Vulnerable Earth: The Literature of Climate Crisis 

A book on Vulnerable Earth: The Literature of Climate Crisis by Prof. Pramod K Nayar, faculty in Department of English at University of Hyderabad (UoH) has been recently published by the Cambridge University Press.

Prof. Pramod K Nayar

Vulnerable Earth is a study of the literature of the climate crisis. Building on the assumption that the crisis is planetary in scope even if differential and unequal in effects, it examines literary fiction, graphic novels, memoirs about toxic wastes and neo-slavery narratives, mostly from the contemporary decades, but touching upon select antecedents as well, and from all over the world. The study covers texts that fictionalize a ‘hydrocrisis’, those that are concerned with species extinction and experimental solutions such as rewilding, fiction and memoirs that are interested in exploring the conversations between and across species in multispecies encounters and, finally, texts that show the linkage between social justice and environmental justice. Focusing on aesthetics, narrative modes and constructions of damaged, wasted and at-risk worlds, this book shows how the literature of climate crisis foregrounds a feature that humans and nonhumans, the living and the non-living share, differentially, with the planet: vulnerability.

Pramod Nayar, winner of the Visitor’s Award for Best Research in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences from the Hon’ble President of India (2018) holds the UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies, a ‘teaching and research’ unit as defined by UNESCO (https://ucvulnerabilitystudies.uohyd.ac.in).

He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the English Association, and his most recent books include Nuclear Cultures (New York: Routledge 2023), Life/Writing (Orient BlackSwan 2023) and the edited 6-volume The Imperial Archives (Bloomsbury 2022-23). With Anna Kurian of the Department of English, Nayar has put together the world’s first OER for Indian Writing in English (https://indianwritinginenglish.uohyd.ac.in), a project under the (Institution of Eminence) IoE project.