- sarahbezan.com
Sarah Bezan
University College Cork, School of English and Digital Humanities, Faculty Member
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University of Manitoba, Institute for the Humanities, Department MemberThe University of Sheffield, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Post-DocUniversity of York, English and Related Literature, Post-Doc add
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English Literature, Film Studies, Material Culture Studies, Critical Posthumanism, Thanatology - Death Studies, Waste Aesthetics, and 28 moreENGLISH CULTURAL STUDIES, Space and Place, Ecology, Contemporary Art, Death Studies, Animal Ethics, Death & Dying (Thanatology), Environmental Humanities, Thanatology, Animals in Literature, Thanatopolitics, Death, Continental Philosophy, Animal Studies, Ecocriticism, Posthumanism, New Materialisms, Human-Animal Studies, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Critical Animal Studies, New Materialism, Environmental Philosophy, Anthropocene, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, English and cultural studies, Object Oriented Ontology, and Akira Mizuta Lippit edit
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I am Lecturer in Literature and the Environment in the Radical Humanities Lab and School of English & Digital Humanit... moreI am Lecturer in Literature and the Environment in the Radical Humanities Lab and School of English & Digital Humanities at University College Cork.
In my first book, Dead Darwin: Necro-Ecologies in Neo-Victorian Culture (forthcoming with Manchester University Press), I examine how twentieth and twenty-first century authors and artists reimagine Darwin's thinking on decompositional processes through the necro-ecological agency of earthworms, snails, corals, fish, and fungi. I am also at work on a second monograph on species revivalist representations of the woolly mammoth, dodo, great auk, thylacine, Steller's sea cow, and Pinta island tortoise. My third book project (under advance contract with Reaktion) explores the “next natures” of the biotechnologically revived woolly mammoth (or “mammophant”). My research on these projects combines approaches to animal studies, science and technology studies (STS), ecofeminism, extinction studies, and Darwinist/evolutionary literary studies.
I am a co-editor of several volumes and special issues. This includes a special issue on "Taxidermic Forms and Fictions" with Susan McHugh for Configurations: Journal of Literature Science, and Technology and two edited volumes, including Animal Remains with Robert McKay (Routledge's Perspectives on the Nonhuman in Literature and Culture Series 2022) and Seeing Animals After Derrida with James Tink (Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series 2018). I have also recently published a special issue on "Sex and Nature in the Anthropocene" with Ina Linge (Environmental Humanities) and a special issue on "Interdisciplinary Coastal Humanities" with Rich Gorman and James Smith (Anthropocenes: Human, Inhuman, Posthuman).
In 2020, I founded the Cultures of Species Revivalism Research Group, a research network dedicated to examining approaches to de-extinction science from across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. For more information, visit https://www.sarahbezan.com/culturesofspeciesrevival.
Previous:
Postdoctoral Research Associate (2020-2022), The University of York's Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity/Department of English
Honorary Research Fellow (2020-2023) at The University of Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre
British Academy Newton International Fellow, University of Sheffield (2018-2020)
Killam Predoctoral Laureate Scholar, University of Alberta (2015-2017)
Visiting PhD Student, University of Cambridge (Autumn 2015)
SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholar, University of Alberta (2012-2015)
For more information, visit: https://www.sarahbezan.com edit
This is an interview conducted with Astrida Neimanis, Canada Research Chair of Feminist Environmental Humanities at University of British Columbia, Okanagan. It examines the "hydro-feminist" turn in critical theory and its... more
This is an interview conducted with Astrida Neimanis, Canada Research Chair of Feminist Environmental Humanities at University of British Columbia, Okanagan. It examines the "hydro-feminist" turn in critical theory and its potential value for thinking about coastline encounters. Neimanis also comments on critical-creative practices, critiques of the Anthropocene, and how the environmental and blue humanities will meet the demands of environmental crisis.
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A prehistoric ichthyosaur cast in plastic resin lies disembowelled on a pile of sand and seaweed at American artist Mark Dion's Microcosmographia exhibition at the South London Gallery in 2005 (Figure I.1). 1 The remains of this animal's... more
A prehistoric ichthyosaur cast in plastic resin lies disembowelled on a pile of sand and seaweed at American artist Mark Dion's Microcosmographia exhibition at the South London Gallery in 2005 (Figure I.1). 1 The remains of this animal's stomach-comprising specimen jars and beakers, wash basins and wooden wheels, scientific reference manuals, antique oil lamps, and other paraphernalia one would expect to find on a nineteenth-century natural-scientific voyage-spill out in a jumbled heap. As a commentary on the worrisome metabolic relation between animal life, taxonomic systematization within the natural sciences, and the material processes that sustain it, Ichthyosaurus (2003) is characteristic of Dion's zoo-archaeological artistic practice, which features the presentation of
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Combining the elemental, the vegetal, and the animal, Steensen reorients the perspective of VR viewers toward a speculative treatment of ecological augmentation in its various forms: as a technological process (through VR), a... more
Combining the elemental, the vegetal, and the animal, Steensen reorients the perspective of VR viewers toward a speculative treatment of ecological augmentation in its various forms: as a technological process (through VR), a conservational practice (also known as rewilding), and a prosthetic engagement with natural environments (though the tool use of the Hawaiian crow). The experience of bewilderment -- as both an ecological emotion and a spatial (dis)orientation) directs the viewer’s attention toward the ‘alalā’s diminishing habitat as a space that harbours the fledgling remainders of its ecological functioning as well as the apparitional presence of its corporeal form. Revealing the extent to which all species are deeply enmeshed with other species and with their unique habitats, Steensen’s VR film is based on the idea that rewilding “spawns a new reality in which time and ecological conditions are warped.” Entering into the affective and cognitive realm of bewilderment, the Hawaiian crow of Re-Wildling is portrayed as a node of co-becoming across species lines, imagining novel worlds that viewers can appreciate through the postural change in perspective that is afforded by the digitally mediated storyworlds of VR.
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The very first animals on earth are absent from the fossil record. Undulating through oxygen-rich Cambrian waters nearly 600 million years ago, these original multicellular organisms were small, soft, and mutable forms that after death... more
The very first animals on earth are absent from the fossil record. Undulating through oxygen-rich Cambrian waters nearly 600 million years ago, these original multicellular organisms were small, soft, and mutable forms that after death disappeared forever, mixed into the muck and silt of the ocean floor. That they lived and died is a matter of retroactive inference, evidenced only by their evolutionary successors-fan-shaped brachiopods, antennaed and multilegged arthropods, and the like-that share their basic body plans. To trace the forms and structures of these bodies, and every other body since, is to assemble a unifying picture of the fossil record, drawing fragmentary remainders from the periphery to the centre of a narrative of development. Animal bones and fossils are integral to our understanding of the emergence of the human animal on an evolutionary timescale, but they also demonstrate the extent to which incomplete records can remind us of the bodies that hide in plain sight, along with those that are lost from the records altogether. Indeed, the remainders of animal bodies are arguably the substrate of narrative itself, plotted into forms that are invariably filled with and shaped by the impressions of life. These absent presences are of central concern to what I call the "ossiferous fictions" of eminent Canadian women writers Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields. In my analysis of Atwood's Life Before Man (1979) and Shields's The
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Edited by Valérie Bienvenue and Nicholas Chare
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Edited by Danielle Sands
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This article explores the representation of anthropogenic extinction in Harri Kallio’s The Dodo and Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters. Making a case for the symbolic logic of extinction imaginaries (developed from Lewis Carroll’s... more
This article explores the representation of anthropogenic extinction in Harri Kallio’s The Dodo and Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters. Making a case for the symbolic logic of extinction imaginaries (developed from Lewis Carroll’s literary and mathematical writings and from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense), I argue that Kallio’s creative practice reanimates animal atopias: the placeless places of extinct animals. In returning the extinct dodo bird (Raphus cucullatus) to its original habitat on the island of Mauritius, Kallio’s project furthermore serves as a case study for the expressive postures of extinction, which make the systemic phenomena of extinction both thinkable and figurable in Kallio’s extinction imaginary.
