In 2016, the Isle de Jean Charles, off the Louisiana coast, received the first US climate resettlement grant, and members of the Isle de Jean Charles Band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe (IDJC) were subsequently referred to as the “first climate change refugees.” In January 2019, IDJC leadership announced its formal rejection of both the funds and the lands Louisiana had purchased with them, explaining that the state had failed to solicit or heed tribal input and that the terms of resettlement meant that the relocated would lose certain access rights to the Isle de Jean Charles. The imminence of the Isle de Jean Charles’s crisis didn’t erase entrenched legacies of injustice, nor did it justify a misguided narrative of totalizing disaster; the Isle de Jean Charles is home, not a barren landscape IDJC members are eager to desert. The IDJC leadership’s decision underscores a theme that is key, not...
Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, 1895–1941
Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature
Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative
Rebecca Evans is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Winston-Salem State University, where she researches and teaches contemporary American literature, speculative fiction, and environmental humanities. Her current book project traces the mediation in contemporary American novels between individual experience and systemic understandings of structural and environmental violence. Her writing has appeared in ASAP/Journal, Science Fiction Studies, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, as well as the Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books.
Rebecca Evans; Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, 1895–1941
Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature
Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative. American Literature 1 June 2020; 92 (2): 390–393. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8267876
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