82-008-L-ANG40-V-S-SE-0916.20251.001

Literature and Other Discourses (Mastermodul): Writing Lands, Waters, and Skies: Indigenous Environments and Poetics

Seminar (präsent)

Englisch

23.04.2025 - 25.07.2025

Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät

Dietrich, René

Semesterbegleitende Prüfung

Hausarbeit

27 unbegrenzt

Indigenous people are regularly connected to the land and environment, but often in ways that reduce them to clichés such as deep admirers of nature or passive victims of environmental destruction, both embodied in the figure of the ecological Indian. The 2016 resistance by the Standing Rock nation and its Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline under the Missouri River on Standing Rock treaty territory is a prime example, by contrast, of the manifold dimensions of Indigenous-led movements for environmental protection. These include questions of tribal sovereignty, environmental and climate justice, as well as Indigenous knowledges and world views, in which the Missouri River is a relative, and part of the waters, lands and skies that make up Indigenous society and peoplehood. Indigenous literature has contributed and responded to the movement.
Accordingly, in our course, we will take the Standing Rock movement as one point of departure to explore how contemporary North American Indigenous writers render their lands, waters, and skies, addressing the intertwined crises of climate change, ongoing settler colonialism, and ecological degradation in doing so. Our discussions of these present-day Indigenous poetics will further be grounded in and resonate with key theoretical frameworks, including the Anthropocene, environmental justice, and the field of environmental humanities. Ranging from poetry to novels and short stories, we’ll examine how Indigenous writers intersect with and critique such concepts as the Anthropocene, offering alternative ways of understanding human and non-human relationships to their environment and their place in it. Considering writers from the American Southeast, the Southwest, the Arctic, and the Pacific Islands, we’ll analyze how their works address broader issues such as extractivism, environmental destruction, and the cultural erasure tied to colonial practices, while foregrounding Indigenous sovereignty, forms of knowledge, and approaches to the environment based in ideas of interdependence and kinship.
By engaging deeply with these texts and theories, you will develop in this course tools to critically analyze cultural narratives about climate change, explore the ethical and political dimensions of environmental justice, and imagine alternative framings that prioritize Indigenous perspectives and decolonial approaches to ecological futures.

18.03.2025 -

a.Anmeldbar