The Environmental Imagination of Mobility: Nature and Migration in Contemporary American Poetry

全球环境危机和不断加剧的移民流动是我们这个时代面临的最大挑战之一，但人们才刚刚开始认识到它们之间的相互关联。到目前为止，这一结合点的研究主要集中在社会科学领域；然而，在文学和文化研究中，环境问题和移民问题在很大程度上仍然是作为单独的问题来讨论的。这种分离尤其令人惊讶，因为有大量当代诗歌将环境观点与全球移民问题以概念复杂、历史悠久和美学创新的方式联系起来。该项目结合了生态批评和移民研究的方法，以解决研究中的这一重大差距，并调查这些诗歌在其种族和地理多样性，全球连通性和正式密度方面如何有助于当前关于环境变化和人类迁移的辩论，作为相互关联的现象。首先，该项目将展示最近美国诗歌对环境危机和移民运动之间联系的新见解，指出超越了经常主导气候难民讨论的一维因果模式。其中包括将移徙视为高度敏感的环境洞察力的生产性来源，以及作为与地方相关的文化特定方式的组成部分的其他观点，尽管与流离失所和被连根拔起的感觉有关的深刻危机。其次，该项目将展示在21世纪之交，与传统的自然之国和移民之国的观念相反，解决环境和移民问题的诗歌如何共同促进正在进行的美国文化重建。这些诗歌通过将它们与自然运动、环境风险和全球生态失衡等问题联系起来，并通过将美国景观构建为流动的地方，从而修正了乡村怀旧、西进运动和边疆的文化模式。第三，该项目调查了这些文本如何参与诗歌的形式和风格的可能性，以协商环境和移民问题在一起，确定新的亚体裁，从这个交汇处出现，并讨论其对美国文学发展的意义。在方法上，该项目采用诗歌分析作为社会批评的方法，进一步将诗歌文本的社会和环境分析结合起来，并将关于地点的生态批评讨论与文化地理学家最近讨论的概念进行对话，以建立地点，位移和安置作为移动类别。结合对新文本的具体解读，该项目开发了一种环境迁移范式，其生产力超出了对当代美国诗歌的分析。

The global environmental crisis and intensifying migration movements are among the greatest challenges of our time, yet they are only beginning to be understood as interrelated. So far, this junction has mainly been studied in the social sciences; in literary and cultural studies, however, environmental and migratory issues are still discussed as largely separate issues. This separation is particularly surprising since there is a substantial body of contemporary poetry that links environmental perspectives with questions of global migration in conceptually complex, historically informed and aesthetically innovative ways. The project combines approaches from ecocriticism and migration studies to address this significant gap in research and to investigate how these poems, in their ethnic and geographical diversity, global connectedness and formal density contribute to current debates about environmental change and human migration as interconnected phenomena. The project will demonstrate, first, which new insights recent American poetry enables regarding the links between environmental crisis and migration movements, pointing beyond one-dimensional cause and effect patterns that often dominate discussions about climate refugees. These include alternative views of migration as productive source of highly sensitive environmental insights, and as integral to culturally specific ways of relating to place, in spite of the profound crises related to displacement and the sense of being uprooted. Second, the project will show how poems that address the environment and migration together contribute to the ongoing reconstitution of American culture at the turn of the 21st century, up and against traditional concepts of nature's nation and nation of immigrants. These poems revise cultural patterns of rural nostalgia, westward movement and the frontier by linking them to issues of natural movement, environmental risk, and a global disequilibrium ecology, and by constructing American landscapes as mobile places. Third, the project investigates how these texts engage the formal and stylistic possibilities of poetry to negotiate environmental and migratory concerns together, identifies new subgenres that emerge from this junction, and discusses their significance for the development of American literature. Methodologically, the project takes the approach of poetry analysis as social criticism further towards a combined social and environmental analysis of poetic texts, and brings ecocritical discussions of place into dialog with concepts recently discussed by cultural geographers in order to establish place, displacement and emplacement as mobile categories. In conjunction with concrete interpretations of a new, far under-researched corpus of texts, the project develops an environmental-migratory paradigm whose productivity points beyond the analysis of contemporary American poetry.