FURTHER READING / BIBLIOGRAPHY

Water & Theory

The following scholars consider how the Blue Humanities affords us new orientations to question our terrestrial epistemes. Approaching the waters / ocean as an opaque body or medium, these scholars provide new language to discern how we might measure and look through the waters. The waters / ocean requires us to assess the mediation / perception of all knowledge. Be it through technological devices, epistemological frames, or the indivisible units and networks of microscopic beings, our perception of the waters / ocean is governed by systems that we have yet to fully comprehend—how then can we make any objective statements about the ocean, as required by the conventions of intellectual and academic practice? More crucially, how can we attach the moral and ethical rhetorical undergirding environmental activism if we cannot fully figure the state of water bodies? While none of the authors take oceanic praxis on as their primary goal, each theorist describes the mediating practices found in the acculturation to the ocean, through sonar (Shiga), seawater (Jue), microbes (Helmreich), and cetaceans (Peters).

Annotated Bibliography and Further Readings by Toby Wu.

Alaimo, Stacy. “Introduction: Science Studies and the Blue Humanities.” Configurations 27, no. 4 (2019): 429–32. https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2019.0028.

Blum, Hester. “Introduction: Oceanic Studies.” Atlantic Studies 10, no. 2 (June 2013): 151–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2013.785186.

Chen, Cecilia, Janine MacLeod, and Astrida Neimanis, eds. Thinking with Water. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 2013.

Jue, Melody. Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater. Elements. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.

Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. University of Chicago Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226253978.001.0001.

Schmitt, Cannon. “Tidal Conrad (Literally).” Victorian Studies 55, no. 1 (2012): 7–29.

Shiga, John. “Sonar: Empire, Media, and the Politics of Underwater Sound.” Canadian Journal of Communication 38, no. 3 (September 14, 2013): 357–77. https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2013v38n3a2664.

Immersion & Visuality

Alaimo, Stacy. “Violet-Black.” In Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, 233–51. University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis, MN, 2013.

Cohen, Margaret. The Underwater Eye: How the Movie Camera Opened the Depths and Unleashed New Realms of Fantasy. 1st ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.

Hayward, Eva. “Sensational Jellyfish: Aquarium Affects and the Matter of Immersion.” Differences 23, no. 3 (2012): 161–96. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-1892925.

Starosielski, Nicole. “Beyond Fluidity: A Cultural History of Cinema under Water.” In Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 0 ed., 161–80. Routledge, 2012. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203106051-13.

Environmental Humanities & Climate Change

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Early Ecocritical Thought in Literary Studies

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Co.; Riverside Press, c. 1906.

Carson, Rachel, and Louis Darling, Houghton Mifflin Company publisher, and Riverside Press printer. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.

Rueckert, William. “Literature and Ecology: Experiment in Ecocriticism.” The Iowa Review 9 (1), 1978: 71.

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995.

Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Spatio-temporal Periodization

Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene

Crutzen, P.J., and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme Newsletter, no. 41 (May 2000): 17–18.

Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London, England; New York, New York: Verso, 2015.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Planetary

Elias, Amy J., and Christian Moraru, eds. The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Northwestern University Press, 2015.

Dimock, Wai Chee, and Walter de Gruyter & Co. Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2020.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Temporal

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Farrier, David, and Project Muse. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.

Giles, Paul. The Planetary Clock: Antipodean Time and Spherical Postmodern Fictions. First edition. OUP Premium: OUP Oxford, 2021.

Extinction

Scranton, Roy. Learning to die in the anthropocene: Reflections on the end of civilization. City Lights Books, 2015.

Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: the Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London: Bloomsbury, 2015.

Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Elizabeth Carolyn Miller. Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion. Princeton UP, 2021.

Climate Visuality

Demos, T. J. Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017.

Environmental History

Africa

Dawson, Kevin. Undercurrents of power: Aquatic culture in the African Diaspora. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

South Asia

Haberman, David L. River of Love in an Age of Pollution: the Yamuna River of Northern India. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2006.

Ray, Sugata, and Venugopal Maddipati, eds. Water Histories of South Asia: The Materiality of Liquescence. Taylor & Francis, 2019.

Mallet, Victor. River of Life, River of Death: the Ganges and India's Future. First edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Colonialism

These scholars consider the historical and material relationships between colonialism and ecological harm. Through analyzing the ways in which colonialism has impacted and involved both human and nonhuman entities, these works help elucidate the breadth and depth of colonial violence.

Mukherjee, U. Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary Indian Novel in English. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Iheka, Cajetan Nwabueze. Naturalizing Africa: Ecological Violence, Agency and Postcolonial Resistance in African Literature. Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis, MN: University Of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Da Cunha, Dilip. The invention of rivers: Alexander's eye and Ganga's descent. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

Hofmeyr, Isabel. Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House. Duke University Press, 2021.

Hinduism

Alley, Kelly D. “River Goddesses, Personhood and Rights of Nature: Implications for Spiritual Ecology.” Religions (Basel, Switzerland ) 10 (9), 2019. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10090502.

Chapple, Christopher Key, and Mary Evelyn Tucker. Hinduism and Ecology: the Intersection of Earth, Sky, and Water. Cambridge, Mass.: Distributed by Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2000.

Drew, Georgina. “A Retreating Goddess?: Conflicting Perceptions of Ecological Change near the Gangotri-Gaumukh Glacier,” in R. G. Veldman, A. Szasz, and R. Haluzy-DeLay, eds., How the World’s Religions Are Responding to Climate Change. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014; 23-36.

Feldhaus, Anne. Water and Womanhood: Religious Meanings of Rivers in Maharashtra. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Gosling, David L. Religion and Ecology in India and Southeast Asia. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

Haberman, David L., Cecilie. Rubow, Guillermo Salas. Carreño, C. Mathews. Samson, Amanda. Bertana, Georgina. Drew, Karim-Aly S. Kassam, Karine. Gagné, Mabel. Gergan, and Willis. Jenkins. Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2021.

Hawley, John Stratton, and Donna Marie Wulff. Devī: Goddesses of India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Hawley, John Stratton. Krishna’s Playground: Vrindavan in the 21st century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Nelson, Lance E. Purifying the Earthly Body of God: Religion and Ecology in Hindu India. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1998.