American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship

Joni Adamson is Professor of Environmental Humanities and Senior Sustainability Scholar, Arizona State University, US.

This collection closely examines the relationship between American Studies scholarship and twenty-first century environmental studies' expanded attention to transnational and transcultural concepts of ecological citizenship and belonging. Visiting literary, historical, and cultural examples from the 19th century to the 21st, contributors examine notions of the common-namely, "common humanity, common wealth, and common ground" as foundational to concepts of global citizenship, civil society, and cosmopolitan democracy. The book engages in scholarly ecological analysis via the lens of various human groups-ethnic, racial, gendered, coalitional-that are shaping twenty-first century environmental experience and vision and contributing to new concepts of citizenship and belonging. Diverse human groups are mobilizing around new concepts of ecological citizenship and belonging catalyzed not only by nuclear meltdowns, oil spills, hurricanes, climate change, and histories of privilege or social and environmental injustice, but by hopes for a common future that will ensure the right of both humans and the more-than-human world to exist, maintain, and regenerate life cycles and evolutionary processes. The collection illustrates how each of us, as members of diverse groups and as inhabitants of planet Earth have a stake in imagining and producing a common future.

Section 1. Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Citizenship and Belonging 1. Zora Neale Hurston and the Environmental Ethic of Risk 2. Haitian Soil for the Citizen's Soul 3. Intimate Cartographies: Defining Navajo Ecological Citizenship through U.S. Mapping, Soil Conservation and Livestock Reduction Programs 4. Getting Back to an Imagined Nature: The Mannahatta Project and Environmental Justice 5. The Oil Desert 6. Japanese Roots in American Soil: National Belonging in David Mas Masumoto's Harvest Son and Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's The Legend of Fire Horse Woman Section II. Border Ecologies 7. Our Nations and All Our Relations: Environmental Ethics in William S. Yellow Robe Jr.'s The Council 8. Preserving the Great White North: Migratory Birds, Italian Immigrants, and the Making of Ecological Citizenship Across the U.S.-Canada Border, 1900-1924 9. Boundaries of Violence: Water, Gender and Development in Context 10. U.S. Border Ecologies, Environmental Criticism, and Transnational American Studies 11. Climate Justice and Trans-Pacific Indigenous Feminisms Section III. Ecological Citizenship in Action 12. Roots of Nativist Environmentalism in America's Eden 13. Wielding Common Wealth in Washington, D.C. and Eastern Kentucky: Creative Social Practice in Two Marginalized Communities 14. "Climate Justice Now! Imagining Grassroots Eco-Cosmopolitanism 15. The Los Angeles Urban Rangers, Trailblazing the Commons