Green LettersPub Date : 2023-10-23DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2254069
Laura Albertini
{"title":"Toxic Matters. Narrating Italy’s Dioxin <b>Toxic Matters. Narrating Italy’s Dioxin</b> , by Monica Seger, Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press, 2022, viii + 216 pp., US$ 35, £ 28.36 (paperback), ISBN 9780813948355","authors":"Laura Albertini","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2254069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2254069","url":null,"abstract":"\"Toxic Matters. Narrating Italy’s Dioxin.\" Green Letters, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135366226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Green LettersPub Date : 2023-10-23DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2260813
M. Keith Booker, Isra Daraiseh
{"title":"Ben Wheatley’s <i>In the Earth</i> (2021): Folk Horror as Climate Change Warning","authors":"M. Keith Booker, Isra Daraiseh","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2260813","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2260813","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTBen Wheatley’s In the Earth (2021) is one of several recent British films that point the genre of folk horror in significant new directions. By mixing folk horror with other horror genres and with science fiction, this film veers into the territory that has recently been described as the ‘New Weird’. In so doing, it generates a complex dialogue surrounding the relationship between humans and nature. The film interrogates the different ways in which we conceptualise and attempt to understand nature, suggesting that these attempts, whether religious or scientific, tend to involve an imposition of patterns on nature that are not necessarily there. Ultimately, this dialogue produces a complex, but effective, warning about the impending danger posed by climate change to both humans and nature, while attempting to avoid the simplistic pattern-making that it critiques.KEYWORDS: Climate changeeco-horrorfolk horrorIn the EarthNew WeirdWheatley, Ben Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1. Bitel discusses the impact on the film of the fact that In the Earth was written and filmed during the period of Covid restrictions (Bitel Citation2021, 74).2. Of course, the most prominent use of Swedish folk culture in recent folk horror occurs in Ari Aster’s 2019 American film Midsommar.3. See Hill (Citation2021).4. The concept that mycorrhizal networks provide communication systems among the trees of a forest is scientifically well-established, though the extent to which these networks can function as a sort of brain governing the forest is not as clear. Such networks, though, have been featured prominently in such fictional works as Richard Powers’ The Overstory (Powers Citation2018); they have also been brought to popular attention in such non-fiction works as Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees (Wohlleben Citation2016). The standing stone of In the Earth also recalls the ‘mother trees’ that Suzanne Simard (the inspiration for a major character in Powers’ novel) has described as ‘hubs’ of mycorrhizal networks (Simard Citation2021).5. Compare here Mark Bould’s spirited argument that the fiction of our time is permeated with the topic of climate change, even when that fiction is not ‘immediately and explicitly about climate change’ (Bould Citation2021, 14).6. Wheatley tells Bitel that his critique of pattern-making in In the Earth came out of current events during the time he was conceiving of the film: ‘It came out of drowning in all the Trump stuff, watching American politics and British politics, and thinking about the erosion of fact, and this weaponising of narrative’ (Bitel Citation2021, 74–75).7. This film is further linked to In the Earth by the fact that, given its timing, many also saw the asteroid (opposed by the inept attempts of the U.S. government to do something about it) as a stand-in for Covid.Additional informationNotes on contributorsM. Keith BookerM. Keith Booker is Professor of Engli","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135412318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Green LettersPub Date : 2023-10-05DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2260802
Subarna De
{"title":"The Return of Nature: Decolonial Reinhabitation and Self-Indigenisation in Kodagu, India","authors":"Subarna De","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2260802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2260802","url":null,"abstract":"This essay contextualises the ecological and cultural practices of the Kodagu coffee plantations of Southern India within the post-/decolonial framework of bioregional reinhabitation. Given that reinhabitation is an essential domain in bioregional thought and practice that aims to restore and maintain the natural systems of an injured land, this essay explores the depiction of indigenous practices on Kodagu’s plantations in Kavery Nambisan’s The Scent of Pepper (2010). Analysing the complex interrelationships between the reinhabitory practices on the plantations and Kodagu’s environment, this essay argues that bioregional reinhabitation in Kodagu takes a decolonial approach to transform the non-native coffee into a bioregional crop in Kodagu and, in the process, foregrounds self-indigenisation as a prominent decolonial reinhabitory strategy in indigenous environments of crises.","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134974887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Green LettersPub Date : 2023-09-30DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2263462
Margaret Ronda
{"title":"Georgics from Below (For Forthcoming Special Issue, Eltringham and Carter)","authors":"Margaret Ronda","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2263462","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2263462","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTThis essay examines the genre of georgic as it generates formal insights into the place of unpaid work and unwaged life alongside waged work within capital’s cycles of accumulation and crisis. The georgic offers key elaborations on the life-worlds and practical activities that subtend the formal economy. Turning to Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead and Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars, this essay argues that these poetic works can be read as ‘georgics from below’ in their expanded inquiries into the conditions of labouring life within capitalist productive relations, and their forceful critiques of the risk exposures and rational violence of waged labour. These works consider potential locales