Ecocritical Awakenings: Emergent Epiphanies in Literary Creation and Study

Abstract

My portfolio-style, research-creation thesis is comprised of critical interventions, creative work, and pedagogical reflections, all of which grapple with questions of social, cultural, and environmental belonging. Though organized as a set of separate forms of engagement, common throughout is my interest in what I call "epiphanic moments"--moments that bring about precipitous realizations, recognitions, and, potentially, changes. Addressing shifting relations of power and privilege as well as complexities of environmental belonging, I trace the ways in which visibility and invisibility (and audibility and inaudibility) can shift in different sociopolitical and ecological contexts. I am particularly interested in the ways in which invisibility can be agentive, acting as a force that shapes the "visible" or the known. My project is in part a chronicle of my own life experience. Having embarked, as an international student from Bangladesh (who had obtained, along the way, an MA in African American Studies from Temple University in the US) on a more traditional journey toward a standard monograph-style dissertation in comparative literary studies, I had my own epiphany, which was that my scholarship, creative work, and pedagogy were in fact all critical engagements with similar themes, including migration, subalternity, and relations of race, gender, sex, and sexuality. In the first section, I perform more conventional literary critical analyses of novels by Zora Neal Hurston, Indra Sinha, Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay, and Eden Robinson. Also included are short, occasional pieces on media representation, from COVID-19 to Bhopal to particulate pollution. The second section turns to my creative pieces, including a stage play, radio drama, short fiction, poetry, and visual art. The third section brings the concerns—and modes—of the first two together in an auto-ethnographic approach to my own experiences of teaching the themes of the project in the undergraduate classroom.