Faculty of Environmental Studies - Winter 1997 Course Syllabus
ENVS 6149.03
CULTURE and ENVIRONMENT
Course
director: Adrian Ivakhiv. Email:
ai@yorku.ca.
Office:
Room 226-B Lumbers Building. Course consultation hours: T.B.A.
OBJECTIVES
This course offers an
advanced, critical introduction into current issues and debates in environmental
cultural studies -- i.e., the growing field of interdisciplinary research
and practice located at the intersection of environmental studies/environmental
thought and critical cultural theory/cultural studies. We will study culture
and cultural practices as both the medium through which and the terrain
within which different ideas about people and nature, and different social
and ecological relations, are articulated and contested. We will survey the
various 'intersections' of environmental thought and cultural studies around a
series of themes including 'social space' and 'sense of place', race, gender,
class, nature, media, globalization, cultural displacement and
deterritorialization, the social production of 'Canada', and the
technologization of the lifeworld.
RATIONALE AND THEMES
The field of environmental
studies has developed as a response to the growing recognition of a deeply
rooted, global ecological crisis -- a crisis marked by such well-known problems
as the destruction and transformation of ecosystems, rapid species loss,
intensifying levels of pollution and bioaccumulation of toxins, climate change,
human population growth and overconsumption, and so on. Many environmental
activists and theorists believe that these conditions cannot be effectively
addressed through strictly technical measures, because they are intertwined
within a crisis of politics, of values, and of worldview. In other words, the
ecological crisis is not merely a scientific fact to be addressed through
'technological fixes,' but it is more importantly a cultural fact: it is
conceived, imagined, discussed, and acted upon through the diverse cultural
activities of humanity. It is 'made sense of' culturally, and our responses to
the crisis are enabled as well as constrained by our imagination and
interpretation of the crisis.
The development of critical
social and cultural theory, especially within the field of cultural
studies, in the last few decades has provided an array of theoretical and
analytical tools useful in understanding the ways cultural practices are
implicated within the perpetuation and contestation of relations of power.
Focusing primarily on the terrain of 'popular' and 'alternative' cultures and
subcultures, dominant or hegemonic cultural formations, and the mass media,
cultural studies has been especially concerned with understanding the workings
of culture in relation to social and political struggles, and with enhancing
the possibilities for social and cultural change. Meanwhile, the fields of
cultural geography, cultural anthropology and sociology, have featured a
deepened concern with cultural practices, issues of representation, identity
and difference, and more recently with questions of 'social space' and the
environment.
The emancipatory focus in
cultural studies and critical theory regarding questions of class, race,
gender/sexuality, and identity/difference, offers a series of 'lenses' or
'optics' through which environmental issues and struggles can be viewed,
engaged, and understood. At the same time, environmentalists' focus on
relations between humans and the nonhuman world presents cultural studies (and
the social sciences in general) with a serious and radical ecological
challenge. Environmental cultural studies (or 'cultural environmental
studies') represents the point at which these traditions meet and overlap; as
such, it can be seen as a response to a crisis that is simultaneously
social/cultural and ecological.
Our engagement with this
emerging field of research and critical practice will involve: (a) a
simultaneous critical focus on relations between humans and their nonhuman
environments, on intra-human social and political relations (i.e.
relations formed around economic class, race, gender, and other cultural
identities/differences), and on the inevitable interaction between
these (two) categories; and (b) an emphasis on the cultural dimensions
of these relations. We will identify and study the relationship between
different dimensions of what Arjun Appadurai calls 'global cultural flows' --
'imagined worlds' (including 'ethnoscapes,' 'technoscapes,' 'mediascapes,' et
al.) constituted by the historical and geographical imaginations of persons and
groups spread around the globe. A central focus of this course will be the
question of ecocultural identity/difference -- that is, different modes
of human interaction and 'immersion' with(in) nonhuman environments (via
productive labour, leisure, scientific research, religion and myth, etc.) and
the politics within which these are imposed, resisted, legitimized and/or
marginalized.
STRUCTURE OF THE COURSE
Following a brief
introduction to different notions of 'culture' and 'environment', we will begin
by looking at the problematic relationship between environmental
thought/radical environmentalism and cultural studies/critical social theory,
especially centered around the 'social construction of nature' debate (weeks 1
and 2). Having mapped out the problematic of the course, we will begin to
address a series of potential 'intersections' between cultural and
environmental concerns, including place/space, agency and ecocultural
identity/difference. We will begin, in week 3, with humanistic and phenomenological
approaches to the perception of landscapes, places and spaces, and will
gradually deepen and critique these, over the course of the next several weeks,
by engaging them within a series of themes and problematics including 'gender,'
'race,' 'class,' media, 'nature,' and 'community.'
EXPECTATIONS AND
REQUIREMENTS
As a 6000-level seminar
course, this course will require an extensive level of engagement with the
course material. The course will assume a basic familiarity with the core
themes and concerns of environmental thought, and, to a lesser extent, of
critical social theory (but not necessarily cultural studies in any great
depth). The reading load for this course is substantial, and student
participation in class discussions will be considered an essential component of
its (potential) success. Student involvement in the course will be expected to
include the following activities and assignments:
Reading and class
participation
1. Reading and
preparation of critical responses to the required readings.
