Panel 7: Ecocriticism I
CLIMATE CHANGE: VIEWS FROM THE HUMANITIES
A NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE
Panel 7: Ecocriticism I
Once but Not Now: Environmental Degradation in Thomas King’s “The Back of the Turtle”
Olivia Pellegrino, University of Toronto
This talk will analyze Thomas King’s novel, The Back of the Turtle, an ecocritical work that looks at the social and environmental consequences of corporations valuing profit over preservation. The author will also connect the novel to apocalyptic environmental narratives so as to better contextualize what it is King does and what his writing says about the future of climate justice (more).
Ecology and the Critique of “History”: The God of Small Things as a Humanist Text
Abhay Doshi, University of Minnesota
This talk examines the radical ecology critics attribute to Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things that dismantles the privileged position of the human over the non-human. In contrast to currents turns to anti or posthumanism, the author stresses that this radical view can only be grasped by retaining certain core humanistic ideals that have been overlooked recently in the humanities (more).
Petrodystopia in Karen Tei Yamashita’s “Tropic of Orange”
Olivia Chen, Washington University in St. Louis
This talk provides a new perspective on Karen Tei Yamashita’s ecocritical work, Tropic of Orange. Building upon established political and literature analyses, the author analyzes Yamashita’s work through the oil culture and its deep connection with the environment and modern society (more).
Q & A
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Hello all,
First of all, thank you for watching. It’s exciting to be involved in a conference such as this one and I congratulate my fellow panelists here on excellent work. I’d like to also say that I look forward to participating in a conversation with those of you who have questions, comments, or insights regarding the work I am doing.
Best,
Olivia Pellegrino
Dear Olivia,
Thanks for a wonderful presentation! I’ve also done some thinking about 20th century lit and apocalyptic environmentalism (in Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles) and your talk made me want to read King’s novel. I was curious about the overlapping threads in your project of apocalypse and optimism (or degradation and restoration, as you conclude) — as, at first glance, one wouldn’t necessarily expect an apocalyptic environmental narrative to be optimistic. I’m especially curious about the connections you draw between optimism and tourism, when you connect Sonny’s nostalgia for tourism (people “flocking” to see the turtles) and “the way it used to be” to his beacon calling everyone to return. Is King making an ecological argument about tourism? I wonder if considering the role of tourists here, particularly in the context of the other homecomings that you persuasively lay out, might be a helpful way to think about space, place, and labor.
Thanks again!
Laura
(on Panel 6 – http://ehc.english.ucsb.edu/?p=13033 )
Dear Laura and Olivia,
I was really impressed by the talk and the comment on the relation between apocalyptic narrative and optimism, between environmental degradation and restoration. I’m wondering in what ways does King’s novel, and the narrator’s storytelling for that matter, help to educate and mobilize its readers/listeners politically by showing them the possibility of disaster yet without completely paralyzing them. To negotiate the “nuance”, as Olivia said, of representing apocalyptic future in an optimistic light ought to be an important role for imaginative environmental texts. So it is for criticism on these texts to go beyond literary criticism and to have political implications, as Buell suggests and Olivia points out in the talk. Finally, I’m wondering if tourism can be seen as a trope for integrating the human and the nonhuman environment as it is finally evoked as a possible means for restoration.
Thanks to both of you!
Olivia Chen
Hello Laura,
Thank you for your comments and insights. My own reading of apocalyptic motifs in 20th century Canadian Literature focuses on literary engagement with prophetic eschatology, in which momentous change occurs by means of human agents. This is the lens through which I approached the apocalyptic disaster in King’s novel, seeing its attempts to navigate between destruction as a catalyst for initiating restoration—though, of course, this is not without its problems and I am (as of now) unsure of the extent to which tourism is one of these problems. I would like to give the novel’s treatment of tourism further consideration, as I think your suggestions to consider the labour connected with ecological tourism would definitely allow me to work through what King is ultimately getting at. It, at the very least, provides a different perspective on the relationship between capital(ism) and environment(alism) that King engages with and critiques through Dorian and Domidion.
If you’d like to discuss further/in the future, please feel free to email me at olivia.pellegrino@mail.utoronto.ca
Best,
Olivia
Hi Olivia,
Thank you for your talk and for taking the time to do an extended close reading of the novel, something at risk, I worry, of becoming a lost art these days. Question, how essential is, do you think, the magical realist genre as that which enables the political functionality of King’s novel as an ecodisaster narrative of hope rather than of foreclosure? This may relate as well to Olivia Chen’s work, though I have not yet gotten as far as her talk.
