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A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History. Edited by Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009. 304 pages. $60.00 (cloth). $29.95 (paper).
Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian. Edited by Michael E. Harkin and David Rich Lewis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 370 pages. $24.95 (paper).
Since the late 1970s, first-wave environmentalism-from the Sierra Club and Earth Day to ecofeminism, deep ecology, and EarthFirst!-has been roundly and righteously criticized as romantic ideology, religio-spiritual irrationality, and recreational escapism. Some of the sharpest critics have been in literary and cultural studies. Working in the vein of anticolonialist and poststructuralist semiotics, cultural critics of the 1980s and '90s argued that "nature" (like "woman" or "wilderness") was the culturally constructed phantasm of historically contingent sign systems, or the ideological "reality effect" of social domination under capitalism. At the same time, on another side of the culture wars, critics in the social sciences attacked the myths and symbols of romantic environmentalism on empirical grounds. Rejecting poststructuralist cultural studies, discourse analysis, and new historicism, data-centered anthropologists and historians took comfort in the disciplinary boundaries set by what Bruno Latour calls "factish" argument,1 grounded in actual, rather than constructed, evidence.
The two essay collections reviewed here both confront, to very different ends, the 1990s critiques of environmentalist cultural politics as romantic ideology. In the environmental humanities, A Keener Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History extends and challenges the cultural studies critique of "wilderness," as summarized by environmental historian William Cronon in his 1995 essay "The Trouble with Wilderness or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature."2 In the environmental social sciences, Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian revisits and deepens the late 1990s controversy over Shepherd Krech III's highly effective, empiricist attack on the romantic myth of the inherently "ecological" behavior of American Indians, in The Ecological Indian, Myth and History (1999).3
With "ecocritical" in the title and a foreword by literary scholar Lawrence Buell, A Keener Perception initially identifies itself with the environmental turn in American literary studies. But Braddock and Irmscher's remarkable foray into art historical ecocriticism goes well beyond the precedence of literary criticism to find itself in more uneven, and more definitively...