Environmental Crisis and Human Rights: Literary and Cultural Representations (Environment and Society)

Environmental Crisis and Human Rights: Literary and Cultural Representations engages with the human rights implications of anthropogenic environmental crisis through a critical reading of a wide spectrum of literary and cultural texts from different parts of the world. The Introduction and the eighteen theoretically informed essays included in the collection highlight how race, caste, class, gender and ethnicity contribute to and complicate human experiences of environmental degradation. The essays address a broad range of issues involving environmental human rights such as climate migration, climate injustice, resource extraction, neo-colonial intervention, politics of development, dam-induced displacement and the violation of the indigenous usufruct rights to the environment. The volume illustrates that the Anthropocene is not a unitary concept, rather a fractured discourse; and environmental crisis, far from being monolithic in nature, is determined by socio-economic particularities and cultural specificities of different human communities across the globe.

Joyjit Ghosh is Professor in the Department of English at Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, West Bengal, India.

Douglas A. Vakoch is president of METI, dedicated to Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence and sustaining civilization on multigenerational timescales. As director of Green Psychotherapy, PC, he helps alleviate environmental distress through ecotherapy.

Samit Kumar Maiti is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Seva Bharati Mahavidyalaya, Kapgari, Jhargram, West Bengal, India.

Sk Tarik Ali is Assistant Professor in English in the West Bengal Education Service, teaches in the PG department of English, Hooghly Mohsin College, Chinsurah, Hooghly, West Bengal, India.