This is the second post of the Archival Outliers, Invented Ephemerals in Constructing Environmental Histories series edited by Nuala Proinnseas Caomhánach.

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Sepia, brackish, yellow, gray— the colors of the round and crescent spots that I found on the pages of the periodical Nimnogangeyo Sundarban Sanskriti Potro (The Lower Gangetic Cultural Letters, 2002) (Figure 1). This periodical is located in a local circulating library in the islands of Sundarbans, a tidal archipelago shared between India and Bangladesh and is dated from May 2002 to June 2006. They contain different genres of writing from short stories, essays, poetry, non-fiction writing and personal memoirs on mangroves, fairs, religion, forest-workers. The periodicals were bound together using cloth and cardboard in a way that made it appear as one volume.  The spots on the pages of the periodicals were a source of curiosity to me. What drew my attention to the spots is a scholarly interest in the interconnected histories of print cultures and environmentalism. I am interested in this particular scholarly intersection between print cultures and environmentalism because the material histories of the page is foundational to the insights that contemporary cultures and histories of print can generate about the changing climate today. This article on environmental periodicals is also an invitation to rethink the stakes of doing interdisciplinary research and the need for reform in graduate education during a period of climate change.

The foxed spots were distracting me and as I dove deep into analyzing the spots and reading more into book conservation terminology, I discovered that the pages were foxed. I studied the spots in detail, carefully, to ensure that they were not offset stains from printing or ink bleeding. The pages had been foxed, a process resulting in discoloration and forming of the irregular spots on the page. This realization led me to a series of speculations: What environmental factors may have contributed to the foxing of the pages in just twenty years? Twenty years seemed too short. Could the foxed pages open a methodology for studying environmental change on the pages of the periodicals? Considering that the Sundarbans experience cyclones every year and have seen sea level rise of an average of three centimeters in the last two decades, what stories can the foxed spots tell about the archipelago? Browsing through the pages of the periodicals, it is easy to disregard the spots on the pages and move on. But I found myself sitting with these spots. On one hand, it is challenging to narrate and make space for these foxed spots in my chapter on the Sundarbans for my dissertation, “Ordinary Environments and Aesthetics in Contemporary Indian Ocean Archipelagic Writings” where I write about movement of fish and women in the short stories. And on the other hand, this ephemeral object forced me to sit down and reflect on the importance of outliers in what Nuala Caomhánach calls a “critical register for the field of environmental history.” The foxed spots register –not as evidence but as invitations to scholars to slow down, to truly notice and immerse.

My gratitude to scholars who have paved the way for me to do the work in print cultures, oceanic studies and environmentalism. I am inspired by Indian Ocean Studies scholar Isabel Hofmeyr’s contribution on “dockside reading” as a model of literary criticism that allows for robust reading between authorship, transmission of books/objects and spatiality of water. Dockside reading is a method of reading “printed material as part of port infrastructure” that offered me insights about how to read the environment for its materiality (Dockside Reading, 2022). Marine literature scholar Hester Blum’s work on shipboard newspapers and objects by sailors in the Arctic and Antarctica in the nineteenth century and how the weather conditions, specifically the temperature impacts shipboard objects, provided me sustenance when I started diving deeper into foxing, tidal waters and print scholarship.  Book historian Joshua Calhoun’s work on foxing has shaped how I think about the environment and the materiality on the page( “Book Microbiomes”, 2020). Literary eco-critic Heather Houser’s book Infowhelm (2020) influenced my academic path as I was particularly struck by a sentence about environmental art. Houser stated that  “information in environmental art calls for entangled methodologies, especially close reading of form, genre, and medium that adds dimension to theories of the social and technoscientific sources for environmental crises” (2). While my object of analysis is not environmental art, these foxed pages are not only a response to demonstrating what entangled methodologies look like but also a reconceptualization of what constitutes environmental information or what I call environmental data.

 Environmental data, as I define it, from the perspective of a literary studies scholar is any source of evidence that can be analyzed to generate new insights about the environment. By this definition, foxed spots on the pages of the book are visual data. Foxed spots as visual data can be interpreted to understand and have analytics about the environmental conditions and changes in the archipelago. The foxed spots are neither numerically represented data nor words but the presence of these foxed spots on the pages of these periodicals opens a site where changes in temperature, humidity and organic/non-organic matter in the archipelago can be tracked. As a scholar of print culture, I want to emphasize the interpretative and imaginative modes of scholarship that the discipline enables to actively intervene in conversations around environmental justice.