2. Regular participation
in class discussions.
3. Preparing a short
in-class presentation. This will normally involve a 'close reading' of
an article or articles, and discussion of their background, contexts and
reception, and relevance to other class topics. (Depending on the size of the
class, students may be expected to present on more than one occasion.)
Written work
1. Two brief (2-3 page) reaction
papers to specific readings. (A format for these will be provided in
class.) These will be used as 'discussion papers' around which in-class
discussion of a given topic or set of readings will be organized.
2. A critical, annotated
bibliography of readings in a topic area of your choice. This would
normally be related to your plan of study, and should include reference to
readings on the course list as well as others you have found useful and
relevant to the topic.
3. A research paper,
which will normally be an in-depth critical analysis -- an 'environmental cultural
study' -- of a specific cultural product or phenomenon. This will involve
analyzing the selected 'item' in terms of its production context, its 'content'
and/or 'discourse', and its reception or 'consumption' and cultural
'resonance.' (Length should be 10-12 pages, typed, double-spaced. Formats other
than the conventional scholarly paper may be acceptable, but will need to be
discussed in advance with the course director. Detailed suggestions and
expectations will be provided in class.)
Additional course-related
activities
In connection with the
course, a series of Monday lunch-time (12 to 2 p.m.) film/video screenings
will take place through the term. Attendance will not be obligatory, but it is
hoped that students will be able to attend at least some of these screenings,
followed by discussions, as they will be programmed so as to supplement the
class topics. Occasional other activities may be recommended to students as
these occur throughout the term.
READINGS
Required readings for the
course will be made available in one of two forms:
(KIT) = a KIT of course
readings, to be available in the York University Bookstore; and
(RESERVE) = readings set
aside on reserve in the F.E.S. Resource Room.
In addition, students are
encouraged to familiarize themselves with books from the following list of
recommended and representative texts. All of the following titles have been
ordered for the course book section of the York University Bookstore (with the
exception of Ebr, available on the World Wide Web). Required Readings
from any of these texts will be made available either on reserve in the F.E.S.
Resource Room (first two categories below) or in the course reading kit.
Recommended 'Core'
Background Reading:
1. William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon
Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (N.Y.: Norton & Co., 1995).
2. Alex Wilson, The
Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez
(Toronto: Between the Lines, 1991).
3. Peter Jackson, Maps of
Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography (N.Y.: Routledge, 1989).
Recommended Texts (containing Required
Readings not included in Course Kit):
1. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson,
and P. Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992).
2. Gillian Rose, Feminism
and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Polity Press, 1993).
3. Doreen Massey, Space,
Place, and Gender (London: Polity Press, 1994).
4. Jody Berland and Jennifer
Daryl Slack (eds.), special issue of Cultural Studies 8:2 (1994).
5. G. Robertson, M. Mash, et
al. (eds.), FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture (N.Y.: Routledge,
1996).
6. David Harvey, Justice,
Nature, & the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
Other recommended texts:
John Storey, An
Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (New York:
Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1993).
Henri Lefebvre, The
Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974/1991).
Ross, Andrew, The Chicago
Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society (New York: Verso, 1994).
Michael Keith and Steve Pile
(eds.), Place and the Politics of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Tom Jagtenberg and David
McKie, Eco-Impacts and the Greening of Postmodernity: New Maps for
Communications Studies, Cultural Studies, and Sociology (London: SAGE,
1997).
Cheryl Glotfelty and Harold
Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (U.
of Georgia Press, 1996).
Kay Anderson and Fay Gale
(eds.), Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural Geography (Melbourne:
Longman Cheshire, 1992).
James Duncan and David Ley,
eds., Place/Culture/Representation (Routledge, 1993).
John Rennie Short, Imagined
Country: Environment, Culture, and Society (N. Y.: Routledge, 1991).
Timothy Luke, Ecocritique:
Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture (Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 1997).
Kay Milton, Environmentalism
and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1996).
Ebr (electronic book review)
special issue (vol. 4, Winter 1996/97) on 'Critical Ecologies'
SCHEDULE OF TOPICS AND
READINGS :
January 12 (Week 1)
INTRODUCTION: 'CULTURE'(S)
AND 'ENVIRONMENT'(S)
January 19 (Week 2)
ENVIRONMENTAL THOUGHT &
CULTURAL STUDIES: DIVERGENCES, CONVERGENCES
REQUIRED READING:
*1. C. Nelson, P. Treichler,
and L. Grossberg, "Cultural Studies: An Introduction," in Grossberg,
et al., Cultural Studies, pp. 1-16. (RESERVE)
*2. Stuart Hall,
"Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies," in Grossberg, et
al., Cultural Studies, pp. 277-86. (RESERVE)
*3. William Cronon,
"Introduction: In Search of Nature," Uncommon Ground: Toward
Reinventing Nature, pp. 23-56. (RESERVE)
4. Mary Douglas,
"Environments at risk." (RESERVE)
RECOMMENDED READING:
Simon During,
"Introduction" to A Cultural Studies Reader, pp. 1-23.
