Boyden, Michael 2026 This review essay interrogates the conceptual foundations of sustainability dis- course by examining three recent monographs in American literary studies: Michelle Neely’s Against Sustainability (2020), Abby Goode’s Agrotopias (2022), and Mary Kuhn’s The Garden Politic (2023). While contemporary sustainability rhetoric is often dismissed as co-opted by corporate and institutional interests, these studies collectively seek to recover alternative genealogies of sustainable thought rooted in early and nineteenth-century American literature. Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual history, the essay situates sustainability alongside other mod- ern collective singulars—abstract, future-oriented terms such as progress and history—to reveal its ideological valences and vulnerability to politicization. Through their distinct yet intersect- ing analyses of sustainability, agrarianism, and botany, Neely, Goode, and Kuhn expose how environmental imaginaries in the American tradition have been entwined with racialized, gendered, and class-based hierarchies, while also recuperating counterdiscourses grounded in reciprocity, minimalism, and collectivity. The essay foregrounds these authors’ shared turn toward Indigenous studies as a vital framework for reorienting sustainability politics. By engag- ing Indigenous epistemologies that emphasize relationality and embodied knowledge, they challenge the liberal individualism underlying mainstream environmental thought. Yet the essay also cautions that Indigeneity, like sustainability itself, might come to function as a Kosel- leckian collective singular—an inherently ambiguous, globally circulating category that risks idealization even as it offers transformative critique. Ultimately, the essay proposes a renewed historical ontology attentive to insights from Indigenous studies as a means of reinvigorating the political potential of sustainability discourse. application/pdf https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/336466 https://folia.unifr.ch/documents/336466/files/465boyden_0.pdf eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1215/22011919-12383906 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/issn/2201-1919 info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess CC BY-NC-ND Environmental Humanities. - Duke University Press. - 2026, vol. 18, no. 2, p. 465-478 sustainability discourse Indigeneity historical semantics American literature info:eu-repo/classification/udc/82 Indigenous Sustainabilities as Analytic and Identity http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501