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In their creative and collaborative response to the de-extinction of the Woolly Mammoth, speculative artists are guided by a paleo-imaginary impulse that structures our cultural fascination with reversing the negative impacts of... more
In their creative and collaborative response to the de-extinction of the Woolly Mammoth, speculative artists are guided by a paleo-imaginary impulse that structures our cultural fascination with reversing the negative impacts of Anthropogenic change. Lisel Shlock’s “Back from the Dead” illustration (commissioned for the cover of the Autumn 2013 issue of Earth Island Journal) imaginatively depicts the reconstruction of the Woolly Mammoth with a series of levers, ladders, scaffolds, cranes, and red rope by lab-coated scientists, while her supporting piece for the issue features a burgeoning petri-dish of extinct species. Both illustrations visualize a controversial set of ethical and political questions that surround de-extinction science, the crux of which appears more explicitly on the April 2013 issue of National Geographic. Bearing the image of a woolly mammoth spilling from a laboratory beaker, the cover contains a caption with an enigmatic question: “We can, but should we?”.
Other images of species revivalism are plentiful. Signalling a politics of consumption, Emma Conley’s “De-extinction Deli” includes a mammoth hashed with a cross-section of meat cuts, while Raul Martin depicts ATV-mounted biologists at Pleistocene Park voyeuristically gazing at mammoths through binoculars. Elsewhere, woolly mammoths are breaking through museum dioramas and through walls of permafrost. Portraying the temporal combustion of the past and future that de-extinction science elicits, these images reconfigure the aesthetics of co-existence that once subtended parietal art (such as the Cave of the hundred mammoths in Rouffignac, France), but which today juxtapose a prehistoric past with an Anthropogenic future.
These images exemplify an aesthetics of speculation that functions to materially graph or “suture” together what Elizabeth Povinelli describes as “various modes of existence” in speculative philosophy (Geontologies 58). Elaborating on Povinelli’s claims about geontopower and biopower in relation to the speculative art and science of de-extinction, I argue that these visual cultures retrace the fault lines of Anthropocene Studies today, which critiques the narrative of human exceptionalism that is at the heart of these debates, and which also perpetuates a cult of “cool” candidates for extinction according to a rubric of flagship species. Drawing on speculative philosophy (Quentin Meillassoux’s arche-fossil, Timothy Morton’s hyperobject, and W.J.T. Mitchell’s palaeontology of the screen), this article examines how collaborations between speculative artists and scientists working in de-extinction science together renegotiate the political and ethical dimensions of an aesthetics of speculation.
Other images of species revivalism are plentiful. Signalling a politics of consumption, Emma Conley’s “De-extinction Deli” includes a mammoth hashed with a cross-section of meat cuts, while Raul Martin depicts ATV-mounted biologists at Pleistocene Park voyeuristically gazing at mammoths through binoculars. Elsewhere, woolly mammoths are breaking through museum dioramas and through walls of permafrost. Portraying the temporal combustion of the past and future that de-extinction science elicits, these images reconfigure the aesthetics of co-existence that once subtended parietal art (such as the Cave of the hundred mammoths in Rouffignac, France), but which today juxtapose a prehistoric past with an Anthropogenic future.
These images exemplify an aesthetics of speculation that functions to materially graph or “suture” together what Elizabeth Povinelli describes as “various modes of existence” in speculative philosophy (Geontologies 58). Elaborating on Povinelli’s claims about geontopower and biopower in relation to the speculative art and science of de-extinction, I argue that these visual cultures retrace the fault lines of Anthropocene Studies today, which critiques the narrative of human exceptionalism that is at the heart of these debates, and which also perpetuates a cult of “cool” candidates for extinction according to a rubric of flagship species. Drawing on speculative philosophy (Quentin Meillassoux’s arche-fossil, Timothy Morton’s hyperobject, and W.J.T. Mitchell’s palaeontology of the screen), this article examines how collaborations between speculative artists and scientists working in de-extinction science together renegotiate the political and ethical dimensions of an aesthetics of speculation.
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Co-Edited by Sarah Bezan and Susan McHugh, Johns Hopkins University Press
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Providing a closer examination of the more unconventional aspects of Crace’s fiction, I argue in this chapter that The Devil’s Larder serves as a magical-realist manual for interpreting the interventions and agencies of food and flesh.... more
Providing a closer examination of the more unconventional aspects of Crace’s fiction, I argue in this chapter that The Devil’s Larder serves as a magical-realist manual for interpreting the interventions and agencies of food and flesh. The guiding principle of Crace’s novel is digestive upset: in each of its courses, the appearance of strange meals produces effects (illness, death, transfers of energy and biomass) and affects (empathy, curiosity, and especially disgust) that lead to the collapse of the natural order of things — particularly of the hierarchical relationship between predator and prey, eater and eaten. I offer a posthumanist critique of these unusual effects and affects, arguing that Crace’s alimentary materialism endows edible matter with characteristics of mutability and agentiality that become the basis for challenging the homo culinaris (the anthropological idea that “to cook is to be human”). In crossing the barriers of taste, Crace’s sensuous book utilizes disgust as an affective mode to rethink nonhuman and edible objects and environments.
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As a creative experiment that harnesses its power in and through natural systems (ecologies) and across a wide range of organisms (zoologies), Collis and Scott’s collection is best described as a jointly ecopoetic and zoopoetic project.... more
As a creative experiment that harnesses its power in and through natural systems (ecologies) and across a wide range of organisms (zoologies), Collis and Scott’s collection is best described as a jointly ecopoetic and zoopoetic project. Furthermore, this chapter argues that the synergy between text, worm, and dirt in Collis and Scott’s poetic practice ought to be understood as reflective of an evolutionary process that is constituted by the continuous and creative composition and decomposition of the codes of organic life in their situated environments. Collis and Scott’s reconstituted poetry responds to the biological and geological aspects of the Origin by re-reading and re-writing Darwin’s theory of evolution as an expression of life that flows both between bodies and across milieus. By creatively de-composing the Origin according to the principles of natural selection and adaptation (inspired by the material-discursive encounters between hominid and annelid), Collis and Scott’s decomp broadens the scope of our understanding of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and offers a new way of thinking about the intersection of species and ecologies in poetic and scientific texts.
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Advancing a renewed critique of deep time in Derrida's thought, and further identifying the fossil as a site of common ground between the linguistic and material turns, this chapter examines how Csotonyi's hyper-realistic paleoart... more
Advancing a renewed critique of deep time in Derrida's thought, and further identifying the fossil as a site of common ground between the linguistic and material turns, this chapter examines how Csotonyi's hyper-realistic paleoart formally subverts the primacy of human vision and enables a critique of anteriority. By utilizing immersive and embedded perspectives, indiscernible foregrounds, shifting frames, and expansive scales, Csotonyi carefully composes an image of the paleontological object that tests - and even embraces - the limits of what is possible to validate through human perception. While Csotonyi's illustrations acknowledge the recency of the human along with its intimate entanglement in the ongoing and perpetual production of the history of life on earth, they are also a representation of the past that is conceived in and through the productive tension that exists between what is known and what can be imagined. Moreover, Csotonyi's paleoart is self-reflexive in its utilization of the visual form, marking a departure from the conventions of what has traditionally subtended the practice of paleontological illustration over the past century. Unlike the majority of paleoart, which largely exhibits prehistoric animals as fixed and definitive prototypes of evolution in its ascent to the supposed supremacy of the human, Csotonyi's illustrations promote a circumspect awareness of the deep anthropocentrism that is inherent to any representation of geological time that blindly idealizes "Nature" as an abstraction of that which falls within the human field of vision. In its self-reflexive critique of the ocular mode, Csotonyi's work troubles the notion that the human wields an unmediated, stable, or superior point of view of primordial life.
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While modernist literary representations of death and the dissolution of the modern subject are often signaled by the breakdown of language, Jim Crace’s Being Dead (1999) situates the decomposition of the corpse at the forefront of the... more
While modernist literary representations of death and the dissolution of the modern subject are often signaled by the breakdown of language, Jim Crace’s Being Dead (1999) situates the decomposition of the corpse at the forefront of the human’s un-becoming. Laying upon the beach of Baritone Bay, the bodies of two zoologists, Joseph and Celise, are host to a number of tiny micro-organisms, bacteria, vermin, and sea creatures that come into intimate proximity with their putrefying and decaying flesh. Through their participation in the decomposition of Joseph and Celise, these non-human creatures initiate a lively animacy that incites the demarcation (and dissolution) of the bounds of animal and human, life and death, object and subject. As active, subjective-objective participants in their own putrid mortifications, the corpses of Joseph and Celise are necro-ecological organisms: vibrant, organic, and vital, their bodies enact an enlivened post-mortem “subjectivity” that enables life to go on after death.