(RESERVE)
Stuart Hall, "Cultural
Studies: Two Paradigms." (RESERVE)
Kate Soper,
"Nature/'Nature'," in FutureNatural, pp. 22-34. (RESERVE)
*Laurie Anne Whitt and
Jennifer Daryl Slack, "Communities, Environments, and Cultural
Studies," in Berland and Slack, eds., Cultural Studies 8:1, pp.
5-29. (RESERVE)
A. Ivakhiv, "The
'Nature' Wars: Seeking Common Grounds for Uncommon Agents." (RESERVE)
*Jennifer Daryl Slack and
Laurie Anne Whitt, "Ethics and Cultural Studies," in Grossberg, et
al., Cultural Studies, pp. 571-90.
FURTHER READING:
On nature and its 'social
construction':
*William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon
Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature
*Alex Wilson, The Culture
of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez.
*G. Robertson, M. Mash, et
al. (eds.), FutureNatural: Nature, Science, Culture.
Elizabeth Bird, "The
Social Construction of Nature: Theoretical Approaches to the History of
Environmental Problems," Environmental Review, Winter 1987, pp.
255-64.
Neil Evernden, The Social
Creation of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
Michael Soule and Gary Lease
(eds.), Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction
(Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995).
Kate Soper, What is
Nature? (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
Cultural studies (general):
*P. Jackson, "Culture
and Ideology," ch. 3 in Maps of Meaning.
*Lawrence Grossberg, Cary
Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge,
1992).
*John Storey, An
Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture (New York:
Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1993).
Ian Angus and Sut Jhally, Cultural
Politics in Contemporary America .
Domenic Strinati, An
Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Simon During (ed.), The
Cultural Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Jessica Munns and Gita Rajan
(eds.), A Cultural Studies Reader: History, Theory, Practice (London
& N.Y.: Longman, 1995).
Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan
(eds.), Studying Culture: An Introductory Reader (London: Edward Arnold,
1993).
John Storey (ed.), Cultural
Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. (Edinbugh University Press, 1996).
Douglas Kellner, Media
Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the
Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Environmental thought /
critical environmentalism (general):
Michael Zimmerman, Contesting
the Earth's Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1994).
Carolyn Merchant, Ecology
(Key Concepts in Critical Theory), (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities
Press, 1994).
Neil Evernden, The
Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment (University of Toronto Press,
1985).
January 26 (Week 3)
ENCOUNTERING ENVIRONMENTS:
HUMANISTIC PERSPECTIVES ON SPACE, PLACE, & LANDSCAPE
REQUIRED READING:
1. Yi-Fu Tuan, ch. 3,
"Common psychological structures and responses," and ch. 6,
"Culture, experience, and environmental attitudes", in Topophilia:
A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values, pp. 13-29,
59-74. (KIT)
2. Yi-Fu Tuan, "Space
and place: Humanistic perspectives," pp. 445-55. (KIT)
3. Edward Relph,
"Placelessness," ch. 6 in Place and Placelessness, pp. 79-121.
(KIT)
4. Robert Mugerauer,
"Language and the Emergence of Environment," in Seamon and Mugerauer
(eds.), Dwelling, Place and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person
and World, pp. 51-68. (KIT)
RECOMMENDED READING:
Christopher Tilley, A
Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, Monuments (Oxford: Berg, 1994)
pp. 14-34. (RESERVE)
Tim Ingold, "Culture
and the Perception of the Environment," in E. Croll and D. Parkin, Bush
Base: Forest Farm. Culture, Environment and Development, pp. 39-54.
(RESERVE)
FURTHER READING:
David Seamon and Robert
Mugerauer, eds. Dwelling, Place and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of
Person and World (Martinus Nijhoff, 1985).
Tuan, Topophilia: A Study
of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1974).
Edward Relph, Place and
Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976).
Edward Casey, Getting Back
into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Indiana
University Press, 1993).
Neil Evernden, "The
Ambiguous Landscape," The Geographical Review 71:2 (April 1981),
pp. 147-57.
Kent C. Ryden, Mapping
the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place (Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1993).
February 2 (Week 4)
THE SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF
SPACE AND PLACE
REQUIRED READING:
*1. K. Anderson and F. Gale,
"Introduction," ch. 1 in K. Anderson and F. Gale (eds.), Inventing
Places: Studies in Cultural Geography, pp. 1-11. (KIT)
*2. Henri Lefebvre, The
Production of Space, sections XII, XIV-IXX in ch. 1, pp. 26-7, 30-59. (KIT)
*3. David Harvey, "From
space to place and back again," in Justice, Nature, and the Geography
of Difference, pp. 291-326. (KIT)
RECOMMENDED READING:
*M. Keith and S. Pile,
"Introduction part 1: The politics of place" and "Introduction
part 2: The place of politics," in Keith and Pile (eds.), Place and the
Politics of Identity, pp. 1-38. (RESERVE)
FURTHER READING:
*Lefebvre, The Production
of Space.
*Duncan and Ley (eds.), Place/Culture/Representation
Ed Soja, Thirdspace:
Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996).
Neil Smith, Uneven
Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1990).
February 9 (Week 5)
GENDERSCAPES: NOT JUST
'MAN''S WORLD
REQUIRED READING:
*1. Gillian Rose, Feminism
and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, selections from ch. 3 (pp.
