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Becoming Undisciplined: On Pathways to Environmental and Racial Justice in Early Modern Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2025

Hillary Eklund ,
Jennifer Park ,
Debapriya Sarkar  and
Ayanna Thompson
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Abstract

This essay is born of the belief that racial justice, social justice, and environmental justice are mutually entangled. Despite their shared commitments to justice, early modern ecocriticism and premodern critical race studies have rarely been in conversation with each other. We address this aporia here and ponder how such intersections can create pathways to more inclusive futures for early modern studies, and for literary studies more broadly. We begin with a brief reflection about how we came to these topics; we then turn to literary and critical works that illustrate the interconnectedness of these issues in premodern literature and explore how those connections persist and haunt our own thinking and writing. This essay is not argumentative in the traditional sense, but rather invites our scholarly communities to unlearn our way to different possibilities.

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Essay
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PMLA , Volume 139 , Issue 5 , October 2024 , pp. 791 - 805
Copyright
Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Modern Language Association of America

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