The Environmental Imagination of Mobility: Nature and Migration in Contemporary American Poetry
Final Report Abstract
The project called attention to, systematized, and analyzed contemporary American poetry that addresses experiences of migration in conjunction with changing views of the natural environment. This new body of texts is socio-politically committed and aesthetically and conceptually innovative; it thus enables complex insights into human migration and the environmental crisis as interrelated phenomena, while also participating in the dynamic reconstitution of American culture in transnational contexts. The project combined the methods of ecocriticism and mobility studies with models from sociology and geography. It developed an interdisciplinary American Studies approach and specific place-related concepts that are productive for discussing not only contemporary environmental poetry of migration, but also environmentally oriented texts from other genres that are interested in related forms of mobility or different historical moments. On the most general level, the project demonstrated how contemporary poetry contributes in geographically and historically differentiated ways to the understanding of environmental issues and experiences of migration as intertwined. The environmental-migratory works of poets ranging from Agha Shahid Ali to Ed Roberson, from Vijay Seshadri to Juliana Spahr, and including historical precursors such as Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, consistently point beyond the one-dimensional perspectives that dominate current discussions about climate migration. These poems foreground how migration and related mobilities are not only caused by negative environmental change, but also cause such change, and how current and historical human and nonhuman mobilities overlap to shape evolving views of the environment. Even more importantly, the poems emphasize that migration and other mobilities tend to intensify people’s environmental attentiveness – especially via new kinds of place attachment – rather than inhibiting it, casting mobile relationships to the world as vital sources of differentiated ecological insights. At the same time, the project showed that contemporary environmental poems of migration are characterized by a set of interrelated aesthetic choices. These range from comparative perspectives that inform the poems thematically and formally (down to the translocalism of individual images), to prominent intertextual and intermedial references (for instance, to Emily Dickinson’s and Charles Olson’s poems, Henry D. Thoreau’s essays, journalistic texts and government papers). These strategies contribute to the emergence of distinctly “mobile” genres such as the trans-species elegy or the planetary epic. Indeed, the project could show that in conjunction with these formal features, the broad and diverse body of environmentalmigratory poetry – and related texts such as 19th-century travel narratives or 21st-century films – participates in the revision of traditional American cultural narratives. Together, these texts not only interrogate dominant ideas concerning the US as “nature’s nation” and “nation of immigrants,” and in doing so question notions of American exceptionalism, but also make the notion of a “nation of immigrants” itself graspable as environmentally relevant concept, inseparable from the idea of “nature’s nation.” Conceptually, the project as a whole focused on the literary (re-)construction of American places in transnational frameworks, identifying new, mobile notions of place as environmental categories. It revealed that recent environmental poems of migration persistently refer to historical instances of forced displacement, embedding historicity into their mobile environmental imaginaries in ways that produce “historically layered places.” It also identified a key textual dynamic that involves experiences of displacement, the yearning for emplacement, and, especially, the practice of “poetic place-making.” Finally, exploring the links between recent environmental-migratory poems and 19th-century precursors, and between migration and mobility, the project defined a “mobile sense of place” as overarching textual quality and cultural phenomenon.
Publications
- Environmental Imaginaries on the Move: Nature and Mobility in American Literature and Culture, special issue of American Studies/Amerikastudien 61.4 (2016)
Gerhardt, Christine and Christa Grewe-Volpp, eds.
- Introduction. Environmental Imaginaries on the Move, spec. issue of American Studies/Amerikastudien 61.4 (2016): 413-420
Gerhardt, Christine and Christa Grewe-Volpp
- “From Planar Perspectives to a Planetary Poetics: Aeromobility, Technology and the Environmental Imaginary in Contemporary American Poetry.” Environmental Imagination on the Move: Nature and Mobility in American Literature and Culture, special issue of American Studies/Amerikastudien 61.4 (2016): 445-467
Rauscher, Judith
- “Imagining a Mobile Sense of Place: Towards an Ecopoetics of Mobility.” Environmental Imaginaries on the Move, spec. issue of American Studies/Amerikastudien 61.4 (2016): 421-444
Gerhardt, Christine
- Toward an Ecopoetics of Randomness and Design, spec. issue of Ecozon@ (No 1, 2019)
Rauscher, Judith and Franca Bellarsi, eds.
- “Toward an Ecopoetics of Randomness and Design: An Introduction.” Toward an Ecopoetics of Randomness and Design, spec. issue of Ecozon@ (No 1, 2019)
Rauscher, Judith and Franca Bellarsi
