As of 2016, there are a recorded three million “documented” Filipinx migrants to countries all over the world. These growing numbers, increasing every year, have reflected the constantly changing landscape of the Filipinx identity - one that arguably has not yet been mapped with certainty due to years of oppression, colonisation, and, now, globalisation. These migrant Filipinx are often subjected to hardships and stereotypes that are perpetrated not only by their host countries, but also their fellow countrymen as well, which renders a major part of their experiences as a migrant “invisible.” Thus, this paper challenges the preconceived notions of a migrant Filipinx via the “homes” they have remapped on new landscapes within and beyond the country. I argue that Filipinx migrants are creating new “routes and roots” that are both fostering a new Filipinx identity and steering back to the Filipinx identity as they navigate their ways onto new landscapes. Using Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s critique of “tidalectics,” which foregrounds “a dynamic method of geography that can elucidate island history and cultural production to provide frameworks that explore the complex and shifting entanglement between sea and land, diaspora and indigeneity, and routes and roots,” I aim to analyse an ecopoem each from Merlinda Bobis and Charlie Samuya Veric that both complicate the geographies of a Filipinx migrant. My hope is that in doing so, the multiplicities of landscapes that the Filipinx migrant experiences are amalgamated in a new environmental culture  that is seen as an integral part of being a Filipinx - one that is not anymore solely centred on the homeland but recognises the possibilities of a new and innovative perspective to energise the current local and global environmental discourse.

Empire and Environment argues that histories of imperialism, colonialism, militarism, and global capitalism are integral to understanding environmental violence in the transpacific region. The collection draws its rationale from the imbrication of imperialism and global environmental crisis, but its inspiration from the ecological work of activists, artists, and intellectuals across the transpacific region. Taking a postcolonial, ecocritical approach to confronting ecological ruin in an age of ecological crises and environmental catastrophes on a global scale, the collection demonstrates how Asian North American, Asian diasporic, and Indigenous Pacific Island cultural expressions critique a de-historicized sense of place, attachment, and belonging. In addition to its thirteen chapters from scholars who span the Pacific, each part of this volume begins with a poem by Craig Santos Perez. The volume also features a foreword by Macarena Gómez-Barris and an afterword by Priscilla Wald.

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Click here for the University of Michigan Press website.

"The concept of race and, relatedly, e-Race-sures, is physical and material. These concepts signal a general de-valuing (past and present) of certain communities and their ways of knowing about/exercising larger-than-human relations. Simply put, there are consequential e-Race-sures in the ways of knowing and imagining that happen in creative artistic fields and educational institutions and/or disciplines dealing with “the environment.” There are also stories of human mastery and exceptionalism over IBPOC communities that are at the heart of environmental issues, where such communities have been rendered less-than- human, closer to a similarly devalued “nature” and thus, more disposable. “Place” as a concept in the environmental humanities is also problematic as this concept, at times, exceptionalizes frontier mythologies and white-settler narratives/belonging over Indigenous ways of living and being in land-based relations. Further, there are also binaries of wild/tamed, north/south, and rural/urban (among others) that homogenize complex environmental and racial issues that form the layers sedimented in key ecocritical terms.

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As emerging scholars and also as creators, we have felt these e-Race-sures in our doctoral programs and previous educational experiences, in institutional work, in conferences, and in many artistic and creative spaces that centre environmentalisms. More than that, we are also experiencing e-Race-sures in our daily lives as we are constantly hailed and/or interpellated to remediate the monolithic hegemony of the communities we find ourselves in."

The essays, most of which are written by emerging scholars, concentrate on aspects of poetic form and style: the distinctive use of the pronoun “I” in The Dyzgraphxst, the tercet and the villanelle, the placement of words on the page, titles, and punctuation. As the essays insist, such elements are laden with significance in Lubrin’s poetry and demand consideration. In taking up the question of how to read the poems carefully and conscientiously, the responses here suggest that ostensible difficulty affords opportunities for creative interpretation, both in the classroom and on the critic’s page.

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- Nicholas Bradley, "I in an Own Place: Reading the Poetry of Canisia Lubrin"

I A Richards was one of the progenitors of practical criticism and close reading of literature. One of the failings, or ‘difficulties’, he identified in readers was a belief that poetic form could have effects independent of the semantic content of the poem. We review examples of support for what it calls ‘the myth of motivated form’ in ecopoetics alongside critiques of this view. We undertake close readings of two poems in which form and content are indissociable, and conclude with an argument for the importance of close reading within the eco-literacy curriculum.

Toward a Migrant Ecocriticism is a proposal for a critical lens that predominantly uses postcolonial ecocriticism and ecocosmopolitanism to address the new environmental cultures constructed out of the visible and invisible migrancies brought about by social, political, economical, and environmental causes. Recent catastrophes like the almost total wipeout of Tacloban City by Super Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines and the devastating wildfires in British Columbia, Canada have resulted in humanitarian crises that have forced the movement of migrants from area to area; thus, this lens aims to shed light on these situations of precarity and instability via a chiasmic organization of disaster ecopoetry from Canada and the Philippines. It also attempts to interrogate colonial systems within these two countries, as well as the imperial debris that tie their ruins and ruinations together. A Migrant Ecocriticism seeks to ask questions such as: What can the migrant’s point of view allow us to see in today’s global human and non-human environmental crises? This framework proposes to answer such questions by comparing ecopoetry from both countries to analyse these marginalised points of view: a poet, a migrant, a survivor.

Binabalikan ng papel ang mga alaala ng may-akda ng kanyang kabataan at ilang pagbisita sa Marinduque upang pag-aralan ang naganap na sakunang pagtagas ng lason ng minahan sa Ilog Boac dala ng mga gawang pagmimina ng Marcopper Mining Corporation. Susuriin ng papel ang mga hangganan ng postkolonyal na ekokritisismo at eko-kosmopolitanismo upang makahanap ng angkop na balangkas teoretikal na maaaring magamit para sa isang ekokritika na lumalampas sa mga hangganang pambansa at estado, upang harapin ang mga usapin ng katarungang panlipunan at pangkalikasan nang lampas pa sa pagkakakilanlang nakabatay sa lugar tungo sa kritika ng mga hangganan. Nakapaloob ang papel sa balangkas ng pag-unawa na nagmumula sa personal na karanasang diasporiko ng may-akda, partikular sa ugnayan ng Canada at Pilipinas, na hindi naman talaga nakabatay sa kolonyal na kasaysayan ang ugnayan, kundi sa ideolohiya ng globalisasyon. (Isinalin ni Alvin B. Yapan.)

Often described as "resilient," the Philippines has weathered storm after storm in its archipelago of roughly seven thousand islands. Every year, as lives are devastated by the almost quarterly onslaught of natural disasters, the solutions to sustaining the Philippine environment may not be in its people's "resilience," but in a paradigm shift that can be ignited through the ecological literacy of Philippine ecopoetry. Using selected ecopoems from the first anthology of Philippine ecopoetry entitled "Sustaining the Archipelago," this paper will interrogate how these ecopoems are defining and redefining what an archipelago is in local literature through the concept of "living limestones." Here, the archipelagic landscape of the Philippines will be mapped out through its poetry, and will be used in the attempt to answer the following questions: First, what is life in an archipelago? Second, what is the ecological literacy of the archipelago's ecopoetry? Third, what can living in an archipelago teach the world about sustainability? In doing so, ecopoetry contributes to democratizing literature not only for human beings, but for all species here and everywhere else.