From the European South

a transdisciplinary journal of postcolonial humanities

issue 13 | special focus | postcolonial environmental humanities | fall 2023

FES 13 (2023) Call for Special Focus on POSTCOLONIAL ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES.

Starting from Issue 13 (Fall 2023), From the European South will devote a Special focus of its next three open issues (Fall 2023, 2024, 2025) to the urgent and widening debate on the Postcolonial Environmental Humanities.

Over a decade ago, in his influential study Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Rob Nixon identified “four main schisms” keeping postcolonial theory and ecocritism  apart. Postcolonialists foregrounded hybridity, displacement, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, marginalized pasts and border histories; ecocritics celebrated wilderness and preservation, place and national traditions; timeless transcendentalism and communion with nature; they mythologized empty lands and repressing the colonization and genocide of native people (Nixon 2011: 236).

Of course, many postcolonial scholars of ex-settler colonies such as Canada and Australia had always taken environmental exploitation and colonial racism into consideration, and several postcolonial authors had developed forms of ecopoetics alternative to the dominant Western paradigms of nature writing. The new millennium has enriched the exchange, dialogue, contamination between the fields. New waves of ecocriticism have moved towards forms of eco-cosmopolitanism that recognize ethnic and indigenous perspectives, North-South dynamics, and interspecies entanglements; postcolonial studies tackle Anthropocene discourses and offer critical alternatives and correctives to them.

The growing urgency and evidence of the environmental crisis, the development of the environmental humanities and posthuman critical theory, the debates over the Anthropocene and its rival definitions, and the exponential growth of ecological migrants and refugees accelerate the need of a productive dialogue.

The next  Special Focus of Issue 13 of the journal intends to map and investigate old and new intersections and articulations, as well as future horizons, of the postcolonial and the environmental. We invite articles that engage with one or more of the following topics, especially through the lenses of literature and the arts.

  • Climate migration
  • Climate racism and critical race theory
  • Posthuman critical theory and postcolonial theories
  • Ecocriticism and ecofeminism
  • European articulations of the environmental and postcolonial
  • Postcolonial literary and artistic responses to the environmental crisis
  • Postcolonial engagements with traditional ecologies
  • Non Western ecologies and Indigenous knowledge
  • Postcolonial figurations of the posthuman
  • Postcolonial critiques of sustainability and mainstream environmental discourses
  • Adaptation and adaptation discourses: literature, arts, science and the environment

The first FES Special focus devoted to the Postcolonial Environmental Humanities is guest-edited by Shaul Bassi and Lucio De Capitani.

Send your articles, reviews, interviews or creative interventions to bassi@unive.it and lucio.decapitani@unive.it  by May 31st, 2023.

Acceptance of the submitted contributions will be notified by June 30th, 2023.

Deadline for submitting revised accepted articles is July 31st, 2023.

PLEASE NOTE:

From the European South considers all proposals on condition that

  • the article is your own original work, and does not duplicate any other previously published work, including your own previously published work;
  • the article follows the journal’s “Author’s Guidelines” closely;
  • the article is not a translation (IT or EN) of an already published text;
  • the article has been submitted only to FES; it is not under consideration or peer review or accepted for publication or in press or published elsewhere;
  • the article contains nothing that is abusive, fraudulent, or illegal.
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