Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

2023_Vol.14_Num.2_wholeissue

2023-10-29T21:27:38+01:00

Book Review of "The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities"

2023-08-01T13:53:29+02:00

Book review of The Bloomsbury Handbook to the Medical-Environmental Humanities.

Book Review of "Nuclear Cultures: Irradiated Subjects, Aesthetics and Planetary Precarity"

2023-08-16T17:11:24+02:00

Book review of Nuclear Cultures: Irradiated Subjects, Aesthetics and Planetary Precarity.

Book Review of "Spectrality and Survivance: Living the Anthropocene"

2023-05-20T03:38:28+02:00

Book review of Spectrality and Survivance: Living the Anthropocene.

Book Review of "Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature"

2023-05-03T17:05:08+02:00

Book review of Transecology: Transgender Perspectives on Environment and Nature.

Book Review of "Exploring Institiality with Mangroves: Semiotic Materialism and the Environmental Humanities"

2023-08-21T17:44:01+02:00

Book review of Exploring Interstitiality with Mangroves: Semiotic Materialism and the Environmental Humanities.

Book Review of "Ecocriticism and the Island: Readings from the British-Irish Archipelago"

2023-06-17T07:53:23+02:00

Book review of Ecocriticism and the Island: Readings from the British-Irish Archipelago.

Book Review of "Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire"

2023-03-15T16:09:18+01:00

Book review of Romantic Environmental Sensibility: Nature, Class and Empire.

Book Review of "Language in Place: Stylistic Perspectives on Landscape, Place and Environment"

2023-08-01T15:06:16+02:00

Book review of Language in Place: Stylistic Perspectives on Landscape, Place and Environment.

Credits 14.2

2023-10-10T22:07:37+02:00

Credits 14.2

Binding and Liberating: Recipes for Environmental Narratives

2023-04-27T16:36:32+02:00

Crafting narratives alternative to dominant discourses of natural-cultural depletion is one of the signature goals of the ecocritical “test kitchen.” This culinary analogy highlights deeper similarities: both recipes and eco-narratives create symbolic and material connections between people and the environment, which, in turn, enable transformative practices. But how can we craft messages that are generative of positive processes of transformation? Or, put it differently, what are recipes for eco-narratives? This article proposes a versatile method to test what uses of language and dynamics elicited by texts might produce environmental action. The culinary experiment draws on Italian second-wave feminism, a theoretical “cuisine” that has engaged with language to rework dominant relationships to others and to the world. Feminist strategies, including the practice of “starting from oneself,” the reclaiming of the personal as political, and the retracing of alternative genealogies, have used language as a means simultaneously of liberation and of reconnection with the material, embodied world. This liberating binding is repurposed as a key technique to craft and identify effective eco-narratives. Here, feminist strategies intersect with the chemical and social operations of cooking through discussion of three recipes tied to the author’s Mediterranean origins: a milk pudding, eggless fresh pasta, and a type of ancient-grains bread. Through the processes of binding and softening, common to preparations that employ starch, the analysis demonstrates that a starchy language used both to bind (us to material life) and to soften (power structures) has enormous environmental potential. While primarily serving scholars in Italian studies and ecocriticism, this culinary method invites adaptations across food cultures and gender identities.

Pesticide, Politics and a Paradise Lost: Toxicity, Slow Violence and Survival Environmentalism in Ambikasutan Mangad’s "Swarga"

2023-03-28T03:18:09+02:00

Ambikasutan Mangad’s Enmakaje (translated into English as Swarga by J. Devika) is a dystopic tale of socio-environmental crisis that represents the actual event of endosulfan disaster in the Indian state of Kerala in literary imagination. This paper examines how Mangad’s text represents the “slow violence” the endosulfan disaster unleashes, in encrypted and incremental ways, upon the environs, bodies and psyches of the victims. It looks into how the politics of denial tries to suppress the inconvenient truth about the invisible invasion of the foreign element in an area where the local people live in reciprocity with their immediate environment. The paper also dissects how Mangad’s use of the images of deformed human bodies with congenital anomalies in rendering the amorphous threats visible brings the environmental and disability concerns together and how these contravened and disabled bodies mark the uncanny nature of the disaster. Finally, it focuses on how the poor victims put up a collective protest in the form of an ecopopulist movement against the pesticide lobby and how their resistance to the socio-environmental injustice substantiates the fact that in a postcolonial country like India environmental issues are integrally connected to the issues of sustenance, shelter and survival of the “ecosystem people”.

