Whiteness and future environmentalism in J.M. Coetzee'sDisgrace(1999)

By critically examining “whiteness” and the interconnectedness between human and nonhuman agencies in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, I highlight a possibility of a future of environmentalism in forms of an ethics of ecological diversity that aims to maintain multispecies interconnectedness and encourage multispecies considerateness. My analysis here examines literary tropes associated with multispecies and employs the future as a crucial dimension, anticipating it as an alternative that makes us aware of our own role in generating our lives. The future marks the potential of literature to widen human visions in making sense of the past while imagining what may become. This future emerges in forms of an environmentalism that connects responsibility and attentiveness to experience of the self and the other. As a result, this future environmentalism reveals literature's ability to raise socio-environmental dilemmas through its engagement with the past.