41-61), ch. 4 (pp. 78-85), ch. 6 (pp. 101-112) and ch. 7. (RESERVE)
2. Rosalyn Deutsche, pp.
13-29 in "Boys town," Society and Space 9 (1991). (RESERVE)
*3. Hilary Winchester,
"The construction and deconstruction of women's roles in the urban landscape,"
in K. Anderson and F. Gale (eds.), Inventing Places: Studies in Cultural
Geography, pp. 139-50. (KIT)
RECOMMENDED READING:
Donna Haraway,
"Situated knowledges." (RESERVE)
*Janice Monk, "Gender
in the landscape," in Anderson and Gale, Inventing Places.
(RESERVE)
Meaghan Morris, "Things
to do with shopping malls." (RESERVE)
*Doreen Massey,
"Flexible sexism," in Space, Place, and Gender.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
"Introduction: Axiomatic" and "Epistemology of the closet,"
in Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press), pp.
1-90. (RESERVE)
FURTHER READING:
*Doreen Massey, Space,
Place, and Gender.
Kate Soper, "Feminism
and Ecology: Realism and Rhetoric in the Discourses of Nature," in Science,
Technology, & Human Values 20:3 (Summer 1995): 311-331.
Annette Kolodny, The Lay
of the Land (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975).
*Peter Jackson, "Gender
and Sexuality" in Maps of Meaning.
Caren Kaplan, Questions
of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Duke University Press,
1996), pp. 143-87.
Verena A. Conley, "Back
to Writing: The Fate of Post-1968 Feminine Writing," in Ecopolitics:
The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought (London: Routledge, 1997).
Joni Seager, Earth
Follies: Coming to Feminist Terms with the Global Environmental Crisis (New
York: Routledge, 1993).
February 16:
READING WEEK: No Class
February 23 (Week 6)
ETHNOSCAPES: IMAGINED
COMMUNITIES, 'ORIENTALISM'/POSTCOLONIALISM, & THE GLOBAL CULTURAL ECONOMY
REQUIRED READING:
1. Edward Said, from Orientalism,
pp. 1-11, 329. (KIT)
2. Arjun Appadurai,
"Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy". (KIT)
3. Akhil Gupta and James
Ferguson, "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of
Difference," Cultural Anthropology 9:1, pp. 6-20. (KIT)
4. Eve K. Sedgwick,
"Nationalisms and Sexualities in the Age of Wilde," in Parker, Russo,
et al. (eds.), Nationalisms and Sexualities (N.Y.: Routledge, 1992), pp.
235-44. (KIT)
RECOMMENDED READING:
Peter Jackson and Jan
Penrose, "Introduction," Constructions of Race, Place and Nation
(Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1994), pp. 1-20. (RESERVE)
Etienne Balibar,
"Racism and Nationalism" and Immanuel Wallerstein, "The
Construction of Peoplehood: Racism, Nationalism, Ethnicity," in Balibar
and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London:
Verso, 1991). (RESERVE)
Simon Dalby, "The
environment as geopolitical threat: Reading Robert Kaplan's 'Coming
Anarchy'," Ecumene 1996: 3 (4): 472-91. (RESERVE)
FURTHER READING:
Edward Said, Orientalism
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
Francis Barker, et al.
(eds.), Europe and Its Others (Colchester: Univ, of Essex Press, 1985).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed.
(London: Verso, 1992).
Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation
and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Smadar Lavie and Ted
Swedenburg, Introduction to Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of
Identity (London: Duke U. Press, 1996), pp. 1-23.
Simon Schama, Landscape
and Memory (N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
Paul Carter, The Road to
Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New York: Knopf,
1988).
Timothy Mitchell, "The
World as Exhibition," Comp. Studies in Society and History 31:
217-36 (1989).
*David Sibley,
"Outsiders in Society and Space," ch. 7 in Anderson and Gale (eds.), Inventing
Places: Studies in Cultural Geography.
March 2 (Week 7)
MEDIASCAPES,
PLACE(LESSNESS), AND GLOBALIZATION
REQUIRED READING:
1. Joshua Meyrowitz,
"Where Have We Been, Where Are We Going?", ch. 15 in No Sense of
Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour (New York: Oxford
Univ.Press, 1985). (KIT)
*2. Doreen Massey, "A
place called home" and "A global sense of place" in Space,
Place, and Gender, pp. 157-72, 146-56. (RESERVE)
*3. Jody Berland,
"Angels Dancing: Cultural Technologies and the Production of Space,"
in Grossberg, et al., Cultural Studies, pp. 38-50. (RESERVE)
RECOMMENDED READING:
Mike Featherstone,
"Global and Local cultures" and "Localism, Globalism, and
Cultural Identity," in Undoing culture: Globalization, Postmodernism
and Identity (London: SAGE, 1995), pp. 86-125. (RESERVE)
FURTHER READING:
Anthony D. King (ed.), Culture,
Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the
Representation of Identity (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997).
David Harvey, Part III,
"Space, Time, and Place," in Justice, Nature & the Geography
of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
Arjun Appadurai, "The
production of locality."
Ulf Hannerz,
"Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture," Theory, Culture &
Society 7 (1990), pp. 237-251.
