ERIC Number: EJ1400381
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2023
Pages: 16
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0034-5237
EISSN: EISSN-2050-4608
Colonial Crises of Imagination, Climate Fictions, and English Literary Education
Research in Education, v117 n1 p26-41 2023
This paper argues that the contemporary climate crises we see around our planet correlate with a colonial crisis of (literary) imagination. The author engages with Caribbean literary scholar Sylvia Wynter and other anti-colonial scholars to trace how the colonial literary imagination is rooted in the euro-western humanism and racial capitalism that governs the west, the stories and literary forms that frame it, and whose logics continue to be rehearsed across the disciplines--particularly in English literatures taught in school. The paper then argues that to understand the histories of this crisis of imagination and its link to climate crises, and perhaps paradoxically access literature's speculative potential to imagine different climate futures, literary educators and scholars need to prioritize literatures and literary critiques that are embedded in a different relationship to the imagination and ecology.
Descriptors: Colonialism, Literature Appreciation, English Literature, Climate, Fiction, Imagination, Racism, Humanism, Futures (of Society), Social Systems
SAGE Publications. 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320. Tel: 800-818-7243; Tel: 805-499-9774; Fax: 800-583-2665; e-mail: journals@sagepub.com; Web site: https://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2993
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A