Narrative, emplotment, power: on agency and the environment

ABSTRACT Questions of agency, narrative emplotment, and power are critical to the work of environmental historians. In an effort to expand the methodological toolbox available to those studying these interconnected problems, this paper develops an analytical distinction between agents and actors that attempts to steer us away from anthropocentric accounts of agency and in the direction of a clearer understanding of the structures and processes of power that are involved in the doing and writing of historical narratives beyond the human. It argues that expanding the scope of agency is pivotal for gaining a fuller understanding of how power moves through the environment and those it hosts and substantiates this claim through a critical reading of a broad range of recent works on environmental history concerning, either explicitly or implicitly, the role of nonhuman agency and power. In the process, this paper explores and questions the dynamics between state and environment, human and environment and ideology and environment.