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This essay builds on Shari Huhndorf's analysis of the "significant implications" of Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead for Indigenous Studies by setting the novel into the context of María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo's analysis of how Zapatista organizing activities in Chiapas, Mexico, reshaped the "revolutionary imagination in the Americas" and helped to construct an "alternative modernity" that disrupts the empty signifier of "authentic" indigenous identity. The essay juxtaposes Silko's novel with the work of emerging Lipan-Jumano Apache poet, scholar, and activist Margo Tamez, who is currently leading an effort to retribalize the Lipan Apache in the militarized US–Mexico borderlands of the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Adamson explores how Tamez and her mother are part of a growing indigenous movement to build capacity among transnational indigenous groups, groups who self-identify as "native" even though they may not be formally recognized by a nation-state, and nonnative groups whose interests in social justice and environmental protection overlap. Adamson explores how this movement is shifting the focus in Native American and American Studies away from debates about "authenticity" and cultural nationalism toward a renewed attention to hemispheric and global struggles for civil, human, and environmental rights. She also argues that, when Silko and Tamez are read together, their work suggests new avenues of interpretation for Borderlands/La Frontera and calls on scholars to reread/rethink Gloria Anzaldúa's concept of mestizaje, not as mere adherence to mythological tropes, but as suggestive of the experiences of persons of indigenous descent living in communities that fall outside the category of "nation." The experiences of Tamez and Anzaldúa with illness and toxins, and their writing about it, also challenge readers to imagine a coalition politics that is not exactly "post-identity" but no longer invested in the boundaries of identity. "Another world is possible," but achieving this goal—Silko, Tamez, and Anzaldúa suggest—will require alliance-making and capacity-building to strengthen local, regional, and global abilities to meet the challenge.

Humanities for the Environment, or HfE, is an ambitious project that from 2013-2015 was funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project networked universities and researchers internationally through a system of 'observatories'. This book collects the work of contributors networked through the North American, Asia-Pacific, and Australia-Pacific observatories. Humanities for the Environment showcases how humanists are working to 'integrate knowledges' from diverse cultures and ontologies and pilot new 'constellations of practice' that are moving beyond traditional contemplative or reflective outcomes (the book, the essay)towards solutions to the greatest social and environmental challenges of our time. With the still controversial concept of the 'Anthropocene' as a starting point for a widening conversation, contributors range acrossgeographies, ecosystems, climates and weather regimes; moving from icy, melting Arctic landscapes to the bleaching Australian Great Barrier Reef, and from an urban pedagogical 'laboratory' in Phoenix, Arizona to Vatican City in Rome. Chapters explore the ways in which humanists, in collaboration with communities and disciplines across academia, are responding to warming oceans, disappearing islands, collapsing fisheries, evaporating reservoirs of water, exploding bushfires, and spreading radioactive contamination. This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences interested in interdisciplinary questions of environment and culture.

Humanities for the Environment, or HfE, is an ambitious project that from 2013-2015 was funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project networked universities and researchers internationally through a system of 'observatories'. This book collects the work of contributors networked through the North American, Asia-Pacific, and Australia-Pacific observatories. Humanities for the Environment showcases how humanists are working to 'integrate knowledges' from diverse cultures and ontologies and pilot new 'constellations of practice' that are moving beyond traditional contemplative or reflective outcomes (the book, the essay)towards solutions to the greatest social and environmental challenges of our time. With the still controversial concept of the 'Anthropocene' as a starting point for a widening conversation, contributors range acrossgeographies, ecosystems, climates and weather regimes; moving from icy, melting Arctic landscapes to the bleaching Australian Great Barrier Reef, and from an urban pedagogical 'laboratory' in Phoenix, Arizona to Vatican City in Rome. Chapters explore the ways in which humanists, in collaboration with communities and disciplines across academia, are responding to warming oceans, disappearing islands, collapsing fisheries, evaporating reservoirs of water, exploding bushfires, and spreading radioactive contamination. This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences interested in interdisciplinary questions of environment and culture.

A new vocabulary for Environmental StudiesUnderstandings of "nature" have expanded and changed, but the word has not lost importance at any level of discourse: it continues to hold a key place in conversations surrounding thought, ethics, and aesthetics. Nowhere is this more evident than in the interdisciplinary field of environmental studies. Keywords for Environmental Studies analyzes the central terms and debates currently structuring the most exciting research in and across environmental studies, including the environmental humanities, environmental social sciences, sustainability sciences, and the sciences of nature. Sixty essays from humanists, social scientists, and scientists, each written about a single term, reveal the broad range of quantitative and qualitative approaches critical to the state of the field today. From "ecotourism" to "ecoterrorism," from "genome" to "species," this accessible volume illustrates the ways in which scholars are collaborating across disciplinary boundaries to reach shared understandings of key issues—such as extreme weather events or increasing global environmental inequities—in order to facilitate the pursuit of broad collective goals and actions. This book underscores the crucial realization that every discipline has a stake in the central environmental questions of our time, and that interdisciplinary conversations not only enhance, but are requisite to environmental studies today.Visit keywords.nyupress.org for online essays, teaching resources, and more