Emplacement and Narrative Identity in Tomas Bannerhed’s "Korparna"

2023-03-28T03:06:26+02:00

In Tomas Bannerhed’s Korparna (The Ravens, 2011), birds and trees not only function as backdrop and setting but contribute toward forming the characters’ narrative identities and sense of place. As this is partly based on cultural values and traditions, I explore historical and literary sources from Småland—the historical province in Sweden where Korparna is set—to assess how Bannerhed interprets and elaborates on them. Drawing on Forrest Clingerman’s concept of “emplacement,” I explicate the interplay between conflicting environmental interpretations, recognizing that places can be described based on the historical record or on ornithological and botanical data, but that folklore and mythology also contribute to local meaning-making. In the context of Korparna, I argue that birding can be a meaningful way of engaging with place, a form of naturalist enthusiasm that fosters deep local knowledge. Finally, I show that relations with nonhumans can be constitutive to a variety of conflicting but partly overlapping environmental identities.

Zoomorphism and Human Biology in Barbara Kingsolver’s "Prodigal Summer"

2023-03-28T03:29:33+02:00

This article explores the conceptual difficulties that arise when fiction explores humankind’s primordial ties to nature, specifically regarding gender representation. I examine how an emphasis on biology demonstrates humankind’s innate connection to nature, while simultaneously perpetuating a problematic, essentialist view of gender. Using Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer (2000) as a case study, I present two perspectives from which to interpret her ecofeminist approach. Firstly, I argue that Kingsolver employs zoomorphism as an effective strategy to override essentialist representations of sexuality. Secondly, I use Hans Gumbrecht’s theory of presence to contextualise the representation of biology and claim that Prodigal Summer attempts to dilute a much broader conceptual binary between humankind and nature.

Toward a Cultural, Literary and Natural History of the Ibero–American Coyote in the 16th–19th Centuries

2023-05-14T19:38:44+02:00

The research discussed in this article takes a preliminary approach to the literary and zoological history of the Ibero-American coyote. As an important mythical figure since pre-Hispanic times, the Ibero-American coyote has commonly played the role of trickster in tales and legends throughout Latin America. As a biological species, it has demonstrated extraordinary adaptability in its expansion throughout the American territories in recent years. While the cultural role of the coyote has been variously considered in previous studies, especially its role in North American literature, this historical sketch focuses specifically on the Ibero-American coyote. The research takes an Animal Studies approach, in that it analyzes the relationships between humans and this species of canid in the texts discussed. It is also interdisciplinary in combining various sources and genres (natural histories, Indian Chronicles, geography books, a hunting treatise, fables...), covering a period of nearly four centuries (from the 16th to the 19th). The intention is to read, where possible, the behaviour, meanings and habits given to the coyote in these documents from a point of view that takes into account zoological knowledge about the species, and not just its symbolism or anthropomorphic attributions. This approach to studying animals—and in the case that concerns us, the coyote—allows us to see what these creatures have meant to us, how we have used them in our cultures and societies, and how we have treated them throughout history.

Editorial 14.2

2023-10-15T14:59:50+02:00

Editorial 14.2

Editorial

2023-10-07T00:09:50+02:00

Editorial.

The Bioplastic Art and Fiber Art: Eco-art

2023-09-15T15:21:29+02:00

Art.

Christ and the Hens from the Next Transgenic Generation

2023-03-16T07:45:59+01:00

This poem was written as a strategy of poetic immersion for ecocritic/ecopoetic research. The idea for this poem appeared during the interdisciplinary exchange entitled “Ganadería x Literatura @Granja T-PIRC” that took place on March 17th 2021 in the Tsukuba-Plant Innovation Research Center, coordinated by professors Maki Eguchi and Atsushi Tajima of Tsukuba University.

