1st Edition
Ecoprecarity Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture
Ecoprecarity: Vulnerable Lives in Literature and Culture presents an examination of ecoprecarity - the precarious lives that humans lead in the process and event of ecological disaster, and the increasing precarious state of the environment itself as a result of human interventions - in contemporary literary-cultural texts. It studies the representation of 'invasion narratives' of the human body and the earth by alien life forms, the ecodystopian vision that informs much environmental thought in popular cultures, the states of ontological integrity and genetic belonging in the age of cloning, xenotransplantation and biotechnology's 'capitalisation' of life itself, and the construction of the 'wild' in these texts. It pays attention to the ecological uncanny and the monstrous that haunts ecodystopias and forms of natureculture that emerge in the bioeconomies since the late twentieth century.
Chapter 1: Ecoprecarity: An Introduction [6280]
Chapter 2: Biosecurity and Invasion in the ‘Outbreak Narrative’ [11883]
Hosts, Contagions and the Invasion/Outbreak Narrative
Frames of Apprehension, Precarity and their Necrospective History
The ‘Host’ Body
The Grotesque Body
The Human, the Clone and the Organs
Chapter 3: Dystopias and the ‘Ecological Uncanny’ [21630]
Ecological Thought and the Dystopian Imagination
The Antiquarian Uncanny and Ecoprecarity
The Architectural Uncanny
Spectral Landscapes
Waste and the Ecological Uncanny
Waste and the Decadent Sublime
The Decadent Sublime and the Uncanny
Ecodystopias and their Reproductive Uncanny
Pathological Reproduction and Uncanny Kinship
Teratogenesis and Species Reproduction
Chapter 4 The Wild and Its Feral Biopolitics [14150]
The Idea of Wilderness in the Age of Precarity
Carnal Geographies
‘Nature Red in Tooth and Claw’
Carnal Geography as Animal Heterotopia
Feral Biopolitics
The Feral and the Idea of Human Civilization
Postnatural Wilderness and the Feral
Feral Childhoods
Chapter 5: Live Capital, Bioeconomies and Endangered Belonging [19500]
The Precarious Bodies of Biocapitalism
Possession and Labour
The Judicialization of Life itself
Genetic Citizenship and Precarious Belonging
Community, Genetic Ancestry and Belonging
The Quest for Origin(al)s
Tales of the Vanishing Subject
The Romance of Species Cosmopolitanism
Precarious Natureculture in the Age of the Genome
Genomic Histories and Cultural Genomics
The Future Genomics
Bibliography [4680]
Biography
Pramod K. Nayar teaches at the Dept. of English, the University of Hyderabad, India. Among his most recent books are Brand Postcolonial: 'Third World' Texts and the Global (de Gruyter 2018), The Extreme in Contemporary Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), Human Rights and Literature (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016), and The Indian Graphic Novel (Routledge 2016).
