Abstract Tagurabong, a quiet agrarian town in a Pacific-facing island in the southern Philippines, is a recurring site of mythmaking in Merlie Alunan’s Susumaton (2017) which anthologizes oral narratives from Leyte. As a narrative commonplace, Tagurabong is a rural place where anachronistic technologies, tricksters, and mystical objects emerge. This essay proposes to examine this anachronism by “facing Tagurabong”, a critical gesture which values oral narratives as integral for understanding the encroachment of techno-modernity in the Philippine pastoral life. To face Tagurabong is to confront the uneven temporality and rhythm of development in the Global South where opposing binaries like the West versus the rest, urban versus rural, or archaic versus modern coexist. Rural imagination transcends realism and moves into fantasy to generate an oracular vision of the future: techno-capitalism, gentrification, and climate change which ultimately threaten the tropical agrarian life. I finally situate Susumaton at the crossroads of magical realism and irrealist writing to show the place of Waray oral narratives in world literature.
Abstract This paper reads The Swan Book (2013) as a world literary text to distill how it offers a localized meaning of climate change. Against the grain of the common tendency amongst contemporary literary critics to adopt a decolonial approach and establish how Indigenous literatures subvert, challenge or estrange non-Indigenous genre and critical approaches, this paper engages Indigenous ways of knowing alongside contemporary ontological theories to demonstrate The Swan Book ’s pertinence on a planetary scale. Through a dialogical critical lens I show how it suggests reimagining and fostering relationalities and relations of coexistence on all levels, starting from below. The Swan Book ’s response to the ecological crisis illustrates how localized meanings coexist with more general, global ones.
Abstract Elif Shafak’s novel The Island of Missing Trees (2021) engages with the recent political history of Cyprus through a tragic love story that foregrounds questions of roots, identity, nationality, and immigration. While the novel has often been read in relation to human trauma and displacement caused by the political unrest of the 1970s, it also draws attention to the impact of political conflict on the island’s ecological life. Shafak presents trauma not only as a human experience but also as a more-than-human condition embodied by a fig tree that is displaced from Cyprus and forced to adapt to an unfamiliar climate in London. This paper reads the fig tree as a storied matter through which political violence, displacement, and environmental disruption are inscribed and communicated across human and nonhuman worlds.
Abstract This paper aims to counterpoint the diverse fluvial scenarios juxtaposed in the video installation A Gente Rio / We River (2016) by Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo and in “Adeus a Sete Quedas” (1982) by Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade. To this end, I combine a reading of their multiple references and of the visual decisions made to approach the ambivalence of different mindsets at work in places characterized by dam constructions. Drawing from the conception of the river as a line, which informs its instrumental use as a source of energy and as a natural border, I argue that this ratio only works in theory and I articulate the main ways in which it always fails: when it is seen through its ecological and intertextual connections, when the infrastructure stops working properly, when reservoirs flood their course, and when the river entities are considered from the spiritual perspective of indigenous rituals.
Abstract This essay analyzes three contemporary novels from India to ask how we might rethink global and planetary approaches to literary comparison. Environmental world literature is more than a corpus of globally circulating ecological narratives. I suggest a mode of reading and a model of comparison that foregrounds how environmental meaning takes shape in the multilingual literary ecologies and linguistic proximity of languages in the Indian subcontinent. While recalibrating models of scale and circulation, the essay also considers what happens to texts in translation and the epistemic displacements that are embedded in literary form as it mediates between local and global frames of environmental knowledge.
