Prismatic Ecology now in print!

by J J Cohen

The FedEx truck dropped off my copy Friday, so now I know it's real. Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond Green is out. Aesthetically it's just ... wow. And the essays in it are (take it from the editor) really something great. Here's what's included:

Foreword
Lawrence Buell
Introduction: Ecology’s Rainbow
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
White
Bernd Herzogenrath
Red
Tobias Menely and Margaret Ronda
Maroon
Lowell Duckert
Pink
Robert McRuer
Orange
Julian Yates
Gold

Graham Harman
Chartreuse
Allan Stoekl
Greener
Vin Nardizzi
Beige
Will Stockton
Brown
Steve Mentz
Blue
Eileen Joy
Violet-Black
Stacy Alaimo
Ultraviolet
Ben Woodard
Grey
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Black
Levi R. Bryant
X-Ray
Timothy Morton
Onword. After Green Ecologies: Prismatic Visions
Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann

Emphasizing sustainability, balance, and the natural, green dominates our thinking about ecology like no other color. What about the catastrophic, the disruptive, the inaccessible, and the excessive? What of the ocean’s turbulence, the fecundity of excrement, the solitude of an iceberg, multihued contaminations? Prismatic Ecology moves beyond the accustomed green readings of ecotheory and maps a colorful world of ecological possibility.

In a series of linked essays that span place, time, and discipline, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen brings together writers who illustrate the vibrant worlds formed by colors. Organized by the structure of a prism, each chapter explores the coming into existence of nonanthropocentric ecologies. “Red” engages sites of animal violence, apocalyptic emergence, and activism; “Maroon” follows the aurora borealis to the far North and beholds in its shimmering alternative modes of world composition; “Chartreuse” is a meditation on postsustainability and possibility within sublime excess; “Grey” is the color of the undead; “Ultraviolet” is a potentially lethal force that opens vistas beyond humanly known nature.

Featuring established and emerging scholars from varying disciplines, this volume presents a collaborative imagining of what a more-than-green ecology offers. While highlighting critical approaches not yet common within ecotheory, the contributions remain diverse and cover a range of topics including materiality, the inhuman, and the agency of objects. By way of color, Cohen guides readers through a reflection of an essentially complex and disordered universe and demonstrates the spectrum as an unfinishable totality, always in excess of what a human perceives.

Read more about the book here! And please consider buying yourself a copy. It's a reasonable price for something with so much within. Only $20 on Amazon.