In the great derangement, the award-winning Indian author Amitav Gosh posits that the climate crisis is a crisis of culture and imagination that poses multiple challenges to the contemporary writer. He argues that the literary traditions of the modern novel are at the core of these challenges as they hinder narratives of the unheard and the unlikely. Like many other Literary critics, Gosh comments on climate writing undeniably show the Western literary canon’s inability to appropriately convey climate and environmental crises urgency.
What, then, are climate and environmental writing? What is the role of environmental writing in the “Anthropocene”? How do African and writers from the African diaspora engage with the genre of the environmental novel in this new age, and how do their narratives challenge the literary traditions of the modern novel?
This interdisciplinary panel seeks to rethink environmental and climate writing and is open to papers that address these- or related questions on the representation of environmental crisis in literature, visual arts and films.
Please submit your paper proposals to Nathalie Agbessi (Rutgers University) noa13@french.rutgers.edu by April 14th.