The House Pet

2023-01-17T14:40:57+01:00

A short story from the series Antiviral Writings and about everyday life during the covid19 confinement.

Poems

2023-01-17T14:40:07+01:00

Collapse carries the weight of catastrophe. But what will collapse, and for whom will it be catastrophic? With the decline of the human, other species might get the opportunity to reconfigure things—but rather than some kind of misanthropic dream, the possibilities of these emergent relations are a source of inspiration and hope. If there is a way to erode the sanctity of the human subject without plunging head-first into fantasies of annihilation and extinction, what kinds of relationships might we discover, or recover—with those who inhabit us, and with those who share our habitats? What kinds of languages would these relationships require? What kinds of poetics? My inclination is towards a relocation of the divine within these emergent networks—to reinfuse matter with spirit, yes, but also to demolish structures of transcendence. The new heaven would be fecund and sloppy as a mud flat rather than abstracted into the pure white zero of a holy moon. But as pleasing (or relieving) as this idea might be, the place to which it refers will remain distant from us while the bodies that compose our ‘us’ remain oblivious to the symbiotic co-constitutions with which they’re composed. Many cultures have developed conceptual technologies to properly articulate these enmeshments—totemist, animist materialisms which are glaringly absent from too much Western intellectual history, but which important work in the environmental humanities and elsewhere has begun to rectify.

Ticking Like a Mountain – or the Bezoszoic

2021-12-14T10:54:58+01:00

Poem.

15,000 Metres Above Time

2023-01-17T14:37:37+01:00

Poem.

Sketches, Paintings and Poster Designs

2023-01-14T19:10:23+01:00

These sketches, paintings and poster designs are made to be shared as a form of activism for wilderness, against nuclear weapons, for ecosystems, and for friendship.

Contemporary Collapse: New Narratives of the End. An introduction

2023-09-12T12:35:28+02:00

Introduction to the guest edited section.

Collapse and Reversed Extinction:Beyond Inherited Epistemologies of Species Loss in Louise Erdrich’s "Future Home of the Living God"

2023-02-13T18:42:46+01:00

This article argues for the importance of a critical examination of the frameworks and epistemologies through which species extinction is conceptualized. As global biodiversity loss rates accelerate, the legacy of nineteenth-century colonial science continues to inform understandings of species extinctions, whereby the discourse around species loss is profoundly intertwined with notions of taxonomies, race, and hierarchies. My article demonstrates how Louise Erdrich’s post-apocalyptic novel Future Home of the Living God (2017) exposes and destabilizes these inherited Western epistemologies of extinction. Erdrich’s narrative centres around a bizarre extinction event where evolution begins to spin out of control, perhaps running backwards, and where biological categories and species boundaries lose their meanings. As an Indigenous Futurist text, the novel is told from the perspective of a pregnant woman of Ojibwe ancestry who becomes imprisoned when a white authoritarian government, in an attempt to maintain the status quo, detain all women of child-bearing age. The reverse extinction scenario, as my discussion shows, produces an ontological uncertainty within the diegesis, with characters left in a state of unknowability about the nature of the world – a situation that provides Indigenous communities with opportunities for land reclamation and empowerment. The novel reads as a counter-narrative to Western notions about scientific progress also on the level of form, as the text presents an introspective and cyclical unfolding of events. In this way, rather than to provide post-apocalyptic resolution, Erdrich’s novel mobilizes uncertainty and subverts the mainstream post-apocalyptic genre template in order to gesture towards the possibility of alternative futures liberated from colonial epistemologies.

