Listing Atrocity: Queering the Epic through Ecopoetics in Dionne Brand’s Inventory and Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation

Matthew Ellis

Dionne Brand’s Inventory and Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation explore the psychological and ecological impacts of 9/11. The book-length poems grapple with a thematic tension of poetry’s failure to articulate the shock of 9/11, while they draw from ecopoetics as a way to reinvent the Epic genre to better suit the new cultural context 9/11 discourse generates. I observe Brand and Spahr queering the figure of the Epic hero. The hero in Brand’s text breaks away from the Epic model; her protagonist is a “translocal witness” who looks out onto the world and begins to take “inventory” of post-9/11 violence (Vellino 242). Meanwhile, Spahr writes her hero as a “they,” using the plural second person pronoun to signify a fractured, queer plurality in identity to consider the environmental impacts of western colonialism and imperialism (14). By taking an ecopoetics approach to the process of poetry creation, which is evidenced in the poems’ metafictional narratives, the poets contest the “failure” of the humanities in addressing global-political issues by demonstrating fluidity in the epic hero archetype.

Jill Magi describes the possibility of using ecopoetics as a way to demonstrate literature’s ability to complicate popular environmentalism and nature writing (238-239). According to Magi, the role of ecopoetics is to incorporate “race, class, and labour” which environmentalism often ignores (239). I argue, through my reading of Brand and Spahr, that poetry informed by an education in the humanities is an apt place for careful considerations of the intersections between “race, class, and labour.” I see Inventory and The Transformation in dialogue with each other over matters of form in the face of ecological disaster. Further, the authors’ queering of the Epic hero shows the humanities’ capability in adapting poetic convention to address major ecological/ geo-political emergencies.

Matthew Ellis is a master’s student of English Literature at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario. He currently holds a BA in Creative Writing and English Literature from the same school. Matthew’s focus is on queer contemporary and twentieth-century literature. In late May, he will attend Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences to present his paper titled: “Imagining a Queer Metropolis: How the contact zone queers in Herman Melville’s Typee.” Presently, Matthew is writing his major research project on the relationship between discos and rhetorics of shame in American literature written during the sexual liberation era.

“Part of Their Story”: Nonhuman Narratives in Australian Habitat Stories

Rachel Fetherston

While it is common and often simpler to consider individual animals, plants, fungi and bacteria as the primary nonhuman beings with whom humans share the planet, it is worth noting that the nonhuman also encompasses collaborative ecosystems which include ‘habitats’ – those natural environments in which nonhuman individuals seek shelter, sustenance and connections with other nonhumans and, in some cases, humans. This paper presents a close reading of two novels that sit within the genre of ecofiction and the Australian settler literature tradition: Catherine McKinnon’s Storyland (2017) and Mireille Juchau’s The World Without Us (2015). Both texts address the present and future impacts of climate change on Australian habitats and the role that colonisation has played, and is still playing, in ecological crises. Taking inspiration from Libby Robin’s claim that habitats are ‘non-human actors’ within Australia’s evolving national identity (2007), I argue that McKinnon’s and Juchau’s ‘habitat stories’ interrogate connections between non-indigenous Australians and habitat, and explore what a more complex understanding of the Australian nonhuman reveals about how humans perceive and react to climate catastrophe.

Rachel Fetherston is a PhD candidate in literary studies at Deakin University investigating the representation of the nonhuman in Australian ecofiction and the potential impact that such fiction has on the reader’s relationship with nature. Her research includes considerations of speculative and science fiction, crime fiction, multispecies studies, and the intersection of literary theory and nature connection. She is also a freelance writer and co-founder of Remember The Wild, a non-profit focused on engaging Australians with the natural world.

Toward a Corona Journal

Ann Fisher-Wirth

Over 70, with an immune condition, I’m in a high risk group and except for my husband I’m living in isolation. I’m trying to write my way into whatever lies ahead. My senses, paradoxically, are both dulled by this lack of stimulation, and made clearer by the shared proximity to suffering. It’s spring in Mississippi, rainy yet beautiful, with spring ephemerals and flowering trees. On my walks I’m struck anew by the smallest things, like the magenta petals of a Japanese magnolia, or the splash of light across rain-slicked pavement. My love and concern travel outward—to my sons, whose jobs bring them in contact with others; to one daughter, learning to teach online; to another daughter, nurse practitioner at a California clinic. In the midst of life we are in death: the first line of a Gregorian chant from the 14t​ h​ century. Yet usually we are not mindful of this fact. “Is it time to panic yet?” No, because panicking accomplishes nothing. In ​The Plague,​ Camus writes of people who, faced with disease, suffer a collapse of “courage, will-power, and endurance,” and become “like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress” (66). This journal is such a rooting.

