Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment

Whole Issue 14.1

Gala Arias Rubio — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Whole issue 14.1

Ocean Acidification as a Hyperobject: Mediating Acidic Milieus in the Anthropocene

Oriol Batalla — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Through the usage of Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects (2013) as a heuristic, this essay aims to portray how Ocean Acidification can be read as a hyperobject affecting tropical seawaters and beyond. Furthermore, it illustrates how the arts and humanities, through their hermeneutical gaze, might help us grasp Ocean Acidification as a hyperobject and the wide array of other objects that act upon each other in such acidic oceanic waters. In this task, the article will close-read the Underwater Woman set of pictures by Christine Ren (2018) understanding the interpretation of art as a tool to reconnect cognition and emotion to move from the understanding of a crisis to the feeling of such crisis. Finally, it aims to shed light upon the implications arising from considering Ocean Acidification as a hyperobject. By connecting the theoretical, visual and political in the same narrative, this essay highlights the transformative potential of interpretation and thinking through hyperobjects. With this, the challenges of the Anthropocene are put at the forefront, situating specific events and problematics in a planetary scale.

The Contribution of Literature to the Composition of a "common world": Marlen Haushofer's "The Wall" and Friedrich Dürrenmatt's "Minotaurus"

Aurélie Choné — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

In the context of the current environmental crisis and Covid-19 pandemic, as it is becoming increasingly urgent to “rethink the relationships between human and non-human beings” (Philippe Descola), this paper offers a comparative reading of two works of German-language literature, both published, within a space of twelve years, during the Cold War: Die Wand (1963) by Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer and Minotaurus: Eine Ballade (1985) by Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt. In these two narratives, I will focus on the way communities are made and unmade, on what Marielle Macé has defined as “the grammar of attachments”. How do words, especially personal pronouns, convey the process by which beings connect one to the other, and are the connections made solid and harmonious ones? Do these two works manage to give rise to a community of living, human and non-human entities? This paper will examine the role of literature in building “a common world” (Bruno Latour), asking whether the scripts outlined in the two books can raise “active hope” (Joanna Macy) and what they teach us about the history of the concept of nature in a time of great environmental change.

Editorial 14.1

Heather Sullivan — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Editorial 14.1

Gardening (against) the Anthropocene. An Introduction

Catriona Sandilands, Catrin Gersdorf — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Introduction to the guest edited section.

Gardening the Planet: Literature and the Reimagining of Human/Nature Relations for the Anthropocene

Axel Goodbody — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Gardening as an activity characterised by attentiveness to nature and willingness to adapt to and care for it, and the idea of gardening the planet are attracting growing interest in the context of debates on the Anthropocene. Garden writing exists in forms ranging from autobiographically framed essays describing plants and their care to prose fiction and even poetry. This article is concerned with its contribution to reimagining human/nature relations in a way which is particularly relevant in the Anthropocene: homo hortensis is a conception of humanity as an integral part of nature, dwelling actively in it and enhancing it rather than consuming or destroying it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie or the New Heloise (1761) and Adalbert Stifter’s Indian Summer (1857–9) are examined as Early Anthropocene novels which anticipate through the gardens they depict aspects of Anthropocene thinking which find more explicit formulation in Michael Pollan’s work of nonfiction garden writing, Second Nature (1991).

Taboo Ecologies: Material and Lyric Dispossession in Anne Spencer’s Garden and Seed Catalogs

Jordan Angel Norviel — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Harlem Renaissance poet and gardener Anne Spencer drew inspiration from both her garden and reading. In a poem entitled “Taboo,” Spencer described reading “garden and seed catalogs, Browning, Housman, Whitman […] oh anything…” and, in doing so, asserted the significance of her catalogs alongside literary works as inspiration for her poetry. The poem as a whole describes how Black women evade the Jim Crow South through covert activities like reading which for Spencer, importantly included garden and seed catalogs. Where Spencer’s poetry and garden have been the subject of academic research, her catalogs have yet to receive the same scholarly attention. This paper argues that by placing garden and seed catalogs in the same category of taboo reading as canonical poets and conventional forms of journalism, Spencer aligns the botanical with the literary as a form of resistance. The seed catalogs Spencer engaged with reveal a long history of racism in the cultivation and naming of garden plants. This paper examines the history of seed catalogs, showing how the naming of plants is a continuation of the racist logic of possession, reflected in the naming of plants by stripping the plant of its previous context and replacing it with the names of colonial scientists and racial slurs. Spencer’s poetic insistence on dispossession, the literal and metaphorical disembodiment and ejection from property, pushes against conceptions of ownership over the natural world in that it subverts the racist logic of possession. I contend that Anne Spencer actively intertwined histories by drawing on catalogs, poetry, and gardening to create new ecologies in the spaces between reading and writing, lyrical and material. The new ecology of Spencer’s garden far exceeds a place where plants are grown but rather becomes a space that blooms through the material, the lyrical, and social spaces, leaving behind instead a living archive of rebellion.

