In his 2009 text entitled Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz describes the political power of art in imagining and reimagining “other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.” Our panel is dedicated to exploring new possibilities of imagining the world and the environment. The panel inquires if these alternative visions of engagement with the world, especially alternative relationships with the environment (or what we have become used to calling ‘nature’) emerge in South Asia's varied and multifarious traditions of poetics and aesthetic ecologies. What aesthetic powers of redescription and reimagination lie buried in these local traditions which are “not yet here” to the notice and attention of the global, dominant discourse on nature? The “not yet here” of the margins! Our panel invites papers from scholars working on the intersections of environment, philosophy, and literature originating in South Asia. We are especially interested in alternative visions of the environment in the poetic, literary, and philosophical voices emerging from South Asia's cultural and material history. The panel aims to study the varied visions of what the environment itself means, what it stands for, and what it represents, in these indigenous traditions. For instance, what the natural world means or how it appears to the eyes (or what narratives it sings in the ears) of a Baul singer from Bengal or a poet from the folk traditions of Pashto music, a street-performer from Punjab, the Warkari Bhakti bards of Maharashtra, and the rich Adivasi traditions across the subcontinent, and how these traditions relate to ethics, the treatment of the Other, the representation of the non-human, the questioning of caste oppression, the performance of love, pluralism and devotion towards the world? Scholars should endeavor to read these voices within the philosophical or conceptual frameworks emic to these traditions. Papers that shed light on the alternative visions to our current ecological crisis will be favored. The focus of analysis need not be only literary texts but can include architectural, visual, material, and theatrical forms of poetics as well. The following pointers can be considered when preparing the abstract:

• Rethinking the category “Ecology” in light of the varied and alternative visions of ‘nature’ in South Asian traditions


• Chronicling conscious and deliberate aesthetic cruising of utopias in relation to the environment in South Asian traditions


• Analyzing poetic, spiritual, and religious eschatologies in ways that offer a critique of social inequalities and violence to the natural order


• The liberatory potential of alternative imaginings of the environment that simultaneously engages with other social issues like those of caste, gender, sexual orientation, etc.