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Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 19, Number
2, Spring/Summer 2011, pp. 5-21 (Article)
DOI: 10.1353/qui.2011.0000
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/qui/summary/v019/19.2.dodson.html
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Introduction
Eco/Critical Entanglements
katrina dodson
Atmospheric disturbances hang over our heads a heavy sense of
urgency, a series of alarms that ring out a global chorus of cata-
strophic proportions: economic collapse, pervasive terror, hys-
terical politics, ecological disaster. Has crisis become the defining
mood of the twenty-first century? Or is this cultural anxiety the ex-
aggerated production of an overactive media in an age of around-
the-clock transmissions?
Crisis has long been the defining catalyst of the modern envi-
ronmental movement, which has gained momentum and legislative
traction through its ability to communicate the plight of plant and
animal species on a more immediately human scale.
1
In the past
decade, concern for the planet’s environmental future has moved
into mainstream consciousness most markedly through the issues
of global warming (or climate change as the more encompassing
term), overconsumption of limited natural resources, and the toxic
saturation of everything from industrialized food systems and chil-
dren’s toys to Hungarian villages. Increasingly spectacular pressure
points of environmental catastrophe—and their undeniable impact
on human communities—have manifested these issues as no longer
merely inconvenient or marginal to politics but constitutive of new
legislative and social agendas. Still, genuine environmentalist ac-
6
qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2
tion threatens to be subsumed by a more fuzzy conversion to con-
sumerist “eco-friendly” lifestyles.
This growing attunement to a newly foregrounded ecological
context has registered in the humanities through increasingly in-
terdisciplinary approaches to understanding how something called
“nature” is conceived and acted upon. These lines of inquiry are
not new, but they have taken on a more recent ecological empha-
sis and disciplinary consolidation in scholarship through the still-
evolving field of ecocriticism. Since its emergence in the
1990s
from
scholarship based on North American nature writing and British
Romanticism, ecocriticism has defined its critical object as texts
that merge the literary and environmental, and its stance as one of
environmental ethics and activism.
2
This special issue of
Qui Parle,
“At the Intersections of Ecocriti-
cism,” brings together essays, poetry, and art that veer in and out
of overtly ecocritical frameworks in order to explore how this dis-
cipline has expanded beyond its initial literary canon. These contri-
butions offer insight into what further conversations ecocriticism
can develop with work in adjacent fields addressing questions of
space and place, human-nonhuman divides, and how the material
world can interrupt and reconfigure notions of human and nonhu-
man ontology, agency, and cultural formation. In the pages that
follow, ecocritical currents crisscross the sciences, posthumanism,
animal studies, biopolitics, gender and queer theory, disability stud-
ies, political theory, new media, visual culture, and landscape de-
sign. This is by no means an exhaustive representation, yet it gives
a sense of the far-ranging points of departure and critical modes
through which environmentally inflected inquiry is being pursued.
3
Qui Parle
has long provided a forum for interdisciplinary work
in critical theory, and in assembling this special issue I sought con-
tributions that would help us explore what critical theory can offer
to ecological criticism and in turn, how alternative understandings
of environments can transform the boundaries and claims of the-
ory. In their essays for this issue, influential environmental critics
Lawrence Buell and Timothy Morton each discuss ways in which
critical theory has occupied something of a blind spot—or sore
spot—in ecocriticism from the start. Buell notes that “some strange
Dodson: Eco/Critical Entanglements
7
disconnects obtain between ‘environmentally’-oriented work and
other initiatives that at first sight ought to seem more intimately
allied,” giving the explosion of animal studies in critical theory as
one example of a field that should be interacting more with ecocrit-
ical work but in which there is relatively little bibliographical over-
lap. Part of the curious lack of chemistry despite seemingly obvious
affinities appears to reside in differences over how to approach a
shared obsession: Nature/nature. What is the right way to appre-
hend, to
really
apprehend, nature? Traditional ecocriticism says we
should come to read and appreciate nature firsthand by rushing
out into a rainstorm or learning to identify all the wildflowers in
a meadow. We should gain empirical understanding alongside aes-
thetic pleasure from environmental texts (e.g., reading the work
of Thoreau, John Muir, or John Clare as field guides) and borrow
observations and methods from the biological and environmental
sciences. The critical theory approach takes a more
critical view,
as it were, one that gains perspective by defamiliarizing social con-
structions of “Nature” and the “natural” that are deeply inter-
twined with anthropocentric values of normativity and inherent
good. Neither camp negates pleasure, but they find it through dif-
ferent means.
While saving the environment—or at least finding a way to co-
exist more ethically with our nonhuman neighbors—is the implicit
impetus for the work featured here, the impassioned urgency of
these essays nevertheless allows for the necessity of taking time
to think through the very concepts we begin with. Many of the
writers featured here attempt to move away from the misleadingly
isolated backdrops suggested by unitary notions of “nature” and
“wilderness” and instead propose alternatives that emphasize more
dynamic conditions of interaction, entanglement, and collectivity:
ecology, environments, biomes, landscapes, naturecultures, second
nature, vital materialism, planetary garden.
4
These approaches
build upon poststructuralist, gender, and queer theory in challeng-
ing naturalized assumptions about identity, relationality, and em-
bodiment but also themselves use an environmental focus to extend
notions of what constitutes language, discursivity, textuality, and
agency. One of the more startling currents that runs throughout
8
qui parle spring/summer 2011 vol.19, no.2
this special issue is a certain “vital materialism”—but not exactly
vitalism, in which vital forces are understood to be separate from
matter—that attempts to reconsider the assumed passivity and
mechanization of substances and adds new life to the perspective
of objects. Karen Barad, Timothy Morton, Jonathan Skinner, and
Gilles Clément in particular turn our attention to ways in which
forces of nature and material objects speak and act—and how we
might hear their voices and read a broader range of physical matter
as text.
5
Katherine Chandler gives a further sense of the political
consequences of reconceptualizations of matter in her review of
Jane Bennet’s
Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things
along-
side Isabel Stengers’s
Cosmopolitics I.
The essays included here each maintain a political charge, reg-
istering the need for a shift in politics and policy to account for
ecologically affected revisions of agency, subjecthood, causality and
accountability. Environmental justice criticism is reflected in the es-
says that extend environmental thinking beyond wilderness and ru-
ral spaces to recognize how government policy and economic struc-
tures shape environmental influences on urban geographies and
minority populations. The selections that turn toward posthuman-
ism and that take up biopolitical frameworks pose difficult and im-
portant questions about how we constitute the subject of rights and
governance normally assumed to be human and the criteria used to
establish interdependent communities and determine ethical respon-
sibility. Biopolitics meets environmental justice in Yates McKee’s
review of the Argos Collective’s
Climate Refugees,
a collection of
photos and essays documenting populations displaced by events
caused by climate change. McKee’s discussion of critical climate
change studies and climate justice points to problems of managing
not only the environmental aspects but also the legal, financial, and
political fallout of events like Hurricane Katrina and the destruc-
tion of ecosystems that support island communities, like Tuvalu in
the South Pacific, which call for revised paradigms of international
responsibility. The way this issue’s contributions interweave theory
with reflections on its political consequences asserts sustained re-
flection not as melancholic paralysis in the face of perpetual eco-
logical catastrophe but as a form of environmentalist action.

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