Ann Fisher-Wirth’s six books of poetry include ​The Bones of Winter Birds​ (Terrapin Books, 2019) and ​Mississippi​ (poetry/photography collaboration with Maude Schuyler Clay, Wings Press, 2018). She is also coeditor, with Laura-Gray Street, of ​The Ecopoetry Anthology​ (Trinity UP, 3rd edition 2020). A senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, 2017 Poet in Residence at Randolph College, and past president of ASLE, she has had Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden, and residencies at Djerassi, The Mesa Refuge, and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Mississippi, where she directs the Interdisciplinary Minor in Environmental Studies–and she teaches yoga in Oxford, MS.

From Cultural Hero to Zero (Emissions): The Ecofeminist Critique of Maui’s Resource Extraction in Disney’s Moana

Christopher Foley

Despite Disney’s widely publicized research into Polynesian cultures and their prominently shared mythological hero, Maui, prior to the making of Moana (2016), the film and its concomitant commodification of indigenous characters and culture by way of the Disney product machine were not without their critics.  Of particular concern to many Pacific Islanders has been the film’s critical and revisionary treatment of Maui, the great culture hero and trickster of pan-Polynesian mythologies who is credited with stealing “fire from down below,” among other notable feats.  Drawing on Brian Attebery’s argument in Stories about Stories (2014) that fantasy narratives in literature (and film) enable modern audiences to reconnect to the cognitive structures transmitted by myths and the “worlds they generate,” I read the critical revision of Maui’s legacy in Moana as an Anthropocenic interrogation of his status as one of the mythic institutors of pyrrhic technologies in the global history of humanity.  While Moana clearly portrays the fate of a preindustrial indigenous Polynesian society, the long-term ecological consequences of Maui’s theft of Te Fiti’s luminous green heart—anticipated in the film, even if they are not fully realized—arguably represent some, if not all, of the most dire Anthropocenic threats: the widespread extinction of fish and other forms of oceanic life, and the gradual blight of staple crops on which both traditional and modern human societies rely for survival.  Through an analysis of the “energy unconscious” (Yaeger 2011) at work in the film, manifestations of which range from the representation of Maui’s theft as an act of mineral resource extraction to the inter-filmic inspiration that Moana’s creators drew from the post-apocalyptic Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), I argue that the film’s gendered critique of Maui’s “heroic” legacy also functions as a critique of the colonial and capitalist extractivist mindset.  As previous postcolonial critics have suggested, however, this is a cognitive structure that this particular Disney film is ultimately in no position to truly subvert.

Surviving Environmental Apocalypse in Film ‘Lifeboats’: Cinema, Psychoanalysis, and the Formal Structure of the Stories We Live By

Robert Geal

This paper applies ecolinguistics and psychoanalysis to films fictionalising environmental disasters in which small groups of humans survive. In order to conduct this analysis the paper develops a new ecosophy derived from the psychoanalytic thought of Jacques Lacan, which is synthesised with Lacanian film theory. This ecosophy extends existing ecocriticism of Descartes’ distinction between the active human res cogitans and the passive non-human res extensa to Lacan’s claim that this illusory Cartesian “ego is structured exactly like a symptom. At the heart of the subject, it is only a privileged symptom, the human symptom par excellence, the mental illness of man” (1988: 16). Lacanian film theory conceptualises the spectating subject as a similar res cogitans granted an illusory mastery over the cinematic res extensa, with film grammar and film narratives emphasising that human subjectivity derives from Cartesian perception. The paper’s new ecosophy and film theory, then, establishes that Cartesian subjectivity is an environmentally destructive ‘symptom’ that everyday activities like watching films reinforce.

