- Arizona State University, English, Adjunctadd
- Ecocriticism, American Literature, Environmental Humanities, American Studies, Environmental History, Indigenous Studies, and 11 moreEnvironmental Justice, Anthropocene, Energy Humanities, Climate Change, Settler Colonial Studies, Resilience, Environmental Studies, Climate Change Adaptation, Narrative Theory, Settler colonialism, and Environmental Policy and Governanceedit
- Matthew Henry is currently a Scholar in Residence at the University of Wyoming, serving a joint appointment with the ... moreMatthew Henry is currently a Scholar in Residence at the University of Wyoming, serving a joint appointment with the Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources, the Department of English, and School of Energy Resources. His current research focuses on how the humanities can help communities dependent on extractive economies and impacted by climate change can imagine a just transition. His first book, Hydronarratives: Water, Environmental Justice, and Imagining a Just Transition, is under contract with the University of Nebraska Press. He is currently co-leading a project entitled Imagining a Future Wyoming: Youth Narratives in a Time of Transition. The project involves scenario-planning workshops and narrative research with high school students in Wyoming towns most impacted by declining coal markets and will facilitate a statewide writing contest to amplify youth visions for the future of Wyoming.
Areas of expertise include environmental justice; the environmental humanities and ecocritical literary/cultural studies; the energy humanities; and cultural representations of climate change.edit
By Matthew S. Henry, Morgan Bazilian, and Chris Markuson The energy landscape is changing dramatically. Communities are being impacted in different ways. Positive impacts include reductions in air pollution and new tax revenues from... more
By Matthew S. Henry, Morgan Bazilian, and Chris Markuson
The energy landscape is changing dramatically. Communities are being impacted in different ways. Positive impacts include reductions in air pollution and new tax revenues from renewables. Negative impacts include lost jobs and foregone tax revenues after closure of large fossil fuels generation facilities and coal mines. The contours of this transition have been further altered by recent events such as the global oil market crash and the COVID-19 pandemic. While economic and social issues can be addressed through thoughtful policy design, the pace of change, and the extent to which communities have a say in what comes next, matter. Though the technical issues of transitions are well-researched, the socio-economic aspects of the energy transition remain both emergent and essential to an equitable transition to a low-carbon energy system. This article provides an overview of the history and current status of just transitions.
The energy landscape is changing dramatically. Communities are being impacted in different ways. Positive impacts include reductions in air pollution and new tax revenues from renewables. Negative impacts include lost jobs and foregone tax revenues after closure of large fossil fuels generation facilities and coal mines. The contours of this transition have been further altered by recent events such as the global oil market crash and the COVID-19 pandemic. While economic and social issues can be addressed through thoughtful policy design, the pace of change, and the extent to which communities have a say in what comes next, matter. Though the technical issues of transitions are well-researched, the socio-economic aspects of the energy transition remain both emergent and essential to an equitable transition to a low-carbon energy system. This article provides an overview of the history and current status of just transitions.
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As a comment on India post-Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s 1995 novel The Moor’s Last Sigh offers a broad-based critique of modern India within the context of economic policy shifts in India following independence from British rule... more
As a comment on India post-Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s 1995 novel The Moor’s Last Sigh offers a broad-based critique of modern India within the context of economic policy shifts in India following independence from British rule in 1947. The gradual implementation of neoliberal economic policies in the 1980s and 1990s accompanied India’s emergence as a major player in the global capitalist economy but also led to drastic increases in income inequality, unemployment, and the proliferation of a vast informal sector of exploitable human capital. Rushdie's novel identifies India's entrepreneurial and capitalist classes, specifically in Mumbai/Bombay, as complicit in the exacerbation of class disparity which has led, in many cases, to increased Hindu-Muslim cultural tensions and the growing ubiquity of government corruption and organized crime. The novel offers additional insight into the exploitative logic of Hindu nationalist politics through its parodic depiction of the Shiv Sena party, which owes much of its political clout to the maintenance of a patriarchal, mafia-esque relationship with urban slum-dwellers. The Moor's Last Sigh delineates new and complex forms of oppression and exploitation in postcolonial India that often occur simultaneously along class and cultural lines.
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This syllabus is for my Spring 2020 Environmental Justice in Literature and Culture class at the University of Wyoming. It was cross-listed as an English and Environment and Natural Resources class.
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Syllabus for ENR 2000: Environment and Society at the University of Wyoming. - Fall 2020
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This syllabus was designed for an online, introductory environmental literature course taught to twenty-five M. Phil students at Kinnaird College for Women in Lahore, Pakistan during the Spring 2017 semester. The course was designed as... more
This syllabus was designed for an online, introductory environmental literature course taught to twenty-five M. Phil students at Kinnaird College for Women in Lahore, Pakistan during the Spring 2017 semester. The course was designed as part of a State Department-funded partnership between Arizona State University and Kinnaird College, which explored the globalization of American literary studies.