The possibility for a post-mortem “subjectivity” arises from Donna Haraway’s contention that the living body is itself a site of multiplicitous, proliferating interactions with non-human animals. For Haraway, the flesh is a “material-semiotic node” (When Species Meet 4) that is home to the “bacteria, fungi, protists, and such,” that constitute ninety-percent of the human genome (4). Calling into question the unity and self-sameness of human flesh, Haraway suggests that “to be one is always to become with many” (4). So in life, as in death: the living body and the putrefying corpse are both sites of metamorphosis and cross-species interaction.
Thus, in exploring the necro-ecological as a mode that represents death as an active and intimate process of human-animal participations, I argue that the corpse opens up new ways of thinking through the mechanisms of becoming and being dead. In considering how we might understand the ontological category of “being” dead, I draw from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who suggests that flesh is an ontological “fold” (Phenomenology of Perception 250) that produces emergent and contingent relations with animate and inanimate matter. A burgeoning locus point for the convergence of organic life, the corpse unravels humanist notions of selfhood, language, and rationality. Since Joseph and Celise are powerless to specify and name the creatures that take up residence in their bodies, they are effectively unseated as the sole proprietors, and propagators, of natural scientific discourse, zoology, and taxonomy. As such, Being Dead productively illustrates the capacity of dead flesh to destabilize the notion of the human through the generation and articulation of inter-corporeal and inter-subjective experience. Exerting pressure on the fields of critical animal studies, post-humanism, and new materialism, Crace’s novel re-imagines human and non-human post-mortality, and suggests that to be dead is to be an active participant in vital, organic (de)compositions.
The possibility for a post-mortem “subjectivity” arises from Donna Haraway’s contention that the living body is itself a site of multiplicitous, proliferating interactions with non-human animals. For Haraway, the flesh is a “material-semiotic node” (When Species Meet 4) that is home to the “bacteria, fungi, protists, and such,” that constitute ninety-percent of the human genome (4). Calling into question the unity and self-sameness of human flesh, Haraway suggests that “to be one is always to become with many” (4). So in life, as in death: the living body and the putrefying corpse are both sites of metamorphosis and cross-species interaction.
Thus, in exploring the necro-ecological as a mode that represents death as an active and intimate process of human-animal participations, I argue that the corpse opens up new ways of thinking through the mechanisms of becoming and being dead. In considering how we might understand the ontological category of “being” dead, I draw from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who suggests that flesh is an ontological “fold” (Phenomenology of Perception 250) that produces emergent and contingent relations with animate and inanimate matter. A burgeoning locus point for the convergence of organic life, the corpse unravels humanist notions of selfhood, language, and rationality. Since Joseph and Celise are powerless to specify and name the creatures that take up residence in their bodies, they are effectively unseated as the sole proprietors, and propagators, of natural scientific discourse, zoology, and taxonomy. As such, Being Dead productively illustrates the capacity of dead flesh to destabilize the notion of the human through the generation and articulation of inter-corporeal and inter-subjective experience. Exerting pressure on the fields of critical animal studies, post-humanism, and new materialism, Crace’s novel re-imagines human and non-human post-mortality, and suggests that to be dead is to be an active participant in vital, organic (de)compositions.
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Proceeding from Judith Butler’s evocative suggestion that unsettling the matter of bodies initiates “new ways for bodies to matter” (Bodies That Matter), this paper investigates the material reality and ethical implications of animal and... more
Proceeding from Judith Butler’s evocative suggestion that unsettling the matter of bodies initiates “new ways for bodies to matter” (Bodies That Matter), this paper investigates the material reality and ethical implications of animal and human death, taking the corpse/carcass as a dramatic site of rupture. While a number of anthropocentric projects from Linnaeus to Descartes have attempted to consolidate the matter of animal-human relations into a cohesive epistemology that emphasizes the alterity of animality, this study regards Death itself as the ultimate Other, and suggests that it is upon the recognition of our shared mortality that an ethical foundation is formed.
Through an examination of the history of veterinary medicine, the carnivalesque corpse and the practice of public dissection, along with an analysis of artistic productions by Janieta Eyre, Damien Hirst, and Gunther Von Hagen (Body Worlds), I argue that the ontological “unsettling” of the corpse/carcass opens up a productive space in which the plurality of being is understood.
Through an examination of the history of veterinary medicine, the carnivalesque corpse and the practice of public dissection, along with an analysis of artistic productions by Janieta Eyre, Damien Hirst, and Gunther Von Hagen (Body Worlds), I argue that the ontological “unsettling” of the corpse/carcass opens up a productive space in which the plurality of being is understood.
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Forged in the scorching flames of chemical fires, Animal’s People is a harrowing fictionalization of the Bhopal disaster of 1984 – a catastrophe deemed the “Hiroshima of the chemical industry.” From the twisted, smelted spine of the... more
Forged in the scorching flames of chemical fires, Animal’s People is a harrowing fictionalization of the Bhopal disaster of 1984 – a catastrophe deemed the “Hiroshima of the chemical industry.” From the twisted, smelted spine of the four-legged narrator, Animal, to the Khaufpurians’s burning thirst for justice against the Kampani, images of fire and intolerable heat serve as a searing indictment of corporate negligence and the project of neoliberal globalization. With alchemic power, Animal’s People transmutes the sweltering pain of “That Night” (the Bhopal disaster) into a cathartic narrative of spiritual and cultural transformation – a process within which identity categories (Khaufpurian/American, human/animal, rich/poor) are transformed and metamorphosized.
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Proceeding from Meg Samuelson’s contention that the rendering of the female form by African writers has been reduced to a self-contained, abstracted symbol of national fantasy, this paper investigates how the social and political... more
Proceeding from Meg Samuelson’s contention that the rendering of the female form by African writers has been reduced to a self-contained, abstracted symbol of national fantasy, this paper investigates how the social and political realities of masculine shame and desire are framed as “structures of feeling” that continue to problematically shift the burden of colonial residues, shifting masculinities, and the conflict arising from post-apartheid democratisation onto the female form. In a comparative reading of raped and prostituted women in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Futhi Ntshingila’s Shameless, I argue that feelings of masculine shame and disgrace are at once avowed and disavowed, creating a system of anxious masculine desire and fantasy that positions the female body as a receptacle of shame and desire, which results in a failure to productively negotiate colonial trauma or the political and social pressures that are the cause of such feelings.
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“I am a compost-ist, not a posthuman-ist: we are all compost, not posthuman.” —Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene” Contemporary ethical paradigms borne out of a divisive framework have, over the past two decades of Animal Studies... more
“I am a compost-ist, not a posthuman-ist: we are all compost, not posthuman.”
—Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene”
Contemporary ethical paradigms borne out of a divisive framework have, over the past two decades of Animal Studies Scholarship, fostered a productive critique of meat-eating culture across the globe, from Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital to Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat. Yet such scholarship has yet to explore the intersections between animal, human, and vegetable edibility. In this presentation, I argue that Jim Crace’s novel, The Devil’s Larder, offers a compelling fictionalization of the edibility of human, animal, and vegetable bodies. From an 83-year-old man who produces woody root vegetable polyps in his bowel that are later grown in his doctor’s garden, to a professor who serves his study group a stew of leather (assembled from a child’s school satchel, a calfskin handbag, and a half-dozen leather belts), Crace’s novel makes a case for the indistinguishability of flesh. In The Devil’s Larder, readers are prompted to consider an alternative ethical paradigm of edibility. Advocating for an intersectional reading of edible bodies, I read Crace’s novel through the lens of a compost ethic (in which all organic matter embarks on a return to its earthy origins). As such, I argue that this innovative novel makes it possible to consider the vital and nutritive capacity of all organic matter. Exploring an ethics of enclosure (in the compost-earth) rather than of exposure (in a divisive frame), I treat death and digestion as the basis for a regenerative and intersectional inter-species relationship with embodied edibility.
—Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene”
Contemporary ethical paradigms borne out of a divisive framework have, over the past two decades of Animal Studies Scholarship, fostered a productive critique of meat-eating culture across the globe, from Nicole Shukin’s Animal Capital to Carol J. Adams’s The Sexual Politics of Meat. Yet such scholarship has yet to explore the intersections between animal, human, and vegetable edibility. In this presentation, I argue that Jim Crace’s novel, The Devil’s Larder, offers a compelling fictionalization of the edibility of human, animal, and vegetable bodies. From an 83-year-old man who produces woody root vegetable polyps in his bowel that are later grown in his doctor’s garden, to a professor who serves his study group a stew of leather (assembled from a child’s school satchel, a calfskin handbag, and a half-dozen leather belts), Crace’s novel makes a case for the indistinguishability of flesh. In The Devil’s Larder, readers are prompted to consider an alternative ethical paradigm of edibility. Advocating for an intersectional reading of edible bodies, I read Crace’s novel through the lens of a compost ethic (in which all organic matter embarks on a return to its earthy origins). As such, I argue that this innovative novel makes it possible to consider the vital and nutritive capacity of all organic matter. Exploring an ethics of enclosure (in the compost-earth) rather than of exposure (in a divisive frame), I treat death and digestion as the basis for a regenerative and intersectional inter-species relationship with embodied edibility.
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This presentation makes a case for the vital cartography of corals in the underwater sculptures of British artist Jason de Caires Taylor. In Taylor’s artistic productions, corals are the witnesses of the earliest origins of life as well... more
This presentation makes a case for the vital cartography of corals in the underwater sculptures of British artist Jason de Caires Taylor. In Taylor’s artistic productions, corals are the witnesses of the earliest origins of life as well as the prescient visionaries of ecological collapse in the unfolding era of the anthropocene. Situating Taylor’s sculptures in relation to Charles Darwin’s own obsession with the vital, world-making capacity of corals in The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, I argue that Darwin’s thinking reverberates as a exemplary case study in geo-vitalist philosophy.
Creatively reinterpreting Darwin’s geo-vitalist framework, Taylor’s ecological-artistic project positions corals as the emblem par excellence of the anthropocene. By marking the advancement and recession of reef structures on the seabed off the coasts of France, Mexico, and The Canary Islands, the vital cartography of corals in Taylor’s work exemplifies the capacity of life and death processes to shape the foundations of the earth across deep time and into an uncertain future. Taylor’s project thereby serves as a creative ethical response to the impending crisis of the anthropocene by literally re-creating reefs upon the decaying matter of the human form. In creating a new ecosystem, Taylor’s sculptures respond to the problems of mass coral bleaching and to the risks of recreational scuba diving in and around fragile barrier reef structures. Furthermore, by anticipating and affirming the decomposition of the human form in an era of increasing environmental uncertainty, Taylor’s project demonstrates how Darwin’s geo-vitalist thinking enables both scientists and artists alike to attend to today’s environmental crises.
Creatively reinterpreting Darwin’s geo-vitalist framework, Taylor’s ecological-artistic project positions corals as the emblem par excellence of the anthropocene. By marking the advancement and recession of reef structures on the seabed off the coasts of France, Mexico, and The Canary Islands, the vital cartography of corals in Taylor’s work exemplifies the capacity of life and death processes to shape the foundations of the earth across deep time and into an uncertain future. Taylor’s project thereby serves as a creative ethical response to the impending crisis of the anthropocene by literally re-creating reefs upon the decaying matter of the human form. In creating a new ecosystem, Taylor’s sculptures respond to the problems of mass coral bleaching and to the risks of recreational scuba diving in and around fragile barrier reef structures. Furthermore, by anticipating and affirming the decomposition of the human form in an era of increasing environmental uncertainty, Taylor’s project demonstrates how Darwin’s geo-vitalist thinking enables both scientists and artists alike to attend to today’s environmental crises.
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Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s poetry collection, decomp (2013), is an innovative project that creatively renders new poetic forms out of the worm-eaten and water-logged pages of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Lodged... more
Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s poetry collection, decomp (2013), is an innovative project that creatively renders new poetic forms out of the worm-eaten and water-logged pages of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Lodged in between granite boulders on mountaintops and buried beneath the fermenting layers of vegetation on the forest floor in British Columbia, Canada for a calendar year, Darwin’s rotting corpus becomes the site for a synergistic partnership between annelid and hominid. Unearthing alliances between poet, worm, and the biogeoclimatic zones of British Columbia, Collis and Scott recast the poet as a collaborative composer and an equal partner to the lively worm. In Collis and Scott’s creative vision, human and non-human animal entities — and the wider ecosystem itself — are “unit[s] of composition” (decomp 132) in the earth’s natural historical record.
As they collaborate with the worm in its natural environment, Collis and Scott showcase the autopoetic self-disclosures that are made possible by the commingling of human and non-human agents. In short, Collis and Scott’s poetry project offers a groundbreaking case study of the non-anthropocentric creation of text. Enacting both a zoopoetics and an ecopoetics, Collis and Scott inaugurate a creative methodology that begins with the human’s “bioegalitarian” (Braidotti 2009) relationship to the earth’s vital, material, and creative forces.
By imagining the creative (de)compositions of the worm and other decomposers on the earth, I argue that poets like Collis and Scott incite new ways of thinking about the generative production of matter and meaning in the earth’s narrative. Along with decomp, my doctoral thesis calls attention to Darwin’s insight in On the Origin of Species that the story of evolution is replete with “missing chapters” due to the death and decomposition of organisms who leave little or no trace in the fossil record. Affirming the capacity of decomposers to make and unmake the “book” of the earth, I investigate how contemporary poets, filmmakers, and artists are working to unravel the anthropocentric narrative of natural history in favour of a collaborative partnership between all living and dead organisms on the earth.
As they collaborate with the worm in its natural environment, Collis and Scott showcase the autopoetic self-disclosures that are made possible by the commingling of human and non-human agents. In short, Collis and Scott’s poetry project offers a groundbreaking case study of the non-anthropocentric creation of text. Enacting both a zoopoetics and an ecopoetics, Collis and Scott inaugurate a creative methodology that begins with the human’s “bioegalitarian” (Braidotti 2009) relationship to the earth’s vital, material, and creative forces.
By imagining the creative (de)compositions of the worm and other decomposers on the earth, I argue that poets like Collis and Scott incite new ways of thinking about the generative production of matter and meaning in the earth’s narrative. Along with decomp, my doctoral thesis calls attention to Darwin’s insight in On the Origin of Species that the story of evolution is replete with “missing chapters” due to the death and decomposition of organisms who leave little or no trace in the fossil record. Affirming the capacity of decomposers to make and unmake the “book” of the earth, I investigate how contemporary poets, filmmakers, and artists are working to unravel the anthropocentric narrative of natural history in favour of a collaborative partnership between all living and dead organisms on the earth.
Research Interests:
A crumbling menagerie of taxidermic specimens populate the pages of contemporary novels by Yann Martel, Kate Mosse, Lydia Millet, and Alissa York. Beyond merely an allegory of the Holocaust, Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil (2010) and its... more
A crumbling menagerie of taxidermic specimens populate the pages of contemporary novels by Yann Martel, Kate Mosse, Lydia Millet, and Alissa York. Beyond merely an allegory of the Holocaust, Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil (2010) and its titular taxidermic specimens (a donkey and a monkey) deconstruct what it means to become dehumanized, stuffed, and made into a preserved relic of loss. Similarly, Mosse’s gothic tale, The Taxidermist’s Daughter (2014) features a collection of avian specimens that darkly portray the depths of human depravation, and York’s historical fiction, Effigy (2007), negotiates human memory and privation through the creation and collection of dead and stuffed wildlife. Finally, as a robust meditation on endangered and extinct species, dead lovers and a reclaimed natural history collection of fossils, bones, and taxidermy animals, Lydia Millet’s Magnificence (2013) dwells upon the lively persistence of the already dead in an increasingly perilous age of environmental collapse and devastation. Ruminating on the significance of being a “final” animal, or the last of one’s kind, and interpreting the intersection of the human and nonhuman animal through these mouldering collections of taxidermic specimens, I argue that these novels exhort their readers to interpret the deaths of others as a foreshadowing of the collapse of one’s own species and way of life on the earth, and ultimately of the collapse of the human itself.
In my reading of these novels by Martel, Mosse, Millet, and York, I elaborate on the work of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Deleuze and Guattari in order to explore posthumanism’s concerns with survival, dehumanization, materiality, and embodiment. Furthermore, my paper will consider how the return to organic matter (as a culmination of the death drive) might inspire new possibilities for thinking through the durability of post-mortem remains and the politics of their persistence in literary representations of taxidermy.