The paper then applies this new approach to films that could ostensibly encourage spectators to develop attitudes which might ameliorate the environmental degradation facilitated by Cartesian dualism. Films like 2012 (Roland Emmerich, 2009) have narratives that provide spectacular warnings against the dangers of environmental apocalypse, and as such might be examples of how what Arran Stibbe calls “the stories we live by” (2015: 3) can be altered to facilitate positive real-world changes in how people treat the environment. However, even these apparently environmentally friendly films exploit cinema’s inherent Cartesian grammar to construct texts in which not only small groups of protagonist survivors, but also vicarious spectatorial survivors, pleasurably transcend the fictionalised destruction through the perceptual mastery of the illusory res cogitans. This ideological effect raises the threat of ecological disaster, but then minimises it, by suggesting that the perceptually masterful spectator would, like the fictional protagonists, survive it.

Robert Geal is Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. He is the author of the monograph Anamorphic Authorship in Canonical Film Adaptation, published by Palgrave Macmillan, as well as numerous articles and chapters in journals and collections including Literature/Film Quarterly, The Routledge Companion to Adaptation, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Film International, and Adaptation. His second monograph, Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis: Surviving the Environmental Apocalypse in Cinema, will soon be published by Routledge.

“Saltwater Wetlands”

Brian Glaser

I am so encouraged by your interest in connecting the discourses of the humanities to the “work that non-academic communities are doing in response to the existential threats of what many have come to call the Anthropocene.” Collaboration with non-academic communities is precisely the kind of connection I hope to realize in my work as an artist. For years I worked as a dramaturg with a Santa Ana non-profit, The Wooden Floor, which offers dance education and tutoring and academic support for socioeconomically marginalized children in my city.

I have recently published a sequence of poems, “Saltwater Wetlands,” which is an imaginative but also frankly propagandistic work of celebration of the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in Huntington Beach. These coastal wetlands have been preserved because of the heroic efforts of the Bolsa Chica Conservancy. And yet of course climate change threatens their existence and the habitats of many species there. My work is written as a contribution of the work of the Conservancy to protect this place.

One of the ways poetry contributes to the range of cultural responses to our situation of emergency is to express the contours of loving a threatened place. This is what I do here. I think it is important to include the temporal rhythms of poetry in our resilient response to climate change.

Brian Glaser has published two books of poems, The Sacred Heart and All the Hills. He is instructional associate professor of English at Chapman University in Orange, California.

“Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against Each Other”: Juliana Spahr’s climate crisis entanglement

Becca Hamilton

Juliana Spahr’s ecological poetics have been critically acclaimed as “successful experiments” to the need to negotiate a response to the goliath collision of globalisation, economic imperialism, and the subsequent environmental exhaustion which has amassed as climate change in recent decades. But what is it that makes her poetry so apt for a crisis of now; a crisis which feels desperately like we are running out of time?

This paper exposes the literary modes at stake in Spahr’s experimental poetic structures as she exposes and rehashes hyper-connectivity between human/nature/animal, in order to articulate the traumatised relationships between them and the way in which each are involved in trying to restore ecological damage as a result of exhaustive capitalist cycles. Nevertheless, Spahr’s entanglement is complex, appearing through “beloved” relationships and yet, equally, those who suffer within “problems of analogy.” In exposing the complex, entangled webs at a moment of crisis, Spahr’s poetics appear to recreate the very essence of the crisis-bound system which it attempts to critique – allowing us the space to wonder whether or not we can rely on the work of poetry in responding to the climate crisis?

Can experiments in poetry – or even poetry as a genre at all – have a role to play, as we edge ever closer to what Spahr calls the approaching “large and extremely fast” point of no return?

Becca Hamilton (she/her) is an MPhil American Literature candidate at the University of Cambridge. Her thesis is on ecocriticism in 19th-century poetry. Her doctoral research will consider the poetics and vital materialism of nineteenth-century American trash. She has a background in maritime draughtsmanship, prior to her academic career, and her research interests often intersect in petrofiction, crisis, and the Anthropocene.

The Future of Housework: Feelings About Domestic Labor in All the Beginnings and Indelible Ink

Jennifer Hamilton

We have the popular idea of “emotional labour” (Hochschild) which is the immaterial and invisible work supporting a society, and then widespread knowledge of labour itself which is often implicitly emotionally neutral. But feeling attaches itself to action and we likely feel quite differently with and about the discrete kinds of work that we do. In this regard, housework is one of the most stereotypically boring workforms and exemplary of a state of drudgery, and its associated suite of negative emotions. Drawing out the examples from my recent article “The Future of Housework: The Similarities and Differences Between Making Kin and Making Babies” (Australian Feminist Studies 34.102), this presentation examines two contemporary Australian texts—a novel and queer autobiography—focussing on the representation of different attitudes towards housework. This paper is part of a much larger trans-disciplinary study of housework in a time of climate change relating to the idea that to change the world we urgently need to do things very differently, but that some of that work may be deeply undesirable or even boring.

