Izzy Lockhart

How might we care for each other in the midst of accelerating planetary change? This course provides us with the theoretical frameworks to grasp the long and multifaceted history of environmental crisis on this continent and, likewise, to grasp the diversity of critical, careful responses to imposed disaster. The course begins with the proposition that dominant structures of care in the settler colony—afforded by the nuclear family, the state, and private enterprise—depend upon and reproduce racialized and gendered exploitation bound to the same systems that make environmental crisis inevitable. Throughout the semester, we will explore other literary and scholarly theorizations and enactments of care work that move outside dominant care regimes and that have always been responsive to environmental crisis in its long history. The reading for the course moves from Indigenous studies to queer studies to the energy and environmental humanities, illuminating critical intersections of use to a student interested in any one of those fields. Primary and secondary texts include works by José Esteban Muñoz, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Natalie Diaz, Sophie Lewis, Kim TallBear, Sheena Wilson, Imre Szeman, Samuel R. Delany, and Dean Spade, among others. Assignments for the course encourage students to take inspiration from the texts on our syllabus. In other words, you may present your work in creative as well as critical forms. Podcasts, manifestos, websites, –zines…are all more than welcome.

The (failed) colonial desire to perpetrate Indigenous elimination has resulted in a fraught relationship between indigeneity and contemporaneity. As the narrator in Tommy Orange’s There There puts it: “We’ve been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive …” (p. 141). In this course, we’ll read across late-20th- and 21st-century Native American literatures to address this loaded question of “the present.” We’ll also think about urbanity, futurity, environmental injustice, climate crisis, solidarity, identity, kinship, and decolonization. With novelists, poets, and storytellers such as Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), Natalie Diaz (Mojave), Linda Hogan (Chickasaw), Sherwin Bitsui (Diné), Jake Skeets (Diné), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), Louise Erdrich (Anishinaabe), Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota), Tommy Pico (Kumeyaay), and Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho), students will be introduced to the reading methods associated with Indigenous literary studies, as well as the multisited and multidisciplinary field of Native American and Indigenous studies more broadly. This course will fully participate in the Spring 2024 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster, with a focus on environmental and climate justice and a strong involvement with local organizations. The semester will include two interludes during which students will engage in collaborative projects across disciplines and in partnership with students from Bronx Community College. Students will have the opportunity to develop field-based conference projects.

How might we read literary history as energy history? Literature and energy are inseparable—energy features in literature not just as foreground content and not just as background context and not just as an aesthetic (a vibe) but also as material possibility. Energy literally fuels culture, and no fuel has fueled culture more vigorously than petroleum. In this course, we approach the enmeshment of energy and literature from a number of different vantage points, with particular attention paid to global anglophone literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries (in this historical moment of energy crisis/impasse/possibility). Likely themes include: pleasure, grief, optimism, despair, booms, busts, petrocultures, renewability, sacrifice, nuclearity, occupation, mining, waste, toxicity, labor, masculinity, and sabotage. We’ll be reading poetry, novels, nonfiction, short fiction, and comics. Likely authors include: Ursula K. Le Guin, Carmen Maria Machado, Italo Calvino, Amitav Ghosh, Abdul Rahman Munif, Leslie Marmon Silko, China Miéville, Paolo Bacigalupi, Pablo Neruda, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Ruth Ozeki, Ogaga Ifowodo, Linda Hogan, Sherwin Bitsui, Warren Cariou, and Kate Beaton.

Settler colonialism might be described as a colonialism that lasts, meaning that settlers come to stay and attempt to permanently dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands and waters. This course proposes that settler colonialism is, itself, a form of environmental crisis that Indigenous peoples have been weathering and resisting for more than 400 years. Using environmental humanities methods, students will be encouraged to think of both crisis and resistance in expansive terms. Topics to be addressed include (but are not limited to) location-based research, kinship relationships and responsibilities, environmental injustice in a settler colony, gender-based violence and resource extraction, Indigenous petrocultures, pipeline blockades, nuclear colonialism, and coalitional environmental resistance. The course begins by locating us in Lenapehoking—the lands of the Lenape—and, in subsequent weeks, we will consider case studies in environmental crisis and Indigenous resistance across local, continental, and global scales. The syllabus includes a range of literary, artistic, and critical texts, including works by Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Nick Estes, and Warren Cariou.