Coal lives: Body, work and memory among Italian miners in Wallonia, Belgium

This chapter explores the link between environmental history and migration studies by analyzing the case of Italian miners in Wallonia after World War II. Employing an Environmental Humanities approach, we use novels and poems to analyze the ecological shift operated by the capitalistic organization of coal extraction and how this affected the socio-environmental structure of the Walloon landscape and its relationship with the people who inhabited it. We aim to demonstrate how workers’ bodies are a key element of the interaction between nature and society, constituting a vantage point to access subaltern ecologies.