[On November 26, 2019, Professor Clara Bosak-Schroeder (Classics) presented a talk on Ecocriticism as part of the Modern and Critical Theory Lecture Series. Below is a response by Mark E. Frank (East Asian Languages and Cultures.)] Diversity in Ecocriticism Written by Mark E. Frank (East Asian Languages and Cultures) Toward the beginning of Professor Bosak-Schroeder’s talk on ecocriticism she put a sort of “who’s who” spread of UIUC leaders in the environmental humanities up on the projector screen. “What do you notice?” she asked. “English rocks!” yelled someone in the audience. And true, three of the five figures on the slide were listed as English faculty. A silence for further reflection. “They’re all white?” came another, more tentative voice. And true, five of the five figures on the slide appeared to be white. Bosak-Schroeder, herself white, was deferential toward the senior scholars yet receptive to the comment: EH (the environmental humanities) has been dominated by white people, she acknowledged, and has been identified with whiteness. Browsing the titles of recent faculty publications, she pointed out another quirk: EH tends to be dominated by modernists. Dr. Clara Bosak-Schroeder is an environmental humanist who is also decidedly not a modernist (“I was impressed that they invited me to give this lecture,” she remarked). She is an assistant professor of Classics whose faculty page specifies “a focus on Greek and Roman historiography and technical literature.” Her forthcoming book, Other Natures, of which we got only a brief glimpse, considers how human-nature interactions figure in the ancient ethnographic writings of Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, and other Greek writers. She is a member of the IPRH Environmental Humanities Working Group on campus. Ecocriticism, explained Bosak-Schroeder, can be understood as a “tool/subcommunity” of the environmental humanities. A tool/subcommunity? That strategic elision of tools and communities ran throughout the talk, beginning with the speaker’s overview of the environmental humanities. She noted that EH is such a broad umbrella that, while it necessarily involves humanistic approaches to human relations with the non-human environment, it might best be defined as “whatever people who identify with [EH] do.” Her description of ecocriticism was only slightly more specific: If Cheryl Glotfelty defined ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment,” Laurence Buell appended that it ought to be “conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmentalist praxis.” I imagine that in the present era this involves combatting climate change, but the speaker devoted little time to walking the audience through either methods or environmentalist praxis. Instead, she focused on who writes ecocriticism, who is represented, and how we as readers ought to approach the literature. Here I might mention that in my own conversations with graduate students and faculty at UIUC, I have found that, while interest in environmental issues is growing, some of my fellow humanists view EH with skepticism as a “white cishet” (cisgender and heterosexual) escape from more inclusive fields like postcolonial studies, critical race studies, and queer studies. Bosak-Schroeder seemed attuned to that critique. She recommended that those interested in ecocriticism avoid going straight to one of the conventional ecocrit companion readers, of which there are a great many, in favor of indigenous ecocriticism, black ecocriticism, queer ecologies, or other intersectional approaches. 

The cover of Black on Earth, one of several intersectional works of ecocriticism that Bosak-Schroeder highlighted during her talk. The “conventional” approach has been to focus on modern white, anglophone writings on nature, but recent scholarship points out that such writers—like Thoreau and Emerson—commonly appropriated indigenous understandings of the cosmos, or “cosmovisions”. Inviting the audience to take indigenous cosmovisions seriously on their own terms, the speaker quoted Joni Adamson and Salma Monani in saying that: “Indigenous understandings…suggest a cosmos of relations that speak to complex entanglements of the human with the more-than-human that must be creatively and thoughtfully negotiated.” The speaker gave nods to several exemplary texts, including Black on Earth: African-American Ecoliterary Traditions by Kimberly N. Ruffin and the edited volumes Queer Ecologies and Queering the Non/Human. To instructors looking for ways to introduce their undergraduate students to environmental literature, she recommended William Cronon’s essay “The Trouble with Wilderness” (Cronon is an environmental historian) as well as the nearly four-thousand-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh. Bosak-Schroeder also highlighted the value of non-textual engagements with the environmental humanities: “I think there is a space for art and activism related to the environmental humanities on this campus,” she remarked, “although the boards that evaluate faculty work don’t necessarily value it.”

This photograph of Apocalyptic Woodland Child by artist Naomi Bebo at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts was one of the many images featured in Clara Bosak-Schoeder’s talk and is on view at the Krannert Art Museum as part of the exhibition Hot Spots: Radioactivity and the Landscape on view until March 21, 2020