Abstract
Building on a stimulating seminar at ACLA 2024, and amidst dramatically shifting geopolitical contexts, this seminar will probe methods of reading that illuminate and disrupt escalating climate change and ecological loss by focusing on race and racialization. A photographic series of eroding Ghanaian coastlines framed by doors conjuring the violent passage into the catastrophe of chattel slavery in the Americas opens Ian Baucom’s History 4° Celsius. Baucom argues that a new method of literary study is required among scholars of the Black Atlantic, one that can both historicize modernity and attend to its intersections with planetary change and emergent forms of climate precarity, particularly in the Global South. Baucom reiterates the importance of cultural studies methods that historicize aesthetics and affects while also acknowledging the provocations raised by historian Dipesh Chakrabarty about how global warming’s long timescales and planetary systematicity cannot be adequately analyzed through historicization. As provocative, but with a startlingly different method, is Min Hyoung Song’s Climate Lyricism, which reads the climate crisis in literary texts where those elements are not a primary focus but at times appear marginally and precariously alongside everyday experiences of structural racism and colonialism. Song argues that poetic techniques that explore the historical and material relations of race in lived experience also provide insight into the structures of feeling and social relations of climate denial and inequality. These two methodological prompts remain our touchstone, posing questions about how to read, think through, and collectively respond to the escalating horrors. There are a set of familiar representations of environmental and climate crisis in documentary, speculative, and poetic modes, well studied in ecocriticism. When the critic starts not with representation but with the histories, affects, and social lives of racialization, what possibilities arise? What forms of legibility are practiced and which are refused? When climate and environmental questions are asked of texts grappling with the afterlives of modernity’s violence, what aesthetic moves appear salient? How might the habits of reading and noticing that these texts demand model ways of thinking about environmental crises? How can literary methods that are oriented to everyday subjects (Song calls them lyrical) be fruitfully extended and complemented by historicizing methods that attend to the material production of environments, resources, and subjects through capital and technical expertise?
Schedule:
Friday, February 27, 2026 | 4:00 PM EST – 5:45 PM EST | Room: 519A
Papers
- Tania Aguila-Way — University of Toronto: “Where the Camera Cannot Go: Documenting the Atmospheric Terror of Transnational Extractivism in Julien Ellie’s The White Guard.”
- amanda macedo macedo — Brown University: “Brown Geographies: Guadalupe Maravilla’s Aesthetic Disturbances.”
- Zishad Lak — Trent University: “Disrupting Denial: Racialized Knowledge and Formal and Narrative Experimentation in Ian Williams’s Reproduction.”
Saturday, February 28, 2026 | 4:00 PM EST – 5:45 PM EST | Room: 519A
Papers
- Sherena Razek — University of California Los Angeles (UCLA): “Frack and Forage: Palestinian Feminist Film Practices in a Fraught Landscape.”
- Jinmei Tian — Ocean University of China: “The Ocean, Trauma, and Postcolonial Reconstruction in Namwali Serpell’s Novels.”
- Mohammed Muharram — Thamar University (Yemen): “Blue Humanities and Cultural Resilience: Water Stories in Arabic Literature”
- Zeenat Zeenat — University of Minnesota Twin Cities: “Wild Race: Lawless Bodies of Empire.”
Sunday, March 1, 2026 | 10:30 AM EST – 12:15 AM EST | Room: 512D
Papers
- Cheryl Lousley — Lakehead University: “‘White Civility’ and Shamelessness: Reconciliation Realism, Prairie Ecologies, and Populist Violence.”
- Max Karpinski — Trent University: “Reading the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy: Treaty, Legibility, Matthew James Weigel’s “Whitemud Walking.”
- Meaghan Sych — University of Alberta: “Ecological Colonialism and the Impact of the ‘Englishman’s Foot’: A Literary Ecology of an Invasive Species.”