Agreed! Also ends with a mere side note on Humanities degrees & this expert insight framing History & English as prepping students for quaint little hobbies 🤦‍♂️

Engrossed by this book of interviews atm. Love this from 1974:
“If you ask me for a visual picture of the future, I think it’ll be increasingly lunar [where] individual actions & individual pieces of behaviour & individual thoughts sit in isolation, like pieces of sculpture embedded in a dune”.

A short piece I wrote in response to the UK’s Far Right riots this summer has just come out along with this collage I made.

It takes aim at “multiculturalism has failed” rhetoric. Read for free here:

sedpoltergeist.com?page_id=304

Welcome Refugee Tales! @refugeetales.bsky.social

Recommended follow for anyone who wants a future without asylum detention

Yinka Shonibare’s show at the Serpentine is excellent (& free!). Looks at the legacies of Empire & the history of offering sanctuary to refugees

Get a 20% discount via Routledge with the code LITENV

The Conclusion looks to eco-dystopian lit & its poss connections to discourses that scapegoat refugees. It makes a claim for dystopian texts (e.g. Wright’s The Swan Book) that are aware of exclusionary forms of nationalism rising with the seas and the Earth’s temperature

Chp 4 ‘Life’ explores literature (such as Rose-Innes’ Green Lion) that contextualises the drivers of mass species extinction, examining the commodification & hunting of non-humans as well as attempts to bring individual species back from the dead

Chp 3 ‘Air’ turns to novels & poems (inc Sinha’s Animal’s People) that depict the socio-economic separations between communities whose exposure to toxified air is structured by class, gender, and racial inequalities

Chp 2 ‘Water’ examines how eco-poetry from the Niger Delta and Alaska (inc okpik’s corpse whale) brings attention to the existential threats to human and non-human life posed by the drilling of oil and mass ice melt & emboldens anti-oil activism

Chp 1 ‘Earth’ looks at texts (inc Butler’s Parable of the Sower) that confront how the extraction of coal, minerals, metal & oil are rooted in the expansion of European empires and transatlantic slavery

The Intro takes up arguments (such as Ghosh’s) about literature’s limited capacity to depict climate change, making a claim for poetry, prose & drama as offering localised, experiential accounts of changing environments esp from regions most at risk today

✌️OUT NOW✌️my new book w/
Jade Munslow Ong.

Explores how literature contextualises the climate crisis within a history of capitalist-imperialism & helps us imagine a habitable and just world for all forms of life.