(Re)creating a Living Memorial: Urban Gardening as a Multispecies Co-creating Practice

JC Niala — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

This essay explores what happened when I recreated an allotment in the style of the year 1918. The plot was located on a charity allotment site in the city of Oxford in the United Kingdom and cultivated during the growing season of 2020 to2021. There have been people growing on the site for over a century. I planted open pollinated non-hybrid heritage seeds from the era. Reflecting on the use of landscape as an archive, I use both academic and creative responses to the soil as a repository of memory. The plot itself became a living memorial that diverse members of the public visited, to share food and engage with the plot and the themes it generated. These themes were the current COVID-19 pandemic, the 1918/1919 flu pandemic, and the First World War in Africa and Europe. In contrast to contested public memorials, the allotment garden space facilitated restoration. This essay therefore examines what can be enabled through a co-creating a multispecies gardening practice. It discusses whether the inclusion of nature enables a different engagement with challenging histories. By working with a store of memory within the natural world, the case study of the 1918 allotment demonstrates the ways in which it is possible to transcend both time and space, to open up counter narratives of key periods in global history. The 1918 allotment also offers up a methodological approach that works with the practice of decolonisation as “convivial” (Nyamnjoh). A meeting place for varied peoples and more-than-human others to come together in transformation, through urban gardening and working alongside and with more-than-human gardeners.

"Le Jardin d’Allah": Ecological Sensibilities in the Francophone Caribbean

Chiara Lanza — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

When gardening and Caribbean islands are mentioned, one cannot but think of Jamaica Kincaid and of the way in which she has articulated the complex relationship between colonialism and gardens, between people and notions such as place and situatedness. The very idea of nature in the Caribbean is strongly connoted, bearing the brunt of age-old associations with exoticism, mystery, unpredictability, or even madness. The symbolic meanings gardens take on in this region are therefore numerous and multifaceted, and if some have been lengthily discussed, others might still be worth exploring. Such is the case of backyards and vegetable gardens in Maryse Condé’s En Attendant la Montée des Eaux: in a violence-torn, poverty-afflicted, and politically unstable Haiti, the orphaned Movar makes people’s lives more bearable by recreating beauty around them, and by giving order to their unruly surroundings. His actions are more than a simple imposition of man over nature, they are also a metaphoric restoration of a lost balance, long forgotten because of other men’s blind exploitation of both human and natural resources in an environment rendered all the more fragile by its fluctuating weather patterns. This paper presents some considerations on Caribbean soil ecologies, with a particular focus on Guadeloupe and Haiti, and on the ways in which the gardener-garden relationship might contribute to restoring damaged ecosystems. Through the character of Movar and the Jardin d’Allah he tends to, concepts such as care time, reciprocal gardening and plant agency are explored. The precarious contexts in which acts of gardening take place allow for the words of Maryse Condé to be read as a paradigm for finding rootedness and balance in a politically, socially, and ecologically suffering world. Finally, Movar’s story is translated on a global scale, as an effective model of social sustainability and responsibility.

“I am not by any stretch a gardener, just curious”: Feminist Gentrifier Memoirs and an Ethics of Urban Gardening

Maria Sulimma — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Even though the texts that this article refers to as “feminist gentrifier memoirs” are not exclusively examples of garden writing, their feminist writers’ gardening practices feature prominently to explore their conflicted position in a gentrifying neighborhood and the networks of care that form out of neighborly interactions over the garden. Drawing on urban studies in the social sciences and humanities, literary studies, and environmental humanities, the article turns to Anne Elizabeth Moore’s Gentrifier (2021) and Vikki Warner’s Tenemental (2018) as prominent engagements with the complex emotions caused by their writers’ white privilege, homeownership, and complicity in processes of displacement and real estate speculation. These texts employ modes and affordances of garden writing, feminist memoir, urban memoir, and gentrification fiction. The article further considers the ways they are influenced by the activism of community gardening and benefit from sustainability measures of cities, including urban farms and gardens (summarized under the keywords green or environmental gentrification).

The Dirt Witches’ Counter-narrative: A Response to Murray Bail’s "Eucalyptus"

Prudence Gibson — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Murray Bail’s 1998 novel Eucalyptus is an exposition of land ownership, plant classification and human-land relations, using a fairy tale structure. Bail uses parodic excess to deftly undermine settler preoccupations and European traditions that have historically been transposed onto the Australian bush. However, upon a second reading twenty-four years after the first, this author detected an absence of decolonial context in the book, relative to the time of publication, and an unintended reinforcement of misogyny that requires fresh interrogation. This author’s own work as a member of a Dirt Witch collective presents as a dovetailed creative object—an urban forest artwork 2021—and allows a witchy reading of Bail’s 1998 book and more contemporary attempts to redress colonial failures. It also allows an interrogation of the way the novel re-stereotypes Australian women on the land, re-oppresses both land and women and reinforces the very misogyny it was purported to expose.

