Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis expands postcolonial precarity studies by addressing the current climate crisis and threats to the habitability of the planet from a range of ecocritical and environmental perspectives.

Janet M. Wilson is emerita Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK. Her research focuses on the diaspora and postcolonial writing of the settler colonies of New Zealand and Australia, and on literature and globalisation, transculturalism and transnationalism, and refugee writing. Her most recent publication is the coedited volume, New Zealand medievalism: Reframing the medieval (2024). She is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, coeditor of Studies in World Literature (Ibidem-Verlag), and chair of the global network, Challenging Precarity.

Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bonn, Germany. Her main research interests are Postcolonial Studies and eighteenth-century British literature and culture. She is a member of the steering committee of the international network Challenging Precarity and has co-edited the collections of essays Representing Poverty in the Anglophone Postcolonial World (Bonn University Press, 2021) and Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World (Brill, 2022). She is a member of the DFG-funded research training school Gegenwart/Literatur (Contemporary/Literature) and an elected member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Science, Humanities and the Arts.

Om Prakash Dwivedi is Associate Professor of English literature at Bennett University, Utter Pradesh, India. He is the author of Representations of Precarity in South Asian Literature in English (2022); Tracing the New Indian Diaspora (2014); and co-author with Lisa Lau of Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English (2014).

INTRODUCTION

00 Janet M. Wilson, Barbara Schmid-Haberkamp, and Om Prakash Dwivedi:

The Anthropocene and the "weak planet": framing postcolonial precarity ecocriticism

PART I

Planetary precarity and vulnerability

01. Wai Chee Dimock: Precarious breath: The arts and sciences of oxygen

02. Pramod Nayar: "One world or none": Planetary nuclear precarity and anti-nuclear cosmopolitanism

03. Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández: Le Transperceneige (1982) and the Snowpiercers (2013; 2020) as post-apocalyptic cli-fis: (Im)Possible technologized habitats for the vulnerable posthuman Other

PART II

Revised Literary Genres and Visual Formats

04. Klara Machata: Imagining planetarity in Vandana Singh's speculative short fiction

05. Chiara Lanza: Precariousness and resistance: Petro-despotism and the imaginative power of literature

06. Jan Rupp: Planetary precarity in performance ecopoetry: Poems to solve the climate crisis?

07. Scott Slovic: Toward critical self-reflection and a vigilant sense of precarity: Why read pandemic literature during a pandemic

PART III

Affective ecoprecarity: Relationality, resilience and resistance

08. Stefan Benz: Of ecological critique and queer utopias: Nicky Drayden's Escaping Exodus (2019)

09. Sonja Frenzel: Women's writing as eco-translation: The critical-creative edges of precarious presence in Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other (2020) and Sharon Dodua Otoo's Ada's Room ([2020] 2023)

10. Leonor María Martínez Serrano: Earth is Oikos: Peter Sanger on the vulnerability of the biosphere as life's home

PART IV

Planetary repair and survival

11. Aleks Wansbrough: Resisting precarity and planetary dysphoria with In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain

12. Kanak Yadav: The precarious case of the zero-waste solution to the planetary problem

13. May Joseph and Sofia Varino: Hydrosophy: Ecology, choreography, and multispecies precarity