Laura Wright
Professor of English at Western Carolina University
My Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Wright_(literary_scholar)
Wikipedia page for The Vegan Studies Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vegan_Studies_Project
My Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Wright_(literary_scholar)
Wikipedia page for The Vegan Studies Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vegan_Studies_Project
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Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place is a collection of scholarly essays that engage environmental and ecocritical theories and Appalachian literature and film. These essays, many from well-established Appalachian studies and southern studies scholars and ecocritics, engage with a variety of ecocritical methodologies, including ecofeminism, ecospiritualism, queer ecocriticism, and materialist ecocriticism, to name a few.
Adding Appalachian voices to the larger ecocritical discourse is vital not only for the sake of increased diversity but also to allow those unfamiliar with the region and its works to better understand the Appalachian region in a critical and authentic way. Including Appalachia in the larger ecocritical community allows for the study of how the region, its issues, and its texts intersect with a variety of communities, thus allowing boundless possibilities for learning and analysis.
This collection of 25 essays maps and engages with that which might be termed the 'vegan turn' in literary theoretical analysis via essays that explore literature from across a range of historical periods, cultures and textual forms. It provides thematic explorations (such as veganism and race and veganism and gender) and covers a wide range of genres (from the philosophical essay to speculative fiction, and from poetry to the graphic novel, to name a few). The volume also provides an extensive annotated bibliography summarising existing work within the emergent field of vegan studies.
that Laura Wright calls vegan studies. We have an abundance of texts on vegans and veganism including works of advocacy, literary and popular fiction, film and television, and cookbooks, yet until now, there has been no study that examines the social and cultural discourses shaping our perceptions of veganism as an identity category and social practice.
Ranging widely across contemporary American society and culture, Wright unpacks the loaded category of vegan identity. She examines the mainstream discourse surrounding and connecting animal rights to (or omitting animal rights from) veganism. Her specific focus is on the construction and depiction of the vegan body—both male and female—as a contested site manifest in contemporary works of literature, popular cultural representations, advertising, and new media. At the same time, Wright looks at critical animal studies, human-animal studies, posthumanism, and ecofeminism as theoretical frameworks that inform vegan studies (even as they differ from it).
The vegan body, says Wright, threatens the status quo in terms of what we eat, wear, and purchase—and also in how vegans choose not to participate in many aspects of the mechanisms undergirding mainstream culture. These threats are acutely felt in light of post-9/11 anxieties over American strength and virility. A discourse has emerged that seeks, among other things, to bully veganism out of existence as it is poised to alter the dominant cultural mindset or, conversely, to constitute the vegan body as an idealized paragon of health, beauty, and strength. What better serves veganism is exemplified by Wright’s study: openness, debate, inquiry, and analysis.
Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," identifies secondary materials, including multimedia and Internet resources, that will help instructors guide their students through the contextual and formal complexities of Coetzee's fiction. In part 2, "Approaches," essays discuss how to teach works that are sometimes suspicious of teachers and teaching. The essays aim to help instructors negotiate Coetzee's ironies and allegories in his treatment of human relationships in a changing South Africa and of the shifting connections between human beings and the biosphere.
Laura Wright explores the changes brought by colonialism and globalization as depicted in an array of international works of fiction in four thematically arranged chapters. She looks first at two traditional oral histories retold in modern novels, Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (South Africa) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood (Kenya), that deal with the potentially devastating effects of development, particularly through deforestation and the replacement of native flora with European varieties. Wright then uses J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (South Africa), Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (India and Canada), and Joy Williams’s The Quick and the Dead (United States) to explore the use of animals as metaphors for subjugated groups of individuals. The third chapter deals with India’s water crisis via Arundhati Roy’s activism and her novel, The God of Small Things. Finally, Wright looks at three novels—Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (Nigeria), Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (New Zealand), and Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (South Africa)—that depict women’s relationships to the land from which they have been dispossessed.
Throughout Wilderness into Civilized Shapes, Wright rearticulates questions about the role of the writer of fiction as environmental activist and spokesperson, the connections between animal ethics and environmental responsibility, and the potential perpetuation of a neocolonial framework founded on western commodification and resource-based imperialism.
