
Everyday Ecofascism
Crisis and Consumption in American Literature
A timely look into how fascist ideas permeate contemporary culture well beyond the far right
Details
Everyday Ecofascism
Crisis and Consumption in American Literature
ISBN: 9781517918682
Publication date: May 6th, 2025
296 Pages
8 x 5
"Everyday Ecofascism boldly exposes the numerous, yet insidiously subtle, narratives in contemporary culture that foster ecofascist ideologies. But perhaps more importantly, Alexander Menrisky also showcases powerful counternarratives that can shape more just futures. This is bracing, timely, and vital work."—Nicole Seymour, author of Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age
"Alexander Menrisky’s vital and moving book attunes readers to the widely used and yet highly contested term ecofascism. He offers an original perspective on the convergence of environmental crisis and political violence, illuminating the quotidian roles of storytelling and genre in these processes."—Teresa Shewry, author of Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature
A timely look into how fascist ideas permeate contemporary culture well beyond the far right
As challenges posed by climate change have intensified in the twenty-first century, right-wing figures in the United States and abroad have increasingly framed anti-immigrant, anti-Indigenous, and white-supremacist sentiments in terms of environmental survival. Everyday Ecofascism explores the insidious nature of this tendency, revealing how permutations of these perspectives in fact resonate across the political spectrum. Drawing on comparative studies of fascism writ large, Alexander Menrisky demonstrates that ecofascism is best understood not as a uniquely right-wing ideology but as a political genre that reinforces white supremacy and other forms of domination.
Presenting a view of fascism as a complex power network that plays out on scales both large and small, Menrisky shows how extremist sentiments have crept into everyday language, stories, and ideas. Through a literary and cultural studies lens, he illuminates ecofascism’s narrative patterns and their easy permeation of environmentalist discourses, from back-to-the-land movements to the resurgence of psychedelic drugs, food localism, and pandemic politics. Opposite his analysis of ecofascism in action, Menrisky sheds important light on narrative resistances to dominant conceptions of race, nation, and territory by Native, queer, and women-of-color writers who have countered ethnonationalism for generations.
Bridging past and present, Menrisky powerfully nails down the emergent concept of ecofascism and forms a basis for understanding phenomena like Covid-19, ecological utopianism, and psychedelic environmentalism that detangles ecofascist tendencies from justice-oriented visions of place-based belonging.
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Alexander Menrisky is assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is author of Wild Abandon: American Literature and the Identity Politics of Ecology.
Contents
Introduction. Everyday Ecofascism: Environmentalist Storytelling and Its Threshold Objects
1. Land: Entitlement to Environment across Settler-Colonial History and Partisan Lines
Interlude I
2. Tools: Circumscriptions of Territory across the Communalist Counterculture and Its Markets
3. Food: Naturalizations of Self and Strength in Appalachia's Extracted Landscapes and Culinary Literatures
Interlude II
4. Drugs: Purifications of Mind, Body, and Earth in Contemporary Psychedelia and Its Prophecies
5. Contagion: Inheritance of a Purified Earth in Viral Politics and Apocalyptic Visions
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index