In her introduction to Living with the Weather: Climate Change, Ecology, and Displacement in South Asia, Piya Srinivasan emphasizes that the focus of the essays in the collection is to “imagine and investigate non-human spaces: charlands, crumbling coastlines, land facing desertification.” (Srinivasan 7) In a reportage-based essay in this anthology, investigating climate migration from the Sundarbans, Dipanjan Sinha discusses the present condition of these marshlands. He argues that the unique ecological and economic challenges faced by the land and its people include salination of water, challenges of relocation in fast-disappearing island communities, and climate migration – all being results of colonial policies of land degradation.

Colonized lands, the world over, have been subject to various forms of violence by the colonizers; mining for coal and silver, extracting spices, forced farming for tea and opium, terraforming, and even chemical and atomic bombing. This kind of violence makes refugees out of the original inhabitants of these “Neo” Europes, as Amitav Ghosh calls these terraformed and colonized lands, therefore, forcing the native and Indigenous peoples to migrate to other ‘safer’ lands.

In the light of these global crises like migration and climate change, this panel invites proposals that seek to study migration and degraded land through the field of postcolonial ecofeminism in order to highlight the implications of colonialism on both, the living and the nonliving. Abstracts may include, but are not limited to:

• How does migrant literature help us think about the climate crisis?

• Terrestrial and aquatic non-human migration and their depictions in literature and culture

• Depictions of different landmasses in literature, such as wastelands, and their cultural and metaphorical implications on migrants

• Genre specific climate migration narratives, for instance, magical realist narratives, science fictions, or graphic narratives

Please send your abstracts of not more than 300 words to ananyabhardwaj@gwu.edu by October 1st, 2024.