Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis Planetary Precarity and Future Habitability

Introduction: the Anthropocene and the “weak planet”: framing postcolonial precarity ecocriticism
Janet  M. Wilson, Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp and Om  Prakash Dwivedi

PART I: Planetary precarity and vulnerability

1.     Precarious breath: the arts and sciences of oxygen
Wai Chee Dimock

2.     “One world or none”: planetary nuclear precarity and anti-nuclear cosmopolitanism
Pramod K. Nayar

3.     Le Transperceneige (1982) and the Snowpiercers (2013; 2020) as post-apocalyptic cli-fis: (im)possible technologized habitats for the vulnerable posthuman Other
Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández

PART II: Revised literary genres and visual formats

4.     Imagining planetarity in Vandana Singh’s speculative short fiction
Klara Machata

5.     Precariousness and resistance: petro-despotism and the imaginative power of literature
Chiara Lanza

6.     Planetary precarity in performance ecopoetry: poems to solve the climate crisis?
Jan Rupp

7.     Toward critical self-reflection and a vigilant sense of precarity: why read pandemic literature during a pandemic
Scott Slovic

PART III: Affective ecoprecarity: relationality, resilience and resistance

8.   Of ecological critique and queer utopias: Nicky Drayden’s Escaping Exodus (2019)
Stefan Benz

9.  Women’s writing as eco-translation: the critical-creative edges of precarious presence in Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (2020) and Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Ada’s Room ([2020] 2023)
Sonja Frenzel

10.  Earth is Oikos: Peter Sanger on the vulnerability of the biosphere as life’s home
Leonor María Martínez Serrano

PART IV: Planetary repair and survival

11.  Resisting precarity and planetary dysphoria with In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain
Aleks Wansbrough

12.  The precarious case of the zero-waste solution to the planetary problem
Kanak Yadav

13.  Hydrosophy: ecology, choreography and multispecies precarity
May Joseph and Sofia Varino

Biography

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.