Sylvain Belluc, Isabelle Brasme, and Guillaume Tanguy (EMMA, University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) are currently editing a collection of essays entitled The Ecopoetics of War: War and Nature in 19th- and 20th-Century Literature and Culture. They have sent out a call for articles on Indian or Caribbean writers that would tackle some of the questions raised in the description below.

Volume Abstract: The Ecopoetics of War addresses the relationship between war and nature in literature written in English from the 19th century onwards. Through the combined perspectives of war studies, ecocriticism, ecofeminism and new materialism, this collective volume explores the environmental imprint of warfare as well as the reverse impact of the natural world on conflict as they are recorded in war writings, both fictional and nonfictional, and to a lesser extent in history and the visual arts. Through innovative readings of the interrelation between war and nature, it explores and brings to light the reversibility and complexity of their relationship.

The chapters are informed by close textual analysis so as to address the aesthetic consequences of the intricate interplay between war and nature: how can the complex inter-relationship between war and its environment be articulated in writing? Finally, the attention given to the entanglements between the human and the nonhuman allows for a reassessment of the traditional nature/culture, agency/passivity dichotomies. This book investigates in what manner the ecopoetics of war questions our onto-epistemological categories.

[Above: January Suchodolski’s “Legioniści na San Domingo,” circa 1801-03 (Creative Commons, Wikipedia).]