Talks by Laura Wright
This episode of Knowing Animals is brought to you by the Australasian Animal Studies Association and the Animal Publics book series at Sydney University Press.
Appalachian Ecocriticism and the Paradox of Place is a collection of scholarly essays that engage environmental and ecocritical theories and Appalachian literature and film. These essays, many from well-established Appalachian studies and southern studies scholars and ecocritics, engage with a variety of ecocritical methodologies, including ecofeminism, ecospiritualism, queer ecocriticism, and materialist ecocriticism, to name a few.
Adding Appalachian voices to the larger ecocritical discourse is vital not only for the sake of increased diversity but also to allow those unfamiliar with the region and its works to better understand the Appalachian region in a critical and authentic way. Including Appalachia in the larger ecocritical community allows for the study of how the region, its issues, and its texts intersect with a variety of communities, thus allowing boundless possibilities for learning and analysis.
This collection of 25 essays maps and engages with that which might be termed the 'vegan turn' in literary theoretical analysis via essays that explore literature from across a range of historical periods, cultures and textual forms. It provides thematic explorations (such as veganism and race and veganism and gender) and covers a wide range of genres (from the philosophical essay to speculative fiction, and from poetry to the graphic novel, to name a few). The volume also provides an extensive annotated bibliography summarising existing work within the emergent field of vegan studies.
that Laura Wright calls vegan studies. We have an abundance of texts on vegans and veganism including works of advocacy, literary and popular fiction, film and television, and cookbooks, yet until now, there has been no study that examines the social and cultural discourses shaping our perceptions of veganism as an identity category and social practice.
Ranging widely across contemporary American society and culture, Wright unpacks the loaded category of vegan identity. She examines the mainstream discourse surrounding and connecting animal rights to (or omitting animal rights from) veganism. Her specific focus is on the construction and depiction of the vegan body—both male and female—as a contested site manifest in contemporary works of literature, popular cultural representations, advertising, and new media. At the same time, Wright looks at critical animal studies, human-animal studies, posthumanism, and ecofeminism as theoretical frameworks that inform vegan studies (even as they differ from it).
The vegan body, says Wright, threatens the status quo in terms of what we eat, wear, and purchase—and also in how vegans choose not to participate in many aspects of the mechanisms undergirding mainstream culture. These threats are acutely felt in light of post-9/11 anxieties over American strength and virility. A discourse has emerged that seeks, among other things, to bully veganism out of existence as it is poised to alter the dominant cultural mindset or, conversely, to constitute the vegan body as an idealized paragon of health, beauty, and strength. What better serves veganism is exemplified by Wright’s study: openness, debate, inquiry, and analysis.
Part 1 of this volume, "Materials," identifies secondary materials, including multimedia and Internet resources, that will help instructors guide their students through the contextual and formal complexities of Coetzee's fiction. In part 2, "Approaches," essays discuss how to teach works that are sometimes suspicious of teachers and teaching. The essays aim to help instructors negotiate Coetzee's ironies and allegories in his treatment of human relationships in a changing South Africa and of the shifting connections between human beings and the biosphere.
Laura Wright explores the changes brought by colonialism and globalization as depicted in an array of international works of fiction in four thematically arranged chapters. She looks first at two traditional oral histories retold in modern novels, Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness (South Africa) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Petals of Blood (Kenya), that deal with the potentially devastating effects of development, particularly through deforestation and the replacement of native flora with European varieties. Wright then uses J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (South Africa), Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (India and Canada), and Joy Williams’s The Quick and the Dead (United States) to explore the use of animals as metaphors for subjugated groups of individuals. The third chapter deals with India’s water crisis via Arundhati Roy’s activism and her novel, The God of Small Things. Finally, Wright looks at three novels—Flora Nwapa’s Efuru (Nigeria), Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (New Zealand), and Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (South Africa)—that depict women’s relationships to the land from which they have been dispossessed.
Throughout Wilderness into Civilized Shapes, Wright rearticulates questions about the role of the writer of fiction as environmental activist and spokesperson, the connections between animal ethics and environmental responsibility, and the potential perpetuation of a neocolonial framework founded on western commodification and resource-based imperialism.
