Environmental Crisis and Human Rights

This anthology of scholarly ecocritical essays offers varied and global perspectives on the representations of violations of human rights, mainly caused by anthropogenic climate change, in literature and various forms of visual media.

Environmental Crisis and Human Rights: Literary and Cultural Representations engages with the human rights implications of anthropogenic environmental crisis through a critical reading of a wide spectrum of literary and cultural texts from different parts of the world. The Introduction and the eighteen theoretically informed essays included in the collection highlight how race, caste, class, gender and ethnicity contribute to and complicate human experiences of environmental degradation. The essays address a broad range of issues involving environmental human rights such as climate migration, climate injustice, resource extraction, neo-colonial intervention, politics of development, dam-induced displacement and the violation of the indigenous usufruct rights to the environment. The volume illustrates that the Anthropocene is not a unitary concept, rather a fractured discourse; and environmental crisis, far from being monolithic in nature, is determined by socio-economic particularities and cultural specificities of different human communities across the globe.