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Document Type

Introduction

Abstract

[First paragraph]

At the time of finalizing EcoCultures for publication, nearly all discussions in mass media remind us that climate change has been caused by anthropogenic excesses in the last three centuries. Environmental concern, intertwined with a critical and scholarly perspective, is also at the heart of EcoCultures: Culture Studies and the Environment. The twelve academic articles comprising this issue were written by scholars based in the North and South, speaking different languages yet living in a multicultural global world, and positioned in disciplines ranging from landscape and environmental history, literature and gender studies to visual studies and art. They all follow an ecocritical perspective on earth-as-lived and earth-as-imagined in order to examine definitions and representations of the environment; they critique relations between the human and the human-non-human worlds and raise questions about Western, ethnocentric assumptions on the nature-culture divide that determine our relations with the environment, men and women, human and non-human worlds. The five essays in the creative section highlight the subjective expression of activism and an ecocritical position, while the book reviews indicate the breadth and width of global environmental concerns. Our fruitful journey as co-editors in selecting, compiling, and publishing this visually rich collection has been creatively interspersed by disciplinary arguments and intercultural (mis)communication, given our different origins in the North and the South and our academic training in literary and culture studies and sociology/social anthropology, respectively. These differences are both reflected in and brought into dialogue by ecocriticism as an interdisciplinary and global discourse.

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