Narratives of Environment and Radical Localism in Indian Anglophone Fiction 2015.10.15

CAS Luncheon Series

Thursday, October 15, 2015, 12:00 p.m.
CAS Conference Room, 1424 Broadway, CU-Boulder

Allison Shelton, Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English, will present in this Luncheon Series event.

A great variety of “environmental narratives,” often simplistic and always political, compete for ascendancy in the ways nations are performed and received by the global community. For some nations, "environmentalism" becomes a navigational act between various cultural, political, social, economic, and scientific narratives of what environmentalism is and how or what the environment should be. Literature is precisely a form that allows for a complex weaving of multiple representations and expressions of environmental relations at once. Literary narratives also allow for the consideration of identity and subjectivity, national or otherwise, as dynamic processes.

In India, the push and pull between national neoliberal development and local environmental subjects is a pressing concern, and Indian authors writing in English are in a unique position to explore local actors and their historical subjectivities while projecting these narratives into a transnational literary space. Just what do these literary narratives have to teach us about the sometimes clashing environmental relations between the local, national, and global spheres?