R. Robertson,
"Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity," in M.
Featherstone, S. Lash, and R. Robertson, Global Modernities (London:
SAGE, 1995), pp. 24-44.
Stanley Brunn and Thomas
Leinbach (eds.), Collapsing Space and Time: Geographic Aspects of
Communication and Infromation (London: Harper Collins Academic, 1991).
Arran Gare, "What is
Postmodernity?" ch. 1 in Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis
(N.Y.: Routledge, 1995).
Veit Erlmann, "The
Aesthetics of the Global Imagination: Reflections on World Music in the
1990s," Public Culture 8:3 (Spring 1996).
Willard Uncapher,
"Between Local and Global: Placing the Mediascape in the Transnational
Cultural Flow"
Mackenzie Wark, Virtual
Geography: Living With Global Media Events (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1994).
March 9 (Week 8)
CONSTRUCTING CANADA &
THE 'NORTH'
REQUIRED READING:
1. Margaret Atwood,
"Death By Landscape," Wilderness Tips, pp. 109-29. (KIT)
2. Rob Shields, from
"The True North Strong and Free," in Places on the Margin:
Alternative Geographies of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp.
82-99. (KIT)
3. Scott Watson, "Race,
Wilderness, Territory, and the Origins of the Modern Canadian Landscape
Painting," in J. Zinovich (ed.), Semiotext(e): Canadas, pp. 93-104.
(KIT)
4. Thomas Haig, "Not
just some sexless queen: A note on 'Kids in the Hall' and the queerness of
Canada," J. Zinovich (ed.), Semiotext(e): Canadas, pp. 227-9. (KIT)
5. Rinaldo Walcott,
"Voyage through the Multiverse: Contested Canadian Identities," Border/Lines
36, pp. 49-52. (RESERVE)
RECOMMENDED READING:
Kieran Keohone,
"Symptoms of Canada: National Identity and the Theft of National
Enjoyment," CineAction 28 (1992), pp. 20-33.
(RESERVE)
Lorna Roth,
"(De)Romancing the North," Border/Lines 36 (1995), pp. 36-43.
(RESERVE)
Gaile McGregor, "Re
constructing environment: a cross-cultural perspective," Canadian
Review of Sociology and Anthropology 31 (3). (RESERVE)
FURTHER READING:
Ian Angus, A Border
Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness (Montreal:
McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997).
Jordan Zinovich (ed.), Semiotext(e):
Canadas (New York: Semiotext(e)/Marginal, 1994)
John C. Lehr, "As
Canadian as Possible... Under the Circumstances: Regional Myths, Images of
Place and National Identity in Canadian Country Music," Border/Lines
2 (Spring 1985), 16-19.
Margaret Atwood, Strange
Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford Clarendon
Press, 1995).
Gaile McGregor, The
Wacousta Syndrome: Explorations in the Canadian Langscape (Univ. of Toronto
Press, 1985).
March 16 (Week 9)
THE CITY: CLASS,
HOMELESSNESS, & CONTESTED SPACE
REQUIRED READING:
1. Neil Smith, "Homeless/Global:
Seeing Places," in Bird, Curtis, et al. (eds.), Mapping the Futures:
Local Cultures, Global Change (Routledge, 1993), pp. 87-115. (KIT)
2. Sharon Zukin,
"Postmodern Urban Landscapes," in Lash and Friedman (eds.), Modernity
and Identity (Blackwell, 1992), pp. 221-43. (KIT)
3. Mike Davis, "Beyond
Blade Runner: Urban Control -- The Ecology of Fear", Open Magazine
Pamphlet Series. (RESERVE)
4. Roger Keil, "Greasy
Jungle Metropolis Noir," in Local Places in the Age of the Global City,
pp. 1-8. (KIT)
RECOMMENDED READING:
Rosalyn Deutsch,
"Uneven development: the spaces of public art in New York City," in
Ferguson, Geher, et al. (eds.), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary
Cultures (Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press, 1992).
*David Harvey, "Class
Relations, Social Justice, and the Politics of Difference," ch. 3 in Keith
and Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity . OR
David Harvey, ch. 12
("Class Relations, Social Justice, and the Political Geography of
Difference") and ch. 13 ("The Environment of Justice") in Justice,
Nature & the Geography of Difference.
Edward Soja, "Inside
Exopolis: Everyday Life in the Postmodern World," in Thirdspace:
Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996), pp. 237-79. (RESERVE)
FURTHER READING:
Mike Davis, City of
Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (N.Y.: Verso, 1990).
Manuel Castells, The
Informational City (Blackwell, 1989).
Roger Keil, "The Urban
Future Revisited: Politics and Restructuring in L.A. After Fordism," Strategies:
A Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics 3 (1990), pp. 105-29.
Susan Ruddick,
"Heterotopias of the Homeless: Strategies and Tactics of Placemaking in
Los Angeles," Strategies: A Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics
3 (1990), pp. 184-201.
*Peter Jackson,
"Popular Culture and the Politics of Class," ch. 4 in Maps of
Meaning.
Peter Jackson,
"Policing difference: 'race' and crime in metropolitan Toronto," in
Jackson and Penrose, Constructions of Race, Place and Nation (London:
UCL Press, 1993).
