Abstract

In an increasingly chaotic global climate change and environmental degradation in the Anthropocene, where man has become a geological agent contributing to global climate change, and where Mother Earth has lost her homeo-statis, it is high time that we collectively look for solutions to heal ravaged ecologies that have resulted in disastrous environmental consequences across the globe. Sometimes these disasters are visible and sometimes as Rob Nixon states this ‘slow violence’ is incremental and accretive. Climate change is not only increasingly shaping ecosystems and economies but also cultural and literary expressions. Across global contexts, communities are responding to ecological disruptions through storytelling practices and rituals that reflect, interpret and sometimes contest their changing dynamics with the natural world. While contemporary literature and scientific scholarship debate and address climate change, there remains a dire need for more comparative, cross- disciplinary and multi-disciplinary engagement with how environment and cosmogonies are narrated in myths, folklore, rituals and cultural traditions and how the supra-natural, animal stories, fairytales and other fictional forms and animistic traditions revered nature and preserved it rather than indulging in extractive and exploitative practices that were detrimental to nature. We need to explore the innate interconnectedness in nature ranging from Slavic traditions, Nordic fairy tales, Indian indigenous wisdom, tribal tales from the Indonesian Islands to the stories of the Amazon Basin and this panel brings together scholars, and academicians across diverse cultures and domains – folklore studies, literary analysis, creative writing, shamanism, oral storytelling, climate security studies, and environmental humanities as also contemporary eco-fiction and mythic reimagining to express how radical or regular environmental shifts and its subsequent effects are studied, remembered and imagined through  narratives. 

 We ask how such narratives, whether revisited, adapted or newly created, respond to ecological precarity, eco-cide and eco-grief or even celebrate the inherent interdependence of the entire biotic or subvert studies where nature is just a commodity/ machine, and how these narratives mediate the inextricable entanglements of the human and the non-human and articulate strategies of resilience, critique or adaptation. The panel expects contributions to consider the role of diverse global narratives and how they shape cultural memory, how their comparative study can connect similarities/differences, sustaining ecological knowledges and epistemes and frame collective identities in times of environmental transformation. The panel welcomes diverse/ comparative methodological approaches and regional case studies, theories and praxis contributing to a deeper understanding of environmental narratives as a mode of response to ecological change.