Pachakuti, an Indigenous Perspective on Collapse and Extinction

2023-01-23T17:25:39+01:00

This work aims to examine pachakuti as the patent mytheme found in three poems written by different indigenous poets: “Todo está dicho” (“Everything has been said”) by Fredy Chakangana, “La Tórtola, pájaro melancólico” (“The turtledove, melancholic bird”) by Lorenzo Ayllapán, and “Vivir-Morir” (“To live-to die”) by Vito Apüshana. Pachakuti is a key concept in Andean literature, both in mythological and cosmological tales, and in contemporary indigenous narrative. Pachakuti is interpreted to symbolize a re-balancing of the world through a chaotic chain of events that manifests itself as a catastrophe or an upheaval of the order of things. As pachakuti becomes a recurrent motif (patent mytheme) in the chosen poems, it is explored to show a different narrative perspective of collapse and extinction, as well as to expose how earth-beings (latent mytheme) acquire their own agency in the poems and denounce modern forms of extractivism (such as deforestation and water contamination). Through the earth-beings’ voices the poems contribute to reveal new perspectives about collapse and extinction anchored in indigenous narratives from the Global South.

The Future is Collapsing: Feminist Narratives of Unmaking in Laura Pugno and Veronica Raimo

2023-03-18T18:54:39+01:00

While long ignored in the Italian panorama, in recent years science fiction and speculative fiction have seen a significant increase in the number of novels and critical analyses related to the two genres. Women writers are reclaiming a central spot in the fields in general, as exemplified by collapse and extinction narratives in particular. Laura Pugno’s Sirene (Mermaids, 2007) constitutes a significant example of such fiction. The work depicts a dystopic future, in which humans are facing extinction due to a dangerous cancer caused by pollution. While mermaids are immune to the disease, they are imprisoned by humans either for mermaid meat production or for sexual purposes. Veronica Raimo’s Miden (2018) has points in common with Pugno’s novel, even if from a (seemingly) utopian perspective. Miden is an ideal society that has flourished according to gender equality, happiness, and community principles. However, not too long after having moved there due to the economic (and moral) “Collapse” of their country, the main character and his partner are investigated by Miden’s society as the protagonist is accused of sexual violence. Both novels have been described by Marco Malvestio as eco-dystopias. Stemming from his definition, the paper investigates how both Sirene and Miden apply the concept of collapse as a key methodology in constructing their narratives. In this way, Pugno and Raimo collapse the human and nonhuman and the dystopia and utopia binaries. The paper argues that the authors follow a queer practice of unmaking theorised by Jack Halberstam, who stated that the only way forward is to unbuild, unmake, and collapse (2021).

Contemporary Graphic Narratives of the End: Sketching an Ecopolitics of Disorientation and Solidarity through Sf Bande Dessinée

2023-03-01T18:14:54+01:00

This article focuses on visions of the end in contemporary science fiction bande dessinée to explore the combined potentialities of the sf genre and the comics medium for imaginaries of world-rebuilding in the Anthropocene, and to develop an ecopolitics of disorientation and solidarity for a collapsing world. Bringing an ecocritical approach to queer and feminist theorizations of the politics of disorientation, it first discusses texts that draw (counter-)narratives of Anthropocenic futures, in which other-than-human agencies, spatialities and temporalities take centre stage in unsettling ways and collapse Western master narratives of the environment. In Jérémy Perrodeau’s Crépuscule, the non-linear storylines of an artificially created and now contaminated planet collide and assemble to disrupt the myth of a ‘virgin land’, rendering the erasure and slow re-inscription of genocidal and ecocidal violence. In Enki Bilal’s trilogy Coup de sang, it is the illusory hyper-separation of humans from nature that is dismantled through post-apocalyptic elemental graphics. The article then explores ways in which disorientation becomes fully productive as part of an ecopolitics when it is entwined with solidarity, a term that here extends beyond the human and is understood as a praxis of both care and resistance, drawing on ecofeminism and environmental philosophy. This is explored through Ludovic Debeurme’s trilogy Epiphania, which critiques and dissolves the human-animal boundary into enmeshed relationalities in sf visions toward multispecies communities and bodily and ethical mutations; and Jeanne Burgart Goutal and Aurore Chapon’s ReSisters, a choral narrative that makes use of comics’ potential for diffractive and participatory readings to draw the outlines of an ecofeminist uprising.

