African American Literature and Environment
MLA panel arranged by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

Proposals are invited for presentations that examine African American literature as environmental literature. bell hooks claims that "black people were first and foremost a people of the land," but for a variety of historical reasons, African American literature has been excluded from the green canon of typical nature writing. How does African American literature, whether an early slave narrative or a contemporary work of
fiction or poetry, complicate traditional ideas about environmental consciousness (including but not limited to the inclusion of environmental justice issues)? How does the history of slavery, Jim Crow segregation and racial violence, and African American migration to northern cities problematize the pastoral as a genre? Despite this historically vexed relationship to rural land, how has African American literature registered ecocentric experience of the nonhuman world? Paper
topics may address these or other questions related to African American Literature and Environment.

Submit 300-word abstracts by March 22, 2009 to Scott Knickerbocker at sknickerbocker@collegeofidaho.edu. Questions are welcome.

Laughter and the Environment
MLA panel arranged by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

Proposals are invited for presentations that explore the rhetoric of humor and comedy in literary responses to the environment. What does "green humor" look like in particular literary texts (including films or other media), whether in the work of classic nature writers like Henry David Thoreau and Edward Abbey or in the work of less well-known authors? Are human inter-relationships with nonhuman animals ever a
laughing matter? Is there a place for laughter when it comes to such un-funny topics such as biodiversity decline, habitat loss, pollution, and global climate change? Is humor an effective rhetorical strategy when it comes to raising public awareness about environmental problems, or does it only diminish the urgency of such problems? Paper topics may address these or other questions related to humor and the environment.

Submit 300-word abstracts by March 22, 2009 to Scott Knickerbocker at
sknickerbocker@collegeofidaho.edu. Questions are welcome.