Can environmental literature help us create more just, sustainable food systems for global futures in the Anthropocene? This talk examines how contemporary multi-ethnic women writers respond to and resist the colonial and environmental agendas of the United States by taking the garden as a rich source for the environmental imagination. Gardens and horticulture can inspire, educate, and help us reimagine the boundaries between plants and humans, food and science, and home and the world. The talk will discuss the works of Leslie Marmon Silko (Gardens in the Dunes, 1999) and Ruth Ozeki (All Over the Creation, 2002) alongside seed catalogs, historical documents, and environmental nonfiction to show how environmental literature opens up new possibilities for thinking and remaking the world with others, both humans and nonhumans, in the face of the global environmental crisis.
BIO
Yeonhaun Kang is a 2017-2018 National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Postdoctoral Fellow and 2018 Texas Tech Humanities Center's Visiting Fellow. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida in 2016, specializing in transnational American studies, contemporary US multi-ethnic literatures, and environmental literature and criticism. Her research and teaching interests include 20th/21st American literature and culture, environmental humanities, literature and science, and critical food studies. She is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled The Garden and the World:The Global Environmental Imagination in Contemporary U.S. Multi-Ethnic Women's Fiction, based on her dissertation.
