This chapter explores narratives of ‘nature’ in the context of climate change and the attendant creation of global and local subjectivities, both resilient and resistant. It first examines dominant renderings of nature and the biopolitics of climate governance before turning to consider counter-narratives of rights, the recuperation of ‘vernacular landscapes’ and their affective maps, and literary interventions into global climate imaginaries. This analysis reveals apparently competing, yet ultimately mutually constitutive, narratives: the increasingly prevalent discourses of resilience and adaptation in global climate change governance, and modes of resistance and reimagination. Given contemporary critiques of the neoliberal and neocolonial biases of international rights regimes, this chapter considers the capacity for local communities to articulate resistance to global climate governance within the language of rights and within the literary imagination. Such resistances reveal a constitutive relation between the global and the local, and the human and the nonhuman, providing a methodology for reimagining nature in international law.

Chapter 1 compares two contemporary Argentine novels that deal with Nazism in allegorical ways. Patricio Pron’s El comienzo de la primavera establishes a dialogue between the German and Argentine post-dictatorship contexts. In doing so, Pron highlights the inevitable insufficiency of justice in relation to dictatorship crimes, or that which Brett Levinson calls ‘radical injustice’. The novel’s melancholic register and parallels between two distinct historical moments lend themselves to an examination with reference to Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory. In Wakolda, Lucía Puenzo examines the activities of Josef Mengele in Argentina but, contrary to Pron, rejects parallels with events related to the dictatorship or post-dictatorship. Instead, she foregrounds the foundational reliance of the Argentine nation on forms of ‘immunization’ (Esposito) and ‘necropolitics’ (Mbembe): the exploitative labour of a racialized mass that are rhetorically and materially excluded from the benefits of being ‘Argentine’ in both the past and the present.

We explore the inherently racialized premises of colonial–national modernity and of imperial and national archaeologies, juxtaposing them with the contradictions and fluidity inherent in “Greek” and “Israeli” identities. This is followed by a brief critique of the reductionist, and often self-serving, roll-out of ancient DNA studies and of their political co-optation.

Along with industrial modernity’s obsession with planning came the idea that the state should take an active role in planning its population: in Foucauldian terms, the rise of biopower, or the idea that population was a political, social, and biological problem. Francis Galton’s ideology of eugenics, developed in the 1880s and at peak popularity in the early twentieth century, suggested that the state should encourage certain people to reproduce while discouraging others in order to address the problem of the differential birth rate, or the overbreeding of the ‘unfit’ poor, which, it was feared, would lead to the degeneration of the British race. A reformist agenda committed to rational reproduction and national efficiency became central to radical feminist and socialist politics. This chapter explores how literary writing from 1900 to 1920 reflects, circulates, and challenges this constellation of ideologies about gender, reproduction, and sexuality. In particular, it considers how and why early twentieth-century writers frequently turned to the Bildungsroman, a form whose generic conventions depend on and encode both the experience and the epistemology of transition.

The ancients believed that emotions were an obstacle to rational thought and good governance. Plato argued for government run by an enlightened king who could resist the influence of personal desires and emotions and employ only reason in pursuit of the common good. Fast forward a couple of thousand years, and an interesting set of ideas about the role of emotion has emerged from the fields of cognitive and neuropsychology. The most exciting, and perhaps surprising, discovery is that Plato, and many other since, might have been all wrong about emotion. Emotions are not biases to be repressed in order to make good decisions. Instead, they are often essential for making rational decisions. The chapter reviews a variety of perspectives on this interesting new idea, including affective intelligence theory, hot cognition, valence theory, cognitive appraisal theory, and the role of biology and evolution in emotion.

The Introduction explains how and why our contemporary context prompts the reinvention of life as conceptualized by Western metaphysics. It theorizes why biopolitical governance should be understood as the real subsumption of life by capital and argues for the importance of speculative fiction as a cultural mode that reflects upon and responds to how biotechnology is remaking life, conceptually and materially. The Introduction argues that we need a new dispositif of personhood that must necessarily be attentive to issues of colonialism and race. Taking up work by Sylvia Wynter, the chapter connects it to Foucault’s discussions of Homo economicus. It concludes by suggesting that the contemporary world can be characterized as a condition of epivitality, the prefix signifying “over, around, and outside of” and thus signaling the blurring of living beings with objectified things in biotechnology and practices of dehumanizing labor.

Despite the critical role of plants in enabling all life on Earth, many people fail to recognize the importance of vegetal life ("plant blindness"). Further, most modern Eurowestern knowledges of plants tend to instrumentalize them, focusing on how plants are useful rather than on how they live their lives. The field of Critical Plant Studies (CPS) has recently emerged in the Humanities to challenge this situation; this chapter explores some of the central preoccupations of this body of work. Broadly speaking, CPS considers the histories and power dynamics involved in Eurowestern utilitarian relations with the vegetal world. In addition, borrowing from insights in the Natural Sciences and also from much older forms of plant knowledge, it considers plants as living organisms with their own forms of agency, being, and desire. These two threads are woven throughout the chapter, with the aim to demonstrate that plants are sophisticated and influential agents caught up in historical and ongoing forms of biopolitics, and that overcoming plant blindness means noticing not only what the plants are doing for us, but also how we are implicated in their unfolding lifeworlds.

