ENG 5933 Spring 2020 Tran

What is the role of the imagination and aesthetics in an age of ecological predicaments? How can we respond creatively—as scholars, teachers, artists, and activists—to the environmental devastation human activities have caused on Earth? This course grapples with the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and the material realities of living on a damaged planet, in the ruins of coloniality, racial capitalism, and manmade natural disaster. Through our engagement with cultural and aesthetic productions, from Karen Tei Yamashita’s environmentally-inflected magical realist fiction to the speculative imaginaries of Octavia Butler and Larissa Lai, we will explore how issues of race, difference, space, community, and humanity are re-envisioned within conditions of ecological crisis. To deepen and contextualize our discussions, we will draw on the scholarship of critics such as Donna Haraway, Ursula Heise, Rob Nixon, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Anna Tsing, and others who emphasize the need to develop alternative imaginaries and practices for inhabiting the planet, building cross-species alliances, and thinking posthuman futures.

Texts may include:

• Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003)
• Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)
• Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (2004)
• Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl (2002)
• Indra Sinha, Animal’s People (2009)
• Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990)