Stanford Humanities Center
October 3, 2013 – “Earth Knows No Borders”: Denizenship in the Cultural Politics of Environmentalism and Immigration
Drawn from a book-length manuscript, Sarah Wald’s chapter addresses the role of nature in contemporary debates around immigration/migration in the post-9/11 nation and considers the category of denizenship as a productive alternative to racialized notions of national belonging and the naturalized nation. Throughout this chapter, Wald attends to the ways narratives of transnational migration mobilize nature to claim belonging to, and rights within, the nation.
Wald recently completed a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in English and Environmental Studies and Sustainability. She specializes in the relationship between the environment and literature, with a particular interest in the environmental imagination in Ethnic American literature. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled, “The Nature of Citizenship.” This work examines twentieth-century representations of California farmers and farm workers to analyze the role nature and land plays in the racialized construction of legal and cultural citizenship.
Discussant: David Stentiford (PhD Student, Modern Thought and Literature)
Co-Sponsored by the Environmental Humanities Project (EHP) and the Program in Modern Thought and Literature (MTL)
Thursday October 3, 2013 | 06:00 - 08:00 PM | Stanford Humanities Center Boardroom
Contact Corey Johnson at cmjohns at stanford dot edu for more information