This chapter examines some of the more powerful encounters between feminism and environmentalism to offer the reader an understanding of both historic points of tension and opportunities for rich collaboration. Reading the environmental humanities broadly, the chapter highlights diverse lines of feminist research that drive toward more just, inclusive, and ecologically vibrant futures. It focuses on critical feminist work that challenges hegemonic conceptions of gender and nature, the body and place, and dominant understandings of knowledge production. The reader will become acquainted with key concepts such as essentialism, intersectionality, the nature/culture dualism, environmental justice, and the anthropocene, and with key subfields including ecofeminism, feminist science studies, corporeal feminism, and biopolitics.

historicizes the concept of public health in the context of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century urban Low Countries. It begins by outlining how then-prevalent Galenic or humoural theories defined health, and how such ideas were employed by various Netherlandish governing bodies through a focus on spatial interventions. Analyses of street paving, water regimes, fire prevention, and military safety demonstrate how health interests involved mitigating communal risks through adaptations in the built environment. Preventative measures thus shaped cities’ morphology from the outset of urbanisation. Town governments were willing to invest major sums to improve safety and well-being and realized a program aimed at preserving flow. The creation and adaptation of complex infrastructures also stimulated further sanitary and maintenance routines. These required coordination concerning the division of responsibilities and tasks, and the policing of such arrangements.

In the mid thirteenth century, Jacobus de Voragine narrated the tale of Saint George and the Dragon in his Golden Legend.

Surrealist practice of the early twentieth century anticipates the biopolitics of contemporary animal philosophy. Modern surrealists welcomed Charles Darwin's paradigm shift, moving beyond any bright line that distinguished humans as a species from the rest of the animal kingdom. Surrealism's investment in evolutionary biology – promoted in journals such as Minotaure, Documents, and View – buttressed its political critique of humanist exceptionalism, sovereign individualism, and any ideal telos that defined the origins and destiny of humankind. Although surrealist animal representations frequently lapse into anthropocentric fantasy, surrealist manifestoes, art, poetry, fiction, and drama remain undeniably revolutionary in depicting human/animal hybridity and assailing the oppressive discursive linkages among classism, colonialism, and speciesism. In particular, the later careers of surrealists such as Leonora Carrington look ahead to recent ecofeminist and environmental debates concerning an “ethic of care,” defining kinship and companion networks in a decidedly posthuman community of human and nonhuman animals.

In 1851, Frederick Douglass publicly challenged the position of William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society that the U.S. Constitution was a proslavery document. As an enslaved child, the self-taught Douglass had identified literacy as “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” The same insight prompted the mature author and editor to part ways with Garrisonian moral suasionists in order to join “legal suasionists” like antislavery constitutionalist lawyers Lysander Spooner and William Goodell. From the 1840s through the 1890s, Douglass promoted the legal literacy of everyday African Americans (free and enslaved) while developing his own legal-critical analysis of American racism. Committed to wielding the “forms of law and . . . rules of hermeneutics” on behalf of freedom and equality, Douglass tirelessly challenged the increasingly biopolitical orientation of post-Reconstruction legislation and jurisprudence. From slavery to mass incarceration, Douglass insisted, racism is incompatible with the rule of law.

The Joint Distribution Committee failed to coordinate effectively among the reactive, incoherent international health campaigns undertaken to prevent the spread of typhus. Reactions to this failure to make public health more sensitive to Jewish needs resulted in the establishment of autonomous Jewish health programs. Jewish social medicine thus flourished, with American Jews, including Hadassah, acting as the bridge from the prewar years. Gradually, Jewish American workers left Europe and turned over work to European Jewish organizations and local Jews. These public health programs allowed Jews to reconstruct and even seek to improve their local status through incremental change, without state sanction. Furthermore, medicine was uncontroversial within Jewish communities and Jewish health professionals were relatively abundant. Unlike battling disease, which required governmental collaboration that was difficult to achieve, social medicine could work as a form of apolitical resistance to oppression.

Natural history and moral-sense philosophy bound American independence to domestic affections in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. By surfacing the racial and spatial architecture of family feeling as the text’s cut-off locus of attachment and traumatic loss, we can locate the centrality of gender and sexuality to the book’s racial project and to the lonely pose of mourning performed by its author. This affective architecture then reveals the relationship among very different forms of collective trauma – plantation slavery, frontier warfare, sexual violence – registered in Jefferson’s text as a failure to recognize or remember.