Paul Gilroy, "Urban
Social Movements, 'Race' and Community," in 'There Ain't No Black in
the Union Jack' (London: Hutchinson, 1987).
Dean MacCannell,
"Postmodern Community Planning: Notes on the Homeless and Other
Nomads," in Empty Meeting Grounds: The Tourist Papers (London:
Routledge, 1992).
March 23 (Week 10)
BORDERZONES,
'HETEROTOPOLOGIES': SPACES & STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE
REQUIRED READING:
1. bell hooks,
"Marginality as site of resistance," pp. 341-3. (KIT)
2. Smadar Lavie and Ted
Swedenburg, Introduction to Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of
Identity (London: Duke U. Press, 1996), pp. 1-23. (RESERVE)
3. Edward Soja,
"Utopias and Heterotopias" and "The Principles of
Heterotopology," Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other
Real-and-Imagined Places, pp. 155-62. (KIT)
*4. Barri Cohen,
"Technological Colonialism and the Politics of Water," Cultural
Studies 8 (2). (RESERVE)
5. George McKay,
"Direct Action of the New Protest: Eco-Rads on the Road," in Senseless
Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance Since the Sixties (London: Verso,
1996), pp. 127-58. (KIT)
RECOMMENDED READING
Jane Jacobs, "'Shake
'im this country': the mapping of the Aboriginal sacred in Australia -- the
case of Coronation Hill", in Jackson and Penrose, Constructions of
Race, Place and Nation, pp. 100-16. (RESERVE)
W. Chaloupka and R. McGregor
Cawley, "The Great Wild Hope: Nature, Environmentalism, and the Open
Secret," in J. Bennett and W. Chaloupka, eds., In the Nature of Things:
Language, Politics, and the Environment (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 3-23. (RESERVE)
*Giovanna di Chiro,
"Nature as community: the convergence of environment and social
justice," in W. Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground. (RESERVE)
FURTHER READING:
*Trinh Min-ha,
"Nature's r," in FutureNatural.
Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of
Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (N.Y.: Routledge, 1996).
Ferguson, Geher, et al.
(eds.), Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (Cambridge,
MA & London: MIT Press, 1992).
George Chauncey, Gay New
York (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
Helene Clark, "Sites of
resistance: place, 'race' and gender as sources of empowerment", in
Jackson and Penrose, Constructions of Race, Place and Nation.
bell hooks, "Postmodern
blackness" and "Choosing the margin as a space of radical
openness," in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics
(Boston: South End Press, 1990).
*Peter Jackson,
"Languages of Racism," ch. 6 in Maps of Meaning.
Steven E. Silvern,
"Nature, Territory and Identity in the Wisconsin Treaty Rights
Controversy," Ecumene 2 (3), 1995, pp. 267-90.
March 30 (Week 11)
SPECTACLE, TOURISM, &
THE CONSUMPTION OF NATURE
REQUIRED READING:
1. Cindy Katz and Andrew
Kirby, "In the nature of things: the environment and everyday life, Trans.
Inst. Br. Geog. 16 (1991), pp. 259-71. (KIT)
2. Jody Berland, "Fire
and flame, lightning and landscape: tourism and nature in Banff, Alberta",
in D. Augaitis and S. Gilbert, Between Views and Points of View (Banff:
Walter Phillips Gallery, 1992), pp. 12-17. (RESERVE)
3. Rob Shields,
"Imaginary Sites," in Augaitis and Gilbert. Between Views and
Points of View, pp. 22-26. (RESERVE)
4. A. Ivakhiv, "Red
Rocks, 'Vortexes,' and the Politics of Landscape," Social Compass
vol. 44, no. 3 (1997), pp. 367-84. (KIT)
5. Jennifer Price,
"Looking for nature at the mall," in W. Cronon, ed., Uncommon
Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, pp. 186-202. (RESERVE)
RECOMMENDED READING:
*Neil Smith, "The
production of nature," in FutureNatural. (RESERVE)
*Alex Wilson, chapters 1
("The view from the road: recreation and tourism"), 4 ("Looking
at the non-human: nature movies and TV"), and 6 ("City and
country"), in The Culture of Nature.
*W. Cronon (ed.), Uncommon
Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature: chapters by Cronon ("The trouble
with wilderness"), Spirn ("Constructing nature: the legacy of F. L.
Olmstead"), Slater ("Amazonia as Edenic Narrative"), White
("Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?"), and
Proctor ("Whose nature? The contested moral terrain of ancient
forests"), and Susan G. Davis, "Touch the magic."
*Ross, Andrew, "The
Ecology of Images," in The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's
Debt to Society (New York: Verso, 1994). (RESERVE)
FURTHER READING:
John Urry, Consuming
Places (London: Routledge, 1995) and The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and
Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: SAGE, 1990).
Guy Debord, The Society
of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983).
Sharon Zukin, "Disney
World: The Power of Facade and the Facade of Power," ch. 8 in Landscapes
of Power: From Detroit to Disney World.
Steven Best and Douglas
Kellner, "Modernity, Commodification, and the Spectacle From Marx through
Debord into the Postmodern," in The Postmodern Adventure.
