Chapter 13, “Sacred Dimensions: Death and Burial,” examines burial practices in Constantinople between the fourth century and the fifteenth century. Particular attention is given to aristocratic and imperial burial practice.

Chapter 15, “Philanthropic Institutions,” looks at the range of social services available to Constantinopolitan residents from the fourth century through the fifteenth century. It notes the contributions of monastics to the institution and organization of such institutions as orphanages, hospitals, leprosaria, and old age homes.

This chapter intervenes in ongoing queer ecocritical debates about reproductive futurity by turning to Henry David Thoreau’s engagement with nurse insects and trees. It demonstrates how Thoreau dislocates biological reproduction in both space and time, urging us to attend to a broader range of participants – and a broader range of contributing actions – in our account of the reproductive process. Arguing that such a complex, multispecies understanding of reproduction distinguishes Thoreau from both contemporary environmentalists, whose rhetoric often relies on normative logics of reproductivity, and queer theorists, who often critique such logics, the chapter theorizes an environmental ethic informed by the extant queerness of reproduction itself. In contrast to the contemporary activist organization “Conceivable Future,” which helps women decide whether to have children in a time of climate catastrophe, such a reading of Thoreau offers possibilities for solidarity and social change that customary definitions of reproduction have rendered inconceivable.

Chapter 1, “Before Constantinople,” discusses ancient Byzantion, the town selected as the location for Constantine’s new capital. It explores the site’s strategic value from its earliest settlement in the eighth century BC until the fourth century AD, paying particular attention to the political, military, and economic implications of its relationship to the Bosporos.

For decades, the Environmental Justice movement in the US has been assessing and opposing the ongoing, harmful material legacies of the plantation for people of African descent. Recently, a few scholars have been trying to think with but also beyond the harm paradigm in order to represent the complexity of the past and possibilities for the future. Paramount to this effort is a prying apart of the malevolent human actions which brought and bring about environmental injustices from a nonhuman world which did not, and does not, innately operate on any race-based ideology. A number of visual artists, in particular, are investigating, and using new media to represent, ancestral Black environmental imaginaries. This chapter focuses on one contemporary photographer, Dawoud Bey, who produced a photographic series in 2017, Night Coming Tenderly, Black, in which he visualizes how a fugitive slave might have moved through, and looked at, northern US woods. Bey seems to recognize that to dismantle the naturalized racism that undergirds the US, he must disencumber nature of its white properties and Black bodies of their disastrous associations, as he investigates what it could mean for Black people to watch nature carefully, all the while feeling for its tenderness.

Chapter 14, “The Administration of Constantinople,” examines how the city was governed in the period between the fourth century and the fifteenth century. Particular attention is paid to the organization of the office of the City Prefect or Eparch. Aspects of continuity and change between the early and late city governance are observed.

Chapter 4, “Waters for the Capital: Hydraulic Infrastructure and Use in Byzantine Constantinople,” provides an overview of the history of water supply and distribution to Constantinople, discussing the construction and maintenance of hydraulic infrastructure and its importance in determining the ways in which the city grew and developed.

Chapter 3, “The People of Constantinople,” tracks population numbers across the centuries together with the factors that contributed to growth and decline. It also examines the ethnic and demographic make-up of the capital’s population.

Chapter 19, “Pilgrimage to Constantinople,” examines the emergence of Constantinople as a sacred center of Christian pilgrimage. It outlines the city’s attractions and considers the motives that drove people to visit.

This chapter traces how queer Indigenous poet Tommy Pico (Kumeyaay) has developed a critique of the “Ecological Indian” trope. While this critique begins most obviously in 2017’s Nature Poem – in which Pico boasts that he “would slap a tree across the face” – I show how he extends and refines this impulse in 2018’s Junk. Junk gestures toward dietary colonization – displacement from ancestral lands and the forced adoption of a Eurowestern diet – as a major force behind Indigenous health problems. But the book also satirizes pervasive trends such as urban “foodiesm” and gay men’s obsession with fitness – developments that, at first glance, seem to offer some corrective to those problems, but which ultimately exacerbate them by imagining eating as a matter of individual choice. Further, Pico resists the utopianism of decolonial dietary discourse, in favor of a perverse celebration of junk food. As I explain, the focus on future generations found in decolonial dietary discourse can be co-opted to pathologize “bad” eating habits and even link them to “bad” parenting. I conclude that Pico believes in the projects of dietary decolonization and Indigenous food sovereignty, but not in the affects or sensibilities they seem to require.

Focusing on Claire Vaye Watkins’s novel Gold Fame Citrus (2015), this chapter explores the dialogue between speculative climate change fiction and ecocriticism. Watkins’s narrative itineraries emplot some well-trodden themes, settings, and motifs of climate change fiction that have to some extent characterized the Anthropocene and the literary genre itself: desertification and extreme weather, toxic landscapes, uncontrollable environments, socio-economic and ecological collapse, the disposability of life, the prospect of extinction, and an imperiled future, all of which have been well theorized in ecocritical discourses. This chapter argues that the novel’s narration of climate change and the Anthropocene reads as theoretically informed, and, as such, anticipates (indeed provokes) its own paradigmatic theorization. What might be provoked in particular by navigating this generic terrain are theories of “reproductive futurism,” nonhuman agency, and scalarity, and, along with them, the opportunity to reflect critically on the limits and possibilities of the theory of climate change fiction, thereby revealing Watkins’s work as a form of meta-critical fiction. What emerges from this novelistic self-reflexivity are ecocritical complicities in the Anthropocene’s reification and histories of environmentally mediated violence and injustice, and the anthropogenesis of environmental catastrophe, otherwise screened by theory.