Sensing Scale in Experimental Gardens: Un-Lawning with Silphium Civic Science

Aubrey Streit Krug, Ellie Irons, Anna Andersson — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Gardening experiments are timely in the context of what many now call the Anthropocene, an era that highlights questions of how humans collectively relate to the larger Earth systems in which we are embedded. In Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept, Timothy Clark reflects on the “unreadability” of the Anthropocene. He invites ecocritics to address this challenge by practicing “scale framing,” reading texts in variable and increasingly broad scales, and engaging the contradictions that emerge. We applied a scale framing approach to a story of relationships with Silphium integrifolium in an experimental gardening project. Silphium is a native North American perennial prairie plant being domesticated as a future oilseed crop. We are researchers and participants in a civic science project, in which individual garden sites are designed to collect data on and conserve silphium ecotypes while being linked into a wider network. In particular, we analyzed a civic science video story created by Ellie Irons called “Un-Lawning with Silphium.” Through our ecocritical analysis, we generated a framework to visualize nested and cross-scalar relationships in gardening projects. This framework could help inform the design and assessment of experimental gardening projects that feature the arts and humanities (e.g., digital narratives, ecocriticism, and pedagogy) and connect them with the natural and social sciences (e.g., plant breeding, botany, geography, and ecology) through transdisciplinary and participatory research methodologies for public engagement (e.g., civic science). We found that civic science gardening with silphium, and other gardening experiments in the Anthropocene, can guide public sensory engagements with scale, help spark recognition and investigation of contradictory scale effects, and motivate us to imagine and build relationships of caring responsibility.

Gardening the Symbiocene: Andrea Zanzotto’s and Daria Menicanti’s Poetic Hospitability

Serena Ferrando — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

This essay explores the weaving together of vegetal and elemental narratives through the poetry of Andrea Zanzotto and Daria Menicanti and shows how their experience of the landscape is punctuated by cross-species encounters, a radical openness to the world, the belief in the common roots of all life, and the embrace of vulnerability in interactions with others. Starting from the premise that these poets comprehend that an emphasis on verbality reflects the anthropic desire to translate life into a one-species code and constitutes an impediment to universal and meaningful communication, this essay argues that Zanzotto’s and Menicanti’s embrace of the nonverbality of plant communication becomes key in the process of meaning-making. A narration of and with plants is the antidote to what they understand as the ultimate malady of language that prevents it from grasping and conveying the richness of the world after it has supplanted the nonhuman domain. Through a close reading of four poems that illustrates how the poets embrace the eloquent silences, gaps, hesitations, and overabundance of meaning of the vegetal realm, this essay foregrounds the boundary-breaking quality of Zanzotto’s and Menicanti’s poetry as a space for rich human-nonhuman exchanges. Ultimately, this essay argues that by declining to place themselves above plants and exert power over them, Zanzotto and Menicanti usher in the Symbiocene, the era characterized by multispecies coexistence, mutual support, and interdependence. Their poetry creates spaces where the human can lean into the more-than-human and, for one brief instant, get a taste of existing in harmony with the life that pulsates all around.

Review Essay. Energy in Crisis: New Perspectives on Petrocultures

Katie Ritson — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Review essay.

Review Essay. Creativity and Resistance in the Age of Waste

Pamela Phillips — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Review essay.

Book Review of "The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene"

Kathrin Bartha-Mitchell — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Book review of The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene.

Book Review of "Die Pflanzenwelt im Fokus der Environmental Humanities. Le végétal au défi des Humanités environnementales"

Stefan Hecht — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Book review of Die Pflanzenwelt im Fokus der Environmental Humanities. Le végétal au défi des Humanités environnementales.

Book Review of "Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media"

Mònica Tomàs White — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Book review of Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene: Imagining Futures and Dreaming Hope in Literature and Media.

Book Review of "Art and Posthumanism Essays, Encounters, Conversations"

Caroline Granger — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Book review of Art and Posthumanism Essays, Encounters, Conversations.

Book Review of "Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity"

Marco Caracciolo — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Book review of Game: Animals, Video Games, and Humanity.

Credits 14.1

Irene Sanz Alonso — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Credits 14.1

Editorial

Elizabeth Tavella — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Editorial.

Rewilding Suburbia in the American Plains

Benjamin Vogt — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

In a time of mass extinction and climate change, every plant in a design urban garden matters. For me, as a garden designer, that means using native plant in sync with local wildlife. The hope is that using plants wildlife recognize will, in some cases, help both fauna and flora adapt to changes. My designs are meant to bridge the wild prairie, most now gone, and the traditional aesthetic concerns of urban dwellers. As wildness is brought back into our lives through all five senses, we gain appreciation for other species and, in turn, may begin to advocate for them and their wellbeing -- as our wellbeing is tied to plants, birds, insects, spiders, and more.

Multispecies Care in the Urban Gardening Practices in Finland

Agnese Bankovska — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

No abstract.

A Big Gay Garden: Cultivating Collective in Str*ke Time

dp patrick — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

No abstract.

Poem

Mary Newell — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Poem.

From "Erbario"

Antonello Borra — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

Poems.

Walnut

William Bond — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

A poem about an eastern American black walnut tree.

Fiddleheads

Elizabeth Bolton — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0200

A poem in six parts tracing the natural history of fiddleheads, also known as Ostrich ferns, Onoclea struthiopteris or Matteucia struthiopteris: a plant native to northeastern North America (Turtle Island) and a traditional food.