Jennifer Hamilton is a lecturer in English Literary Studies at the University of New England, on unceded Anaiwan Country. Her first book is This Contentious Storm: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear (2017). Her current research examines the relationship between weather, shelter and housework. With Astrida Neimanis, she is co-founder of COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities and co-edited the recent special issue of Australian Feminist Studies “What do we WANT?: Feminist Environmental Humanities”.

“Kindling Suns”: Decolonial Spaceflight Imaginaries

Rachel Hill

Queer Zombies and the Apocalypse of Man: Ecocriticism, Post-Feminism and Queer Theory in Recent German Literature and Film

Eva Hoffmann

In this presentation I will argue that contemporary writers and filmmakers in the German speaking world engage with the challenges and opportunities brought by both our current ecological crises through modes of representation often associated with queer theory. I will explore how Olivia Vieweg’s graphic novel Ever After (Endzeit) (2012) and the feature-film based on her comic, directed by Corinna Helsgard and released under the same title in 2019, employ irony, perversity, and playfulness, but also absurdity, camp, indecorum, and ambivalence to explore the shared precarities and vulnerabilities between human and non-human bodies in the Anthropocene and in neoliberal patriarchy.

As I will illustrate, works such as Vieweg’s comic and Helsgard’s film present an important intervention to the genre of Anthropocene fiction. They facilitate a deeply critical cultural diagnosis of contemporary cultural and ‘natural’ problems, provide the critical tools to probe the instruments and solutions to which we turn to solve our ecological and environmental crises, and imagine alternative futurities beyond heteronormative modes of procreation and populated and invigorated by inappropriate affiliations, identities, and affects.

Traditional works of Anthropocene fiction frequently evoke feelings such as nostalgia, grief, and melancholia as “appropriate” responses to our current sense of ecological crisis. Similarly, queer theory has not been particularly interested in environmental questions, with the notable exception of ‘queer ecology’ thinkers such as Greta Gaard (1997) and Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (2010). Yet, as Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson (2010) claim, queer ecology points us to the “biopolitical knots through which both historical and current relations of sexualities and environments meet and inform one another” (5). Moreover, I argue that mobilizing the afore-mentioned affects associated with queer theory can disrupt the impetus of traditional environmental art to re-inscribe the very logic that caused our ecological crises to begin with: postcolonialism, racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Eva Hoffmann is a lecturer for German Studies at Whitman College (PhD University of Oregon). Her work on the intersections between critical animal studies, ecocriticism, queer and intersectional feminist theory has been published, among others, by ISLE. She is the editor of the volume What is Zoopoetics: Texts, Bodies, Entanglements (Palgrave Macmillan 2017). Her current book project Kinky Lovers and Curious Creatures: Feminism and the Non/Human in Contemporary German Literature, Film, and Art explores how recent feminist writers, artists, and filmmakers in the German-speaking world probe shared precarities between the human and the non-human world in the Anthropocene.

(Mis)reading at High Tide: Emergent Unreadability in an Age of Emergency

Jessica Holmes

This presentation utilizes Timothy Clark’s notion of emergent unreadability in order to perform an ecocritical reading and analysis of “High Tide,” a contemporary poem by Jorie Graham. According to Clark, “Ecocritical reading cannot just be some act of supposed retrieval, but now becomes also a measure of the irreversible break in consciousness and understanding, an emergent unreadability” (Ecocriticism on the Edge). Graham’s poem usefully demonstrates the concept through its depiction of a misreading of the human within the context of both planetary climate emergency and personal crisis. In an everyday encounter, the poem’s speaker confuses living subject with inanimate waste object and is thereupon provoked to contemplate the degrees of connection and separation between two bodies. As the poem exhibits, anthropocentric and egoistic worldviews have a tendency to diminish or erase–often violently–the subjecthood of vulnerable bodies. This presentation will explore the question of whether the climate crisis exacerbates or helps mitigate the unreadability of human, as well as nonhuman, bodies; I argue that poetry holds the capacity to correct misreadings of other bodies, but also to productively acknowledge the limitations of “knowability.” Our relations to other bodies and subjects are just that: relations—relational to our own unique, embodied experiences of the world. The climate crisis requires an “irreversible break in consciousness,” as Clark suggests, but it also requires an unprecedented degree of community connection–and the failure to recognize or “read” humans, animals and land/water as such (and as inherently valuable) prevents such connection. In this way, poetic reading constitutes a radical empathic practice in the age of emergency.

