Symposium 2014: "Nature - Mobility - Literature: The Environmental Imagination of Migration"

Veranstalter: Professur für Amerikanistik

The present cultural moment is increasingly informed by a global environmental crisis and by people’s movements within and across national borders. The complex and often ambivalent links between both of these phenomena, however, have received relatively little attention so far. While documentary films such as Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and Michael Nash’s Climate Refugees (2010) as well as a number of geographical, sociological and historical studies have begun to discuss the phenomenon of ‘environmental refugees,’ little has been said about other possible links between peoples’ relationships to the environment and geographical movement that would point beyond this specific cause-and-effect pattern. Literary and cultural critics, in particular, have yet to explore environmental and migratory questions together in a systematic way. With this symposium on the relations between nature and migration in American literature we invite scholars to engage in an open dialog about specific forms of literary expression that combine these two concerns, and about the methodological and theoretical challenges of such a double-oriented critical approach.

Conceptually, the symposium is situated at the intersection between ecocriticism and the fields of transnational, mobility and migration studies. On the one hand, ecocriticism’s defining interest in textual constructions of nature and human-nature interactions, and in place as a key critical category, has recently shifted from an implicit eco-localism that celebrates practices such as dwelling, reinhabitation and bioregionalism towards environmental reconsiderations of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, postcolonialism and globalization—a reorientation that manifests itself in publications such as Sarah Phillips Casteel’s Second Arrivals: Landscape and Belonging in Contemporary Writing of the Americas (2007), Ursula K. Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008), and Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley’s Postcolonial Ecologies (2011). On the other hand, transnational and mobility studies have always been concerned with global movements of commodities, technologies, media, ideas, and people, and with their literary and cultural manifestations. Yet while analyses such as Jahan Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics (2009) and the essays in the collection Cultural Mobility – A Manifesto (2009) discuss the cross-cultural movements of concepts and themes, forms and genres, objects and practices, the interactions between such global flows and the physical environment do not yet play a role in this framework, even though one might argue that an interest in cultural mobility is also, at a very fundamental level, an interest in the dynamics between ideas and places, including, at least potentially, natural places. Considering these developments, we believe that a dialogue between ecocriticism and transnational, mobility and migration studies is particularly well suited for discussing the dynamics between the natural world and migratory movements in American literature. In order to discuss how literary representations of certain natural environments are related to experiences of geographical mobility, or how different kinds of migration are shown to be related to a subject’s sense of place (or sense of planet), we invite presentations that may start with but are by no means limited to the following questions:

What kinds of places/natural environments and what kinds of human-nature interaction play a prominent role in contemporary literatures of migration? How do texts featuring instances of migration approach questions of globalization and environmental crisis? How do environmentally oriented texts conceptualize cultural mobility? Are texts that negotiate issues of migration and an interest in the natural world still invested in a ‘sense of place’ as traditional ecocriticism celebrates it? What are the environmental implications of the presence of places, and the simultaneous focus on issues of ‘placelessness’ and ‘cultural displacement,’ that characterizes migration literature as a genre? Which kinds of migration, or other forms of geographical movement, have shaped the tradition of nature writing, and how do they affect a genre traditionally associated with the ideal of local attachment? How are human migratory movements and other instances of cultural mobility shown to affect a subject’s perception of and relationship to the nonhuman environment, and vice versa? Do poetry and prose, fiction and literary nonfiction approach these issues differently?

Kontakt:

Gerhardt, Christine Professur für Amerikanistik Telefon 0951/863-2298, E-Mail: christine.gerhardt@uni-bamberg.de

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