Writing Environmental Catastrophes: Black and Indigenous Critical Approaches to Environmental Humanities

Writing Environmental Catastrophes will be an experimental methodological and writing workshop meant to teach students the art of environmental storytelling while critically enhancing their writing and communication skills through environmental storytelling and the environmental humanities. In our writing of environmental catastrophes, we will open up the environmental humanities fascination with environmental disaster, post-humanism, and apocalypses, by exploring the histories, methods and writing of Black and Indigenous environmental thinkers, practitioners, and writers to challenge the doomsday narratives of worlds collapsing to think through the possibilities of worldmaking. In era of climate change and climate denialism, this class asks: how do we write environmental stories that inspire people to act, that can inform policy, and that can always center social justice and decenters racial and gendered power relations. We explore how to tell climate stories that mobilize, how the methods of Black and Indigenous practitioners may map alternative climate narratives, endings that do not lead to the demise of humanity. In this way, this course will function as a critical writing and methodological workshop where we study methods and practices often ostracized in environmental studies, but also harness these practices to learn and write our own environmental stories. Employing a critical Black/Indigenous Ecology approach, this course will engage in creative exercises designed to foster an “all talents welcome/ all-hands-on-deck” approach to the current planetary/ existential crisis, moving across traditional writing, fiction, poetry, interviews, visual artistic production, and music. The course will culminate in the collective production of a zine.