Unfenceable: Ecofascism, Literary Genre, and Native American Environmental Justice
April Anson (Assistant Professor, English & Social and Critical Inquiry, UConn)
with a response by Kathleen Tonry (English, UConn)
Wednesday, April 1, 2026, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)
The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.
Dr. Anson will be discussing her book-in-progress, tentatively titled Unfenceable: Ecofascism, Literary Genre, and Indigenous American Environmental Justice, forthcoming with University of Minnesota Press. Unfenceable traces today’s rise of ecofascist climate rhetoric to a long tradition of American ecofascist storytelling while also unearthing resistance strategies in Indigenous American authors infrequently studied, especially in relation to environmental issues. Anson analyzes 19th C American ecofascist fictions as a literary tradition that clarifies the blood and soil logic uniting stages of settler capitalism. Most importantly, she shows that Native American tribal specificity, sovereignty, and literary production have been and continue to be crucial to environmental concerns. In nineteenth-century America, as in today, Unfencable finds ecofascism lurks in the stories we tell and our individual places within, and responsibility for, systems of oppression. Ultimately, Anson argues that the realities of climate change demand reckoning with the politics of literary genre and prioritizing land return.
Dr. April Anson is an assistant professor of English and Social and Critical Inquiry and the 2025-26 Justice, Equity and Repair Fellow at the University of Connecticut’s Humanities Institute. She is also current co-president of the Association for Literature and the Environment, with Dr. Alex Menrisky. Dr. Anson works in the environmental humanities, American studies, and Native American and Indigenous studies. Her current book project uses literary analysis to trace the historical and ongoing relationship between climate change, white supremacy, and American environmental thought as well as the Indigenous American environmental justice traditions that eclipse those relations. Examples of her public-facing work include “No One is a Virus,” Against the Ecofascist Creep, and “Water Justice and Technology.” Her scholarship has appeared in boundary 2, Resilience, American Quarterly, Environmental History, Western American Literature, and more.
Kathleen Tonry is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. Her work focuses on the history of the premodern book, and especially on the intertwined transitions in literary and material textual histories that took place over the fifteenth century. She has published on forms of history-writing, the place of leisure, and on the formal tensions evident in writing across the fifteenth century. Her work has won an NEH grant and the Beatrice White prize, and in 2023, she was a Visiting Scholar with Harvard’s Medieval Studies Program. Her current monograph project, Books, Labor, and Time: Experiments and Ambitions in Premodern English Texts, foregrounds the preoccupation with temporality among book readers and makers over the course of the fifteenth century.
Access note
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