New Imaginaries in the Anthropocene

Dee Horne

Increasing disparities of wealth, inequalities and unfairness have led to social protests, civil wars and other forms of unrest in many parts of the world. Extreme climate changes: droughts, forest fires, floods, hurricanes and other disasters strain already limited and finite resources and have led to social unrest and to displacement and migration of citizens in search of basic necessities: food, water, shelter. In some respects, the current coronavirus pandemic might be a wake-up call in which, even as we adhere to social distancing, we also come together to re-think existing practices and create alternative ways of living.  Other forces and events have disrupted the stability of Earth’s systems throughout deep time, but the Anthropocene is the only one distinguished by at least the opportunity for human self-awareness and reflexivity regarding the agency of change.

Seeing the Anthropocene as “top-heavy and bureaucracy prone,” Donna Haraway suggests that “Revolt needs other forms of action and other stories for solace, inspiration, and effectiveness” (49). She sees humans as “entangled” and “worldly” and proposes “staying with the trouble” and creating “unexpected collaborations and combinations” (4).

In this online presentation, I will share a short story and three poems that I have written which illustrate some possible new imaginaries.

The stories we tell, or do not tell, affect how we react to global warming, to pandemics and to economic crises. Moreover, they influence how we choose to live in the Anthropocene. Art can be self-reflexive and inspire us to change our behaviors and work to create more sustainable alternatives, new ways of relating that preferably do not, or at least mitigate, harm to the planet.

Dee Horne is a professor in the English Department at the University of Northern British Columbia. She teaches Creative Writing and Modern and Contemporary Literature. She has published several short stories and numerous poems in literary journals. As well, she has published two scholarly books: Mary Oliver’s Grass Roots Poetry (an eco-critical examination of Oliver’s works) and Contemporary American Indian Literature: Unsettling Literature and book chapters and articles in scholarly journals. Horne is now focusing on her own creative writing. She is currently working on a collection of short stories about living in the end time.

Apocalypse from Below: A Manifesto for the Futureless

Jessica Hurley

This paper aims to intervene in a central problem in contemporary social and environmental theory: how counterhegemonic work can continue when all avenues of possibility appear to be foreclosed. As late capitalism grinds inexorably on, as more and more lives are precarious, as the protections and promises of liberalism become increasingly hollow, as overt white supremacy seizes power, and as the irreversible environmental catastrophes of climate change, toxification, and the sixth mass extinction project an uncertain future for life itself, the affective function of hope and a belief in progress comes under increasing pressure. For many theorists across disciplines, to take an apocalyptic approach to the emergencies of the present is a nihilistic politics of defeat; Donna Haraway, for instance, asks “how can we think in times of urgencies without the self-indulgent and self-fulfilling myths of apocalypse?”, while Rebecca Solnit uses apocalypse as a synonym for “easy despair.”

This paper argues instead for the importance of apocalyptic modes and imaginaries for radical thought in this moment of emergency, particularly for those peoples whose futures are most threatened by the unevenly distributed violence of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, climate change, and other forms of disaster. Drawing on interdisciplinary theoretical, literary, and artistic accounts of how chrononormativity works to oppress and disenfranchise Black, Indigenous, queer, and disabled populations, I offer a new theorization of apocalypse as radical futurelessness, a formal afuturity that can disrupt the normative time of social reproduction in which the future extends out from the conditions of the present. As contemporary thought begins to reckon with the foreclosure of its own futures by environmental and social crisis, this paper animates futurelessness as a starting point for thought rather than its end, as a place for struggle and resistance and somehow, impossibly, for hope.

The format of this paper is a manifesto: half academic paper, half performance piece. It is accompanied by a creative powerpoint presentation that should translate well to the virtual conference setting.