In my reading of these novels by Martel, Mosse, Millet, and York, I elaborate on the work of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Deleuze and Guattari in order to explore posthumanism’s concerns with survival, dehumanization, materiality, and embodiment. Furthermore, my paper will consider how the return to organic matter (as a culmination of the death drive) might inspire new possibilities for thinking through the durability of post-mortem remains and the politics of their persistence in literary representations of taxidermy.
Research Interests:
In Darwin’s Worms, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips argues that Darwin’s final book on the earthworm (1881) is “obsessed by burial,” “counter-elegaic,” and representative of a kind of “secular after-life: the life of the world that continues... more
In Darwin’s Worms, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips argues that Darwin’s final book on the earthworm (1881) is “obsessed by burial,” “counter-elegaic,” and representative of a kind of “secular after-life: the life of the world that continues after one’s own death.” Imagining such a world - the world of being dead, of decomposition and reconstitution beyond the scope of an overseer - leads us to consider how natural history presumes the reliability of the postmortem organism (fossil, skeleton, etc) as a stable source of knowledge and an impervious record of the history of species adaptation, evolution, and extinction.
But how does an encounter with what Jessica Mordsley calls the “terrifying, faceless, nameless long-dead animal other” create productive possibilities for thinking and un-thinking the constitution of the human and non-human animal in natural science? How, indeed, can we pinpoint the origin of humanity when the nonhuman animal remains entangled in the play of traces that is embedded within the DNA ancestry of every species? And how does recognizing the inter-connection of living and dead organisms - for example, the action of the worm on a decaying leaf - fortify an alternative view of the earth, or “world”?
As I argue, Darwin’s notion that the earth is reconstituted and re-created through the digestive action of the earthworm leads to the view that the natural world exists in deep time, where organisms, whether living or dead, remain in a continuous state of change. Thus, in advancing a postmortem reading of natural history, this paper examines how Darwin’s later work on earthworms conceptualizes an alternative view of the world that emphasizes its capacity to recompose, disassemble and recreate itself through continual death and decomposition.
But how does an encounter with what Jessica Mordsley calls the “terrifying, faceless, nameless long-dead animal other” create productive possibilities for thinking and un-thinking the constitution of the human and non-human animal in natural science? How, indeed, can we pinpoint the origin of humanity when the nonhuman animal remains entangled in the play of traces that is embedded within the DNA ancestry of every species? And how does recognizing the inter-connection of living and dead organisms - for example, the action of the worm on a decaying leaf - fortify an alternative view of the earth, or “world”?
As I argue, Darwin’s notion that the earth is reconstituted and re-created through the digestive action of the earthworm leads to the view that the natural world exists in deep time, where organisms, whether living or dead, remain in a continuous state of change. Thus, in advancing a postmortem reading of natural history, this paper examines how Darwin’s later work on earthworms conceptualizes an alternative view of the world that emphasizes its capacity to recompose, disassemble and recreate itself through continual death and decomposition.
Research Interests:
A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), directed by British filmmaker Peter Greenaway, is a bizarre, grotesque representation of creaturely death and decay that self-reflexively critiques the technologies of surveillance and observation that... more
A Zed and Two Noughts (1985), directed by British filmmaker Peter Greenaway, is a bizarre, grotesque representation of creaturely death and decay that self-reflexively critiques the technologies of surveillance and observation that undergird the practice of zoological and ethological science. Interspersing clips of British naturalist David Attenborough’s narrated wildlife film documentaries with time-lapsed scenes of the zooetic putrefaction of animal carcasses and other organic materials, the film later comes to its strange denouement with the double suicide of two zoologists before their movie cameras. The desire to record their return to the “ooze, slyme, [and] murk” of their creaturely origins is thwarted, however, by the invasion of an escargatoire of slugs that short out the electrical equipment and arrest the taping.
Confounding the visual politics of looking and collapsing the seemingly stable construct of the subjective scientific observer/observed object, Greenaway’s film invites viewers to consider the im/possibilities of seeing animals, and the power dynamics that found these im/possibilities. Ultimately, I argue that Greenaway’s ethology of creaturely putrefaction aims to detangle the dualisms that frequently attend zoological and ethological practice: namely, the articulation of difference that is foundational to understandings of human/non-human, living/dead, and observer/observed.
Confounding the visual politics of looking and collapsing the seemingly stable construct of the subjective scientific observer/observed object, Greenaway’s film invites viewers to consider the im/possibilities of seeing animals, and the power dynamics that found these im/possibilities. Ultimately, I argue that Greenaway’s ethology of creaturely putrefaction aims to detangle the dualisms that frequently attend zoological and ethological practice: namely, the articulation of difference that is foundational to understandings of human/non-human, living/dead, and observer/observed.
Research Interests:
A robust meditation on endangered and extinct species, dead lovers and a reclaimed natural history collection of fossils, bones, and taxidermy animals, Lydia Millet’s trilogy of novels - How the Dead Dream (2009), Ghost Lights (2011), and... more
A robust meditation on endangered and extinct species, dead lovers and a reclaimed natural history collection of fossils, bones, and taxidermy animals, Lydia Millet’s trilogy of novels - How the Dead Dream (2009), Ghost Lights (2011), and Magnificence (2013) - dwells upon the lively persistence of the already dead in an increasingly perilous age of environmental collapse and devastation. Amidst the harrowing adventures of the main protagonist, T., who escapes the clutches of a life as a venture capitalist and survives the death of his lover and nature guide, Millet invites her readers to examine how the dead body persists as a monument to its own demise. Millet’s trilogy further ruminates on the significance of being a “final” animal, or the last of one’s kind, exhorting her readers to read the deaths of others as a foreshadowing of the collapse of one’s own species and way of life on the earth.
In my reading of Millet’s Trilogy, I elaborate on the work of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Deleuze and Guattari in order to explore posthumanism’s concerns with survival in the era of the anthropocene. Furthermore, my paper will consider how the return to organic matter (as a culmination of the death drive) might inspire new possibilities for thinking through the durability of post-mortem remains and the politics of their persistence.
In my reading of Millet’s Trilogy, I elaborate on the work of Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Deleuze and Guattari in order to explore posthumanism’s concerns with survival in the era of the anthropocene. Furthermore, my paper will consider how the return to organic matter (as a culmination of the death drive) might inspire new possibilities for thinking through the durability of post-mortem remains and the politics of their persistence.
Research Interests:
While modernist literary representations of death and the dissolution of the modern subject are often signaled by the breakdown of language, Jim Crace’s Being Dead (1999) situates the decomposition of the corpse at the forefront of the... more
While modernist literary representations of death and the dissolution of the modern subject are often signaled by the breakdown of language, Jim Crace’s Being Dead (1999) situates the decomposition of the corpse at the forefront of the human’s un-becoming. Laying upon the beach of Baritone Bay, the bodies of two zoologists, Joseph and Celise, are host to a number of tiny micro-organisms, bacteria, vermin, and sea creatures that come into intimate proximity with their putrefying and decaying flesh. Through their participation in the decomposition of Joseph and Celise, these non-human creatures initiate a lively animacy that incites the demarcation (and dissolution) of the bounds of animal and human, life and death, object and subject. As active, subjective-objective participants in their own putrid mortifications, the corpses of Joseph and Celise are necro-ecological organisms: vibrant, organic, and vital, their bodies enact an enlivened post-mortem “subjectivity” that enables life to go on after death.
The possibility for a post-mortem “subjectivity” arises from Donna Haraway’s contention that the living body is itself a site of multiplicitous, proliferating interactions with non-human animals. For Haraway, the flesh is a “material-semiotic node” (When Species Meet 4) that is home to the “bacteria, fungi, protists, and such,” that constitute ninety-percent of the human genome (4). Calling into question the unity and self-sameness of human flesh, Haraway suggests that “to be one is always to become with many” (4). So in life, as in death: the living body and the putrefying corpse are both sites of metamorphosis and cross-species interaction.
