Ways of Reading Racialized Ecologies 2
Description
Building on a stimulating seminar at ACLA 2024, and amidst dramatically shifting geopolitical contexts, this seminar will probe methods of reading that illuminate and disrupt escalating climate change and ecological loss by focusing on race and racialization. A photographic series of eroding Ghanaian coastlines framed by doors conjuring the violent passage into the catastrophe of chattel slavery in the Americas opens Ian Baucom’s History 4° Celsius. Baucom argues that a new method of literary study is required among scholars of the Black Atlantic, one that can both historicize modernity and attend to its intersections with planetary change and emergent forms of climate precarity, particularly in the Global South. Baucom reiterates the importance of cultural studies methods that historicize aesthetics and affects while also acknowledging the provocations raised by historian Dipesh Chakrabarty about how global warming’s long timescales and planetary systematicity cannot be adequately analyzed through historicization. As provocative, but with a startlingly different method, is Min Hyoung Song’s Climate Lyricism, which reads the climate crisis in literary texts where those elements are not a primary focus but at times appear marginally and precariously alongside everyday experiences of structural racism and colonialism. Song argues that poetic techniques that explore the historical and material relations of race in lived experience also provide insight into the structures of feeling and social relations of climate denial and inequality. These two methodological prompts remain our touchstone, posing questions about how to read, think through, and collectively respond to the escalating horrors. There are a set of familiar representations of environmental and climate crisis in documentary, speculative, and poetic modes, well studied in ecocriticism. When the critic starts not with representation but with the histories, affects, and social lives of racialization, what possibilities arise? What forms of legibility are practiced and which are refused? When climate and environmental questions are asked of texts grappling with the afterlives of modernity’s violence, what aesthetic moves appear salient? How might the habits of reading and noticing that these texts demand model ways of thinking about environmental crises? How can literary methods that are oriented to everyday subjects (Song calls them lyrical) be fruitfully extended and complemented by historicizing methods that attend to the material production of environments, resources, and subjects through capital and technical expertise?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Tania Aguila-Way is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto. She works at the intersection of Canadian literary studies, settler colonial and critical race studies, and the environmental humanities. Her work has appeared in Social Text, ISLE, Canadian Literature, and Studies in Canadian Literature, among other venues. Her first monograph, Saving Seeds, Decolonizing the Commons, is under contract with McGill-Queen's UP.
Speaker Bio
Amanda Macedo Macedo is a Ph.D. candidate in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University. Her dissertation, Unraveling Resistance: Aesthetic Disturbances in the Face of Imperial Violence, examines how artists in contemporary Mexico and Latin America mobilize performance, sound, and visual culture to contest extractivism, ecological crisis, and displacement. Her research sits at the intersections of performance studies, decolonial thought, cultural geography, and visual culture.
Speaker Bio
Zishad Lak is an adjunct Professor in the Departments of French and Francophone Studies and the School for the Study of Canada at Trent University. Her interdisciplinary research spans energy humanities, queer theory, and decolonial, postcolonial, and settler colonial studies. Her current research explores the intersections of race and ecology in literary portrayals of Canadian suburban landscapes.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sherena Razek is a diasporic Palestinian feminist scholar and activist. Currently, she is a President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at UCLA and will begin as Assistant Professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UMass Boston next fall. She holds a PhD from the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. Her research focuses on Palestinian visual cultures of resistance and decolonial feminist ecologies.
Speaker Bio
Tian Jinmei
- Ph.D. Candidate, College of Liberal Arts, Journalism and Communication, Ocean University of China.
- Research Specialties: African Anglophone Literature, Zambian Anglophone Literature, Ocean/Maritime Literature.
- Contributor, National Social Science Fund Major Project: " A History of African Anglophone Literature" (19ZDA296).
- Lead organizer for the 8th International Symposium on Marine Literature and Culture.
Speaker Bio
Zeenat is a doctoral student in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on atmospheric insecurities and idealism in the literature of necropolitics. She holds an interest in visual poetics, animality, technology and race studies. She’s also involved in art practices and creative writing facilitation.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Cheryl Lousley is a professor in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Lakehead University Orillia, Canada, focused on environmental humanities, environmental justice writing and cultural studies, and contemporary Canadian literature. She leads a research group studying racialized ecologies in literature, film, and art in settler-colonial Canada: raceandecology.ca.
Speaker Bio
As of October 2025, Max Karpinski is a sessional instructor at Trent University. He has guest edited two special issues of Canadian Literature on the topic of “Poetics and Extraction” and published in journals such as ESC, ISLE, and Canada and Beyond. With Dr. Henry Ivry and Dr. Alexandra Campbell, he is co-author of Sounding Out: Sonic Revolt, Insurgent Listening, Abolition Ecologies, which is in peer review for the Sonics Series at MIT/Goldsmiths Press.
Speaker Bio
Meaghan Sych (she/her) is a second year PhD student at the University of Alberta in the Department of English and Film Studies. She is interested in walking, listening, and plants. She recently defended her MA thesis entitled “Ecological Colonialism and the Impact of the ‘Englishman’s Foot’: A Literary Ecology of an Invasive Species”. She is a settler in amiskwacîwâskahikan where she likes to walk along the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy.
University of Alberta
Canada