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The special issue titled Ecologies of Life and Death in the Anthropocene examines a multifaceted notion of ecology: life and death involve numerous entities, processes and relationalities that cannot be analyzed separately. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of environmental humanities, blue humanities, continental philosophy, arts and film studies, this special issue explores life and death eco-imaginaries and entanglements of the human and non-human world, highlighting an eco-ontology that exposes these entanglements where ethical territories of eco-grief and eco-mourning are unfolded.
This special issue is structured in three main axes: articles that study existential aspects of death and life in the Anthropocene and are apt to environmental approaches concerning the intricate relationship between death and life in water narratives, articles that focus on how to deal with eco-grief through the literary and artistic conceptualization of the ecologies of life and death, and articles that shed light on alternative ecologies of life and death beyond the Anthropocene and the western discourses.
The discussion about various narratives of ecologies of life and death moves across boundaries, considering that all research fields involve forms of expression that somehow ‘disrupt’ entrenched patterns while at the same time ‘revealing’ their contingency and opening the discussion about life and death, ‘(un)settling’ dominant grief imaginaries and ‘mobilizing’ different sensibilities for the humans and non-humans.

Table of contents:

ECOLOGIES OF LIFE AND DEATH IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Editorial
Peggy Karpouzou, Nikoleta Zampaki

Existentialism and the Anthropocene: An Appraisal of Two Humanisms
Rahul Pillai

Bataille’s Laughter: Comedy, Irony, or Wonder?
Examining Ecstasy as an Anthropocentric Limit
Rachel Holmes

Slimy Fertility: Lagoons and Climate Change
Simon Estok

Blue Death Studies: Theorising the Water-Corpse Interface
Jesse Peterson, Sarah Bezan, Kate Falconer

The Ongoing Grief of Boglands
Re-Interpreting Ecological Grief with Lessons in Sympoiesis and Wetland Ecology
Moss Berke

The Price of Extinction and the Epic Journey to Mourn Beyond the Human in Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker
María Torres Romero

Loss, Grief and Planetary Literacy in Informational Picturebooks for Children
Rosy-Triantafyllia Angelaki

“I Can’t Control It”: Lila Avilés’s Feature Films as Environmental Mourning
Kevin Anzzolin

Mourning the Mounted: An Analysis of the Taxidermy Exhibition Dead Animals with a Story
Robin Jiskoot

Slow Violence, Sacrifice, and Survival: Environmental Catastrophe as (Eco)Feminist Freedom in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
Holly Nelson

Seeing beyond the Anthropocene with Joyce and Beckett
Michael Kane

Narrative Agency and Storied Becomings in Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves
Andrea Ruthven

Life, Death and Sustainability through Indigenous Literature
An Ecocritical Study of Selected Works from Northeast India
Sayan Mazumder

Beyond Life and Death: Humanistic Care of Eco-Arts in China
Xintian Liu