Special Issue of ARIEL:
South Asian Literature and Cinema in the Anthropocene:
Heterotemporal and Multiscalar Narratives
Co-edited by Drs Jill Didur (Concordia) and Amit Baishya (U Oklahoma), this special Issue for ARIEL considers heterotemporal and mutiscalar literary and cinematic works from South Asia dealing with multiple facets of the Anthropocene in the region: multispecies cohabitation, the representation and role of elementals, issues of environmental and ecological justice, among others. The decision of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) in March 2024 to vote down the recognition of the Anthropocene as a new geologic epoch represents a timely opportunity for research in postcolonial environmental humanities to provide a more nuanced view of the “historical complexity of humans relationship to the environment rather than one that distorts this history in the attempt to define it through neat scientific labels” (Sherry 2024).This special issue interrupts Eurocentric and Global North perspectives that have dominated scientific approaches to this problematic and highlights a specific focus on literature and film emerging from South Asia with global circulation. This special issue also speaks to the agenda of ARIEL as a journal that focuses on the “critical and scholarly study of literatures in English around the world” with attention to how the legacy of colonial rule and globalization in literature and media continues to produce works from South Asia preoccupied with the current climate emergency.
Why use the Anthropocene as a descriptor for such narratives though, especially given that it has both been a controversial term and one that has recently been rejected as a nominative for a geological epoch by the ICS in 2024? We want to state clearly that we sidestep discussions of nomenclatures, when the Anthropocene began, the question of who is responsible for the Anthropocene, whether we should have another prefix before the “cene” and other related questions. Instead, we focus on what affordances an Anthropocene viewpoint offers for the study of literature and cinema from South Asia. We align ourselves with critics like Kathryn Yusoff, Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Nancy Langston to argue that the nominative Anthropocene is useful in thinking about multiple dimensions of the planetary crisis and modes of life and survival in an increasingly damaged planet (Tsing et al). The Anthropocene names a “polycrisis” (Singh) and our SI studies these multiple dimensions of the crisis via a reading of South Asian literary and cinematic texts.
This special issue proposal to ARIEL originated in a three-day workshop organized by Didur and Baishya at the American Comparative Literature Association in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in March 2024, with an anticipated publication date in ARIEL 2027.
Jill Didur 