Abstract Ecocriticism describes and confronts the socially uneven encounters and entanglements of earthly living. As a political mode of literary and cultural analysis, it aims to understand and intervene in the destruction and diminishment of living worlds. A core premise is that environmental crises have social, cultural, affective, imaginative, and material dimensions. Although ranging in its critical engagements across historical periods, cultural texts, and cultural formations, ecocriticism focuses on the aesthetic modes, social meanings, contexts, genealogies, and counterpoints of cultural practices that contribute to ecological ruination and resilience. These include myths about frontiers, progress, and human mastery over animality and nature; capitalist modes of valuing, devaluing, and radically transforming lifeworlds; and biopolitical and racialized inequalities in health, risk, development, and disposability. Ecocriticism also involves broad theoretical engagement with discursive formations and semiotic significations, including the interrogation of crisis frameworks and apocalyptic representations, considering their histories, scales, and temporalities, while also asking how any particular socioecological arrangement comes to count as a matter of concern, for whom, and in which contexts. The concept of nature is a long-standing theoretical topic in ecocriticism. While nature may seem, rather straightforwardly, to be the domain environmentalism seeks to protect, it is a concept on which hinge crucial and contested claims about ontology (the nature of something, such as assertions about human nature as an inherent, often determining set of shared qualities) and epistemology (how we know what is real, such as the scientific practices through which credible assertions can be made that the planetary climate is changing), claims whose modern authority has rested on positioning nature as a domain outside culture. While structuralist and poststructuralist theorists have destabilized the binary opposition of nature to culture, the political and epistemological imperative to engage with nature as simultaneously material and semiotic has spawned an array of theoretical developments, from Donna Haraway’s cyborg figure and other “natureculture” assemblages to new materialisms. Meanwhile, nature circulates as a commodity form and spectacle animating digital, film, and television screens as well as many other consumer products and experiences. Cultural studies approaches to ecocriticism raise questions about the relationships of visual, narrative, and sound representations to economic power, media technologies, and the material and social ecologies through which they are produced and which they form and transform.

This comparative examination of Canadian writer Barbara Gowdy’s fiction, specifically the novels Falling Angels (1989), Mister Sandman (1996), The Romantic (2003), and Helpless (2007), and several short stories in We So Seldom Look on Love (1992), expands the study of the feminist grotesque from representations and performances of transgressive bodies to the politics involved in imagining and inhabiting grotesque environments. Gowdy’s fiction makes freaks ordinary through domestic realism, and in so doing her narratives make strangely surreal the “normal” environments of late modernity. By imagining our bodies and environments as grotesque forms — uneven and ungainly, open and porous, incomplete and excessive — Gowdy’s depictions of freaks and their ordinary domestic and suburban environments broadly entail a carnivalesque inversion of normative environments that has social and ecological relevance. The normative home is figured by way of miniaturizing containers that restrict — albeit only partially — gender, sexuality, and physical embodiment to normative practices and symbolically exclude ecological processes in an illusion of self-enclosure. Gowdy’s carnivalesque inversions show ordinary residential environments to be dense with animal lives and deaths, energy flows, and fungal and vegetative growth and decay. The recurring theme of power outages and electricity transmission lines shows seemingly self-contained domestic space supported by an extensive industrial infrastructure, and socially marginal women absurdly imagining themselves responsible for industrial failures in primarily masculine domains. Gowdy’s carnivalesque domestic realism historically situates suburban development, nuclear families, and nuclear weaponry as a particular set of gendered social relations while resisting any reduction of the physical world to an inert background.

Journal Article Spectral Environmentalisms: National Politics and Gothic Ecologies in Silent Spring, Surfacing, and Salt Fish Girl Get access Cheryl Lousley Cheryl Lousley Email: clousley@lakeheadu.ca Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Volume 25, Issue 2, Spring 2018, Pages 412–428, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isy039 Published: 11 July 2018

