The way we imagine, represent, and signify the relations between empire and environment significantly shapes contemporary discourses on climate change, development, and globalization. Colonial and neoliberal legacies produce a “combined and uneven development” of the world system, resulting in hierarchies of metropolitan and peripheral relations. The elemental composition of environments (such as air, water, soil, and fire) in literary and cultural forms maps the intensification of these uneven relations under the capitalist mode of production. Jason Moore argues that the economy and environment are not independent of each other and posits that capitalism is a way of organizing nature (2015). The imagination and portrayal of environmental elemental constitution in literary and cultural forms map this spatial organization. Yet, we continue to witness a distinction being made between “natural” and built landscapes in their representations. 

Drawing on such conversations, this panel focuses on how elemental compositions register the tensions of spatial transformation and consolidation of place-making. In the postcolonial context, Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee notes that toxicity of elements emerges as a key motif in ecocritical readings of the environment (2010). Along with the metaphors of pollution and contamination, the paradigms of defining the aesthetics of elementary constitution of places are constantly negotiated in local and global mediascapes. Therefore, the panel will engage with contemporary (post-1950s) debates on how form and genre articulate the anxieties of development and globalization at a local and planetary scale. 

The panel invites papers on the following themes and adjacent fields of interest: 

• Elementary constitution (including but not restricted to air, water, soil, fire) in the construction and representation of place in literary and cultural forms 

• Articulation of lived realities and spatial identities in fictional imagination 

• Utopian and dystopian imagination of place in literary and cultural forms 

• Representation of place through signs, symbols, metaphors, and allegories  

• Plurality of scales in the imagination and reception of place in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction 

• Symbolic, cultural, and imaginative geography of elements in place-making 

• Environmental justice and ecological resistance movements through literary and cultural interventions