I engage in an act of speculation when I write that these foxed spots have a capacity to theorize environmental change in the Sundarbans. The foxed spots offer a site to theorize environmental change in the Sundarbans that moves our understanding away from scientific data into literary data. The foxed spots are a measure of time past and a material representation of showing the changes that the archipelago has encountered. I locate the temporality of the foxed spots within a larger conversation about timescales in the periodicals and the climate crisis. I found these periodicals in a small local library on the islands of Sundarban. The run of these periodicals was often intermittent with issues of periodicals missing, which is a ubiquitous feature of many periodicals in South Asia. I track environmental changes across the short stories focusing on the silt and tide in the narratives of the stories, which have distinctive local temporalities. Tide and silt time capture forms of time capture environmental changes in terms of narrative time. However, they occupy different time-scales. Tide-time is an encapsulation of planetary forces and localized shift in time. On the other hand, silt time comes into existence by accumulation of material deposits over a certain period of time. The pastness of time embedded in the foxed spots are also suggestive of the future of the archipelago. How could knowing the history of environmental changes and anthropogenic factors impact future policy decisions about the archipelago? More importantly, I want to emphasize that literary scholars have real stakes and expertise in redirecting and shaping the nature of such conversations on environmental policy. 

Additionally, the foxed spots on the pages of the periodicals enabled me to understand how the literalness of the pages interact with the materiality of the archipelago. I read the foxed spots as a material-metaphoric representation of the archipelago on the printed page. The foxed spots have varying colors-sepia, yellow, gray- tones, textures and occupy different spaces within the periodicals. The foxed spots alter the composition of the paper and the volume of the pages texturally. They are fragmented and disjointed, much like the islands that make up an archipelago. The foxed spots embody the islands of fragments on the pages of the periodicals. The materiality of the tinted spots and the metaphorical islands of the periodicals provide a way to conceptually understand how the archipelago shows up in quotidian and mundane ways. I read the metaphorical and foxed spots as invitations to scholars about the need to shift our lenses of analysis of climate change from the grand to the granular. The ephemerality of periodical publications makes it doubly challenging to register and make the granularity of climate change visible.

The methodological challenges that foxed spots present to me are immense. The challenges of working with ephemeral outliers primarily arise from the wide range of disciplinary training needed to be able to carry out a project on foxing.  On the one hand, recognizing foxing in the periodicals that I am working with is one thing. On the other hand, evaluating what stories the foxed pages can tell about the environment in the archipelago is another. Such a project requires collaboration with climate scientists and my STEM colleagues. The foxed pages need to go through a systematic procedure of laboratory analysis to be able to ascertain the pace of environmental changes and forms in which they show up in material and literary objects. I see this as not only a great opportunity for collaboration with the sciences on conversations around climate change but also how the methods and training in the humanities and literary studies can shift. In turn, such collaborations will make space for scientists to understand the importance of the affordances offered by language and literary studies in theorizing climate studies.

What tools does a literary scholar need to address these questions? Our training in languages, in theorizing and in giving forms and words to ideas shape our approaches to these questions. Building on this training in literary scholarship, we zoom out and be able to integrate useful laboratory methods. Such a method could mean undergoing a scientific analysis of the spots. However, using laboratory methods can be challenging when the pages are already fragile. In the context of print cultures of environmentalism, the training in laboratory methods could include schools and programs embracing a conservatory model of studying environmental humanities. In such a conservatory model of studying print cultures of environments, students are not only trained in how to read foxed pages and books but are also aware that they have to engage with scientific concepts to map environmental change from the brackish spots. Such a conservatory would be home for literary scholars and scientists alike and would require institutional support and funding to support the interdisciplinary nature of collaboration in book history and environmental humanities. 

The challenges of climate change today are different because of the speed at which the changes have begun to become visible for marginalized communities living in the islands. To adequately address the challenges, the ecology of graduate education and training must transform too. Such a reform in graduate training in literary studies needs a holistic curriculum that integrates learning not only the history and culture of material texts but also more collaborative and interdisciplinary inquiry grounded in scientific training of how to analyse material texts. The training could also include how to mobilize the findings from the analysis to advocate for the communities that would be most impacted by such environmental changes. And such forms of advocacy require a slow and sustainable building of ethical relationships– a timescale that the three to five years of graduate school education does not allow for.  I use the foxed spots in the pages of the periodicals that I found in Sundarbans to call for reform in graduate education in relation to climate change. 

The foxed spots are ephemeral outliers that hold the key to telling a story about environmental changes and its renditions on the pages of the periodicals. The phrase “outliers” has multiple connotations: it could mean detachment from the body; located away from the mainstream; in mathematics, an outlier is a value in a data set that is very different from the other values in that set and therefore they stand out. The foxed spots in periodicals that are only twenty years old are unconventional– they do not fit in the recognized narratives about climate change. And therefore, we need to pause and take cognizance of why they are standing out to us now.

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to Professor Ananya Jahanara Kabir for her early insights on how I can think about foxing and the archipelago in relation to each other. I have also benefited from conversations with my favorite book historians and comrades Pritha Mukherjee and Titas Bose.