Global Futures PastOur Common Future, Postcolonial Times, and Worldly Ecologies Cheryl Lousley (bio) Each one of these speeches belongs to a different time. I would say that the speech of the discourse of the rubber tappers is of the present time. The government speech is that of the past time and that of the UN of the future. —Mary Allegretti, World Commission on Environment and Development public hearing In their maps of the future, there is no sense of place, no touch of embeddedness, no names of towns smacking of magic and memory. —Shiv Visvanathan, "Mrs. Brundtland's Disenchanted Cosmos" Our Common Future, published in 1987, was a highly influential policy report that optimistically outlined a global framework for a sustainable form of development. It was the culmination of the work of the World Commission on Environment and Development (widely known as the Brundtland Commission after its chair, Norwegian Labour leader and prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland), which had been given a mandate in 1983 by the United Nations General Assembly "to propose long-term environmental strategies for achieving sustainable development by the year 2000 and beyond."1 While the concept of sustainability popularized by the Brundtland report had a prolific future, remaining a buzzword well into the twenty-first century, the Brundtland Commission conceived of a future now past. Our time is its beyond. Can we now say that sustainable development is a future that did not come to be? A "generation's time" has passed since the World Commission [End Page 21] urged its audience "to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs," still the classic definition of sustainable development.2 The needs of people in the "present" of the commission were not met, much less their varied political-ecological demands, some of which were recorded at the public hearings held by the commission from 1985–87 and quoted extensively throughout the report. And what of us, who were once the future—did we arrive at our "now" without compromised ecologies? Or might we conclude that the future of sustainable development came just as predicted, in that its much-criticized embrace of economic growth contributed all too readily to the neoliberal futures that followed, with intensified privatization and enclosure of ecological commons: waters, forests, agricultural lands, and seeds, not to mention the global markets in carbon emissions?3 Taking Our Common Future as a global "future past" or "the past's future," an approach to futurity conceived in an earlier time and place, might seem to misjudge its intent.4 The World Commission insisted that Our Common Future was not "prediction," "forecast," or "blueprint," explicitly distancing itself from the infamous ecological predictions of the 1970s, ridiculed when they did not come to pass or when utopian blueprints, like The Ecologist's 1972 "Blueprint for Survival," faded like fads, showing themselves to be all too much of a particular time, place, and class.5 Instead, as "a call to action" with a set of ethical and political commitments and international signatories, the report and commission were an aspirational political project, somewhat parallel to the 1955 Bandung conference that announced the solidarity of decolonizing and newly independent, nonaligned Third World nations.6 Many would thus aver that sustainable development could still come—thatit remains a viable political vision and that it is premature to relegate it to that clichéd repository, the so-called dustbins of history, where what is no longer useful is labeled "waste." That the Bandung project has been variously declared a past future once valid but now obsolete in the new "problem-space" of globalization, revisited as a utopian project still relevant in its prophetic promise of an alternate present, and rejected as a mystifying "dead-weight" gives some sense of the political stakes involved in the project of retrospective futurity.7 Our Common Future is both similar to and different from other kinds of past aspirational political projects and environmental discourses, [End Page 22] which is why I turn back to how it conceived—and narratively constructed—a global environmental futurity. Some aspects of the World Commission's global futurity...

A History of Environmental FuturitySpecial Issue Introduction Susie O’Brien (bio) and Cheryl Lousley (bio) Political struggles of all sorts are formed and fought over the power to shape “the future”—usually the future of a place or a people. Environmentalism has a somewhat different relationship to futurity than other social and political movements, because it is engaged with safeguarding the future of the future in presenting ecological viability as the foundation for all human and more-than-human worlds. Much attention thus turns to practical and speculative questions about what the planet will be like in the future: What climatic conditions will prevail and for how long? What forms of life will thrive in those conditions? How will human communities cope? Different visions of the preferred future and the pathways to achieve it also abound. Sustainability, resilience, the Anthropocene, and economic prosperity are some of the current frameworks vying to explain and shape what is to come, against a present shaped by capitalism, colonialism, and climate change and by myriad movements to shape alternative possibilities for living together well. Yet the future is not only about what is to come or even about present imaginings. Futures also have histories. This special issue pays attention to futurity as a discursive formation, a historically specific mode of technology, knowledge, and power, because we think that frameworks of environmental futurity have profound implications not only for what is to come but also for the present and our understandings of the past. Imagined futures help to structure and organize social relations, often solidifying and legitimizing existing inequalities in the process. We pose these questions: Who gets to imagine and to occupy environmental futures? What publics and political possibilities are enabled and [End Page 1] which are foreclosed in particular imaginings of environmental futurity? What alternative futures have been or might be imagined from post-colonial and other marginalized perspectives? What are the historical conditions that shape their emergence, and what role do they posit for history and memory? And how—through what institutions, technologies, and genres—do different futures get produced and contested? The essays in this issue pose diverse answers to these questions. They address the production of environmental futurity by focusing on the institutions and technologies, tropes, and genres through which it appears as a matter of concern. In their essays in this issue, Patricia Audette-Longo, Susie O’Brien, and Cheryl Lousley show how, in processes ranging from United Nations commissions to resource-industry environmental reviews, questions of environmental futurity come to crystallize debates about development, economic growth, indigenous sovereignty, and democracy, harnessing them to evolving data and theories focused on planetary boundaries.1 And as Joshua Schuster’s essay demonstrates, even seemingly unconnected projects such as scientific investigations into life on other planets reverberate into questions about the spatial and temporal boundaries of life on this one.2 Imaginative acts of future projection define the literary and philosophical genres of speculative fiction, science fiction, and utopian thought, as both Schuster and Rebecca Evans discuss in their essays.3 But speculation is part of other practices as well. Richard Crownshaw and Catriona Sandilands, in their essays, point to commodity trading, futures markets, and habitat restoration, not to mention climate modeling, as other forms of speculative practice that involve imagining possible futures.4 Residual hierarchies and existing social relations of race, gender, sexuality, and class are often embedded in these projected futures, such as the recurring trope of the child as symbol of the future and normative family relations that Evans discusses in her essay.5 Humanities scholarship, however, also emphasizes how the past is more than an instrument for future prediction. Remembering is a social and place-based as well as personal process in which affective attachments and commitments—what matters and has mattered—give meaning to our cultures and identities. Narratives of the future provide insight into cultural memory—what has, and will have, mattered enough to be remembered, and by whom—but also reshape it, recursively rewriting remembered pasts in order to make certain futures possible, as O’Brien, Crownshaw, and [End Page 2] Sandilands each discuss in this issue.6 Different institutions and constellations of political...

