Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Law
Speculative Constitutions In Ursula K. Le Guin’S Hainish Cycle And The Rights Of Nature, Ted Hamilton
Speculative Constitutions In Ursula K. Le Guin’S Hainish Cycle And The Rights Of Nature, Ted Hamilton
Faculty Journal Articles
This paper examines two speculative examinations of humanity as a unified species and agent of ecological change: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle and the rights of nature movement. Le Guin’s Cycle imagines the slow interplanetary reintegration of human polities against a backdrop of cultural and environmental difference. I read the novels of the Cycle as an allegory for the rights of nature movement, which seeks to synthesize traditional and modern knowledge in a legal solution to ecological crisis. Both discourses, I argue, productively imagine a new historical understanding of humanity’s place on Earth, but they provide a weak theory …
The Dream Of Property: Law And Environment In William T. Vollmann’S Dying Grass And Leslie Marmon Silko’S Almanac Of The Dead, Ted Hamilton
The Dream Of Property: Law And Environment In William T. Vollmann’S Dying Grass And Leslie Marmon Silko’S Almanac Of The Dead, Ted Hamilton
Faculty Journal Articles
This article describes how the law inflects the narration of environmental conflict in William T. Vollmann’s Dying Grass (2015) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991). By focusing on the legal common sense of settler colonialism—its emphasis on private property in land and its subjugation of Indigenous peoples to the guardianship of the state—the article explores the ways in which Vollmann’s and Silko’s novels present counternarratives to the law’s story of justified conquest. Combining a law and literature approach with ecocriticism, this article highlights the importance of the legal imagination in defining human-land relations in the United States. …