Jessica Hurley is Assistant Professor of English at George Mason University. Her forthcoming book Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), examines how apocalyptic narrative forms are used to both enforce and resist the destructive practices of the nuclear age as they play out unevenly across axes of race, sexuality, and indigeneity. Her work has appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, Commonwealth Essays and Studies, American Literature, Extrapolation, Frame, The Faulkner Journal, and The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World, and been recognized by the Don D. Walker Prize in Western Literature, the 1921 Prize in American Literature, and the Jim Hinkle Memorial Prize. In 2018 she co-edited a special issue of ASAP/Journal titled Apocalypse.

Envisioning Global Emergency: The Cinematic Language of Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi Trilogy

Caren Irr

One of the film styles that responds to a condition of global environmental emergency is so-called “slow cinema.” Most often associated with art-house productions of international auteurs such as Apichatpong Weerasthakul, Bela Tarr, and Semih Kaplanoglu, as well as European predecessors such as Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky, the contemplative effects of slow cinema also characterize Godfrey Reggio’s brilliant Qatsi trilogy. Consisting of wordless montages accompanied by Philip Glass’s looping minimalist scores, Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Powaqqatsi (1988), and Naqoyqatsi (2002) employ a dazzling range of camera techniques in order to convey this former monk’s vision of a world out of balance, in transformation, and at war. Fast and slow-motion sequences, remarkable angles, editorializing editing, ample use of negatives and special effects, in addition to a distinctive style of portraiture all contribute to Reggio’s signature cinematic language. Sweeping over the viewer in waves of sensation, these images cumulatively produce a profound sense of urgency, tension, and mournful awe. They stitch together a putatively global account of energy crisis, nuclear threat, social strife, and technologically mediated alienation, positing ancient forms of spiritual knowledge as a reservoir on the verge of drying up as one of humanity’s only remaining resources for change. While on closer inspection this account of a global emergency is grounded more solidly in a specifically American experience than it perhaps aspires to be, Reggio’s Qatsi Trilogy nonetheless develops a distinctive and endlessly malleable cinematic vocabulary for conveying the texture, rhythm, and infrastructural effects of environmental emergencies.  This talk will isolate some of the most inspiring elements of Reggio’s filmic language in order to suggest how they propose a symphonic formal harmony as an alternative to the unstable global environment they describe.

Caren Irr is Professor of English at Brandeis University. She is the author of Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the 21^st Century (Columbia 2013), Pink Pirates: Contemporary American Women Writers and Copyright (Iowa 2010), and The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the U.S. and Canada during the 1930s (Duke 1998), as well as the editor or co-editor of four volumes. Seven or eight of the more than thirty essays and book chapters she has published tackle environmental topics, and she is currently working on a book on environmental aesthetics. This talk develops themes from that manuscript.

Nuclear Storyworlds: Writing (Radio)Toxic Wilderness in Mary Mycio’s Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl (2005)

Hannah Klaubert

The Chernobyl exclusion zone, in addition to being a popular tourist destination, has developed a cultural life of its own, as the 2007 video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and innumerable films, novels and the recent HBO TV series attest to. In these representations, competing visions of wilderness stand in contrast with hyper-technological disaster. Safe domesticity and risk of contamination (see Marran 2012), global and local sense of place (cf. Heise 2012) merge into a complex spatial configuration.

Following the recent turn in ecocriticism towards formal or narratological readings of environmental literature (cf. Lehtimäki 2013, James and Morel 2018, 2019), in this paper I examine how fictional and non-fictional texts dealing with potentially radiotoxic environments (such as Christa Wolf’s 1987 Störfall and Mary Mycio’s Wormwood Forest, 2005) complicate common understandings of narrative space. Distinctions between foregrounding and backgrounding are put into question by texts which have the unreliability of environmental perceptions as their central concern. The “slow violence” (Nixon) of nuclear contamination is interwoven with the fuzzy spatiality of ‘wilderness’. What are narrative strategies for representing phenomena that escape the human senses and/or exceed human experience and frameworks spatially and temporally?  What might an ecocritical reading of nuclear ‘storywolds’ (Herman  2002) contribute to critical scholarship on toxic discourse (Buell 1999) and to investigations of the Anthropocene?

My aim in this paper is twofold: First, to understand how fictional and non-fictional texts formally negotiate toxic environments and contribute to the formation of a nuclear “ecosocial imaginary” (Heise 2010). And second, to discuss how this type of narrative inquiry might feed into wider debates about the role of the humanities in interdisciplinary research on nuclearity and risk.

