Selected Scholarly Writing
Environmental justice/literary historian Cheryl J. Fish’s work on June Jordan as transformative writer/architect
Cheryl J. Fish did extensive research in June Jordan’s and Buckminster Fuller’s archives to establish their long correspondence, friendship and collaborations. ➔
“The Toxic Body Politic: Ethnicity, Gender, and Corrective Eco-Justice in Ruth Ozeki's My Year of Meats and Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold's Blue Vinyl” (critical essay)
An article from MELUS (Vol. 34, No. 2) 2009: 43-62 Available on Oxford Academic and JStor. Winner of the 2009 Florence Howe Award from the Women's Caucus of the Modern Language Association for best feminist essay in English.
Cheryl J. Fish's essay "‘Extractivism’ in Sápmi.: Elegiac Ecojustice in Liselotte Wajstedt’s Film ‘Kiruna Space Road’ and Marja Helander’s ‘Silence’ Photographs" appears in the collection Nordic Narratives of Nature and the Environment.
Fish examines film and photographs by two Sami artists as a response to extractive industry practices and state/corporate storylines in the northern Fennoscandia region, known as Sápmi (which include parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula of Russia). What techniques and provocations call into question the human-nature relationship and how do indigenous artists represent self and community within the field of ecological inquiry?
Black and White Women's Travel Narratives: Antebellum Explorations
By Cheryl J. Fish
University Press of Florida, 2004
Cheryl J. Fish argues that the concept of mobility offers a significant paradigm for reading literature of the United States and the Americas in the antebellum period, particularly for women writers of the African diaspora. Charting journeys across nations and literary traditions, she examines works by three undervalued writers—Mary Seacole, an Afro-Jamaican; Nancy Prince, an African American from Boston; and Margaret Fuller, a white New Englander and Transcendentalist--in whose lives mobility, travel literature, and benevolent work all converge.
A Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African-American Travel Writing
Edited by Cheryl J. Fish and Farah J. Griffin
Beacon Press, 1999
This anthology documents two centuries of writing by African-Americans who have traveled abroad in search of new opportunities, political insight, pleasure, and adventure. Includes work by James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Matthew Henson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Ntozake Shange, and more.
[A Stranger in the Village] will explode any lingering notions that travel writing is a white writer's game.
– Bob Sipchen, Los Angeles Times
"[A] remarkable anthology."
Victoria Valentine, Emerge
"An intelligent, authoritative collection for anyone interested in travel writing, memoirs, or African-American history."
– Condé Nast Traveler
"[James] Baldwin's astute observation that 'this world is white no longer, and it will never be white again,' could not be more obvious in this collection."
– The Miami Herald
"A thinking person's travel anthology."
– Chicago Sun-Times
Cheryl J. Fish contributed an essay, ““Environmental Justice in Literature and Film” to this MLA anthology.
Teaching North American Environmental Literature
by Laird Christensen (Editor), Mark C. Long (Editor), Frederick O. Waage (Editor)
Modern Language Association (January 1, 2008)
The essays in this volume focus on North American environmental writing, presenting teachers with background on environmental justice issues, ecocriticism, and ecofeminism. Contributors consider the various disciplines that have shaped the field, including African American, American Indian, Canadian, and Chicana/o literature. The interdisciplinary approaches recommended treat the theme of predators in literature, ecology and ethics, conservation, and film. A focus on place-based literature explores how students can physically engage with the environment as they study literature. The volume closes with an annotated resource guide organized by subject matter.