ABSTRACT The essay uses the term “charismatic life” to describe representations of nature that emphasize vitality and vibrancy. Beginning with how life is reified when nature becomes spectacle, the essay discusses how a fetishism of life was part of the early structuring logic of biodiversity science in a way that undermined crafting other ethical and political responses to loss. When biodiversity emerged as a popular science concept in the 1980s, it was described as a scientific replacement for the sentimental attachment to charismatic megafauna that previously structured conservation priorities. But this essay argues, in a historicized reading of conservation biologist E.O. Wilson’s popular science memoir Biophilia [Wilson, E. O. (1984). Biophilia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press] alongside the seminal edited collection Biodiversity [Wilson, E. O. (Ed.). (1988). Biodiversity. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences], that Wilson’s sentimental biopolitics renders the world as if a collection of living souvenirs – tokens by which to remember forms of life that will have been lost.

The language of nature that permeates Dionne Brand’s poetry is often read as a metaphor for place, a site from which the politics of identity, home and belonging are negotiated. But the places through which the politics of inclusion and exclusion are enacted are alive in Brand’s poetry. This essay reads her attention to the living world of nature as an ethical and political engagement with the complex intersections of social injustice and environmental degradation, as traced through the motifs of landscape, territory, cartography, and planetarity in four poetry collections: No Language Is Neutral (1990), Land To Light On (1997), thirsty (2002), and Inventory (2006). In these poems, nature becomes the lived world when experienced through bodily movement not totalized cartography, when voiced in sound rather than pinned down by the gaze, and when recognized as a multitude of both friends and strangers. The expression of love for nature makes the disjuncture between place, belonging, and justice so painful in Brand’s poetry. In marking so carefully the relations of love and power that bind and rupture identity and place, Brand shows how necessary but difficult is the task of making the places we live in actually liveable.

The formal conventions of global humanitarianism when performed as melodrama, structured around temporal devices such as peripeteia, deferral, delay, and missed chances, reveal some of its affect-making roles in globalization. The melodramatic flourishing of Live Aid commemorative events and commodities in the twenty-first century suggests there is a melancholic attachment to Euro-American global hegemony, retroactively and repetitively constructed as a missed chance to do good that always meant well. The melodramatic enactment at Live 8 of the 'end' of global poverty promised by Live Aid patches over the discontinuities between the era of development internationalism and neoliberal globalization, creating a moralized image of Euro-American globalization as a 'long-standing' form of humanitarian power that can be lamented in place of confronting the absence of any alternative explanatory framework for escalating processes of uneven development. By suspending time, melodrama creates a fantasmatic site for aspiration, ambivalence, melancholy, and nostalgia without resolving their contradictions.

