Environmental Justice in Ethnic American Literature

Environmental Justice in Ethnic American Literature focuses on a wide range of conceptions, depictions, and issues of environmental (in)justice found in African American, Latinx, Asian American, and American Indian literature to provide a panorama of ethnic peoples, regions, and cultures affected by disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards and racial discrimination, now exacerbated by the effects of climate change. Specifically, the volume highlights the capacity of literature and literary criticism to help uncover the causes and consequences of instances of environmental injustice and their impact. The chapters analyze a diverse selection of voices and texts, which underscore how the literary imagination of ethnic American writers captures, in contrast with official statistics, impersonal data and the reports compiled from them, the tangible and often inescapable problems of communities struggling against environmental racism. The issues addressed in the volume range from slow violence, transcorporeality, food and reproductive justice, to agrarianism, while utilizing theoretical lenses such as ecofeminist paradigms or innovative applications of ecolinguistic methods to poetry. Overall, the monograph brings to the fore a diversity of literary responses to environmental racism and calls for environmental justice.

Petr Kopecký is associate professor in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Ostrava.

Jan Benes is assistant professor of American and British Literature at the University of Ostrava.