Description:
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.
Brief description: Leilani Nishime is professor of communication at the University of Washington. She is the author of Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture (University of Illinois Press, 2014) and co-editor of three edited volumes: Racial Ecologies (University of Washington Press, 2018), Global Asian American Popular Culture (NYU Press, 2016), and East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (NYU Press, 2005).
Review Quotes:
"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"