Environmental Justice in Contemporary US Narratives

Yanoula Athanassakis received her PhD in English (American Literature), with a global studies emphasis, from the University of California at Santa Barbara, USA. She is Co-Founder of the Environmental Humanities Series at New York University (NYU) and Assistant Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, NYU, USA.

• 1. Bodies Interrupted2. Laboring Bodies3. Embodied Consumption4. Toxic and Illegible Bodies5. Bodies on the Border6. Environmental Interplay

Athanassakis expands our understanding of environmental justice through her brilliant engagements with the power of imaginative witnessing, social movements, and biological citizenship. Her book creates essential bridgework between issues as wide-ranging as immigration, industrial agriculture, not-so-natural disasters, and cellular mutation. This ambitious, persuasive work will have a transformative impact across a range of fields, including the environmental humanities, transnational American studies, gender and ethnic studies, immigrant studies, food studies, trauma studies, biopolitics, and animal studies.Rob Nixon, author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the PoorEnvironmental Justice in Contemporary US Narratives dives into the lively, sometimes contentious debates surrounding ecocriticism, American studies, and media studies to make sense of their entangled intellectual roots. From John Steinbeck to Karen Tei Yamashita, Athanassakis brilliantly reads environmental justice fictions about food production, laboring bodies, citizenship and globalization, for what they tell us about ecological destruction inherent in rampant – markedly American – global capitalism. The result is a richly satisfying, and much needed, recalibration of our understanding of the major contributions of transnational American Studies to the fast rising field of the environmental humanities." Joni Adamson, Professor, Environmental Humanities, and Director of the Environmental Humanities Initiative, Arizona State University, USA