*J. R. Short, Imagined
Country: Environment, Culture, and Society.
Larsen, Svend Erik. 1994.
"Nature on the move: meanings of nature in contemporary culture." Ecumene
1 (3): 283-300.
Joe Bandy, "Managing
the Other of Nature: Sustainability, Spectacle, amd Global Regimes of Capital
in Ecotourism," Public Culture 8:3 (Spring 1996).
April 6 (Week 12)
'TECHNOSCAPES', CYBERNETIC
NATURES, AND DIGITAL ECOLOGIES
REQUIRED READING:
*1. Donna Haraway, "The
Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others,"
ch. 18 in Grossberg, et al., Cultural Studies. (RESERVE)
2. Jody Berland,
"Mapping Space: Imaging Technologies and the Planetary Body," in
Aronowitz, ed., Technoscience and Cyberculture (New York: Routledge,
1996). (KIT)
*3. Mackenzie Wark,
"Third Nature," Cultural Studies 8:1 (1994). (RESERVE)
4. Nigel Clark, "Panic
Ecology: Nature in the Age of Superconductivity," TCS 14(1): 77-96,
1997. (KIT)
RECOMMENDED READING:
Jennifer S. Light, "The
Changing Nature of Nature," Ecumene 4: 2 (1997), pp. 181-95.
(RESERVE)
D. Haraway, "The Cyborg
Manifesto," Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge,
1991). (RESERVE)
*Tiziana Terranova,
"Posthuman unbounded: artificial evolution and high-tech
subcultures," in G. Robertson, M. Mash, et al., FutureNatural: Nature,
Science, Culture (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 165-180. (RESERVE)
*J. Berland, "On
Reading 'the Weather'," Cultural Studies. (RESERVE)
Arthur Kroker, "Virtual
Capitalism" in Aronowitz, ed., Technoscience and Cyberculture (New
York: Routledge, 1996). (RESERVE)
FURTHER READING:
"Nature, politics, and
possibilities: a debate and discussion with David Harvey and Donna
Haraway," Social Space 1995
Felix Guattari, "The
Three Ecologies," New Formations 8 (1989): 131-47.
Stephen Cosgrove,
"Contested Global Visions: One-World, Whole-Earth, and the Apollo
Space Photographs," Annals of the Assn. of Amer. Geographers 84
(2), 1994, pp. 270-94
*Alex Wilson, "Technological
Utopias: World's Fairs and Theme Parks" and "On the Frontiers of
Capital: Nuclear Plants and Other Environmental Architectures" in The
Culture of Nature.
Arthur Kroker and Michael
Weinstein, "The political economy of virtual reality: Pan-capitalism."
*Timothy Luke,
"Environmental Emulations: Terraforming Technologies and the Tourist Trade
at Biosphere 2" (ch. 5) and "Worldwatching at the Limits of
Growth" (ch. 4) in Ecocritique.
Timothy Luke, "On
Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary
Environmentalism," Cultural Critique, Fall 1995, pp. 57-81.
Timothy Luke, "Liberal
society and cyborg subjectivity: The politics of environments, odies, and
nature," Alternatives 21 (1996): 1-30.
*Jagtenburg and McKie,
"Decentering Cartography," ch. 9 in Eco-Impacts and the Greening
of Postmodernity.
*Mark Poster,
"Postmodern virtualities," in FutureNatural.
Vivian Sobchack, "New
Age mutant Ninja hackers: reading Mondo 2000," in Mark Dery, ed., Flame
Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (London, Duke University Press, 1994),
pp. 11-28.
Jane Bennett, "Primate
visions and alter-tales," in J. Bennett and W. Chaloupka (eds.), In the
Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the Environment (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 250-65.
William Gibson, Neuromancer
Larry McCaffery (ed.), Storming
the Reality Studio (London: Duke University Press, 1991).
Andrew Ross, Strange
Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (London:
Verso, 1991).
*Andrew Ross, The Chicago
Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society.
April 13 (Week 13; optional
class)
REIMAGINING NATURES/CULTURES
. . . ?
READINGS T.B.A.
Note:
A course in 'Culture and
Environment' could take a number of different forms, and this one has taken its
shape around a particular focus -- that of current issues and debates in
cultural theory, intersected with (and against) an interest in place, space,
environment and 'nature.' Needless to say, the 'field' covered by this is still
quite large, and any single weekly topic could potentially be expanded into a
whole course on its own. Certain topics deserving of their 'own' separate week
(such as race, sexuality, queer theory, nationalism, religion, ethnicity,
animals, wilderness, weather, natural disasters and technological risks,
television and other forms of cultural production, et al.) have been collapsed
or merged into others. And among the forms that this course has not
taken, but which it may well have, is one focused on environmental literature
and the growing field of environmental literary criticism or 'ecocriticsm'; and
the very active area of environmental discourse analysis (the analysis of media
and public discourses and rhetorics of nature, the environment, and environmental
issues, politics and action). Depending on student interest, an attempt could
be made to accommodate these or other relevant areas within the course -- by
way of student presentations, for instance, or through an 'extra,' thirteenth
week. A few suggestions along with bibliographies for such an additional week
follow.
(a) ANIMALS
John Berger, "Why Look
at Animals?" in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980).
