Environmental Humanities and Indian Literary Responses
updated:
Monday, February 9, 2026 - 12:24am
Goutam Karmakar, University of Hyderabad, India, Somasree Sarkar, Ghoshpukur College, University of North Bengal, India, and Payel Pal, The LNM Institute of Information Technology, India.
deadline for submissions:
Thursday, April 30, 2026
Scholarly discussions on environmental concerns have long been Euro-American-centric. In his 2005 essay, Rob Nixon critiques literary representations of environmentalism as an “offshoot of American Studies,” which has excluded non-American and non-Western perspectives on environmental degradation from critical inquiry. Nixon highlights Nigeria’s Abacha regime’s execution of Saro-Wiwa, a writer, activist and poet, who died fighting for his Ogoni people’s farmlands and the encroachment of their fishing waters by American and European conglomerates, supported by the local despotic regime. Nixon observes that Saro-Wiwa’s writings have received little attention from ecocriticism scholars (2005).