Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS - E-Journal)
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In Search of a New Cognitive Schema: Unsettling Colonial Epistemologies in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return
Full text linkIn this paper, I argue that Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging“ unsettles the epistemic foundations of the (Post-)Colonial Anthropocene, which prioritize linearity, binarity, and purported objectivity. Dominant contemporary epistemologies, as Sylvia Wynter has demonstrated, race and gender legitimate knowledge production as the preserve of Man, to the exclusion of human and non-human others. Instead, writing towards the multipolarity and -modality of the Door of No Return, Brand posits and practices, through both form and content, an anti-colonial epistemology, in which temporality and spatiality are recursive and knowledge is embodied and pluriversal
“But the storm, this storm, has no apology”: Extraction, Ecophobia, and the Ecogothic in Linda Hogan’s Power
Full text linkExamining Linda Hogan’s Power“ in the context of the ecogothic, a mode emphasizing the Western world’s desire to subdue and dominate the natural world, this paper contextualizes and analyzes changes imposed upon the natural world as the result of ecophobia. Hogan’s young female protagonist Omishto—a member of the fictional Taiga tribe—struggles to come to terms with these realities. At the same time, she learns the danger of disclosing information to Euro-American institutions, specifically courts of law. In this ecophobic world, the importance (and lack) of credence given to Indigenous testimonies and the danger of relying on static, stereotypical images of “eco- Indians” as models of environmental responsibility are brought to the fore. This article also argues that Indigenous literature is often treated in the same fashion in scholarship. In such readings, Indigenous-authored texts are expected to function as resources from which knowledge and lessons can be gleaned. The implementation of the ecogothic mode in Power“, however, thwarts such efforts on both an intratextual and an extratextual level
Embracing the Loss of Nature: Searching for Responsibility in an Age of Crisis
Full text linkIntroduction to the Thematic Issue
Is Nature About to (Be) End(ed)? Conceptions of the Environment and Moral Responsibility in the Anthropocene
Full text linkThis essay reads two policy documents, Our Common Future“ (1987) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change“ (1992/94), and one non-fiction text, Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature“ (1989), against the backdrop of moral responsibility. Bringing these texts into conversation by interpreting them as threshold texts of Anthropocene thinking, this essay attempts to map the cultural-political climate of the late 1980s and early 1990s with regard to changing conceptualizations of the environment. I argue that McKibben’s The End of Nature“, despite various shortcomings as to capturing implications of culpability and responsibility in the Anthropocene, contributes a crucial component to the changes needed for developing a sense of moral responsibility at the time of its publication
Phenomenally Affective: Kass Morgan’s The 100 and the Apocalyptic Politics of Care
Full text linkThis essay confronts a growing consensus that the apocalyptic mode is the wrong way to tell the story of climate change. Contrary to the widely held belief that an apocalyptic framework invites apathy and political disengagement, I contend that the apocalyptic mode can in fact serve as a vital locus of highly differentiated and deeply felt engagements with the embodied experience of dwelling in crisis. An ecocritical reading of what I term ‘phenomenal apocalyptic narratives’—like Kass Morgan’s The 100, which I will explore in detail—reveals an impulse to care that is avowedly political in nature
Returning to Nature as Habitat? The Ecocritical, Non-Canonical Voice of the Environmentally Dispossessed in Waslala: Memorial del Futuro
Full text link“Neoliberal capitalist growth and ecological exploitation have been raising formerly unknown problems and pose significant difficulties for the environmentally dispossessed, for instance in terms of meeting an ever-increasing consumer demand concerning natural resources and simultaneously coping with a massive and indisputable waste problem. The virulent topic of inconsiderate environmental destruction and improper waste disposal is addressed by Gioconda Belli’s 1996 utopian novel Waslala: Memorial del Futuro“ in different ways. With its postcolonial-ecocritical agenda, the novel detaches itself from narrow dichotomous and stereotypical conceptions and aims to draw the readers’ attention to the negative and fatalistic impact that neoliberal capitalist consumerism has on the environments of the poor. The Nicaraguan novel furthermore highlights the underrepresented, non-canonical voices of the environmentally dispossessed and depicts environmental exploitation and ecological damage through their perspectives. This article demonstrates how Waslala“ articulates a powerful anti-capitalist, ecological, and postcolonial critical perspective and helps imagine alternative convivialist scenarios of returning to nature as habitat in ethically and ecologically more inclusive terms. My close reading focuses on the novel’s critique of the waste policies of capitalist and industrialized nations and the challenges resulting from what Rob Nixon has termed “slow violence.” Hereby, the article illuminates the ways readers are addressed by the drastic depiction of tragic historical events. In its critical examination of stereotypical dualistic thinking, Waslala “concretely proposes the bioregion of the river as a promising and convivialist alternative space for returning to nature as habitat
A Farewell to Anthropocentrism in American Postbellum Prose: A Reconsideration of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
Full text linkThis article is driven by the urgency of the current ecological situation and humanity’s role in its development. It explores the ways in which nature, humanity, and the relationship between the two are negotiated in Tim O’Brien’s collection of short stories The Things They Carried“ (1990). Close readings of key passages show that through use of anthropomorphisms nature is portrayed as active rather than passive, and that the soldiers are, on the one hand, alienated and removed from US society and, on the other, embedded within nature. As a result, the human-nature dualism is exposed as a reductive, hierarchical, and separatist approach to a multifaceted, complex relation between interacting, equally valuable entities. The analysis of prevalent themes and devices—including anthropomorphisms, temporal non-linearity, decentering and fragmentation of the individual, and the omnipresence of death as well as the narrator’s preoccupation with mortality—provides a blueprint for an ecocritical reading of postwar literature. This approach values nature in itself and generates an understanding of the ways in which the anthropocentric worldview prevalent in the Western world encourages a misinformed and harmful attitude towards nature
“Like harvest moon, except I ate a guy:” Graveyard Keeper’s Dark Ecology
Full text linkThis article argues that Lazy Bear Games’ Graveyard Keeper“ (2018) engages in a critical dialogue with the farm game genre by reformulating the nostalgic ideal as one mired in exploitation and the grotesque, thereby opening new and uncanny avenues through which to consider the farm game’s instrumentalizing premises