of resistance, collective counter-imaginaries, places of rewilding and feral existences.KEYWORDS: Georgicsecopoeticssocial ecologyecocriticismenvironmental literature Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes1. Nefertiti X. M. Tadiar, Michael Denning, Tania Li, Mike Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Jason Moore, and Jan Breman, among other scholars, offer frameworks for thinking about life beyond the wage. This argument also draws on the key insights of social reproduction theorists such as Silvia Federici and Maria Mies.2. On the georgic as a measure of climatological change with the rise of industrial capitalism, see Tobias Menely’s Climate and the Making of Worlds (2021).3. See, for instance: Jacob Taylor’s ‘Pennsylvania’ (1739–40), Timothy Dwight’s Greenfield Hill (1797), Joel Barlow’s The Columbiad (1807), and Philip Freneau’s ‘On the Great Western Canal’ (1822). For a reading of the American georgic tradition, see Timothy Sweet’s American Georgics (2002), which emphasises prose writing and views the georgic as a form of environmental writing intimately tied to early American agrarian-economic discourses and land ethics.4. Kadue’s phrase evokes the feminist social practice ‘maintenance art’ of Mierle Ukeles, along with other feminist ‘art workers’ of the 1970s who staged feminised unpaid labour in their art pieces.5. See Martin Cherniack, The Hawk’s Nest Incident: America’s Worst Industrial Accident (1986) and Tim Dayton, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead (2015) for more extensive description of this event and its aftermath.Additional informationNotes on contributorsMargaret RondaMargaret Ronda is the author of a critical study on American postwar poetry and the genres of global ecological crisis, Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End (Stanford University Press, Post × 45 Series, 2018). She is also the author of two poetry collections. Her critical scholarship has appeared in journals including PMLA, American Literary History, Post45, Genre, and English Language Notes, as well as in edited volumes such as Life in Plastic, Prismatic Ecology, Veer Ecology, and Writing Against Capital. She is an Associate Professor in English at the University of California-Davis.","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136343303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Green LettersPub Date : 2023-09-26DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2258916
Emilia Weber
{"title":"The Liverpool Dockers and Reclaim the Streets: Creating Spaces of Solidarity","authors":"Emilia Weber","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2258916","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2258916","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines the unlikely alliance forged between environmentalist group Reclaim the Streets and a group of Liverpool dockworkers. I propose that excavating historical collaborations between the environmentalist and labour movements offers ways forward for thinking about solidarity. The Liverpool dockers’ dispute was one of the longest running in the history of British industrial relations; however, it has received little academic attention, compared to The Miners’ Strike of 1984–1985, for example. The attention it has received primarily discusses the, admittedly significant, internationalism of the campaign. But the dockworkers’ alliance with Reclaim the Streets is rarely commented on. Using interviews I conducted with activists and dockworkers between 2019 and 2022, and interviews conducted in 2004 by those involved in the dispute, I offer a way of reading this collaboration by attending to its spatial politics and intersections with performance, thereby pointing to the generative character of these political relations.","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134958480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Green LettersPub Date : 2023-09-11DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2254506
Matthew Griffiths
{"title":"Late modernism and the poetics of place","authors":"Matthew Griffiths","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2254506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2254506","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135939085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Green LettersPub Date : 2023-09-03DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2254067
Paul Anthony Knowles
{"title":"Ecocriticism and the Sense of Place","authors":"Paul Anthony Knowles","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2254067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2254067","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82011477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Green LettersPub Date : 2023-09-03DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2252440
Olubunmi Tayo Agboola, Stephen Oladele Solanke, Stephen Ese Kekeghe
{"title":"Alter-Narrativity and Ecofeminism in the Mythical Account of Sogidi Lake in Awe, Oyo, Nigeria","authors":"Olubunmi Tayo Agboola, Stephen Oladele Solanke, Stephen Ese Kekeghe","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2252440","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2252440","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79624339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Green LettersPub Date : 2023-09-03DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2254071
Pippa Marland
{"title":"A History of English Georgic Writing, edited by Paddy Bullard, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023, xiii and 387 pp., £90 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-009-01950-7; Georgic Literature and the Environment: Working Land, Reworking Genre, edited by Sue Edney and Tess Somervell, Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 2023, xv and 252 pp., £34.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-032-14825-0","authors":"Pippa Marland","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2254071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2254071","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135499516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Green LettersPub Date : 2023-09-01DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2023.2254072
Maria Trejling
{"title":"Spectrality and Survivance: Living the Anthropocene","authors":"Maria Trejling","doi":"10.1080/14688417.2023.2254072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2023.2254072","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38019,"journal":{"name":"Green Letters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88454028","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}