Best,
Molly
Hello Molly,
Thank you for your question! Upon first reading King’s novel, I was struck by it’s comparatively sparse inclusion of magical realism. There are key moments of community restoration, such as the beaching of The Anguis near the end of the novel, that are very much reliant on instances of magical realism. However, not all such moments of community are facilitated by magical realism. Since I see King’s narrative of hope being rooted in community building, I would suggest that magical realism, while certainly present in the novel, is not the only means of optimism and achieving community
Hello all,
I have found your talks to be very compelling and persuasive, and I am now keen to read the novels you have discussed at some point in the near future. I wonder what direction we would like to take for further discussion here in the comments. Given that our panel is titled “Ecocriticism,” I wonder if we want to try and sketch a more general theory of how literature — and perhaps more specifically the novel — can (and ought) to foreground ecological concerns; alternately, we could focus more on the question of “criticism” and discuss what the interpretive priorities should be while we read novels that foreground ecologic concerns (and perhaps even ones that don’t). Another approach we could take is to further discuss larger political and philosophical questions (pertaining to ecology) that we have unearthed in the texts that we discussed.
Of course I’d also be happen to discuss anything else that you may have in mind!
Dear Abhay,
Thank you so much for this wonderful talk! I’ve read some criticism on The God of Small Things before, but just as you said, most criticism focus on the nonhuman part and seldom has the novel’s humanistic message been touched upon together with the environmental theme. I really like your argument that to appreciate the humanistic ideals is a necessary step for the restoration of the nonhuman environment. I’m especially interested in the intersection between the human-nonhuman relations and the Hegalian critique of history that you emphasized in your talk. Now I really want to read Roy’s novel again!
Best,
Olivia Chen
Greetings ecocriticism panel #1!
I just watched Sam Solnick’s eco-poetics talk on Panel 6, which moves, as I noted to him, to an inspiring affirmation (starting around minute 15) of the importance of the poetry in the CC discussion.
Any thoughts on this?
Ken
By the way, I am really excited to view your panel and promise to get to it soon!
Hello Ken,
Thanks very much for routing us to that talk! I found it very engaging and I think the notion that poetry and art helps us engage with the temporality of climate change to be very exciting. While I agree that the “density of poetry” (as the author puts it) has much to offer in this respect, the novel has another advantage in the multiplicity of voices that it can offer, forcing us to navigate through those multiple voices and discern which — if any at all — is the privileged voice. Simply by compelling us to reflect on which voice we should privilege, the novel in a way resists the tyranny of those forces that have us believe that violence against the environment in inescapable. Literature — and perhaps art more generally — has the capacity to compel us to forge a critical consciousness, which in my view is the strongest defense we have against climate change.
Hello Ken and Abhay,
Thanks so much for bringing up the issue of temporality in our literary imagination of climate change. If the type of “just do it” environmentalism no longer works in the contemporary moment of what Sam Solnick calls “misanthropocene”, I’m together with Abhay in believing in the redemptive role of literature in making a difference. Novels can be as deeply engaged with temporality as poetry does, and Yamashita’s magic realistic vision is a powerful technique that encourages the readers to see beyond the present moment into the deep time of history and geology. Besides, just as Roy’s novel foregrounds the multiplicity of voices as a way to resist the violence against the environment, the narrative of Tropic of Orange also develops in multiple threads centered around each of the seven characters, thereby rejecting the sense of authoritative narrative voice in favor of heterogeneity–or a certain form of heteroglossia if we might say so. Perhaps this convergence suggests certain formal aspects that might be shared by environmental texts that are invested in exploring cultural/political alternatives for climate change?
Hi Olivia,
Yes, I agree that the multiplicity of voices that literature affords can counter violence against the environment (and all forms of historical violence more generally). I think, though, that my only concern is that this multiplicity cannot do away with hierarchy altogether (for instance, are we also obliged to accommodate those voices that legitimize violence?). I think negotiating this tension between the need for multiplicity as a strategy of resistance on the one hand, but also not allowing multiplicity to become an end in itself on the other hand, is a serious challenge that must be confronted.
