This newly-established speaker series seeks to give a forum to Japan-inflected issues relating to the growing field of Environmental Humanities.
Environmental Humanities encompasses a broad range of ever-evolving subfields including but not limited to climate justice, animal studies, ecocriticism, environmental ethics, posthumanism, and biosemantics. It seeks to acknowledge indigenous knowledge about biosystems alongside of more well-known “Western” and “Eastern” regimes of knowledge. Professor Christine Marran, long at the forefront of ecocritical research on modern Japanese literature, is the inaugural speaker of this series.
Events
Wednesday, March 29 2023
In this lecture, Marran offers an analysis of island chains in the work of famed author of industrial pollution, Ishimure Michiko, beginning with the question of how best to address specific island-sea cosmologies in relation to the broader archipelago of “Japan.” Showing synchronicities between Ishimure and Édouard Glissant’s poetics regarding archipelagoes, Marran demonstrates how Ishimure’s philosophy explicitly decenters humanistic approaches to island-chains to forward a planetary commons that rejects geopolitical and ethnic identities as primary modes of belonging…
