Identity politics and poststructuralism delayed environmentalism’s entry into literary studies.
Evidence
I have outlined some of the primary conceptual divergences between postcolonial and environmental literary studies, but we need to understand their parallel development historically as well. That history is partly internal to the university and partly to do with broader conflicts over the meaning of environmentalism in American society and in the larger world. Of particular pertinence here is Ursula Heise’s insight into why the environmental movement that burgeoned in the United States during the 1970s was slow to reshape literary studies. Heise notes how the civil rights movement, feminism, the gay rights movement, and the Chicano/a movement all had a more immediate, powerful impact in recasting literary studies. The environmental movement, by contrast, seemed ill fitted to the emergent theoretical and pedagogical mood of the late 1970s and 1980s in which multicultural identity politics was transforming the literary field and in which, through poststructuralism’s ascent, a suspicion of holistic thinking was becoming widespread. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 774
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: Supports the Eco-Justice polyad’s institutional-history thread by explaining why climate-driven literary work lagged identity-driven fields.
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: does this same 1970s-80s lag apply to how environmental history, versus literary studies, absorbed justice concerns earlier?
- XREF: connects to: Institutionalized ecocriticism canonized only American authors for over a decade — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 717; Creationism versus naturalism persists as a front in the cultural war over environmentalism — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2522
Broader Connections
- Creationism versus naturalism persists as a front in the cultural war over environmentalism
#complicates(0.75) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2522