That’s a good point, Abhay! Thanks for bringing it up. I agree that multiplicity cannot do away with hierarchy, but simply complicates it. How to mobilize this literary device without fetishizing or rigidifying the idea is indeed “a serious challenge”. I’m afraid I don’t have time to write more now, but I’ll keep thinking about this point after the conference is closed.
Hello all!
I’m so excited to participate in this special conference. Greetings to my fellow panelists as well as everyone else who are part of this conference in one way or another! Thank you for watching my video, and I’m looking forward to hearing your comments! I came across studies on oil culture and petromodernity last year, and am very interested in pursuing this further for my future research. I think studies of petromodernity and literature of energy in general would be of great relevance in the context of global climate change. Yet so far I haven’t found much existing scholarship that talks about this in the context of contemporary American literature, which is my primary field of interest. So I’m still trying to figure out how to expand oil culture into a larger Ph.D. project. I’d greatly appreciate it if anyone could give me some suggestions on this!
Hi Olivia,
I found your research really interesting, particularly since I’m working on a text that presents the opposite of what you call a petrodystopia: in the episode of the Sci-Fi series Black Mirror that I discuss (in Panel 8), humanity seems to have done away with oil-based energy. However, there the alternative is not compelling, as people are forced to spend their whole days on bicycles to recycle their calories back into a closed system. I wonder to what extent Black Mirror and Tropic of Orange are determined by the ecological concerns of their time period. Whereas Tropic of Orange‘s concern with smog seems to be a result of the great problems with smog in the LA-area during the 90s, Black Mirror seems to be more afraid of the future of a type of eco-fascism (the ultimate consequence of Deep Ecological Thinking). I wondered what you thought about the possibilities of such time-bound ecocritical novels: is their relevance limited by the moment in history that produces these fictions, or do you think that there is a deeper concern of ecocritical fiction that would be found across different novels? If you get this after the conference is already closed, please write to me if you want to talk more: bvanover@ucsd.edu.
Hi Ben,
Thank you so much for this interesting comment, as well as your inspiring talk on Black Mirrors in Panel 8! I’m very interested in the question of the particularity of historical moment as shaping forces of different ecological imaginations. Personally speaking, I do feel that both Tropic of Orange and Black Mirrors speak to the ecological concerns of their own time of production; yet I’m hesitant to claim that their relevance is “limited” by this temporality. Whereas the debate of peak oil and the anxiety over a warming planet has been around way before Yamashita’s novel, the controversy of wilderness has long anticipated Black Mirrors, and indeed been solidified as a trope of environmental dilemma for humans’ intertwined entanglement with the environment (this latter point can be seen, for example, from the works of John Muir, Edward Abbey, Gary Snyder, to name just a few). In fact, I found that Tropic of Orange, to some extent, share the critique of wilderness as hinted by Black Mirror’s envisioning of “eco-fascism”, to quote from your words. It’s interesting that, although the two narratives seem to take opposite stands towards environmental degradation (TO exposes the limits of petromodernity whereas BM envisions an “environmentally-friendly” alternative), both express reservation towards a purely dichotomous understanding of nature versus culture. Instead, both seem to posit redemptive potential in “natureculture” as a form of co-existence between human and the nonhuman environment, rather than simply endorsing the latter over the former. In this sense, both seem to join the contemporary critique of Deep Ecological Movement as formulated by later ecocritics and posthumanists from the late 90s to the present. In short, I’m wondering if, instead of viewing the two narratives as shaped by different historical concerns, we could rather see them as informed by a common understanding of the entangled state of human and nature that lays the basis for any environmental imagination of alternatives. What do you think? Yes let’s keep talking about this after the conference. My email is wenjia@wustl.edu.
ou.
Thanks again for this intriguing response! It’s so nice talking to you. Looking forward to more conversation!
Olivia
Dear Olivia,
That’s a great point. I do wonder about the common characteristics of different ecocritical narratives, and I think Black Mirror and Tropic of Orange’s mutual concern with the putative separation of man and nature are a good starting point for such an investigation. I would say though, that Black Mirror reacts against Romantic understandings of the wilderness such as Muir’s. In doing this, it is articulating a view of non-human nature that feels recent to me. But I could be wrong here. Yes, I would love to collaborate more on this, particularly since I’m developing the talk into a publication.
Talk soon,
Ben