Deadline: December 6, 2024
Contact: Nimisha Sinha
Email: nsinha1@binghamton.edu

Panel at ASLE 2025: Collective Atmospheres
July 8-11, 2025
University of Maryland, College Park

This panel invites papers that examine the “collective and unequally distributed” impacts of climate change through a lens of contamination. We consider contamination in its pollutive, infectious, and radioactive sense. How do literary and/or media texts from or about the Global South respond to worsening air quality due to pollution and toxic waste disposal, radioactive contamination from nuclear testing, or the spread of infectious disease owing to the disproportionate distribution of natural resources? What is the interplay between systems of oppression based on contamination, such as the South Asian caste system, and environmental degradation in the Global South? How do literary, visual, and other media ‘contaminate’ Western-centric forms including but not limited to the novel, the documentary, the lyric poem?

We also consider contamination as a textual practice: invoking both the philological idea of blended words and forms, and a more expansive practice that is both marked by and is marking out contaminants. For example, renowned postcolonial texts dealing with this issue, from Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) to Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021) imbue the form of the novel with journalistic and folkloric modes to more powerfully evoke the scale of ecological damage and highlight the neocolonial systems that enable it.

We welcome proposals from any discipline considering topics that include (but are not limited to):

— Racialized and casteist genealogies of knowledge on contamination and purity – colonial knowledge, colonial sciences, neo-imperial networks of exploitation, capitalist contamination, neoliberal responses to contamination, etc
— Violence and discrimination against racialized populations in the wake of global pandemics (e.g. Anti-Asian rhetoric and violence in the wake of COVID-19)
— The nation-state and contamination – how do borders fail/succeed to contain peoples, ideas, cultures, systems of knowledge?
— The visibility of contamination – what does contaminated representation look like?
— Genre and contamination – how do non-realistic forms like science and speculative fiction, fantasy, folklore, etc. trouble ‘traditional’ forms of literature and media?
— The role and evolution of language ‘contaminants,’ dialects/topolects, creoles, etc.
— Toxicity in literature and media

For questions about the panel, or to submit your abstract, please write to Raina Bhagat (rainabhagat2024@u.northwestern.edu) and Nimisha Sinha (nsinha1@binghamton.edu).

Please submit your abstracts of 300 words or less, along with a 2-3 line bio, to the above emails on or before December 6, 2024.

Posted on October 17, 2024