Ecocritical Geopolitics

What is the role of popular culture in shaping our discourse about the multifaceted system of material things, subjects and causal agents that we call "environment"? Ecocritical Geopolitics offers a new theoretical perspective and approach to the analysis of environmental discourse in popular culture.

Linking environmental concerns and popular geopolitics, this innovative volume blurs the boundaries of both by engaging in a wide ranging critical survey of novels, television and movies that represent the earth and its inhabitants in the numerous genres of contemporary culture. At the intersection of environmental humanities, political geography, gender, race and critical cultural studies, this volume adds historical insights as well as cross cutting theoretical synthesis to these rapidly growing fields. This makes it essential reading for anyone interested in interrogating cultural representations of animals, landscapes, nature as well as the novel hybrids of our rapidly changing world. - Simon Dalby, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University This book combines two critical readings of popular culture ecocriticism and critical geopolitics toexplore the power of popular culture in framing the way we represent the world and morespecifically the relation between the human and the non-human. Dell'Agnese not only introducesthe foundations for an ecocritical geopolitics investigating how popular culture constructs andreveals environmental fields of meaning, she also skillfully guides the reader during an exhilaratingride through the dense landscapes of western popular culture, demonstrating an immense literaryand cinematic knowledge when presenting famous and less famous books/films/series to discussdifferent types of ecocritical geopolitical discourses. Dell'Agnese focuses on three types ofenvironmental discourses pertaining to landscapes of fear regarding (dystopian) futures, posthumanworlds, and carnism (the commonsensical attitude towards eating meat represented as "normal,natural, necessary and nice") respectively, to demonstrate the originality of ecocritical geopolitics. - Virginie Mamadouh, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Autorentext

Elena dell'Agnese teaches political geography and cultural geography at the University of Milano-Bicocca, where she is also Director of the Centre of Visual Research. Her work has been mainly focused on developing a wide-spectrum approach to "peripheral geographies". For this reason, she is interested in any form of apparently innocent "geo-graphical representation", from movies to television drama, cartoons and popular music, with specific attention given to issues relating to politics, gender, and race. She publishes extensively on these topics, mostly in Italian and in English, but also in French, Spanish, Japanese, and Croatian. In 2009, she founded the Association of Italian Geographers Study Group on "Media and Geography", which she chaired until 2015. She is now Vice-President of the Società Geografica Italiana. In 2014, she was elected Vice-President of the International Geographical Union.

Inhalt

Acknowledgments Introduction: Why we need an "Ecocritical Geopolitics" Part 1. Theoretical framework 1.1 Geo(-)graphy, Critical Geopolitics, Popular Geopolitics 1.2 What kind of environmental discourse is that? 1.3 Assembling the toolkit Part 2. Landscapes and fears: discourse about the environment (and unavoidably also about race and gender) in dystopian texts and post-apocalyptic narratives **2.1 Re-visioning the future 2.2 Dystopian settings and (post)human landscapes 2.3 Gulliver and beyond: gender, race and "environmental" clichés Part 3. Posthuman worlds 3.1. Post-human/Transhuman/Posthuman 3.2 Viewing dogs with (post)human lenses 3.3 Posthuman (dis)orders: monsters, hybrids, metamorphosis Part 4. Reframing carnism 4.1. Carnism in popular culture 4.2 Engendering meat 4.3. Carnonormativity and its discontents Index**