Jill Gatlin (New England Conservatory)

Sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE)

Drawing on NeMLA’s 2024 theme, this interdisciplinary session interrogates literary and other artistic depictions of environmental (in)justice in relation to “surplus” as a form of “excess . . . , as surfeit, or what is leftover, or unwanted,” including an “excess of emotions (anger, fear, passion, desire)” or “populations rendered ‘surplus’—migrants, the marginalized, the unemployed, the incarcerated.” Through this lens, participants might consider theoretical approaches including:

-The association of “surplus” populations with pollution/waste

-Ecological subjecthood and surplus value

-Incarceration, abolition, biopolitics, and the environment

-Surplus and reproductive environmental justice

-Political economics of territory, nation, terrain, and landscape; spatial and temporal surplus

-Infrastructural and energy surplus

-Subsistence, surplus, and resilience

-Ecological care and surplus labor

-Climate anxiety as surplus emotion

-Environmental abundance as surplus

-Narrative/artistic form as surplus

Format: roundtable (5-10 participants) or traditional panel (3-4 participants). Please submit 300-500 word abstracts on the NeMLA website.

This ASLE roundtable interrogates the association of 'surplus' with abolition, biopolitics, and ecology; reproductive environmental justice; political economics of energy infrastructure, nation, and landscape; ecological abundance, subsistence, and resilience; climate anxiety as surplus emotion; waste; or narrative/artistic form as surplus.