Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis : Planetary Precarity and Future Habitability

Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis expands postcolonial precarity studies by addressing the current climate crisis and threats to the habitability of the planet from a range of ecocritical and environmental perspectives. The collection uses planetary thought-action praxis that acknowledges the interconnectedness of all forms of life in addressing the socioecological issues facing humanity: accelerating climate change, over-exploitation of natural resources, and the Global North–South divide. With reference to contemporary cultural productions, such praxis seeks to examine the ideas, images, and narratives that either represent or impede potential disasters like the so-called sixth extinction of the planet, that inspire the dismantling of carbon democracies arising in the wake of neoliberalism, and that address rising inequality with precarious conditions in the transition to renewable energy. The different chapters explore literary and visual representations of planetary precarity, identifying crisis-responsive genres and cultural formats, and assessing approaches to environment-re/making that call for repair, recovery and sustainability. In imagining future habitability, they deploy diverse critical frameworks such as queer utopias, zero-waste lifestyles, alternative ecologies, and adaptations to the uninhabitable. The collection tackles problems of global vulnerability and examines precarity as a condition of resilience and resistance through collective actions and solidarities and innovative constructions of the planet’s survival as a shared home. It engages with current postcolonial debates, uses intersectional methodologies, and introduces contemporary literary, visual concepts, and narrative types.

Janet M. Wilson is Emeritus Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK. Her research focuses on the diaspora and postcolonial writing of the settler colonies of New Zealand and Australia, literature and globalisation, pandemic fiction, transculturalism and transnationalism, and refugee writing. Her most recent publications are the coedited volume, New Zealand medievalism: Reframing the medieval (2024) and “Diaspora Screen Media”, special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing 60.2 (2024). She is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and co-founder and Chair of the global network, Challenging Precarity.

Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her main research interests are postcolonial studies and eighteenth-century British literature and culture. She is a member of the steering committee of the international network Challenging Precarity, and has co-edited the collections of essays Representing Poverty in the Anglophone Postcolonial World (Bonn University Press, 2021) and Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World (Brill, 2022). She is a member of the DFG-funded research training school Gegenwart/Literatur (Contemporary/Literature) and an elected member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Science, Humanities, and the Arts.

Om Prakash Dwivedi is Associate Professor of English literature at Bennett University, Uttar Pradesh, India. He is the author of Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English (2022), Tracing the New Indian Diaspora (2014), and co-author with Lisa Lau of Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English (2014). He is co‑founder and vice‑Chair of the global network, Challenging Precarity.