Worldmakers and Worldwreckers in Decolonial and Developmentalist Imaginaries of Environmental Justice from Western Europe and North America in the 2010s
Abstract
This dissertation investigates imaginaries of environmental justice from Western Europe
and North America in the 2010s. It explores the relevance of research on predominantly
Global South environmental movements and writer-activism for a part of the Global
North. A contribution to the cross-pollination of political ecology and literary studies, it
develops decolonial, ecofeminist, and cultural materialist theory, and constructs an
ecopolitical narratological method—an econarratology for political-ecological analysis of
how the power to make and wreck worlds is imagined.
The study teases apart colonial and decolonial conceptions of being and knowledge
in six Anglophone texts: the pop music album ORDA: This Is My Land by Sofia Jannok;
the creative nonfiction The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing; the science
fiction novel New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson; the investigative journalistic book
This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein; the design fiction The World We Made by Jonathon
Porritt; and the textbook The Age of Sustainable Development by Jeffrey Sachs. These texts
approach the intersections of sustainability and justice from different professed political
positions and different forms of knowledge production.
Part I presents a theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of
environmental justice imaginaries (Chapters 1 and 4), and also contextualises the study
through an overview of academic-political debates on political concepts, ontology, and
epistemology in environmentalism—research in political ecology, the environmental
humanities, and ecocriticism that has previously not been synthesised (Chapters 2–3). Part
II (Chapters 5–7) turns to the comparative analysis of the six texts, and identifies divergent
conceptions of the makers and wreckers of sustainable and just worlds, and of the ways of
knowing that can be part of worldmaking. This divergence is understood as producing two
poles on a spectrum of imaginaries: ecological decolonisation and sustainable capitalist
development. Part III (Chapter 8) further discusses this through a distinction between
decoloniality and developmentalism, and considers the implications of the study for
political ecology and the environmental humanities, as well as for social movements with
an environmental justice orientation.
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy
University
Göteborgs universitet. Humanistiska fakulteten
University of Gothenburg. Faculty of Humanities
Institution
Department of Languages and Literatures ; Institutionen för språk och litteraturer
Disputation
Fredagen den 15 September 2023, kl 13, i sal C350, Humanisten, Renströmsgatan 6
Date of defence
2023-09-15
Date
2023-08-21Author
Blomqvist, Rut Elliot
Publication type
Doctoral thesis
ISBN
978-91-8069-358-1 (PRINT) and 978-91-8069-386-8 (PDF)
Language
eng