Cheryl J. Fish

About

Cheryl J. Fish’s first scholarly book was Black and White Women’s Travel Narratives: Antebellum Explorations and she had many publications on African-American and women’s travel writing in the nineteenth century and edited an anthology with Farah Griffin, A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing before she started to publish in the field of environmental justice humanities, climate change, and artivism. Her essay “The Toxic Body Politic: Ethnicity, Gender and Corrective Ecojustice in Ruth Ozeki’s and Daniel B. Gold’s My Year of Meats and Judith Helfand’s Blue Vinyl,” appearing in an issue of MELUS on Ethnicity and Ecocriticism, edited by Scott Slovic and Joni Adamson, won the 2009 Florence Howe Award for best essay in English from the Women’s Caucus of the MLA. Her essay “Place, Emotion and Environmental Justice in Harlem: June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s 1965 ‘Architextural’ collaboration,” in a special issue on Race, Environment, and Representation in the journal Discourse has been widely influential in establishing June Jordan as significant African-American advocate for making powerful connections between race and environmental and social justice. Fish also published an essay on teaching in The MLA’s Approaches to Teaching North American Environmental Literature; her essay on Representations of “Environmental Terrorism” in Direct-Action Protest in U.S. Literature and Law, was published in Finnish in the first collection of Finnish Eco-criticism, Äänekäs kevät. Fish is a poet, fiction writer, single mom and is an adjunct lecturer at University of Helsinki.

In 2007, she was a Fulbright professor at University of Tampere, Finland, and since then she has written and lectured on the significance of ecomedia by indigenous Sami filmmakers, photographers, and art collectives with a focus on critical responses to mining and extraction in the Arctic Sami areas that threaten Sami culture.

Department and Climate Courses

English 320 – Environmental Literature and Film 

This is a class that will focus on a variety of timely and historical environmental and social justice issues related to sustainability at the local, national, and global levels. Students will read essays, fiction, and poetry that establish the field of ecocriticism, then draw on readings and films that have expanded ecocriticism to include environmental justice, urban nature and we shall view films on themes related to the readings. 

English 101 and English 100.5

A unit on Food Justice, Food deserts, food systems in the United States through readings, films, and videos, and requires students to research a topic such as environmental racism, factory farms versus smaller, local farms, or how what we eat is related to climate change.

Climate Research

Fish is researching artistic activism, or artivism, and its relationship to resistance to climate change, mining, extraction, and fossil fuel dependancy. She has written about the Indigenous Sami Collective, Suohpanterror, and also connecting artistic poster-making and cultural jamming to historical global activist art that examines connections between settler-colonialism, extractivism, and racism—Fish plans to include Black Lives Matter murals and posters as well as consider art collectives in the U.S. and Latin America to examine how they challenge violations of human rights. She is also interested in the questions of when activism about climate change and environmental degradation become curated in museums. A blog post contains some of the basic ideas: “Indigenous Art Collectives: Environmental/Social Justice Protests Through Artvism and Direct-Action Protest” February 7, 2020. http://enviro-history.com/artivism

Fish is also a poet and fiction writer. Her poetry book, CRATER & TOWER, examines trauma and healing focused on environmental and habitat destruction at Mount St. Helens Volcanic eruption, and the aftermath of terrorist attack on The World Trade Center. Her book of poems and photos, THE SAUNA IS FULL OF MAIDS, celebrates Finnish sauna culture, the natural world, and friendships.

Research Citations

Guest Blog post, Environmental History blog: “Indigenous Art Collectives: Environmental/Social Justice Protests Through Artvism and Direct-Action Protest”  February 7, 2020. http://enviro-history.com/artivismc

“Liselotte Wajstedt’s Kiruna: Space Road (Kiruna— Rymdvägen): Experimental Ecocinema as Elegiac Memoir in ‘Extractivist’ Sápmi.” Journal of Scandinavian Cinema,Vol. 8, No. 2. 2018. Special Issue on Ecocritical approaches to Scandinavian Visual Media. Edited by Linda Rugg, Salma Monani, and Christopher Oscarson. P.111-122.

“Extractivism’ in Sápmi.: Elegiac Ecojustice in Liselotte Wajstedt’s Film Kiruna Space Road and Marja Helander’s Silence Photographs.” In Nordic Narratives of Nature and the Environment. Ecocritical Approaches to Northern European Literatures and Cultures. Eds. Reinhard Hennig, Anna-Karin Jonasson, and Peter Degerman. Lexington Books, 2018: 208-228.

“Lost and Found: Liselotte Wadjstedt’s ‘The Lost One,’ essay on installation and film by Sami artist, Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden: Avtryck Fran Ovan-Landet: Contemporary Art from Sapmi,” 2017: 51-60.

“Surveilliance & the Self: Two Sami Filmmakers Explore Indigenous & Personal Sovereignty Across Borderlands,” in Critical Norths: Space, Nature, Theory. Eds. Kevin Maier and Sarah Jaquette Ray. Anchorage: University of Alaska Press, 2017: 237-252.

Review Essay, on African-American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow. By Gary Totten. Oxford University Press, ALH Online Review, Series VIII, 2016.

“Sami Filmmakers Explore National, Environmental and Personal Sovereignty,” in Rivers to Cross: Sami Land Use and the Human Dimension. Eds. Peter Sköld & Krister Stoor. Umeå, Sweden: Umeå University Press, 2013.

“Place, Emotion and Environmental Justice in Harlem: June Jordan and Buckminster Fuller’s 1965 ‘Architextural’ collaboration,” special issue on Race, Environment and Representation, Discourse, Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. 29.2&3. 2009 Wayne State University Press: 330-345.

“The Toxic Body Politic: Ethnicity, Gender and Corrective Ecojustice in Ruth Ozeki’s and Daniel B. Gold’s My Year of Meats and Judith Helfand’s Blue Vinyl.” Special Issue of MELUS on Ethnicity and Ecocriticism. Edited by Scott Slovic and Joni Adamson. Vol. 34, Number 2. Summer 2009: 43-62. (Winner of 2009 Florence Howe Award for best essay in English, Women’s Caucus of the MLA)

“Environmental Justice in Literature and Film” in Approaches to Teaching North American Environmental Literatures. Eds Laird Christensen et al. New York: Modern Language Association, 2008: 294-305.