Thus, in exploring the necro-ecological as a mode that represents death as an active and intimate process of human-animal participations, I argue that the corpse opens up new ways of thinking through the mechanisms of becoming and being dead. In considering how we might understand the ontological category of “being” dead, I draw from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who suggests that flesh is an ontological “fold” (Phenomenology of Perception 250) that produces emergent and contingent relations with animate and inanimate matter. A burgeoning locus point for the convergence of organic life, the corpse unravels humanist notions of selfhood, language, and rationality. Since Joseph and Celise are powerless to specify and name the creatures that take up residence in their bodies, they are effectively unseated as the sole proprietors, and propagators, of natural scientific discourse, zoology, and taxonomy. As such, Being Dead productively illustrates the capacity of dead flesh to destabilize the notion of the human through the generation and articulation of inter-corporeal and inter-subjective experience. Exerting pressure on the fields of critical animal studies, post-humanism, and new materialism, Crace’s novel re-imagines human and non-human post-mortality, and suggests that to be dead is to be an active participant in vital, organic (de)compositions.
The possibility for a post-mortem “subjectivity” arises from Donna Haraway’s contention that the living body is itself a site of multiplicitous, proliferating interactions with non-human animals. For Haraway, the flesh is a “material-semiotic node” (When Species Meet 4) that is home to the “bacteria, fungi, protists, and such,” that constitute ninety-percent of the human genome (4). Calling into question the unity and self-sameness of human flesh, Haraway suggests that “to be one is always to become with many” (4). So in life, as in death: the living body and the putrefying corpse are both sites of metamorphosis and cross-species interaction.
Thus, in exploring the necro-ecological as a mode that represents death as an active and intimate process of human-animal participations, I argue that the corpse opens up new ways of thinking through the mechanisms of becoming and being dead. In considering how we might understand the ontological category of “being” dead, I draw from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who suggests that flesh is an ontological “fold” (Phenomenology of Perception 250) that produces emergent and contingent relations with animate and inanimate matter. A burgeoning locus point for the convergence of organic life, the corpse unravels humanist notions of selfhood, language, and rationality. Since Joseph and Celise are powerless to specify and name the creatures that take up residence in their bodies, they are effectively unseated as the sole proprietors, and propagators, of natural scientific discourse, zoology, and taxonomy. As such, Being Dead productively illustrates the capacity of dead flesh to destabilize the notion of the human through the generation and articulation of inter-corporeal and inter-subjective experience. Exerting pressure on the fields of critical animal studies, post-humanism, and new materialism, Crace’s novel re-imagines human and non-human post-mortality, and suggests that to be dead is to be an active participant in vital, organic (de)compositions.
Research Interests:
In its reappraisal of subjectivity and objectivity, vitality, agency, and relationality, new materialisms has begun to consider the generativity of flesh as an ontological “fold” that can inaugurate new ways of articulating... more
In its reappraisal of subjectivity and objectivity, vitality, agency, and relationality, new materialisms has begun to consider the generativity of flesh as an ontological “fold” that can inaugurate new ways of articulating inter-corporeal and inter-subjective experience (Coole 2010). But what of the seemingly inert matter of the corpse? Taking post-mortem flesh as a problem for new materialism, this paper proceeds from, and complicates, Rosi Braidotti’s claim (2010) that finitude is a constitutive element of subjectivity. In my analysis of the artistic productions of Joel-Peter Witkin, which feature macabre “still life” tableaus of severed human heads, taxidermied animals, and dismembered limbs, I argue that post-mortem flesh de-centers and unseats the human as the sole proprietor of objects and their correlating significations and circulations. In tracing the irreversible trajectory of life, which necessarily includes the processes of becoming inert, becoming object, and becoming post-mortem, I contend that the corpses of Joel-Peter Witkin’s collection incite new ways of demarcating (and dissolving) the bounds of animacy, subjectivity, and the contingent relations of assemblages of objects (as per Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter). If matter becomes “vibrant” and animate through contingent relations, then post-mortem flesh concedes to the heightened contingency of alliances brought about by its imminent decay and decomposition, or its ineluctable becoming-inert.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Aurel Schmidt’s “Maneater” collection is a putrid, decaying, offensive - and yet exquisite - artistic representation of waste and fleshly remains that advances an incisive commentary on the appropriation of the dead by the natural world.... more
Aurel Schmidt’s “Maneater” collection is a putrid, decaying, offensive - and yet exquisite - artistic representation of waste and fleshly remains that advances an incisive commentary on the appropriation of the dead by the natural world. Discarded chicken wings, fish bones, used condoms, crushed beer cans, coins, banana peels, and milk bottles are composed (and decomposed) into animal-human hybrid figures, destabilizing categories of the organic and inorganic, natural and unnatural, product and waste, living and dead, animal and human. Schmidt’s representation of garbage and spectacular organic growths work to displace and re- orient the dead human corpse and animal carcass in fascinating ways, thus pointing to what Jane Bennett calls a “political ecology of things.” Inviting her audience to contemplate the seemingly antithetical notion that dead flesh can remain in motion and in metamorphosis, and potentially unite with other objects, Schmidt implicitly critiques the neoliberal programme of consumption and waste, while also reckoning with the (de)composition of postmortem tissue. My paper will thus question how the corpse and carcass are repurposed, fetishized, and objectified as fleshly matter in Schmidt’s work, and will thereby consider how her collection re-animates debates about fleshly animal and human remains as “waste.”
Research Interests:
While seemingly fertile ground for the negotiation of the gendered, racial, and sexual politics of post-apartheid South Africa, the raped and prostituted female body in South African fiction demands de-metaphorization. In her essay, “The... more
While seemingly fertile ground for the negotiation of the gendered, racial, and sexual politics of post-apartheid South Africa, the raped and prostituted female body in South African fiction demands de-metaphorization. In her essay, “The Rainbow Womb,” Meg Samuelson contends that “the metaphorical use of women’s bodies eclipse[s] and distort[s] the social and political realities they inhabit” (88). Samuelson’s point elucidates the problematic rendering of the female form by South African writers as penetrable and violatable, and yet as a self-contained, abstracted symbol of national fantasy. Reduced either to abjected materialism or abstracted symbolism, women’s bodies appear to function as the un-integrated, de-contextualised, and convenient dumping ground for masculine anxieties and desires.
Rather than reinforce the notion that the female form is a carrier and container of meaning, it is essential to acknowledge the mode of affect – that is, shame – that motivates acts of violence against women in the first place. Sexually independent and newly-empowered women in the workplace, for instance, effectively threaten patriarchal power, resulting in feelings of shame on the part of men, followed by an attempt to recover dominance through sexual violence as well as through the displacement of shame upon women in the form of public stigmatization. An approach to raped and prostituted women, then, ought not to privilege the female body as the preferred site of negotiating colonial trauma, the tensions of post-apartheid democratisation, or the destabilising of Zulu masculinities, but should examine the affect of shame as the embattled ground of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic systems.
In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, a system of anxious masculine desire is mobilized through feelings of “disgrace” – a structure of feeling that carries with it notions of private (inward) shaming and public stigmatization. Similarly, in Futhi Ntshingila’s Shameless, the rhetoric of “shame” is directed toward the prostituted, female body. Intriguingly, though, shame is not represented statically, but is enacted in both novels through its concomitant avowal and disavowal. In Disgrace, Lucy Lurie (a lesbian) is gang-raped and impregnated by three violent black men, and yet refuses to publicly acknowledge the trauma of this act – just as her father, David Lurie, publicly denies the effect and affect of his sexual assault on one of his students, Melanie Isaacs. In Shameless, protagonist Thandiwe renounces the stigmatization of prostitution, arguing that to be a female labourer in any sector of society is simply to be another “kind of whore” (59). The disavowal of shame on the part of the female protagonists in these fictions serves to negate a reading of the female body as the passive receptacle of masculine fear and fantasy, and points instead to the political and social pressures that are its cause. To be sure, along the complicated nexus of shame, who is ashamed and who is shaming another is never an entirely divisible line.
Rather than reinforce the notion that the female form is a carrier and container of meaning, it is essential to acknowledge the mode of affect – that is, shame – that motivates acts of violence against women in the first place. Sexually independent and newly-empowered women in the workplace, for instance, effectively threaten patriarchal power, resulting in feelings of shame on the part of men, followed by an attempt to recover dominance through sexual violence as well as through the displacement of shame upon women in the form of public stigmatization. An approach to raped and prostituted women, then, ought not to privilege the female body as the preferred site of negotiating colonial trauma, the tensions of post-apartheid democratisation, or the destabilising of Zulu masculinities, but should examine the affect of shame as the embattled ground of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic systems.
