HUM 580 Topics in the Humanities
Thursday 4:00PM to 6:40PM
AL 109
Professor April Anson
Dr. April Anson is an Assistant Professor of Public Humanities at San Diego State University, core faculty for the Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs, and affiliate faculty in American Indian Studies. Her research explores the historical and ongoing connections between climate change, white supremacy, and political sovereignty—and the Indigenous environmental justice traditions that eclipse those relations. She is the co-founder of the Anti-Creep Climate Initiative, co-author of Against the Ecofascist Creep, and was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has appeared in boundary 2, Resilience, Environmental History, Western American Literature, and others. In all, she remains committed to anti-racist and anti-colonial knowledge production and social movements.
Ecofascist rhetoric circulates in our everyday lives, using environmental ideas to justify violence, death, and other systemic harms. For example, the Covid-19 pandemic prompted analogies that "humans are a virus," but this recent example of ecofascism has a much longer history. This class will trace ecofascist rhetoric from its identification across the spectrum of modern American environmental politics, earlier origins in the Green Nazis, and nineteenth century precursors in the transnational circulation of “survival of the fittest” fantasies. Through novels, poetry, film and research, we will investigate the rhetorical imprecision of the term “ecofascism,” attend to its specific pasts, and anticipate its possible futures due to climate change, infectious disease, and police violence, among many other topics.
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