Norwegian Futurisms: Posthumanism and the Norwegian Nordic Model in Tor Åge Bringsværd’s "Du og Jeg, Alfred" and "Alfred 2.0"

2023-03-18T18:27:35+01:00

In Norway, much of the Science Fiction published over the last two decades has been dystopian and focused on the future effects of climate change on society. In light of this trend, this article explores how the ecodystopian duology, Du og jeg, Alfred: Et tidsbilde (2020) and Alfred 2.0 (2022), written by Tor Åge Bringsværd under the pseudonym Edgar Burås, reflects on and criticizes the Norwegian Nordic model, particularly in relation to Norway’s oil wealth, social welfare, consumerism, and ecological concerns. As both novels mobilize characters and technologies that blur and confuse the boundaries of the human, the posthumanist theories of Donna Haraway are utilized in interpreting their cultural and socio-political symbolism. Additionally, these novels also serve as an intertextual update to Astrid Lindgren’s Emil i Lönneberga series (1963-1970), with the traditional boundaries of familial relationships pushed into posthuman notions of gender, age, and species. This article ultimately argues that the ecodystopian setting and posthuman characters posit an intersectional diversity and multispecies kinship that challenge notions of ecological and social sustainability in the Norwegian Nordic model. This article begins by introducing Bringsværd and the core texts, then concretizes the Norwegian Nordic model and explores the ecodystopian setting in light of neoliberalism and nationalism, and concludes with a discussion of posthumanism and intertextuality.

Seeing the World Through Glass: Time and Extinction in Fiona Tan’s "Depot" (2015)

2023-03-16T13:17:55+01:00

These times of mass extinctions ask for different temporalities than rationalized, linear time, to become in synch with them. Depot (2015) is a film installation by Indonesian-Australian artist Fiona Tan showcasing endangered and extinct marine animals that are preserved in jars, taxidermied or parts of skeletons in the natural history museums of Leiden and Berlin. I argue that through cinematic techniques such as stilled images, (extreme) close-ups, framing and a poetic voice-over recounting memories of marine animals, these specimens are given duration. Through this, Depot scrutinizes narratives of Western science and imperialism tied to linear time and progress perpetuated by natural history museums. The scientific and objective status of the natural history museum and its extraction histories is not only criticized, but its histories are also acknowledged, lamented and reframed. As such, Depot offers a decolonising extinction temporality as well as a new ocean imaginary that opposes ideas of ocean life as abundant frontier. I argue that Depot questions the mechanisms of science and time that determine how we see ourselves as humans and our place in the nonhuman world.

Facing Depletion. Artworks for an Epistemological Shift in the Collapse Era

2023-09-17T12:29:44+02:00

This article first reports a victory of technosolutionism over the other alternatives to the ongoing collapse (species extinction, ecosystems depletion...). The victory is considered double: extraction can continue to increase (quantity and scope) and the devices made by technoscience are accepted as a solution to the problems caused by intensive exploitation (which they also require). Exploitation is extended, following Achille Mbembé's proposal, to humans, non-human animals, and the earth (in a geological sense), retaining the terms fracturing, extraction, depletion. Four works are analyzed as epistemological shifts to technosolutionism. David Claerbout's The Pure Necessity (2016) is an animated cartoon of animals with a streamlined behavior depicted with the graphic style of Disney. The complex interlocking of eras, styles, behaviors (human and non-human) is envi-saged as resistance to fracking and exploitation. Animal Cinema (2017) by Emilio Vavarella is a short film made from rushes produced by non-human animals. It is emphasized that the frugal production method opposes the spectacular logics of big-budget animal reporting. It adopts the animal point of view while respecting their means of production. It is also seductive by a fluid and hypnotizing editing more easily accessible to humans. Emilio Vavarella's Amazon's Cabinet of Curiosity (2019) is an installation with a strict protocol: the artist asks what he should order to make an artistic production. He then buys each suggestion until his budget is exhausted. By its absence, the commercial behavior of the so-called intelligent device is underlined. The artist also resists fracturing and exploitation by reducing himself to a demand. Finally, She Was Called Petra (2020) by myself is a multi-media installation. In this one, language is re-interrogated and a zone of contact/exchange is set up to cohabit with and think a hybrid presence.