In J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, a system of anxious masculine desire is mobilized through feelings of “disgrace” – a structure of feeling that carries with it notions of private (inward) shaming and public stigmatization. Similarly, in Futhi Ntshingila’s Shameless, the rhetoric of “shame” is directed toward the prostituted, female body. Intriguingly, though, shame is not represented statically, but is enacted in both novels through its concomitant avowal and disavowal. In Disgrace, Lucy Lurie (a lesbian) is gang-raped and impregnated by three violent black men, and yet refuses to publicly acknowledge the trauma of this act – just as her father, David Lurie, publicly denies the effect and affect of his sexual assault on one of his students, Melanie Isaacs. In Shameless, protagonist Thandiwe renounces the stigmatization of prostitution, arguing that to be a female labourer in any sector of society is simply to be another “kind of whore” (59). The disavowal of shame on the part of the female protagonists in these fictions serves to negate a reading of the female body as the passive receptacle of masculine fear and fantasy, and points instead to the political and social pressures that are its cause. To be sure, along the complicated nexus of shame, who is ashamed and who is shaming another is never an entirely divisible line.
Research Interests:
As Helmut Willke contends (2007), atopias are “placeless” places. Defying classification and order, atopias are quite unlike the “contractual solitariness” associated with non-places, and the relationally- and historically-imbued quality... more
As Helmut Willke contends (2007), atopias are “placeless” places. Defying classification and order, atopias are quite unlike the “contractual solitariness” associated with non-places, and the relationally- and historically-imbued quality of places in Marc Auge’s theoretical apparatus (1995). Atopias are also distinct from Michel Foucault’s heterotopias (which are concerned with time, crisis, purification, juxtaposition, deviation, and function). Instead, atopias are productively negative spaces of non-belonging, dislocation, deterritorialization, non-origin, and disorder; they are the philosophical terrain of Deleuzoguattarian “becoming” that proceed by way of affective flows, movements, and intensities.
The shoulder of the road - replete with roadkill - is an example of an animal atopia and the subject of my theoretical analysis. Thrust into an “unnatural participation,” to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari, animals and humans occasionally (and horrifically) enter into collisions on highways that may or may not result in death. The shoulder of the road thereby becomes a negative threshold of becoming and a “zone of proximity” that overflows in its multiple relations between animals and humans. While highways can be globally-positioned, mapped, and located spaces, they are also largely ignored spaces of animal and human interaction. In my analysis of roadkill, I will consider how we might conceive of these unnatural participations and negative becomings as a way of ethically re-orienting the discipline of critical animal studies.
The shoulder of the road - replete with roadkill - is an example of an animal atopia and the subject of my theoretical analysis. Thrust into an “unnatural participation,” to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari, animals and humans occasionally (and horrifically) enter into collisions on highways that may or may not result in death. The shoulder of the road thereby becomes a negative threshold of becoming and a “zone of proximity” that overflows in its multiple relations between animals and humans. While highways can be globally-positioned, mapped, and located spaces, they are also largely ignored spaces of animal and human interaction. In my analysis of roadkill, I will consider how we might conceive of these unnatural participations and negative becomings as a way of ethically re-orienting the discipline of critical animal studies.
Research Interests:
An acknowledgement of our shared precarity - what I have been calling the “fleshly finitude” we share with animals is, I believe, what establishes an ethical foundation between humans and animals. From an unsettling of our own... more
An acknowledgement of our shared precarity - what I have been calling the “fleshly finitude” we share with animals is, I believe, what establishes an ethical foundation between humans and animals. From an unsettling of our own constitutions, an ethics of edibility reminds us that we are the potentially consumable, and that our tissues are mortal and finite. Through a sympathetic imagination, we can consider our obvious similarities with animals and move beyond the long-established boundary separating the animal from the human, into a future that acknowledges our shared precarity and vulnerability to death.
Research Interests:
A number of founding anthropocentric projects from Linnaeus to Descartes have theoretically and philosophically sequestered the animal to a position of alterity, deeming it responsible for conferring otherness in its various forms. Like... more
A number of founding anthropocentric projects from Linnaeus to Descartes have theoretically and philosophically sequestered the animal to a position of alterity, deeming it responsible for conferring otherness in its various forms. Like the dead, these philosophers argued, animals do not possess subjectivity, reason, presence, language, or immateriality (spirit). As a result of this thinking, the animal has become problematically affixed upon the axis of Otherness; a representation of death and its accompaniment, disparity. Yet recent writing on the animal (Cora Diamond, Jacques Derrida, Nicole Shukin) has begun to proclaim the significance of our shared finitude with animals, resulting in the rigorous disassembly of the divisionary line that separates the animal from the human. Death itself, these writers suggest, is the ultimate Other. Collapsing the boundary that separates the animal from the human and, more significantly, the dead from the human, this paper will revise and diversify ideas about the fraught relationship between life and death, and its corresponding binary, human (life) and animal (death). I will consider how, in the process of delineating the metrics of having and being, animality has been theoretically aligned with the alterity of death. How much distance exists between life and death; the human and the animal? Is it productive to collapse this distance, and how can we retrieve the animal from its relegated position in the realm of the dead?
Sinews, ligaments, muscles, eyeballs, blood, tongues, skin, bones. What does it mean to disassemble the human and animal body? In her prodigious work, Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler wrote that “to problematize the matter of bodies may... more
Sinews, ligaments, muscles, eyeballs, blood, tongues, skin, bones. What does it mean to disassemble the human and animal body? In her prodigious work, Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler wrote that “to problematize the matter of bodies may entail an initial loss of epistemological certainty,” but that the “unsettling of ‘matter’ can be understood as initiating new possibilities, new ways for bodies to matter” (30). As Judith Butler suggests, new ethical and ontological possibilities emerge when matter, and what matters philosophically, are unsettled.
Throughout anthropological and philosophical discourse, animal and human bodies have often been consolidated and ordered into “readable” forms: semantic surfaces upon which rigid distinctions, including reason and unreason, materiality and immateriality, presence and absence, subjectivity and non-subjectivity, have been inscribed. Yet, as I argue, it is precisely when matter is “settled” into such forms that epistemological violence occurs. My discussion is, therefore, committed to the continual unsettling of the matter of the animal and human corpse, and it is indebted to Jacques Derrida’s own rigorous work on the question of the animal, in which he explodes the “singular, indivisible line” that separates the animal from human into a “multiple and heterogeneous border” (The Animal That Therefore I Am 31). Through an exploration of the severed, sawed, and separated bits of the animal and human corpse that takes place in slaughterhouses, morgues, and laboratories, I hope to flesh out a framework that is inclusive of the plurality of matter, in all its rich complexity. The figure of the corpse is a site of rupture – a space within which distinctions between humans and animals collapse. The corpse reminds us of that mysterious experience shared by both animals and humans: death.
Throughout anthropological and philosophical discourse, animal and human bodies have often been consolidated and ordered into “readable” forms: semantic surfaces upon which rigid distinctions, including reason and unreason, materiality and immateriality, presence and absence, subjectivity and non-subjectivity, have been inscribed. Yet, as I argue, it is precisely when matter is “settled” into such forms that epistemological violence occurs. My discussion is, therefore, committed to the continual unsettling of the matter of the animal and human corpse, and it is indebted to Jacques Derrida’s own rigorous work on the question of the animal, in which he explodes the “singular, indivisible line” that separates the animal from human into a “multiple and heterogeneous border” (The Animal That Therefore I Am 31). Through an exploration of the severed, sawed, and separated bits of the animal and human corpse that takes place in slaughterhouses, morgues, and laboratories, I hope to flesh out a framework that is inclusive of the plurality of matter, in all its rich complexity. The figure of the corpse is a site of rupture – a space within which distinctions between humans and animals collapse. The corpse reminds us of that mysterious experience shared by both animals and humans: death.
Branching together Guy Debord’s work on détournement in “The Society of Spectacle,” the psychogeographical project of the Letterist International, and the pedestrian practices of Michel de Certeau in his chapter on “Walking in the City”... more
Branching together Guy Debord’s work on détournement in “The Society of Spectacle,” the psychogeographical project of the Letterist International, and the pedestrian practices of Michel de Certeau in his chapter on “Walking in the City” (from The Practice of Everyday Life), I analyse the way in which Banksy’s work “detours” and reworks advertisements, invigorates the everyday space of the street, and subverts the politics of looking through his recurring themes of surveillance. I also situate Banksy’s work alongside the earlier graffiti artists in New York during the Subway Art Movement in the 1970s, and more broadly within the existing scholarship on graffiti (going as far back as ancient Greece and Pompeii).
