Environmental Justice at the Margins: Non/fictions

Does it make sense to talk about environmental justice at the margins of global society, where the political, social, and legal structures that ensure justice tend to fail? With three literary case studies—the toxic slums of a fictionalized Bhopal; the ghost-voices of Chernobyl’s radioactive wasteland; and the land-mined countryside of a post-war Mozambique—we will consider the strategies writers use to fictionalize real contaminated environments. Our three primary texts are Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, 2015 Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, and Mia Couto’s The Last Flight of the Flamingo, which we will read alongside critical writings and short films. This course counts as an ENVS humanities cognate.