CALL FOR PAPERS
Posted by Jennifer James and Richard Grusin on 2024-11-01
“I agree with the leaves”: Diversifying the Arboreal Humanities
Trees have long been an important object of study for natural history and science. This interest in trees and forests has spread to the humanities as well, helping to create what Solvejg Nitzke and Helga G. Braunbeck have called "arboreal imaginaries.” Contemporary writers publish large, sweeping novels about humanity from an arboreal perspective, while artists create projects that dramatize the ecological implications of deforestation or collaborate with trees as artistic agents and media. But such arboreal imaginaries are hardly new. Trees, forests and woodlands have long been a part of the ecological imagination across the world. Indigenous peoples have complex legends, traditions, and practices involving trees as nonhuman people.The Baobab Tree is central to African folktales, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil is at the heart of Judeo-Christian religion. However sacred and revered trees might be to many, “progress” in human civilization is too often accompanied by their disappearance. The cultural, historical and environmental value of the arboreal becomes subordinate to an economic definition of value that fails to recognize the importance of the arboreal within “the web of life.” This failure to respect the ontological integrity of trees is perhaps no more evident than when they are co-opted into participating in human subjugation. As just one example, lynchings transformed trees from life-giving parts of an intricate ecological system into mechanisms of death.
This special issue of Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture, an open-access, double anonymous peer-reviewed journal of the environmental humanities, is seeking essays on arboreality from a range of diverse perspectives. Inspired by Lucille Clifton’s poem “the lesson of the falling leaves,” we are interested not only in analyzing trees, forests, woodlands and arboreal life within a cultural studies framework, but perhaps more significantly, in what can be learned from arboreality about how humans have, can, and should relate with the more-than-human world. In other words, how can the arboreal be theorized? What emerges from this examination? How might it change how we think about the work that ecocriticism, and environmental humanities more broadly, performs?
Essays that engage the arboreal in relation to race, gender, sexuality, and disability, including work from transnational perspectives, are especially welcome. Regeneration’s multimedia capacity encourages the inclusion of visual material, sound, and moving images.
Please send a 250-500 word abstract to Jennifer James at jcj@email.gwu.edu and Richard Grusin at grusin@uwm.edu by December 15th. Full essays will be due by April 30, 2025. Inquiries are welcome.
Possible Topics
The relation of the arboreal humanities to other modes of ecocriticism, such as energy and plant humanities
The arboreal in literature, film, and visual arts
Entanglement, interconnectedness and arboreality
The arboreal in Western and non-Western philosophical thought
Arboreality and the ethics of care and caretaking
The arboreal and slavery
The arboreal and empire and/or settler colonialism
Arboreality in anti-racist and decolonial thought
The arboreal and queer and trans ecologies
Carceral landscapes/enclosures and arboreality
The arboreal and Black, Latinx, Indigenous and AAPI ecologies
Arboreal agency and consciousness in specific cultural traditions
The arboreal, the posthuman and/or the more-than-human
Arboreal activism
Arboreal animality
Arboreality and affect
Arboreal preservation, conservation and reforestation
Deforestation and climate change
The arboreal and environmental justice
The arboreal and urban environments
Trees and paper/print culture studies
Arboreal economics, e.g., labor, mills, exchange