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E-book Ecopoetic Place-Making : Nature and Mobility in Contemporary American Poetry

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Penilaian

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Anthropogenic environmental change and the uneven global effects of mass mobil-ity,eachwiththeirownuniquehistoriesandlong-termeffectsonlifeontheplanet,are two of the most urgent challenges of the twenty-first century. ContemporaryAmerican poetry can help us understand some of the complex ways in which thesetwo challenges are interrelated.When connecting environmental change and massmobility,both public and scholarly debates frequently focus on the phenomenon ofclimaterefugeesandenvironmentalmigrants,thatis,onindividualswhohavebeendisplaced by climate change or environmental degradation. A similar trend can beobserved when environmental crisis and human mobility are discussed in works ofliterature and popular culture, especially in the United States. Whether in Holly-wood blockbusters such as Roland Emmerich’sTheDayAfterTomorrow(2004), docu-mentary films such as Al Gore’sAnInconvenientTruth(2006),or contemporary worksof science fiction such as Paolo Bacigalupi’sThe Water Knife(2015), climate refugeeshavebecomeapowerfulshorthandforthewaysinwhichenvironmentalchangeandmatters of mobility are imagined together. Yet, as is necessarily the case with thiskind of shorthand, the figure of the climate refugee cannot capture the complexinterplay between environmental issues and human mobility.Understanding thesecomplexities is crucial, however, because the sedentary lifestyle idealized by tradi-tionalenvironmentalistdiscourses,moststrandsofecocriticism,andthedominanttraditions of ecopoetry has often been unattainable for large parts of the world’spopulation and will only become more so as oceans continue to rise and desertscontinue to spread. In particular, idealized notions of emplacement as attachmentto one’s chosen place of residence resulting from long-term inhabitation have littlein common with the lived experiences of displaced peoples who are forced to movedue to floods, droughts, famine, and armed conflicts over dwindling resources, orprevented from doing so by borders, walls, or patrol boats, whether in the UnitedStatesorelsewhere.Attendingtotheintersectionsofenvironmentalissuesandhu-man mobility matters too, because econativist arguments that link (pseudo-)eco-logical,racist,and anti-immigrant discourses continue to resurface in times of na-tional and global crisis and are all too easily used to attack marginalized communitiesofcolorinparticular,whethertheyareactuallyonthemoveormerelyunwantedin their current place of residence. Reading contemporary American poetry aboutnature and mobility by poets with different migratory backgrounds, I argue in thisstudy, can help us to counter such arguments and enrich existing models for howto live place-conscious and sustainable lives.As I will show in the following,the po-etry of Craig Santos Perez, Juliana Spahr, Derek Walcott, Agha Shahid Ali, and EtelAdnan proposes mobile environmental imaginaries that rely on critical notions ofbelonging and offeralternative perspectiveson how meaningfulplace-attachmentscanbeformedinthecontextofdisplacement.Indoingso,theecopoetriesofmigra-tion I discuss inEcopoetic Place-Makingenvision ways of being in the world that areboth more eco-ethical and more just. Like contemporary filmmakers and novelists, many contemporary poets too ap-proach the interdependences between global environmental change and humanmobility by evoking the figure of the climate refugee. A well-known example is theMarshallesepoetandclimateactivistKathyJetñil-Kijinerwhoperformedoneofherpoemsaboutclimaterefugees,“DearMatafelePeinem,”attheopeningceremonyoftheUnitedNationsClimateSummitin2014.LaterincludedinJetñil-Kijiner’sdebutcollectionIepJalt?k:PoemsfromaMarshalleseDaughter(2017),“DearMatafelePeinem”draws attention to the threat that rising sea-levels pose to small island nations andtheirIndigenouspopulations,who“willwander/rootless/withonly/apassport/tocallhome”(70).Thepoemisaddressedtothepoet’sdaughterandpromisesthechildthat “no one’s gonna become/ a climate change refugee” (71), only to retract thatpromise, at least partly, immediately afterwards: “or should i say/ no one else” (71).If there is hope in the poem that the drowning of the Marshall Islands and similarplacesmaystillbepreventedsoherdaughterwillnotbedisplacedandloseaccesstothe land her ancestors inhabited, it arises at least in part from the speaker’s angerand desperation over world leaders’ reluctance to take the necessary measures toprotect Indigenous lives and cultures,an anger and desperation partially concealedin the poem for the child’s sake but nonetheless articulated through the careful useof imagery and insistent placement of line-breaks.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

821 RAU e

Penerbit

Germany : transcript Verlag., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

281 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783839469347

Klasifikasi

821

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

English Poetry

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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