Ecocriticism

Abstract

Much ecocriticism scholarship published in 2021 sought to tackle the question of environmental emergency. The work considered in this essay covers a considerable range of topics, temporalities, and spaces, ranging from British histories of industrial extraction to Canada’s polluted waterways in the present, and draws upon an array of disciplinary contexts, including work from literary theory, media studies, the environmental humanities, waste and discard studies, Black studies, feminist theory, and Indigenous studies. I examine works that suggest new ways of understanding our current ‘crisis’ through a reframing of timescales and an emphasis on infrastructures; works that think explicitly about extraction and extractivism by considering what critical and cultural theory can offer to help better conceptualize both the climate crisis and the structures of racial capitalism on which it is grounded; and works that employ and develop experimental, hybrid forms of creative-theoretical research methods, operating outside the bounds of what we might traditionally understand as ecocriticism. I conclude by suggesting that these experimental modes of theory exemplify how ecocriticism and the environmental humanities are increasingly turning to new forms to imagine possible routes out of contemporary intersecting crises. The essay is divided into four key sections: 1. Introduction: Code Red for Humanity; 2. The Colonial Logics and Infrastructures of Environmental Crisis; 3. Theorizing Extraction and Extractivism; 4. Finding New Forms.