*Alex Wilson, "Looking
at the nonhuman," in The Culture of Nature.
Jody Emel, "Are you man
enough, big and bad enough? Ecofeminism and wolf eradication in the USA," Society
and Space 13 (1995), pp. 707-34.
Chris Philo, "Animals,
geography, and the city: notes on inclusions and exclusions," Society
and Space 13 (1995), pp. 655-81.
J. R. Wolch, K. West, and T.
E. Gaines, "Transspecies urban theory," Society and Space 13
(1995), pp. 735-60.
Haraway, Donna, Primate
Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. (New
York: Routledge, 1989).
Barry Lopez, Of Wolves
and Men (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1978).
M. Cartmill, A View to a
Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993).
Jennifer
Wolch,"Zoopolis," Capitalism Nature Socialism v. 7, n. 2
(1996), pp. 21-47.
Morris Berman, "The
wild and the tame: humans and animals from Lascaux to Walt Disney," in Coming
to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West (New
York: Bantam, 1990), pp. 63-102.
(b) ECOCRITICISM
(ENVIRONMENT AND LITERATURE):
Lawrence Buell, The
Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of
American Culture (Cambridge, London: Belknap/Harvard University Press,
1995).
Michael McDowell, "The
Bakhtinian Road to Ecological Insight," in C. Glotfelty and H. Fromm
(eds.), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens:
Univ. of Georgia Press, 1996).
John Berger and Jean Mohr,
excerpt from Another Way of Telling.
Barry Lopez, "Landscape
and narrative," in Crossing Open Ground (N.Y.: Random House/Vintage,
1989), pp. 61-71.
Barry Lopez, Arctic
Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Bantam,
1987).
William Least Heat Moon, PrairyErth:
(a deep map) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991).
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
(New York: Viking, 1977).
*Cheryl Glotfelty and Harold
Fromm (eds.), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology
(Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1996).
Karl Kroeber, Ecological
Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (N.Y.:
Columbia Univ. Press, 1994).
Patrick Murphy, Literature,
Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1995).
(c) ENVIRONMENTAL(IST)
DISCOURSES & RHETORICS:
*Timothy Luke, Ecocritique:
Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture (Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 1997).
Carl G. Herndl and Stuart C.
Brown, eds. Green Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America
(Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1996).
James G. Cantrill and
Christine L. Oravec (eds.), The Symbolic Earth: Discourse and Our Creation
of the Environment (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996).
Jane Bennett and William
Chaloupka (eds.), In the Nature of Things: Language, Politics, and the
Environment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
M. Jimmie Killingsworth and
Jacqueline S. Palmer, Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in
America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992).
Star A. Muir and Thomas L.
Veenendall (eds.), Earthtalk: Communicative Empowerment for Environmental
Action (Westport, CN & London: Praeger, 1996).
*Michael X. Delli Carpini
and Bruce A. Williams, "'Fictional' and 'non-fictional' television
celebrates Earth Day: or, politics is comedy plus pretense," in Cultural
Studies 8:1 (1994), pp. 74-96.
Andrew Ross, Strange
Weather: Science, Culture & Technology in an Age of Limits (Verso,
1991) and The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life (Verso, 1994).
Michael Redclift and Ted
Benton (eds.), Social Theory and the Global Environment (London:
Routledge, 1994).
Jacquelin Burgess and J. R.
Gold (eds.), Geography, the Media and Popular Culture (London:
Croom-Helm, 1985).
Anders Hansen, ed., The
Mass Media and Environmental Issues. Leicester: Leicester University Press.
(d) DOOM AND DISASTER:
TECHNOLOGICAL HUBRIS & THE FEAR OF NATURE
Mike Davis, "Let Malibu
burn: A political history of the fire coast."
Mike Davis, The Ecology
of Fear (to be published in spring 1997).
Don Delillo, "The
Airborne Toxic Event," from White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1986),
pp. 109-63.
Lawrence Buell,
"Environmental Apocalypticism," in The Environmental Imagination:
Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 280-308.
M. Jimmie Killingsworth and
Jacqueline S. Palmer, "Millennial ecology: the apocalyptic narrative from Silent
Spring to Global Warming," in C. G. Herndl and S. C. Brown, Green
Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America (Madison:
Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 21-43.
Some useful journals
In cultural studies and
related areas (sociology of culture, communications, cultural geography, social
space, etc):
Antipode, Border/Lines ,
Canadian Journal of Communication , Canadian Journal of Political and Social
Theory, Configurations, Critical Quarterly , Critical Studies in Mass
Communications, CTheory (electronic journal), Cultural Critique,
Cultural Studies , Environment and Planning D: Society and Space , Ecumene ,
Feminist Review, Gender, Place and Culture, Journal of Popular Culture , Media,
Culture and Society, New Formations, Postmodern Culture (electronic journal)
, Public Culture , Representations, Science as Culture , Screen, Social
Text , Space and Culture , Strategies, Textual Practice , Theory, Culture &
Society , Topia , 21.C
In environmental thought and
culture:
Capitalism Nature Socialism
, Environmental Ethics , Environmental History , Environmental Review , ISLE ,
The Trumpeter , Terra Nova (Nature and Culture)