From the Flint water crisis to the Dakota Access Pipeline controversy, environmental threats and degradation disproportionately affect communities of color, with often dire consequences for people's lives and health. Racial Ecologies explores activist strategies and creative responses, such as those of Mexican migrant women, New Zealand Maori, and African American farmers in urban Detroit, demonstrating that people of color have always been and continue to be leaders in the fight for a more equitable and ecologically just world.

Grounded in an ethnic-studies perspective, this interdisciplinary collection illustrates how race intersects with Indigeneity, colonialism, gender, nationality, and class to shape our understanding of both nature and environmental harm, showing how and why environmental issues are also racial issues. Indeed, Indigenous, critical race, and postcolonial frameworks are crucial for comprehending and addressing accelerating anthropogenic change, from the local to the global, and for imagining speculative futures. This forward-looking, critical intervention bridges environmental scholarship and ethnic studies and will prove indispensable to activists, scholars, and students alike.

About the Author

LeiLani Nishime is associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. She is the author of Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture. Kim D. Hester Williams is professor of English at Sonoma State University. The contributors are Sunny Chan, Yu-Fang Cho, Zoltan Grossman, Dominique Bourg Hacker, Stephen Nathan Haymes, Tiffany Jeannette King, Dian Million, Curtiz Marez, Catalina Maire de Onis, Ashley Cheyemi McNeil, Jessi Quizar, Ana Elizabeth Rosas, Min Hyoung Song, Julie Sze, and Erica Tom.

Reviews

"This text provides an invaluable contribution to scholarship on race and the environment, featuring a wide-ranging set of essays which variously deal with both the symbolic and material means through which race intersects with the politics of the more-than-human world. . . . this volume is an indispensable contribution to environmental history and allied disciplines, and is positioned to stimulate work which can better understand the roots and effects of contemporary ecological crises, and envision more just futures."

* Environment and History *

"Racial Ecologies is a needed intervention into environmental studies. . . . Essays in this volume highlight the legacies of colonialism and everyday consequences of capitalism on racialized bodies. . . . This collection is not just about framings and ontologies; it is also about politics and collective action. Social change comes from critical understandings. Essays incorporate environmental studies, environmental justice scholarship, and ethnic and Indigenous studies to understand the important problems facing us in our multiple experiences with the environment."

* Environmental History *



Book Information
ISBN 9780295743738
Author Leilani Nishime
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint University of Washington Press
Publisher University of Washington Press
Weight(grams) 431g