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Written in luxurious prose-poetry, Gail Scott’s The Obituary is a literary tourniquet, a twisting and turning of articulations that compress the traumatic flow of time, space, and memory. Gauzed over by the mystery of “who-am-we” (46),... more
Written in luxurious prose-poetry, Gail Scott’s The Obituary is a literary tourniquet, a twisting and turning of articulations that compress the traumatic flow of time, space, and memory. Gauzed over by the mystery of “who-am-we” (46), Scott’s narrative is a composite of collective rememberings that spill over into footnotes, diary entries, computer documents, emails, transcripts of surveillance tapes, and crossed-out words. The Obituary combines the musings and conflicting memories of I/Rosine, MacBeth the Therapist, neighbours, a footnoting Historian, and even a fly on the wall, into a communal longing for a dénouement that cannot be.
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The dream of humanism is to cleanly discard of humanity’s animal remains along with its ecological embeddings, evolutionary heritages and futures, ontogenies and phylogenies, sexualities and sensualities, vulnerabilities and mortalities.... more
The dream of humanism is to cleanly discard of humanity’s animal remains along with its ecological embeddings, evolutionary heritages and futures, ontogenies and phylogenies, sexualities and sensualities, vulnerabilities and mortalities. But, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate, animal remains are everywhere and so animals remain everywhere. Animal remains are food, medicine, and clothing; extractive resources and traces of animals’ lifeworlds and ecologies; they are sites of political conflict and ontological fear, fetishized visual signs and objects of trade, veneration, and memory; they are biotechnological innovations and spill-over viruses.
To make sense of the material afterlives of animals, this book draws together multispecies perspectives from literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, anthropology and ethnography, photographic and film history, and contemporary art practice to offer the first synoptic account of animal remains. Interpreting them in all their ubiquity, diversity, and persistence, Animal Remains reveals posthuman relations between human and non-human communities of the living and the dead, on timescales of decades, centuries, and millennia.
To make sense of the material afterlives of animals, this book draws together multispecies perspectives from literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, anthropology and ethnography, photographic and film history, and contemporary art practice to offer the first synoptic account of animal remains. Interpreting them in all their ubiquity, diversity, and persistence, Animal Remains reveals posthuman relations between human and non-human communities of the living and the dead, on timescales of decades, centuries, and millennia.
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Seeing Animals After Derrida charts a new course in animal studies that re-examines Jacques Derrida's enduring thought on the animal in his seminal 1997 Cerisy conference, "The Animal That Therefore I Am." Building new proximities with... more
Seeing Animals After Derrida charts a new course in animal studies that re-examines Jacques Derrida's enduring thought on the animal in his seminal 1997 Cerisy conference, "The Animal That Therefore I Am." Building new proximities with the animal in and through -- and in times in spite of -- the visual apparatus, this collection of essays investigates how the recent turn in animal studies towards new materialism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology prompts a renewed engagement with Derrida's animal philosophy. In taking up the matter of Derrida's treatment of animality for the current epoch, the contributors of this book each present a case for new philosophical approaches and aesthetic paradigms that challenge the ocularcentrism of Western culture.
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What are the temporalities, histories, and post-mortem animal embodiments of taxidermic forms and fictions? In her seminal essay, "Teddy Bear Patriarchy," Donna Haraway proclaims that the taxidermic form operates as a "servant of the... more
What are the temporalities, histories, and post-mortem animal embodiments of taxidermic forms and fictions? In her seminal essay, "Teddy Bear Patriarchy," Donna Haraway proclaims that the taxidermic form operates as a "servant of the real," while feminist scholars Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey illuminate how skin produces its own dermographics (inhabiting the spaces of landscape and the discourses of nationhood) and temporalities (aging, preservation, decay). Skin, Pauline Wakeham further suggests, produces signs in the reconstruction of Aboriginality through the colonial conquest of living forms, and Chantal Nadeau explores how fur is intimately tied to the inscription of sexual desire onto the female form. The Afterlives of Animals: A Museum Menagerie edited by Samuel J.M.M. Alberti similarly negotiates the museological imperative to capture and archive animal flesh, and the studies of Rachel Polinquin (The Breathless Zoo) as well as Bryndís Snaebjörnsdottír and Mark Wilson (Nanoq: Flat out and Bluesome: A Cultural Life of Polar Bears) explore how affect circulates around taxidermic forms. Investigating cultural, literary, cinematic, poetic, artistic and historical engagements with practices of taxidermy, this panel will invite a discussion of the histories and futures of animal flesh, the performativity of the taxidermic animal, and its exposures, preservations, fetishizations, proximal encounters, inter-embodiments, and temporalities. In our exploration of taxidermic forms and fictions, we will develop methods, frameworks, and paradigms that enable us to contextualize taxidermic practice in the wake of the anthropocene, an era of unparalleled species loss. How can thinking through the flesh-both human and nonhuman-initiate creative possibilities for an alternative present? How are literature, film, poetics, and art responding to the history of natural science, which has so meticulously recreated a microcosm of the world by preserving species that stand in as exceptional prototypes? What is the impact of the decay of these forms in the natural history museum? And even more pressing: what are the ethics of cutting and flaying animal bodies and fetishizing their forms? Can we attribute agency and subjectivity to the taxidermic animal? What would an ethical repurposing of taxidermy look like? Ruminating on these (and related) research questions, this panel will serve as a response to the recent flux of critical and creative work being produced on the subject of the taxidermy. The roundtable will consist of a panel of 20-minute presentations followed by a discussion period. Students and scholars of all disciplines are invited to participate. Please email 250-word abstracts to Susan McHugh and Sarah Bezan at smchugh@une.edu and bezan@ualberta.ca by April 15th, 2017. research categories: environmental and ecological humanities human-animal studies, critical animal studies, critical posthumanism(s) new materialism; material ecocriticism taxidermic fiction, art, poetry, film history of natural science; natural or human history cultural anthropologies cli-fi (climate change film and fiction)
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Abstracts of 350 words, along with a 50-word bio (in email body or in doc.x), can be sent to Sarah Bezan (s.bezan@sheffield.ac.uk) and Robert McKay (r.mckay@sheffield.ac.uk) by November 23rd, 2018. Early career scholars and post-graduate... more
Abstracts of 350 words, along with a 50-word bio (in email body or in doc.x), can be sent to Sarah Bezan (s.bezan@sheffield.ac.uk) and Robert McKay (r.mckay@sheffield.ac.uk) by November 23rd, 2018. Early career scholars and post-graduate researchers are expressly encouraged to submit abstracts, and will be eligible to apply for ShARC Travel Awards to defray the costs of travel. Confirmed participants will be notified by late December 2018. An edited volume on ‘Animal Remains’ will be one of the anticipated outcomes of this meeting, and will be considered for publication in the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series.
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"Texts, Animals, Environments. Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics" probes the multiple links between ecocriticism and animal studies, assessing the relations between animals, environments and poetics. While ecocriticism usually relies on a... more
"Texts, Animals, Environments. Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics" probes the
multiple links between ecocriticism and animal studies, assessing the
relations between animals, environments and poetics. While ecocriticism usually relies on a relational approach to explore phenomena related to the environment or ecology more broadly, animal studies tends to examine individual or species-specific aspects. As a consequence, ecocriticism concentrates on ecopoetical, animal studies on zoopoetical elements and modes of representation in literature (and the arts more generally). Bringing key concepts of ecocriticism and animal studies into dialogue, the volume explores new ways of thinking about and reading texts, animals, and environments – not as separate entities but as part of the same collective.
multiple links between ecocriticism and animal studies, assessing the
relations between animals, environments and poetics. While ecocriticism usually relies on a relational approach to explore phenomena related to the environment or ecology more broadly, animal studies tends to examine individual or species-specific aspects. As a consequence, ecocriticism concentrates on ecopoetical, animal studies on zoopoetical elements and modes of representation in literature (and the arts more generally). Bringing key concepts of ecocriticism and animal studies into dialogue, the volume explores new ways of thinking about and reading texts, animals, and environments – not as separate entities but as part of the same collective.