Futures Revolving: Ecohumanisms Out of Sync - NeMLA 2025
56th Annual Northeast MLA Convention
March 6-9, 2025 | Philadelphia, PA
Revolve comes from the Latin revolvō, meaning “to turn back, reflect upon, roll back; to return, recur, restore.” In this roundtable, we consider how ecocritical thought and ecologically-minded figures, movements, and collectivities enliven us to the radical potential of retrospection and restoration. We seek presentations that consider how artists, writers, and activists have refused the hegemonic ideologies and metanarratives of their times—the Industrial Revolution, Manifest Destiny, the Anthropocene, the Great Acceleration, the AI Revolution—deviating from normative epochal understandings to imagine more radical temporalities and utopian counter-tendencies. What can we take from these figures who argued for falling out of sync with all-too-human historical trends in order to live in communion with the more-than-human world? By reorienting and reconditioning conceptions of progress, the subjects of our collective inquiry challenge capitalism’s seeming inevitability and question the linearity of revolution. They illuminate the cyclicality of collective experience and resistance, as they articulate humanistic visions of the future animated variously by the generative powers of slow movements, civil disobedience, anti-consumerism, intentional communities, pacifism, Indigenous and traditional environmental knowledge, deep ecologies, green anarchism, religious conviction, Black separatism, queer theory, and more. Facing charges of naïveté, controversy, misanthropy, sentimentality, idiosyncrasy, infeasibility, or strangeness, these figures and collectives at times saw their experiments in countercultural world-making “fail” spectacularly, but in their speculative ideation, they birthed wilder and weirder radical imaginaries and cultural forms.
We welcome presentations on any medium, genre, linguistic tradition, or period. Possible figures for consideration might include Henry David Thoreau, George and Sophia Ripley of Brook Farm, William Morris, Zitkála-Šá, George Washington Carver, Mahatma Gandhi, Robinson Jeffers, Simon Rodia, Dorothy Day, Ruth Asawa, Bob Kaufman, MaVynee Betsch, Gary Snyder, Wangarĩ Maathai, W. S. Merwin, Vandana Shiva, Judy Grahn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and other visionaries.
The due date for abstract submissions is September 30, 2024. General guidelines for submitting to the conference and information about session types can be found at https://www.nemla.org/convention.html. You do not need to be a member of NeMLA to submit an abstract for consideration.
Submit your abstract of 300 words or fewer here: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21268