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How can the imagination help us cope with, confront, and overcome contemporary ecological crises such as climate change, resource scarcity, and environmental injustice? Can the humanities help humans simultaneously re-imagine a... more
How can the imagination help us cope with, confront, and overcome contemporary ecological crises such as climate change, resource scarcity, and environmental injustice? Can the humanities help humans simultaneously re-imagine a relationship with the natural world that has frequently been defined in oppositional terms (nature vs. culture) while also improving the well-being of marginalized cultural groups throughout the world?
This course seeks to answer these questions by filtering them through contemporary crises surrounding our most precious resource: water. Turning to literature, film, and literary criticism, we will explore the cultural, economic, and ecological significance of water in diverse cultural contexts. Along the way, we’ll discuss the promises and pitfalls of early environmentalist approaches to river conservation; the convoluted history of dam-building in the American West; indigenous cosmological approaches to resource use in the American Southwest; the ravages of water privatization in Pakistan; hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), groundwater contamination, and the exploitation of rural working class communities in Pennsylvania; and an apocalyptic vision of a near-future Phoenix, Arizona ravaged by a megadrought.
This course seeks to answer these questions by filtering them through contemporary crises surrounding our most precious resource: water. Turning to literature, film, and literary criticism, we will explore the cultural, economic, and ecological significance of water in diverse cultural contexts. Along the way, we’ll discuss the promises and pitfalls of early environmentalist approaches to river conservation; the convoluted history of dam-building in the American West; indigenous cosmological approaches to resource use in the American Southwest; the ravages of water privatization in Pakistan; hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”), groundwater contamination, and the exploitation of rural working class communities in Pennsylvania; and an apocalyptic vision of a near-future Phoenix, Arizona ravaged by a megadrought.
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23 September 2020
by Brad Handler, Matt Henry, and Morgan Bazilian
by Brad Handler, Matt Henry, and Morgan Bazilian
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In this essay I trace the historical roots of the Green New Deal and, with a focus on Kim Stanley Robinson's novel New York 2140, discuss how climate fiction can help us envision climate action that places the concerns of... more
In this essay I trace the historical roots of the Green New Deal and, with a focus on Kim Stanley Robinson's novel New York 2140, discuss how climate fiction can help us envision climate action that places the concerns of frontline/fenceline communities at the forefront.
Originally published in Edge Effects: A Digital Magazine: http://edgeeffects.net/green-new-deal-climate-fiction/
Originally published in Edge Effects: A Digital Magazine: http://edgeeffects.net/green-new-deal-climate-fiction/
Research Interests: American Literature, American Studies, Climate Change, Climate Change Adaptation, Environmental Studies, and 9 moreScience Fiction, Environmental Policy and Governance, Ecocriticism, Environmental Justice, Environmental Humanities, Climate Justice, Green New Deal, Climate Fiction, and Sustainability
"Victor and the Fish" was selected as runner-up for a global climate fiction contest organized by Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination as part of the Climate Futures Initiative. It was judged by a... more
"Victor and the Fish" was selected as runner-up for a global climate fiction contest organized by Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination as part of the Climate Futures Initiative. It was judged by a multidisciplinary field of climate fiction experts including esteemed science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson.
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In this talk, I discuss what I call “extractive fictions,” or cultural productions that map the uneven impacts of fossil fuel extraction on poor, ethnic minority, and indigenous communities. As a case study, it focuses on fiction, poetry,... more
In this talk, I discuss what I call “extractive fictions,” or cultural productions that map the uneven impacts of fossil fuel extraction on poor, ethnic minority, and indigenous communities. As a case study, it focuses on fiction, poetry, and public art exhibits that respond to socio-ecological crises associated with coal and gas development in impoverished rural communities in northern Appalachia, with an emphasis on the ways in which artists are challenging dominant narratives of extraction as a path to economic and social progress. The talk closes with an exploration of collaborative, cross-disciplinary reclamation art projects that prompt affected communities to envision post-extraction futures and an epistemological shift away from extraction culture.
