Literature and the Environment
In this course, we will focus on hopeful narratives of climate change in order to engage different approaches to global climate change. As people all over the world stand for the elements against state and corporate devastation of the earth, we see that natural worlds being restored and flourishing. In my own work, I call this the “mapping of abundance,” an urgent insistence on life. Envisioning and working toward abundance is a necessity in the face of human-induced climate change events. We will explore the power of these narratives to bring about an epistemological shift that can help us to see that seemingly catastrophic climate change events can be possibilities for renewed abundance.
We will begin with a discussion of what journalist Naomi Klein describes as the contest between the climate and capitalism. Globalization and imperialist capitalist economies have had genocidal effects on Indigenous peoples and have devastated the natural worlds they live in. We will consider the ways that writers represent capitalism, settler colonialism, and slavery, and the anti-capitalist conversations between Klein and Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. From there, we will consider the possibilities raised by Ernest Callenbach’s utopian novel Ecotopia (1975), which continues to offer a radical reimagining of alternatives to capitalist economies of scarcity. My book Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future (2021) foregrounds Kanaka Maoli economies of abundance, illustrating the ways that Kānaka continue to cultivate intimate relationships with the akua, the elemental forms, that flourish in restoration projects across the islands. Keaomelemele (1900) is one oral tradition recorded in the Hawaiian language newspapers by Moses Manu that teaches us the importance of ceremony in cultivating relationships with the akua who take the form of 405 different cloud formations. The vibration in the throat, as the moʻolelo shows us, has the power to split mountains open, as in the creation of Nuʻuanu Valley and its many waterways. Anime, as a genre, has explored our human relationships with the elements, posing alternative social relations for the ways we live in this world. We will compare two Hayao Miyazaki films, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Princess Mononoke (1997) to explore ways that anime artists reenvision the agency of the elements, deepening our relationships with them. We will then consider the ways that any representation of the natural world cannot be separated from considerations of Indigeneity, race, class, gender, and sexuality. We will read Black Nature: Four Hundred Years of African American Nature Poetry and black poets’ expressions of the complex ways that the beauty of sycamore and cypress trees of the South also evoke the violence of lynchings, but also the ways that black writers articulate what Kevin Quashie calls “black aliveness” and the poetics of a black world. We will end with the Wind Gourd of Laʻamaomao to consider the other ways that wind energy has been greenwashed as a form of violence against Indigenous peoples in Oaxaca and peoples in Kahuku. By contrast, Kanaka Maoli map the winds to know how to regreen Kahoʻolawe, an island that the US Navy used as a bombing target for fifty years.
Some of the broader questions we will ask are: How are ancestral knowledges and decolonized STEM knowledges being brought together to approach climate change? How do anime artists imagine other worlds and relationalities with the natural world? How are systems of oppression like racism and colonialism drivers for climate change and how do writers envision alternatives to settler capitalism economies of scarcity?
As literary critics, we will foreground close textual analyses of the ways that stories are told and the narrative strategies writers use to challenge or transform the material conditions of their lives. We will discuss basic literary terminology, concepts, methods, and practices that illustrate the connections among people who read and write texts and the larger conditions of production and systems of power in which their texts are produced and read.
Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) include an awareness of critical approaches to the contemporary field of English Studies, including the purpose, practice, and potential of literary and rhetorical study of texts that include such subfields as American literature, indigenous literatures, ethnic literatures, rhetoric, ecocriticism, genre studies and cultural studies; written and oral ability to situate the study of these literatures within broader critical and historical conversations. Students will be able to gain an understanding of the interconnectivity of human and natural systems, and they will be able to use evidence-based reasoning on the implications of sustainability problems and/or proposed solutions. Students will improve their ability to ask questions of and to read, analyze, and interpret complex literary texts, using relevant literary terminology critically and creatively within the conventions of academic writing. Consideration given to Hawaiian texts in cultural and historical context.
Requirements: One three-page paper, two four-page papers, peer-editing, short assignments, a final exam, attendance and participation.
Required Texts (will are available at UH Bookstore):
1) Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (1975)
2) Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
3) Candace Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaiʻi (2021)
4) Moses Manu, Keaomelemele (1884)
5) Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke (film, 1997)
6) Hayao Miyazaki, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (film, 1984)
7) Camille Dunghi, ed., Black Nature: Four Hundred Years of African American Nature Poetry (2009)
8) Moses Nakuina, The Wind Gourd of Laʻamaomao (1900)
Additional essays will be uploaded to Laulima:
Paper #1 (2 pages): 15%
Paper #2 (4 pages): 20%
Paper #3 (4 pages): 20%
Assignments (7): 20%
Final exam: 15%
Peer-editing: 5%
Participation: 5%