Environmental Crisis and Human Rights

Literary and Cultural Representations

Joyjit Ghosh, Samit Kumar Maiti, Sk Tarik Ali

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798216252733
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Environmental Crisis and Human Rights: Literary and Cultural Representations engages with the human rights implications of anthropogenic environmental crisis through a critical reading of a wide spectrum of literary and cultural texts from different parts of the world. The Introduction and the eighteen theoretically informed essays included in the collection highlight how race, caste, class, gender and ethnicity contribute to and complicate human experiences of environmental degradation. The essays address a broad range of issues involving environmental human rights such as climate migration, climate injustice, resource extraction, neo-colonial intervention, politics of development, dam-induced displacement and the violation of the indigenous usufruct rights to the environment. The volume illustrates that the Anthropocene is not a unitary concept, rather a fractured discourse; and environmental crisis, far from being monolithic in nature, is determined by socio-economic particularities and cultural specificities of different human communities across the globe.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figure
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Voicing Human Rights in a Vulnerable Environment
• Chapter 1: Depicting Crime in Climate Change: How Mystery Fiction Interrogates Rights and Culpability in the Climate Crisis
• Chapter 2: Our Fragile Islands and Islanders: Re-engaging with Climate Change and Slow Violence in Pankaj Sekhsaria’s The Last Wave and Islands in Flux
• Chapter 3: Climate Justice, Human Rights, and Tribal Poets of Jharkhand
• Chapter 4: Picturing Injustice: Climate Change and Human Rights in Two Contemporary Graphic Narratives
• Chapter 5: Navigating the Mountains of the Mind: An Eco-psychological Reading of Ankush Saikia’s The Forest Beneath the Mountains
• Chapter 6: “God Has Cursed Us with Oil”: Perto-colonial Extractivism, Ecocidal Violence, and the “Pipeline People” in Select Oil Stories of Nnedi Okorafor and Uwem Akpan
• Chapter 7: Building Big Dams for “The Greater Common Good”: Politics of Development, Environmental Degradation, and Displaceme t
• Chapter 8: Climate Change Narrative and Hydro Crisis: Representation in Bollywood Film Jal
• Chapter 9: Violation of Rights of the Adivasis and Exploitation of Nature in Mahasweta Devi’s Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pi tha: An Intersectional Analysis
• Chapter 10: Toward a “Transformative Utopia”: Locating Emancipation in Select Contemporary Australian Young Adult and Children’s Fiction
• Chapter 11: Cinematic Silence and Necropolitical Dynamics: Interrogating Coal Mining Realities in Bollywood Films
• Chapter 12: A Far Cry from Sri Lanka: Reclaiming Human Rights for the Climate Refugees through Benjamin Dix and Lindsay Pollock’s Graphic Narrative Vanni
• Chapter 13: “Slow Violence” and Subaltern Resistance: A Reading of Imbolo Mbue’s World in How Beautiful We Were
• Chapter 14: Exploring the Anthropocene: Climate Resilience and the Plight of Eco-refugees in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island
• Chapter 15: From Pandora to Jengaburu: Indigenous Rights, Resource Extraction, and Subaltern Environmentalism in Avatar and The Jengaburu Curse
• Chapter 16: Precarity of Life in the Himalayas: Environmental Hazards and Human Rights in Nuzhat Khan’s Whistling Woods
• Chapter 17: Eco-critical Perspectives and Cultural Politics of Indigenous Struggle: A Comparative Study of Literary Texts
• Chapter 18: Who Pays the Price?: Conservation Pitted against Environmental Displacement in The Hungry Tide
• Index
• About the Editors
• List of Contributors