Literature offers a different kind of witnessing to environmental catastrophe

The human implications of environmental disasters

Martyn Bone has for most of his professional career immersed himself in the richness of U.S. southern literature. Through this literary lens, he explores how social and economic processes, especially migration and economic globalization, shape people's lives in (and beyond) the U.S. South.

Bone speaks in a fluent, soft-spoken manner with a native British English accent subtly influenced by his extensive time in the US, including his previous job as an associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi.

- Concepts such as environmental racism and environmental justice originate in the black experience in the US South. Such concepts came out of grassroots activism led by poor, predominantly working-class African Americans who were drawing attention to the disproportionate impact of toxic waste dumping in black communities in the South. They were protesting in ways that echoed the civil rights movement of the Sixties and came to influence academic thinking, including environmental literary criticism.

He has recently dedicated himself to an immersive study of the writing of African American author Jesmyn Ward. This new book (to be published in May 2025) will be the first monograph about Ward’s work. A number of Ward’s books depict significant environmental disasters and their disproportionate impact on specific populations: economically disadvantaged communities in the U.S. South who are predominantly black:

- Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones explores the human implications of Hurricane Katrina, a spectacular natural disaster that unfolded in August 2005. But the novel also subtly reflects the broader history of slavery’s legacies, the persistent presence of racism, and enduring severe economic disparities.

- It’s impossible to consider extraordinary environmental disasters in the US South—not only Hurricane Katrina but also the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe (depicted in Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing) without acknowledging their disproportionate impact on specific population groups.

Slow and invisible violence

Martyn Bone also refers to environmental disasters that do not manifest instantly but instead gradually evolve over an extended historical timeframe, with long-lasting implications for humanity:

- Some environmental disasters happen much more slowly, over generations, whether it's toxic waste or waste dumping, whether it's living in an area like Louisiana's chemical corridor where you're constantly exposed to the fumes of chemical plants but over a long period of time. In the U.S. South, this slow or invisible violence is often rooted in the legacies of slavery and a longer history of environmental racism.

He emphasizes the role of literature in helping us make sense of how swift, spectacular catastrophes and slow invisibles ones impact people’s livelihoods and shape their perceptions.

Can literature bring hope?

According to Martyn Bone, novels and other forms of literature can offer stories that provide new ways of imagining and apprehending an otherwise overwhelming and paralyzing catastrophe. He quotes Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, a book by the postcolonial ecocritic Rob Nixon:

- Imaginative writing can help make the unapparent appear, making it accessible and tangible by humanizing drawn-out threats inaccessible to the immediate senses.

Literature can imagine and represent historical experiences that are not always recorded in archives. In this way literature can offer valuable insights into both past and present crises.

Bone argues that environmental humanities has a role to play when research can illuminate and enhance our understanding of how historical, social, and economic phenomena, such as slavery and racism, contribute to environmental degradation. He also insists that literature can provide a sense of hope in the face of climate crisis, as it offers a distinctive form of bearing witness: a form of testimony that involves a deep connection to past suffering and a recognition of how contemporary experiences of suffering relate to longstanding social, racial, and economic realities.

- Literature, including memoirs and novels by writers like Jesmyn Ward, often emphasize hope for individuals, families, and communities going through various forms of suffering, including environmental catastrophe. This sense of community and solidarity is crucial, and contrasts with the focus on individualism in a neoliberal society.

He reflects that Jesmyn Ward's novels, while confronting harsh realities and various forms of violence, nevertheless dramatize a sense of hope: not a utopian hope, but rather a realistic depiction of community solidarity and perseverance. He notes how literature, including climate fiction (cli-fi), often deploys dystopian themes or depicts a dystopian future to allegorize contemporary environmental problems and to warn about the consequences of our current actions; but, he adds, environmental writing like Ward’s can also depict existing forms of community resilience and solidarity.

The trans-disciplinary field of American studies

Martyn Bone highlights the importance of trans-disciplinary approaches to understanding the climate crisis. He extends this discussion to the interdisciplinary nature of American Studies, the field in which he was trained, which integrates literature, politics and history. This kind of interdisciplinary approach to literature can help grasp the broader historical and political contexts concerning environmental racism and the afterlife of slavery.

- Literature can imagine and represent historical experiences that are not always recorded in archives. In this way literature can offer valuable insights into both past and present crises. And by offering nuanced depictions of human experiences that have been and often remain overlooked, literature, like the humanities more broadly, can play a crucial role in the wider debates on climate change and the green transition.

Bone has also written extensively about the representation of Denmark and Danish colonialism in African American literature. He reflects on how environmental humanities in Denmark could pay greater attention to race and racism, not least given the country's colonial history:

- One of the criticisms of the Anthropocene as a concept has been that it pays insufficient attention to the ways in which social factors such as settler colonialism, slavery, and racism have played a massive role in environmental degradation and climate change, and how the Anthropocene is unevenly experienced by different groups of people. Here too the environmental humanities can make a contribution: through its attention to concepts like racial capitalism, environmental racism, the Capitalocene and the Plantationocene.

Read more about Martyn Bone and his publications.