Environmental Justice in Ethnic American Literature

Addressing issues from slow violence, transcorporeality, food and reproductive justice or agrarianism and employing a wide range of ecolinguistics approaches, this volume brings to the fore a diversity of literary responses by African American, Latinx, Asian American, and American Indian writers to environmental injustices and their impact.

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 historically affected by disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards and racial discrimination, now exacerbated by the effects of climate change. In particular, the volume highlights the capacity of literature and literary criticism to help uncover the causes and consequences of different 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, especially in contrast with official statistics and often impersonal data and the reports compiled from them, the tangible and often inescapable problems of communities struggling against environmental racism. The particular 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.