Critics’ own rootlessness versus rootedness shapes how they frame place and displacement

Evidence

Autobiographical divergences sharpened intellectual differences between postcolonial and ecocritics over the politics of purity, place, nation, and history. The preeminent critics associated with postcolonialism—Kwame Anthony Appiah, Homi K. Bhabha, Edward Said, Sara Suleri, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Gauri Viswanathan, among others—have lived across national boundaries in ways that have given a personal edge to their intellectual investment in questions of dislocation, cultural syncretism, and transnationalism. Conversely, the most prominent American environmental writers and critics are mononationals with a deep-rooted experiential and imaginative commitment to a particular regional locale: Vermont for John Elder, the Sierra Nevada for Gary Snyder, Appalachian Kentucky for Wendell Berry, southern Indiana for Scott Russell Sanders, and Utah in Terry Tempest Williams’s case. These regionally rooted national writers were adaptively carrying forward the place commitments evinced in the New England writings of Thoreau and Robert Frost and in Willa Cather’s Nebraska. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 727

Categorization

• XREF: Cross-polyad use: postcolonial vs bioregional divide maps the settler-colonial vs land/place strands the reader is weaving together. — connects to: Dialectical criticism occupies a non-position between immersion and externality — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 53; Authentic cultural criticism requires simultaneous participation and detachment — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 55; Whether art reflects class passively or actively depends on the critic’s historical distance — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 739 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Authentic cultural criticism requires simultaneous participation and detachment #expands (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 55
• Dialectical criticism occupies a non-position between immersion and externality #expands (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 53
• Root metaphors are buried cultural assumptions reproduced unconsciously across generations #expands (0.75) — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 514
• Whether art reflects class passively or actively depends on the critic’s historical distance #corroborates (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 739