Slow Violence and Dirty Mourning Cheryl Lousley (bio) The longevity of Sheldon Currie’s 1977 short story “The Glace Bay Miner’s Museum”—adapted to radio and stage play (by Wendy Lill), film (Margaret’s Museum, directed by Mort Ransen), and novel (by Sheldon Currie)1—lies with narrator Margaret’s grotesque response to coal mining deaths: she claims and preserves with formaldehyde selected body parts of her husband, brother, and grandfather to display as museum exhibits. Margaret’s narration and her museum, I suggest here, are forms of “dirty mourning.” Margaret’s dissection of the bodies is “dirty” because it transgresses social taboos, just like her “dirty” thoughts and “dirty” body—the runny nose and sexual activity that earn her the labels “snot face” and “snot nosed whore” from her peers (Currie 8). Snotty and slutty, Margaret’s body is grotesque in the way Bakhtin defines it—open, degraded, porous, and pleasurable, with exaggerated orifices and leaking fluids (317–18), a symbolic inversion of the closed, symmetrical classical body. This carnivalesque dimension of Currie’s story is situated within another iconography of dirt: the trope of the dirty miner’s face and the social ritual of cleaning the bodies of the dead. These remind us of the social, [End Page 31] symbolic, affective, and physical work involved in sustaining a way of life. In the case of “The Glace Bay Miner’s Museum,” explicitly addressed to “you” (Currie 22), the reader as museum visitor and regional tourist, the way of life sustained through the “dirty” work of coal mining is mostly located elsewhere, in the modern conveniences powered by a fossil-fuel economy. Literary critics Patricia Yaeger, Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, Stephanie LeMenager, and Sheena Wilson are crafting a new cultural criticism focused on the relationship between energy systems and cultural practices—a line of inquiry that insists on re-imagining the role of criticism in the context of global climate change. Sheldon Currie’s depiction of dirt as a social relation, linking individuals to place, to work, to family, to community, and to national economy, and hence open to acts of resistance and re-organization, is a useful beginning. Cleaning the bodies of the injured and dead is a ritual practice that recurs in Currie’s mining stories, often as part of a coming-of-age experience in which sons and daughters come to terms with the actual or eventual loss of their parents through bodily intimacy. In The Company Store, Ian is shaped by his father’s pit accident and his intimate washing of his father’s body—naked with erect penis—at the hospital afterwards. He takes on familial responsibilities for a neighbour, Madeline, after helping her wash her husband, whom he found dead in the sewer. In the story “The Glace Bay Miner’s Museum,” Neil courts Margaret by writing a song elegizing her eldest brother Charlie Dave, dead in the pits at age sixteen, alongside her father. The song becomes the rite of passage that enables Margaret to agree to marry. In Glace Bay the novel, Margaret’s first impulse on seeing the bodies of her father and brother is to ask to clean their faces: “I pulled the sheet down off their faces. Their faces were black with coal dust and didn’t look like anything was wrong with them except they were dirty” (38). Although Margaret is comforted by the help of a nun in this task, the narrative troubles how the ritual normalizes their deaths: “she talked to me and made it all seem normal, the two of us standing over a dead face and cleaning the dirt off of it” (39). The dirty miner’s face is a trope used extensively in the novel and the film Margaret’s Museum, appearing at times of trauma or to signify solidarity, such as when Peggy, daughter of the mine manager, re-emerges from hiding in the coal bin from her father, her face “all over black,” showing her allegiance with Ian, Neil, and Margaret (Currie, Glace Bay 85). Angus’s blackened face amidst the clean miners at the mine washhouse—which hosts the only showers in the community—is used in...

This paper discusses affective attachments to popular global imaginaries by examining the place of love in the popular humanitarianism associated with the 1984-85 music charity events Band Aid and Live Aid.The paper offers a materialist reading of the charity spectacles that situates them within a popular culture of sentimentality engaged in making and imagining forms of global community through social practices of exchange. It draws on the feminist scholarship on sentimental cultures and their imbrication with social reform movements and commodity capitalism to show how Band Aid can be understood as part of a popular culture of sentimental exchange, in which famine relief images, stories, tears, money and goods were passed along in affective exchanges that also involved sentimental stories and personalized commodities and capital such as wedding rings, household furniture and allowances. The circulation of feeling, concretized in the exchange of goods and money, confirmed the social fantasy of global community, imagined through the terms of intimate love and familial gift exchange. When combined with local, national and international commodity markets that allowed information, goods and images to travel among strangers, global gift giving appeared to replace geopolitical alliances and financial interests with an open, barrier-free, affective economy of love and cooperation. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The essay discusses the significance of narrative for environmental ethics by attending to the conventions of autobiography in Farley Mowat’s anti-whaling text, A Whale for the Killing. A tension emerges in environmental nonfiction narrative between the desire to transcend the self and its expression in autobiographical form, which necessarily places the self at the centre of the narrative. I trace the construction of the narrator’s and whale’s ethical personae to argue that even as Mowat’s narration of a subject-to-subject encounter challenges the ontological and ethical divide between “human” and “animal,” it nevertheless reconstructs a liberal-humanist notion of subjectivity.