Indigenous Sustainabilities as Analytic and Identity
BCU-LLM
- Boyden, Michael ORCID Department of English, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
- 2026
Published in:
- Environmental Humanities. - Duke University Press. - 2026, vol. 18, no. 2, p. 465-478
English
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.
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.
- Faculty
- Faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines
- Department
- Département d'anglais
- Language
-
- English
- Classification
- Literature
- License
-
CC BY-NC-ND
- Open access status
- gold
- Identifiers
-
- DOI 10.1215/22011919-12383906
- ISSN 2201-1919
- Persistent URL
- https://folia.unifr.ch/unifr/documents/336466
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