(Re)Thinking Kin: Alternative Approaches to the Environmental Crisis from the 1970s to the Present

Abstract

This article narrativizes and theorizes the ways in which certain cultural artifacts from the onset of the United States’ modern environmental movement in the 1970s to the present offer creative means of addressing the ecological crisis faced then and now. Notably, these works - which are none of them conventional environmentalist texts - critique dominating, damaging ways of being and knowing and extend an alternative “participatory onto-epistemology” that relies on the formation and recognition of kinship between all earthly entities. In so doing, they sketch new understandings and experiences of what is meant by the term “ecology.” By tracing a thread through Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Undrowned (2020), and the contemporary social media content of Alexis Nikole Nelson (@blackforager), this article enters into discourses of ecofeminism and posthumanism to argue, overall, that these avant-garde works prompt and proffer compelling new ways to think and feel ourselves out of environmental catastrophe.