The Disposition of Nature

This book examines how literature shapes understandings of nature and can therefore be both complicit in environmental harm and part of an environmentalist practice. The book devotes particular attention to formerly colonized regions (e.g. Africa and South Asia) in order to understand the relationships among imperialism, globalization, and environmental injustice.

This book shows how our understandings of nature are shaped by literature and other forms of cultural imagining–for better and for worse. Literature is complicit in environmental crisis, yet might also offer ways of confronting it.

Wenzel Jennifer :

Jennifer Wenzel is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal, 2009). With Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger, she co- edited Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham, 2017).Jennifer Wenzel is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal, 2009). With Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger, she co- edited Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham, 2017).

A world is not the world. The globe is not the planet. These deceptively simple but powerful claims inform Jennifer Wenzel’s impressive contribution to debates about global capitalism and energy regimes, environmental justice, and world literature. Wenzel brilliantly analyzes images and imaginations of the planet in the intellectual tradition of vernacular cosmopolitanism: constructions of the world from below rather than above, from the socioeconomic margins rather the elite. The result is a powerful affirmation of the value of postcolonial perspectives in discussions of the Anthropocene as well as a trenchant critique of the recent world literature paradigm. A must-read for anyone interested in environmental justice and its relation to literature and narrative.

The Disposition of Nature is a tour de force. It will set a new bar for the burgeoning field of ecological criticism, and will become a foundational text for the environmental humanities. The research is of astounding range and quality, it is written with gorgeous clarity and elegance, and its intellectual ambition leaves one breathless.