Climate on the Ground: Environmentaljustice and Climate Change in Global Southliterature

Climate on the Ground: EnvironmentalJustice and Climate Change in Global SouthLiterature

Climate today is thought of in abstract terms – as the aggregate of local weather patterns and atmospheric phenomena such as temperatures, humidity, or rainfall. But before this fairly narrow scientific definition took hold, climate was treated as a much more localized, particular, and experiential phenomenon. Much of its meaning dovetailed with the influence the surrounding environment had upon human and nonhuman bodies, as both climate and environment were thought to influence bodily qualities, traits, and well-being. Evident in medical theories based in the Hippocratic humors, ideas like climatic racism which posited that particular climates gave rise to particular racial characteristics, and the “circumfusa” of biologist Herbert Spencer, which blended the meaning of climate and environment by referring to all the surrounding circumstances of an organism that might affect it, theseversions of climate acknowledge its impinging and shaping force upon bodies.

In this project I try to link climate back to the earlier sense in which it was an environment for bodies – a surrounding envelope, localizable and apprehensible to the senses, a shaping force for good and ill. As Linda Nash has argued, the entanglement of bodies and their surroundings is far from a historic anachronism, and this dissertation uses climate and environment in overlapping ways in order to highlight localized experiences of climate, namely in terms of the extreme weather events and forms of environmental degradationthat translate changes in climate into situated experiences. Doing so will challenge the abstract character of contemporary climate and climate change by bringing to the fore their sensory, experiential, and particular manifestations.

Like the atmospheric aggregates of climate in general, climate change is foremostlythought of as atmospheric change, specifically as rising temperatures. The shift I propose will not do away with the dominant understanding of climate change as a macroscalar problem of planetary warming, but it will draw attention the localized effects of carbon dioxide as they participate in a host of other changes such as rising sea levels, intensified drought, and biodiversity loss that are also part of the threat of climate change, and which necessitate in turn human political and social responses as well as attention to the shared vulnerability of the nonhuman world. In bringing bodies and climate back together, Iinsist on thecentrality of sense perceptions, situated experiences, and shared exposure to climate in order to develop new ways of representing climate change, to give special credence to those peoples whose experiences of unpredictable climate events and environmental degradations are most acute, and to further claims to environmental justice by addressing theuneven distributions of risk, resources, andbodily exposure to climate changes across the global South.

In the excerpts from ch. 2, submitted with this application, I focus on the work of two Indian writers, Arundhati Roy and Amitav Ghosh. For both, the climate or environmental refugee emerges as a flashpoint in tracking modes of displacement and exploitation that arise from resource attrition and environmental degradation. By refiguring the refugee, the chapter illuminates how political, economic, and environmental harm entwine with and reinforce each other, and the ways in which these unequally burden the rural poor and the environments they depend on; in response,Roy and Ghosh proposecosmopolitan polities of belonging as well as, in Ghosh’s case, a figure I am calling the “diffuse human” which emphasizes the delocalized nature of environmental harm and thus also of claims to justice.

Taking the Naramada Valley damming project as a case study inher essay“The Greater Common Good,” Roy argues that the millions displaced by the project’s environmental destruction should count as refugees in an “unacknowledged war” for continued subsistence and against misuse of the world’s resources.[1] These environmental refugees have been failed by the national government in its pursuit of neoliberal profit and accumulation, and by an system of international aid and recognition which remains complicit with nationalist agendas or overlookssubnational and environmentally-motivateddisplacementsthat fall outside a system keyed to political and international violence.

In contrast with these failures she calls for a political and ethical response to rival what she describes as a planet-wide crisis of resource vulnerability. The specific problems of the Narmada are linked with resource exploitation in many different parts of the world, and from this position of shared vulnerability Roy posits a version of cosmopolitan citizenship in which nation-based divisions of the planet, which currently circumscribe the status of climate or environmental refugees, becomesuperseded

by the imperative of recognizing resource vulnerability and environmental harm across, within, and outside the nation-state system.

The chapter then turns to Ghosh’s2005 novel The Hungry Tide, which narrates the suppressed history of a refugee massacre on the island of Morichjhapi in 1979. The chapter follows the violent logics that emerge in the state’s response to these migrants, and in particular the state’s co-option of discourses of environmental conservation to justify its expulsion of unwanted humans from the island.This part of the chapter highlights the place of international ideologies within national responses to environmentally-influenced migration.

These violent tactics contrast with the effort of the refugees themselves to create a cosmopolitan and egalitarian community on Morichjhapi as an assertion of their own agency and in critique of the exclusionary premises of the nation. However, the limited efficacy and redress available to the refugee community then prompts the chapter to turn to an alternate regime of material persistence and posthuman subjectivity available in the novel. Drawing on a character who becomes disembodied, multiply-mattered, and spatialized after death but who remains available to recognition and sense perception, the chapter argues that this figure of a“diffuse human” offers a way of theorizing environmental harm that does not rely on traditional humanist markers such as rationality, cultural difference, or a coherent body.

