CALL FOR PAPERS

The Green Wall: Narrating Ethnicity, Belonging, and Environmental Nativism in South Asian Cultural Production

Guest Editors

Dr. Mansi Bose, Assistant Professor, Chandigarh University, India

&

Dr. Pratyusha Pramanik, Assistant Professor, Chandigarh University, India

Rationale

Across the world, environmentalism has become an increasingly contested terrain. What was once a predominantly progressive political project — protecting natural habitats, advocating for climate justice, and resisting the excesses of industrial capitalism — has been appropriated, in varying degrees, by nationalist movements that deploy ecological rhetoric to advance exclusionary agendas. This phenomenon, broadly termed green nationalism, fuses the language of environmental protection with ideologies of ethnic purity, territorial sovereignty, and nativist belonging. Its consequences are not merely political but profoundly cultural: they reshape how communities story themselves — how they narrate their relationships to land, home, and belonging. For communities across South Asia and its diaspora, this transformation carries a particular urgency. Many come from regions at the sharp end of climate crisis — the flood-prone coasts of Bangladesh, the drought-stricken plains of the Deccan, the rapidly retreating glaciers of the Himalayas — landscapes that have long anchored the stories people tell about who they are and where they come from. Yet in the host nations where they have settled, the same environmental discourse that might seem to offer solidarity is increasingly wielded as a tool of exclusion: green nativist movements in Europe and North America frame immigration as an ecological threat, casting the migrant body as an intrusion upon a pristine, ecologically balanced homeland. The narratives available to these communities are thus doubly constrained — their ancestral landscapes are disappearing, and in the countries they now call home, they are cast as the agents of ecological harm. This double bind is what this special issue sets out to investigate through the lens of cultural production. How do novelists, poets, filmmakers, and digital storytellers rooted in South Asia and its diaspora make sense of these contradictions? What narrative and aesthetic strategies do they develop to contest, inhabit, or refuse the environmental stories told about them? How does ecological crisis become a medium through which South Asian and diasporic identities are made, unmade, and remade?

This special issue proposes eco-bordering as its organising theoretical framework. Originally developed in the context of European far-right politics (Turner and Bailey 2022), eco-bordering describes the process by which immigration control is reframed as environmental protection: migrants are constructed as ecological threats, and borders are justified as green defences. We extend this framework to ask what happens when it enters the cultural imagination — when it is absorbed into fiction, refracted through film, or contested in poetry and memoir. We are equally attentive to analogous processes within South Asia itself: conservation regimes that displace indigenous communities and erase their stories of belonging; climate-migration policies that criminalise movement and silence those who move; the militarisation of border zones that renders certain landscapes — and the people who have always lived in them — as threats to be contained. Eco-bordering, as we employ it here, is fundamentally a narrative practice. It tells stories about who belongs to a landscape and who threatens it; it assigns ecological virtue and ecological guilt. The cultural texts this issue examines are sites where those stories are challenged, rewritten, and sometimes, painfully, reproduced. By bringing an ecocritical lens to literature, film, and other cultural forms, this issue seeks to illuminate how South Asian writers and artists — wherever they live — are forging new languages for identity in an age of ecological and political crisis.

Scope and Suggested Themes

We welcome original research articles (7,000–8,000 words) that engage literary, filmic, or cultural analysis to investigate the intersections of environmental narrative, green nationalism, and South Asian and diasporic identity. Contributions may engage with, but are not confined to, the following themes:

• Narrating Green Belonging: How novels, poems, memoirs, and other literary forms produced by writers across South Asia and its diaspora respond to the use of environmental discourse to redefine who belongs — and who does not — to a given land or nation. What new grammars of belonging do these texts propose?
• Ancestral Landscapes, Diasporic Grief: Literary and cinematic representations of homelands altered by climate change, conservation enclosures, or ecological dispossession — and what these representations reveal about the stories communities tell themselves about origin, loss, and the possibility of return.
• Writing Back to Eco-Nativism: How South Asian and diasporic novelists, essayists, and filmmakers give narrative form to the experience of being cast as an ecological threat in Western host nations — and the creative strategies through which they contest or reclaim environmental discourse.
• Eco-Poetics of Resistance: Indigenous and ethnic minority literary and poetic traditions in South Asia that challenge or reimagine state-led conservation narratives, asserting alternative stories of human and ecological community in the face of dispossession.
• Gender, Land, and the Stories Women Tell: How South Asian women writers and filmmakers — both within the subcontinent and across diaspora — narrate embodied relationships to land and ecological space, and how those narratives contest the erasures of green nationalist and ecobordering discourse.
• The Ecological Border on Screen: How South Asian and diasporic cinema imagines 'protected' or 'threatened' landscapes — and what these visual narratives reveal about the entanglement of ethnic identity, displacement, and the longing for a place to belong.
• Digital Storytelling and the Green Nation: How social media, online communities, and digital narrative forms circulate, contest, or transform green nationalist stories among South Asian publics at home and abroad — and what new forms of collective identity emerge in the process.
• Stories of Climate Migration: Literary and cultural responses to climate-induced displacement from South Asian regions — the Sundarbans delta, the Himalayan borderlands, coastal Bangladesh — that explore how the experience of being forced to move reshapes the narratives through which people understand themselves and their place in the world.

Submission Guidelines

This call is for a proposed special issue of the Asian Ethnicity, a Scopus Q1 journal published by Taylor and Francis. Acceptance of an abstract does not guarantee eventual publication; the special issue, along with all full manuscripts, will be subject to final approval by the journal’s editorial board and a standard double-blind peer-review process.

Abstract Submission: Please submit an abstract of 300–350 words along with a short biographical note (approximately 100 words) to specialissuehumanities@gmail.com  

• Last date for Abstract Submission: 31st May 2026.
• Notification of Abstract Acceptance: 5th June 2026
• Full Manuscript Submission Deadline: 31st October 2026

More details on the submissions of full papers can be checked by clicking on the link.

We look forward to receiving contributions that advance critical understandings of the cultural geographies of eco-bordering and green nationalism in South Asian and diasporic contexts.

We look forward to contributions that advance ecocritical and diasporic scholarship on the cultural lives of green nationalism in South Asian and diasporic contexts.