Ecologies of Violence: Crimes against Nature in the Contemporary Cultural Imagination

Introduction

The ongoing destruction of the natural world raises critical questions about responsibility. How do we remember the victims, both human and non-human? And who is to blame? Contemporary culture plays a crucial role in addressing these questions.

Challenges of Ecocide and Extinction

Large-scale processes like ecocide and extinction pose significant conceptual and representational challenges. This project posits that writers, artists, and filmmakers are responding to these challenges by adapting existing repertoires, especially ones that emerged in response to the Holocaust, slavery, and other atrocities. In so doing, they reveal the historical, structural, and discursive links between crimes against humanity and crimes against nature.

Project Overview

EcoViolence will be the first comprehensive, transnational, comparative study of the cultural imaginary of environmental violence.

Objectives

Bringing together recent work in cultural memory studies and ecocriticism, we will develop an innovative ecological model for the study of violence and its representation. Our objectives include:

1. Documenting how texts, films, artworks, plays, and exhibitions represent ecoviolence.
2. Mapping how they link ecoviolence to colonialism and genocide.
3. Analyzing how they reflect on questions of guilt and responsibility, as well as culture’s own implication in the violence it depicts.

Emotional Engagement

Furthermore, we will explore how these representations harness affect and emotion to help people relate to the environmental crisis and promote critical self-reflection.

Impact on Cultural Memory Research

EcoViolence will effect a major reorientation in cultural memory research and ecocriticism by providing a framework to think about violence and memory in more-than-human terms.

Expected Outcomes

The project will result in a “best practices” guide to engage cultural representations in pedagogy to enhance critical literacies about ecoviolence. It aims to move beyond simplistic stories where everyone is either a victim or a perpetrator, which have stifled full responses to our collective ecocidal trajectories.