Description:

An event of the Environmental Humanities Workshop of the Kaplan Humanities Institute.

Sara Černe will present a work-in-progress chapter that examines the layers of environmental and human exploitation along the Mississippi River.

The section to be discussed focuses on the Lower River and starts with Eudora Welty's and Joy Harjo's conceptions of historical palimpsests in their respective works, "Some Notes on River Country" (Welty's essay, 1944) and "New Orleans" (Harjo's poem, 1983). It also examines photographs from the 1970s EPA-commissioned DOCUMERICA archive and Richard Misrach's work in Petrochemical America (2012) to track the increasing industrialization of these sites of Native American removal and plantation slavery and the case they make for environmental justice.

The reading will be pre-circulated a week in advance of this workshop. To receive a copy, contact the Environmental Humanities Workshop co-conveners: Corey Byrnes (corey.byrnes@northwestern.edu), Keith Woodhouse (keith.woodhouse@northwestern.edu), or Sarah Dimick (sarah.dimick@northwestern.edu).

Image: Ashland-Belle Helene Plantation, acquired by Shell Chemical, 1998, Richard Misrach

is a PhD student in English at Northwestern and a Franke Graduate Fellow of the Kaplan Humanities Institute.