This episode of Knowing Animals is brought to you by the Australasian Animal Studies Association and the Animal Publics book series at Sydney University Press.
is more clearly aligned with a desire to escape codification in a society in which apartheid demands strict adherence to racial and gender-based classification. Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s 1969 novel The Edible Woman depicts veganism as the precursor to insanity for Marian, the novel’s female protagonist, who stops eating animals at a moment when she realizes, in the context of her ensuing marriage, their subjectivity as aligned with her own. Zimbabwean novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 Nervous Conditions, the first novel published in English by a Black Zimbabwean woman, tells the story of Tambu, a teenage Shona girl who witnesses the bulimia and subsequent nervous breakdown of her cousin Nyasha. Veganism is never explicit in the novel, but Nyasha’s “nervous condition” is very much a reaction to her unsuccessful attempts to resist “the Englishness” of her education and her meat-heavy diet, which alienates her from a more traditionally plant-based Shona diet. In Kafka’s and Coetzee’s work, men’s starvation is associated with passion, with art, and with the plight of being misunderstood and mistranslated. For the women of Atwood’s and Dangarembga’s novels, on the other hand, veganism is the first step towards mental illness and possibly death for women who feel they have no other option but to starve to avoid inscription within patriarchy. But while Coetzee’s and Dangarembga’s works also underscore these associations, their texts nevertheless complicate and challenge such gendered stereotypes, offering a postcolonial vegan unconscious that offers new and potentially empowering ways of thinking about the revolutionary potential of non-standard diets.
Laura Wright; Introducing Vegan Studies, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, , isx070, https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isx070
My name is Laura Wright, and I am Professor of English Studies at Western Carolina University in North Carolina. My scholarship and teaching have historically focused on postcolonial literatures, specifically the literatures of Nigeria, South Africa, India, and the Pacific Rim. My work has always examined the role of systematic and interconnected oppressions (of women, colonized subjects, animals, and the natural world) in various texts. I have been vegan since 2001, and I was vegetarian before that; I became vegetarian when I started college in 1988. I have written about my journey to veganism (by way of an eating disorder) in Defiant Daughters. I’ll attach that piece for your consideration. The Vegan Studies Project was my third monograph study, and it was the first work that I had written that examined US culture and media. It was published in 2015, and I have since gone on to edit and co-edit three scholarly volumes on vegan studies.
Veganism is a practice that allows for environmentally responsible consumer choices that are viewed, particularly in the West, as oppositional to an economy that is largely dependent upon big agriculture. This groundbreaking collection exposes this disruption, critiques it, and offers a new roadmap for navigating and reimaging popular culture representations on veganism. These essays engage a wide variety of political, historical, and cultural issues, including contemporary political and social circumstances, emergent veganism in Eastern Europe, climate change, and the Syrian refugee crisis, among other topics.
Through a Vegan Studies Lens significantly furthers the conversation of what a vegan studies perspective can be and illustrates why it should be an integral part of cultural studies and critical theory. Vegan studies is inclusive, refusing to ignore the displacement, abuse, and mistreatment of nonhuman animals. It also looks to ignite conversations about cultural oppression
A number of the Open Letter’s signatories have also contributed short companion essays reflecting on a range of questions raised by the pandemic. Together with a broad selection of open-access media resources curated from many sources, these essays open up a rich conversation concerning the present crisis. The essays also explore how Environmental Humanists can come together effectively in this precarious moment to build a community of purpose capable of promoting meaningful, long-term social-ecological change.
The Bifrost COVID-19 special issue is co-authored and co-edited by Steven Hartman, Serpil Opperman, Joni Adamson and Greta Gaard, with curation of selected media by Lea Rekow. It includes additional essays by Kate Rigby, Scott Slovic, David Pellow, Serenella Iovino, Richard Twine and Laura Wright.
The Open Letter co-authored by 41 Environmental Humanists, after many iterations that built on Greta Gaard's initial draft, can be endorsed by readers who support its commitments and principles. These new signatures can be added online, and will be archived publicly with the letter.