Hannah Klaubert is a doctoral student at Stockholm University and the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at JLU Giessen, Germany. Her research focuses on literature of nuclear disasters. Through an (eco)narratological analysis of the forms employed in non-fiction and fiction, she aims to understand how the imperceptible threat of radiation and its impact on the human and non-human world are negotiated. Hannah holds a BA in Comparative Literature and Philosophy from Freie Universität Berlin and an MA in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam. She has co-organized a workshop on “Ecocriticism and Narrative Form” with the Oikos research group (GCSC) and the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and the Environment (EASLCE). In Stockholm, she participates in the Doctoral School “Environmental Humanities”, which runs from autumn 2018 to summer 2020.

The Climate of AIDS: Gentrification, Urgency, and Loss at the End of Nature

Davy Knittle

On October 13th, 1996 an estimated 300 protestors gathered at the White House to throw the ashes of AIDS victims onto the White House lawn. The action was inspired by queer artist and writer David Wojnarowicz’s essay collection, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, in which Wojnarowicz outlines acts of resistance to protest the U.S. government’s neglect of people with AIDS. Close to the Knives was published in May 1991. By July 1992, Wojnarowicz had died of AIDS. As he grappled with his own impending death and the deaths of friends and lovers, Wojnarowicz looked to early conversations about climate change, and to the rampant gentrification of his neighborhood on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to teach himself how to conceptualize the ongoing emergency of the AIDS pandemic. Wojnarowicz’s engagement with climate change and gentrification supplements what Douglas Crimp, Dagmawi Woubshet and others argue of early AIDS mourners, who developed what Woubshet describes as a body of mourning with “unique formal and extraformal dimensions” that have “significant implications for the way we theorize loss.”

In this paper, I consider the entanglement of AIDS, gentrification, and climate change in the grieving of early AIDS mourners, and the model they offer to the conceptualization of loss in the context of ongoing climate crisis. I use the nearly carbon-neutral symposium format to show images of early AIDS protests, as well as Wojnarowicz’s artwork, and to consider how queer coalition politics can help map approaches to remote solidarity. Thinking with Wojnarowicz, I contribute to a genealogy of urgency that describes how queer organizing has developed coalitions across dispossessed groups as a response to emergency conditions. I trace how Wojnarowicz witnesses loss and imagines collectivity out of diffusion on scales from the ends of individual lives to the reconfiguration of a recognizable planetary future.

Davy Knittle (he/they) is a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches in the Urban Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies programs. He works at the intersection of queer and trans theory, critical race studies, and the environmental humanities. His critical work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Women’s Studies Quarterly, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Modern Language Studies, and Planning Perspectives. He is a reviews editor for the poetics journal Jacket2 and curates the City Planning Poetics series at the Kelly Writers House.

A Speculative Mythology for a Future of Practicing Kinship and Distance

Solarpunking the Impasse of the Anthropocene

Ariel Kroon

Yes, yes, it is well past time to panic, and even if you do not think you are panicking: think again.  There seems to be so much to worry about and, faced with a plethora of choices, individuals can freeze up in indecision, overwhelmed, finding it easier to ignore climate catastrophe than to make the many, many changes it demands. This is a legitimate human response to perceived threat, the third in the fight-flight-freeze response trifecta, where flight is not an option in the face of the hyperobjectivity of climate change, and fight seems by turns impossible (against the social machine of global neoliberal late capitalist petrocultures) and inutile (against various groups such as climate denialists, or people who still think that buying bottled water for conferences is an okay thing to do). The freeze response, parlayed into academic terms, is an impasse: we cannot physically move past it, and so even trying to imagine past it feels like an unrealistic exercise. In this short presentation I will analyze the recent emergence of the solarpunk genre as a way to root academic thought in on-the-ground action, in many ways realizing the feminist philosophies of radical immanence (Braidotti) and trans-corporeality (Alaimo). Solarpunk is much more than just an offshoot of science fiction, as literature is but one outgrowth of solarpunk ideology among many, including a political stance, an activist mindset, and even an aesthetic. I argue that solarpunk is committed to “staying with the trouble,” as Donna Haraway puts it, and as such is a potent medium for connecting the speculative with the actual, for embodying theory, and for tackling impasse.