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As severe drought conditions continue to persist in the western United States, it has become increasingly clear that large-scale water development infrastructures are partially to blame. While groundwater pumping has been blamed for... more
As severe drought conditions continue to persist in the western United States, it has become increasingly clear that large-scale water development infrastructures are partially to blame. While groundwater pumping has been blamed for unprecedented levels of terrestrial subsidence, large dams, reservoirs, and diversion canals have had marked effects on regional hydrological processes and water availability. Mainstream environmentalist and anti-dam rhetoric often focuses on the politics, economics, and ecosystemic impacts of the crisis, as in historical accounts like Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert; documentaries like Patagonia's DamNation and Cody Sheehy's Beyond the Mirage; and the photographs of Edward Burtynksy, Peter Goin, and others. However, there is far less discussion surrounding the ways in which human-induced water crises have been impacting indigenous communities in the western United States since the so-called “Reclamation Era” between the 1930s and the 1970s, when thousands of large dams were built throughout the western US. As historian Jane Griffith argues, large dam construction reflected the process of "dam/ning," wherein water development efforts were infused with the eliminatory logic of settler colonialism and "tactics to preserve White settler memory, history and claims to land and water.” In this essay, I examine the ways in which contemporary anti-dam and water-focused ecomedia in the western United States continues the process of "dam/ning" by largely excluding indigenous voices and failing to adequately account for indigenous experiences. Using examples of photography, museum exhibits, film, and social media campaigns, I highlight the ways in which indigenous artists are re-historicizing water development, drought, and indigenous displacement as the dystopic results of settler colonialism and seeking to re-orient contemporary drought discourse in ways that account for long-standing indigenous water rights struggles.
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This essay operates at the intersection of postcolonial ecocriticism and biosphere theory to explore the transnationalization of US water management models, particularly those developed in the western US, in decolonized regions of the... more
This essay operates at the intersection of postcolonial ecocriticism and biosphere theory to explore the transnationalization of US water management models, particularly those developed in the western US, in decolonized regions of the world during the latter half of the twentieth century. More specifically, I perform a comparative reading of Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, Pakistani writer Uzma Aslam Khan’s novel Trespassing, and Canadian photographer Edward Burtynksy’s collection Water to delineate the rise of emergent “hydrocolonialisms” and resultant disruption of regional water cycles and displacement of marginalized cultural groups across natural and human-made borders.
This essay is an abbreviated version of a chapter of my dissertation, entitled "Hydronarratives: Reading Water in the Anthropocene," and I am currently revising it to submit for publication.
This essay is an abbreviated version of a chapter of my dissertation, entitled "Hydronarratives: Reading Water in the Anthropocene," and I am currently revising it to submit for publication.
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Amidst the historic and ongoing drought in the US southwest, images of desiccation along the Colorado River, the region’s lifeline, have proliferated in the popular media. Photos of cracked shorelines and bathtub rings lining the river’s... more
Amidst the historic and ongoing drought in the US southwest, images of desiccation along the Colorado River, the region’s lifeline, have proliferated in the popular media. Photos of cracked shorelines and bathtub rings lining the river’s reservoirs recall when, in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Gardens in the Dunes, Sister Salt encounters the empty riverbed downstream from the Parker Dam construction site along the California-Arizona border in the 1930s. Finding “silver-green carp belly-up, trapped in water holes” and “datura plants and wild purple asters on the riverbank suddenly left high and dry” (212), Sister Salt, Sister Salt mourns the river’s diversion as an ecological and cultural death as she watches the decline of local indigenous peoples traditionally (and cosmologically) dependent on the river’s waters.
In this presentation, I argue that Gardens in the Dunes joins a corpus of artistic and public engagements with the US southwest that curate specific, regional manifestations of the Anthropocene characterized by declining river ecologies, worsening drought, and indigenous water rights struggles. Gardens, as an environmental justice novel, both diagnoses the current water crisis as symptomatic of Reclamation Era dam projects and resultant water management systems and provides crucial context for the Tohono O’odham Nation’s water rights struggles in central Arizona. I complement this reading with an analysis of Mark Klett’s rephotographic survey of the US west, which works to materialize anthropogenic changes to regional topographies over time, and the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, which traces the history of the Hohokam people and their vast irrigation system and, because of its location in what Andrew Ross has called the least sustainable city in the world, calls contemporary resource ideologies into question. Taken together, novel, photographic collection, and museum highlight pre-development and cosmologically-based approaches to resource management and urge readers/viewers to think beyond dominant resource paradigms.
In this presentation, I argue that Gardens in the Dunes joins a corpus of artistic and public engagements with the US southwest that curate specific, regional manifestations of the Anthropocene characterized by declining river ecologies, worsening drought, and indigenous water rights struggles. Gardens, as an environmental justice novel, both diagnoses the current water crisis as symptomatic of Reclamation Era dam projects and resultant water management systems and provides crucial context for the Tohono O’odham Nation’s water rights struggles in central Arizona. I complement this reading with an analysis of Mark Klett’s rephotographic survey of the US west, which works to materialize anthropogenic changes to regional topographies over time, and the Pueblo Grande Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, which traces the history of the Hohokam people and their vast irrigation system and, because of its location in what Andrew Ross has called the least sustainable city in the world, calls contemporary resource ideologies into question. Taken together, novel, photographic collection, and museum highlight pre-development and cosmologically-based approaches to resource management and urge readers/viewers to think beyond dominant resource paradigms.
