(Under) Grounding Italian Colonialism: Practices of Historical Displacement
Roberta Biasillo traces Italy’s colonial engagements in Africa through a reflection sources uncovered in the Italian archives.
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Water Flows and Topographic Networks of Power: Social Struggles for Water in the Copiapó Valley in the Eighteenth Century
"Itineraries of Conflict in Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades"
Alok Amatya studies the depiction of indigenous struggles against the grab of minerals, crude oil, and other natural resources by private and government corporations in works such as Arundhati Roy’s travel essay Walking with the Comrades (2010). He suggests that narratives of conflict over the extraction of natural resources can be studied as the corpus of “resource conflict literature,” thus generating a global comparative framework for the study of contemporary indigenous struggles.
"The Midwife and the Poet: Bioaccumulation and Retroactive Shock"
Triangulating narratives from a prospective mining site in northern Norway, Hugo Reinert works to identify (and render graspable) a particular effect of retroactive shock—tracing its resonance through experiences of chemical exposure, colonial racism, cultural erasure, and destruction of the built environment.
A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America
This collection of studies provides valuable historical contexts for making sense of contemporary environmental challenges facing Latin America.
Layers of Meaning and Layers of Time in a Former Russian Peat Mining Region
Arcadia, Autumn 2019, no. 36
“Asbestos: Inside and Outside, Toxic and Haptic”
In this article, Sasha Litvintseva examines the history and materiality of asbestos to theorize toxic embodiment through the mutuality of the haptic sense and the breaching of boundaries of inside and outside. She develops this through an analysis of her own film project Asbestos (2016), shot at the mining town of Asbestos, Quebec.
Anaconda’s Pipelines: Water Supply Problems of a Desert Region
Arcadia, Autumn 2019, no. 32
Lessons from the Last Continent: Science, Emotion, and the Relevance of History
Shortis suggests that the World Park Antarctica campaign offers a positive example of an environmental campaign that includes but does not center scientific authority.
"'Hungry Dragons': Expanding the Horizons of Chinese Environmental History—Cantonese Gold-miners in Colonial New Zealand, 1860s–1920s "
This article examines the environmental impacts of Cantonese gold-miners in New Zealand and situates its research in both Chinese environmental history and comparative global environmental history.