverse places as British Columbia's Meldrum Creek and Italy's Po River Valley, the Arctic and the Outback. There are even forays into cyberspace and outer space. In their comprehensive introduction, the editors map the terrain of the bioregional movement, including its history and potential to inspire and invigorate place-based and environmental literary criticism. Responding to bioregional tenets, this volume is divided into four sections. The essays in the “Reinhabiting” section narrate experiments in living-in-place and restoring damaged environments. The “Rereading” essays practice bioregional literary criticism, both by examining texts with strong ties to bioregional paradigms and by opening other, less-obvious texts to bioregional analysis. In “Reimagining,” the essays push bioregionalism to evolve—by expanding its corpus of texts, coupling its perspectives with other approaches, or challenging its core constructs. Essays in the “Renewal” section address bioregional pedagogy, beginning with local habitat studies and concluding with musings about the Internet. In response to the environmental crisis, we must reimagine our relationship to the places we inhabit. This volume shows how literature and literary studies are fundamental tools to such a reimagining.

Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies is the third volume of essays produced as part of the TransCanada conferences project. The essays gathered in Critical Collaborations constitute a call for collaboration and kinship across disciplinary, political, institutional, and community borders. They are tied together through a simultaneous call for resistance—to Eurocentrism, corporatization, rationalism, and the fantasy of total systems of knowledge—and a call for critical collaborations. These collaborations seek to forge connections without perceived identity—linking concepts and communities without violating the differences that constitute them, seeking epistemic kinships while maintaining a willingness to not-know. In this way, they form a critical conversation between seemingly distinct areas and demonstrate fundamental allegiances between diasporic and indigenous scholarship, transnational and local knowledges, legal and eco-critical methodologies. Links are forged between Indigenous knowledge and ecological and social justice, creative critical reading, and ambidextrous epistemologies, unmaking the nation through translocalism and unsettling histories of colonial complicity through a poetics of relation. Together, these essays reveal how the critical methodologies brought to bear on literary studies can both challenge and exceed disciplinary structures, presenting new forms of strategic transdisciplinarity that expand the possibilities of Canadian literary studies while also emphasizing humility, complicity, and the limits of knowledge.

Bioregionalism is the first book to explain the theoretical and practical dimensions of bioregionalism from an interdisciplinary standpoint, focusing on the place of bioregional identity within global politics. Leading contributors from a broad range of disciplines introduce this exciting new concept as a framework for thinking about indigenous peoples, local knowledge, globalization, science, global environmental issues, modern society, conservation, history, education and restoration. Bioregionalism's emphasis on place and community radically changes the way we confront human and ecological issues.

As the planet faces ever-worsening disruptions to global ecosystems—carbon and chemical emissions, depletions of the ozone layer, the loss of biodiversity, rising sea levels, air toxification, and worsening floods and droughts—scholars across academia must examine the cultural effects of this increasingly postnatural world. That task proves especially vital for southern studies, given how often the U.S. South serves as a site for large-scale damming initiatives like the TVA, disasters on the scale of Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon spill, and the extraction of coal, oil, and natural gas. Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies is the first book-length collection of scholarship that applies interdisciplinary environmental humanities research to cultural analyses of the U.S. South. Sixteen essays examine novels, nature writing, films, television, and music that address a broad range of ecological topics related to the region, including climate change, manmade and natural environments, the petroleum industry, food cultures, waterways, natural and human-induced disasters, waste management, and the Anthropocene. Edited by Zackary Vernon, this volume demonstrates how the greening of southern studies, in tandem with the southernization of environmental studies, can catalyze alternative ways of understanding the connections between regional and global cultures and landscapes. By addressing ecological issues central to life throughout the South, Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies considers the confluence between region and environment, while also illustrating the growing need to see environmental issues as matters of social justice.

Globalization discourse now presumes that the “world space” is entirely at the mercy of market norms and forms promulgated by reactionary U.S. policies. An academic but accessible set of studies, this wide range of essays by noted scholars challenges this paradigm with diverse and strong arguments. Taking on topics that range from the medieval Mediterranean to contemporary Jamaican music, from Hong Kong martial arts cinema to Taiwanese politics, writers such as David Palumbo-Liu, Meaghan Morris, James Clifford, and others use innovative cultural studies to challenge the globalization narrative with a new and trenchant tactic called “worlding.” The book posits that world literature, cultural studies, and disciplinary practices must be “worlded” into expressions from disparate critical angles of vision, multiple frameworks, and field practices as yet emerging or unidentified. This opens up a major rethinking of historical “givens” from Rob Wilson’s reinvention of “The White Surfer Dude” to Sharon Kinoshita’s “Deprovincializing the Middle Ages.” Building on the work of cultural critics like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Kenneth Burke, The Worlding Project is an important manifesto that aims to redefine the aesthetics and politics of postcolonial globalization withalternative forms and frames of global becoming.

“Groundbreaking in its call to reconsider our approach to the slow rhythm of time in the very concrete realms of environmental health and social justice.” —Wold Literature Today The violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly. Using the innovative concept of "slow violence" to describe these threats, Rob Nixon focuses on the inattention we have paid to the attritional lethality of many environmental crises, in contrast with the sensational, spectacle-driven messaging that impels public activism today. Slow violence, because it is so readily ignored by a hard-charging capitalism, exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems and of people who are poor, disempowered, and often involuntarily displaced, while fueling social conflicts that arise from desperation as life-sustaining conditions erode. In a book of extraordinary scope, Nixon examines a cluster of writer-activists affiliated with the environmentalism of the poor in the global South. By approaching environmental justice literature from this transnational perspective, he exposes the limitations of the national and local frames that dominate environmental writing. And by skillfully illuminating the strategies these writer-activists deploy to give dramatic visibility to environmental emergencies, Nixon invites his readers to engage with some of the most pressing challenges of our time.