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Research Interests:
Recent studies have shown that the world's freshwater supply is being used faster than it is being replenished. Dwindling water resources have been compounded by recent and ongoing issues such as the lead-contaminated water supply in... more
Recent studies have shown that the world's freshwater supply is being used faster than it is being replenished. Dwindling water resources have been compounded by recent and ongoing issues such as the lead-contaminated water supply in Flint, Michigan; unprecedented drought in the US Southwest and central India; the increased privatization of water; and social and environmental justice movements to protect the integrity of water resources, such as the fight led by Water Protectors at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in South Dakota protesting the construction of an oil pipeline beneath Lake Oahe on the Missouri River. The urgency of such struggles has been confirmed by socio-environmental tragedies due to industrial malpractices causing extreme pollution on rivers such as the Animas in Colorado and the Rio Doce in Brazil as well as farms and fields just miles from the site of peaceful protests at Standing Rock. These ecological disasters have been shown to affect poor and marginalized communities most in the form of what Rob Nixon has called "slow violence," a form of environmental catastrophe that unfolds over time and often goes undetected or ignored by spectacle-driven media. Such crises expose the corrosion of water/environmental management systems, and of legislative structures and their implementation, and often result in a breakdown in trust between affected communities and those concerned with the well-being of the environment on the one hand, and governmental and bureaucratic entities on the other.
This panel explores the ways in which literature, film, photography, museum exhibits, and other forms of contemporary media work to uncover and diagnose the (mal)practices and (mis)management causing contemporary water crises. Ultimately, the texts and cultural forms examined in this panel offer novel ways to imaginatively engage with the catastrophic effects of water (mis)management; materialize the hidden social and ecological effects of water crises; make forceful environmental justice claims; and propose alternative, non-corrosive approaches to water management and use in the 21st century
This panel explores the ways in which literature, film, photography, museum exhibits, and other forms of contemporary media work to uncover and diagnose the (mal)practices and (mis)management causing contemporary water crises. Ultimately, the texts and cultural forms examined in this panel offer novel ways to imaginatively engage with the catastrophic effects of water (mis)management; materialize the hidden social and ecological effects of water crises; make forceful environmental justice claims; and propose alternative, non-corrosive approaches to water management and use in the 21st century
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This panel takes a comparative approach to explore the fallout of US involvement in Latin America, the Caribbean, and South Asia by highlighting issues of human rights, migration, and economic development in these regions, which have so... more
This panel takes a comparative approach to explore the fallout of US involvement in Latin America, the Caribbean, and South Asia by highlighting issues of human rights, migration, and economic development in these regions, which have so far been largely treated separately in the study of U.S. multiethnic and postcolonial literature. The panel establishes connections between US Latina/o and Asian-American fiction with works of Pakistani literature, which remains under-examined in postcolonial studies. This approach highlights similarities in the ways Latin American and South Asian literatures address the aftermaths of US imperialism, including collective trauma, immigration to the US, and environmental disaster.
Zahra Hanif examines Graciela Limon’s The River Flows North and Ana Luisa Calvillo’s No Documents, No Escape. Dealing undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border, both texts elicit “compassion fatigue,” counteracting the authors’ aim to elicit compassion from the audience. Saifiya Fawad performs a comparative study of Pakistani author Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. As she argues, incorporating Tresspassing into global US studies can engender an identification of US readers with the Pakistani "other," while including Oscar Wao in Pakistani studies would bring the racialized, diasporic US “other” to bear on Pakistani studies. Finally, Matthew Henry analyzes Japaenese-American author Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest to argue for the utility of postcolonial studies in delineating human and environmental consequences of economic development in the Americas. The novel critiques environmentally destructive resource development in Brazil, paralleling a Latin American “brand” of postcolonial studies focused on economic development.
Zahra Hanif examines Graciela Limon’s The River Flows North and Ana Luisa Calvillo’s No Documents, No Escape. Dealing undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border, both texts elicit “compassion fatigue,” counteracting the authors’ aim to elicit compassion from the audience. Saifiya Fawad performs a comparative study of Pakistani author Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. As she argues, incorporating Tresspassing into global US studies can engender an identification of US readers with the Pakistani "other," while including Oscar Wao in Pakistani studies would bring the racialized, diasporic US “other” to bear on Pakistani studies. Finally, Matthew Henry analyzes Japaenese-American author Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest to argue for the utility of postcolonial studies in delineating human and environmental consequences of economic development in the Americas. The novel critiques environmentally destructive resource development in Brazil, paralleling a Latin American “brand” of postcolonial studies focused on economic development.