Ghosh’s novel intimates the idea of a human whose harm and whose material presence are not centrally localizable or containable; instead it insists on the imbrication of human and environmental harm across political borders and categories of recognition, and across multiple spatial and temporal planes. It is inspired by what Linda Nash and Stacy Alaimo have called the “ecological body,” porous and open to its surrounding environment in contrast to the autonomous, enclosed subject of the Enlightenment and modern medical discourses. Drawing on the newmaterialist turnto the liveliness of matter and plurality of worldly agents,but retaining a postcolonial commitment to subaltern and migrant figures, histories, knowledges, and experiences, this version of the human is characterized by its multi-materiality and its explosion of narrow evidentiary regimes that contribute to the disenfranchisement of those most

subject to environmental and climatic harm.

As such, the diffuse human may expand the grounds upon which claims to environmental justice are made. While an extremely diverse movement thatbegan by addressing the unequal exposure of nonwhites to environmental bads such as toxins, in generalenvironmental justice assumes a human subject endowed with and able to claim rights, and able to show proof of harm through regimes of bodily evidence in support of claims to reparations, treatment, compensation, or other forms of legal redress. However, this reliance on coherent and time-bound bodies cannot fully account for the scope and scale of bodies and sites affected by environmental harms or theirlongue duree.In emphasizing the mutual entanglement of humans and their surroundings, I seek to widen the material grounds upon which claims to environmental justice are made, expand what counts as a climatic problem, who or what are considered agents and victims of environmental harm, and the aesthetic, material, and sensory grounds upon which climate changes are represented and made available to collective action.

The diffuse human is further developed in ch. 3, which focuses on Indra Sinha’s 2006 novel Animal’s People. In this fictionalization of the Bhopal gas disaster of Dec. 2-3 1984, Animal expresses a posthuman ethos, styling himself as “an animal in a world of human beings.”[2]This liminal perspective allows him to question the anthropocentric paradoxes at the center of environmental justice claims, including the right to have rights, the slippage between “human” as inviolable category vs.sliding spectrum, and the exclusion of nonhuman life that underpins exclusive claims to human worth.

Animal’s posthumanism also shows up in his porous, diffuse subjectivity and bodily inhabitations. His consciousness is both housed in his body and dispersed into others, demonstrating a kind of porous subjectivity where the mental, emotional, and physical boundaries between individual bodies are shown to be less than solid. Animal’s body is also often characterized as multiple mattered, comprised of stars, planets, time, flowers; this comes out most pointedly in his discussions of human sexuality and reproduction, but instead of reproducing the species, the text links diffuse, multiply-mattered bodiesto an ethos beyond the human wherein the body contains, reproduces and supports vaster

worlds outside a human centric lens.

Chapter 4 returns to the problem of the climate refugee and the inadequacies of international

refugee conventions and asylum touched on in ch. 2. It will compare the temporalities of violence,

humanitarian aid, and genres of response inspired by the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami versus the threat of sea level rise in the Pacific. The chapter will be framed by the international aid response to the tsunami and its recognition as a climate disaster in contrast to the as yet under-theorized but looming problem of climate change-induced migration and the recent asylum claims of Pacific Island residents as their nations face severe sea level rise.Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir Wave and two stories in Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection Unaccumstoned Earth narrate experiences of the tsunami while the mixed genre book Stonefish by Maori author Keri Hulme casts human and nonhuman merging as a new form of subjectivity and embodiment in response to unstoppable sea level rise, arguing for forms of awareness, adaptation, and overthrown bodily boundaries that arise from shared vulnerability to environment change.

These three chapters focus on the practices of national and international governance that arise in the face of climate change, their limits, and new forms of agency, subjectivity, and embodiment generated by climate change.Ch. 1 will set up some of theframing political and environment problems that are elaborated and critiqued in the following chapters.Close reading of Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Chinua Achebe’s Anthills on the Savannah, and Yvonne Ouwor’s Dust will examine the co-constitution of political and environmental harm, the politics of recognition and response to visibleand acute vs. diffuse, slow, or invisible harm, andthe ways in which statesrespondto thethreat of climate-induced migration.

Climate changes are especially burdensome in the global South, given the uneven distribution of capital, resources, and infrastructures between the South and North, and the colonial extraction and neocolonial development programs that have degraded much of the South’s environment. But climate effects are not exclusive to the South and this project does not seek to reify a North/South axis of climate vulnerability. It seeks to expand climate awareness and strategies of representation and action appropriate to the scale of worldwide climate change by keeping in view their unequal effects. This work should be of interest to ecocritics, those working onenvironmental justice, feminists, and postcolonial scholars, as well

as those concerned with the climatic present and its possible futures.

Timeline for Completion of Dissertation

I have submitted excerpts from ch. 2 for this application but aim to finalize the draft as stated below. I include plans to revise ch. 2 for publication and a timeline for completing remaining chapters.

Oct. 2016Ch. 2 Cosmopolitanism, Environmental Harm and the Diffuse Human in Arundhati

Roy and Amitav Ghosh

Nov. 2016ch. 2 revised for article publication

Apr. 2017Ch. 3Human, Unbound: Animal’s People, Environmental Justice, and Porous Life

Sept. 2017Ch. 4The Wave and the Shore: The 2004 Tsunami, Temporalities of Harm, and

Climate Refugeeism

Mar. 2018Ch. 1Red Land: Climate Change as Political and Environmental Violence

May 2018Introductionand Conclusion

Jun. 2018Dissertation defense

Jul-Aug 2018Revisions

Oh / 1

[1] Arundhai Roy. “The Cost of Living,” 21.

[2] Indra Sinha. Animal’s People, 364.