Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis

Janet M. Wilson is Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK. Her research focuses on the diaspora and postcolonial writing of the settler colonies of New Zealand and Australia, literature and globalisation, pandemic fiction, transculturalism and transnationalism, and refugee writing. Her most recent publications are the coedited volume, New Zealand medievalism: Reframing the medieval (2024) and “Diaspora Screen Media”, special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing 60.2 (2024). She is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and co-founder and Chair of the global network, Challenging Precarity.Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her main research interests are postcolonial studies and eighteenth-century British literature and culture. She is a member of the steering committee of the international network Challenging Precarity, and has co-edited the collections of essays Representing Poverty in the Anglophone Postcolonial World (Bonn University Press, 2021) and Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World (Brill, 2022). She is a member of the DFG-funded research training school Gegenwart/Literatur (Contemporary/Literature) and an elected member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Science, Humanities, and the Arts.Om Prakash Dwivedi is Associate Professor of English literature at Bennett University, Uttar Pradesh, India. He is the author of Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English (2022), Tracing the New Indian Diaspora (2014), and co-author with Lisa Lau of Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English (2014). He is co‑founder and vice‑Chair of the global network, Challenging Precarity.

• INTRODUCTION00 Janet M. Wilson, Barbara Schmid-Haberkamp, and Om Prakash Dwivedi: The Anthropocene and the “weak planet”: framing postcolonial precarity ecocriticismPART IPlanetary precarity and vulnerability01. Wai Chee Dimock: Precarious breath: The arts and sciences of oxygen02. Pramod Nayar: “One world or none”: Planetary nuclear precarity and anti-nuclear cosmopolitanism03. Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández: Le Transperceneige (1982) and the Snowpiercers (2013; 2020) as post-apocalyptic cli-fis: (Im)Possible technologized habitats for the vulnerable posthuman OtherPART IIRevised Literary Genres and Visual Formats04. Klara Machata: Imagining planetarity in Vandana Singh’s speculative short fiction05. Chiara Lanza: Precariousness and resistance: Petro-despotism and the imaginative power of literature06. Jan Rupp: Planetary precarity in performance ecopoetry: Poems to solve the climate crisis?07. Scott Slovic: Toward critical self-reflection and a vigilant sense of precarity: Why read pandemic literature during a pandemicPART IIIAffective ecoprecarity: Relationality, resilience and resistance08. Stefan Benz: Of ecological critique and queer utopias: Nicky Drayden’s Escaping Exodus (2019)09. Sonja Frenzel: Women’s writing as eco-translation: The critical-creative edges of precarious presence in Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2020) and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Ada’s Room ([2020] 2023)10. Leonor María Martínez Serrano: Earth is Oikos: Peter Sanger on the vulnerability of the biosphere as life’s homePART IVPlanetary repair and survival11. Aleks Wansbrough: Resisting precarity and planetary dysphoria with In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain12. Kanak Yadav: The precarious case of the zero-waste solution to the planetary problem13. May Joseph and Sofia Varino: Hydrosophy: Ecology, choreography, and multispecies precarity