Authors:Susan Haris Pages: 6 - 25 Abstract: Multispecies ethnography attempts to bring to the forefront those animal lives previously overlooked by charting our shared social worlds and showing how humans and nonhumans are mutually affected by social, cultural and political processes. The resistance in postcolonial critique to focus on nonhuman animal subjects stems from making the colonised and the animal comparable and the fear that such an association may dehumanise the human subject. This paper suggests that multispecies ethnography influenced by Latour, Haraway, Tsing and others is a useful tool for analysing postcolonial contexts because of its emphasis on relation, mutuality and alliances. However, I suggest that this inheritance is rebuilt as a postcolonial multispecies ethnography because of its attention to five aspects that is common to both fields: subaltern, local, collective, representation and decolonisation. By a careful reading of these key concepts with examples from contemporary literature, I show how postcolonial multispecies ethnographies engage with hybrid identities that are culturally produced and historically situated and how they register the nonhuman animals as narrativisable subjects who are nevertheless “irretrievably heterogeneous” (284). In this ethnographic emergence, postcolonial multispecies ethnography re-dignifies the nonhuman animal subject which opens up the radical possibility of realizing their embodied perspectives. PubDate: 2022-10-29 DOI: 10.37536/ECOZONA.2022.13.2.4736 Issue No:Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Ashwarya Samkaria Pages: 26 - 40 Abstract: Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island (2019) explores the intersection of the nonhuman with 21st century issues pertaining to racial and ecological injustice, ethnic cleansing, environmental catastrophe and migrant ecologies by way of allegorising the myth of Manasa Devi (goddess of snakes and other venomous creatures). A postcolonial ecocritical lens helps analyse how the novelist presents nonhuman actors to contest Western anthropocentric conceptualisations of human subjectivity shaped by historical forces of modernity. By positing a postanthropocentric way of reading the world in order to shape new human subjectivities which do not efface human-nonhuman entanglements, my paper studies how Ghosh recognises agentic capacities and storied matter of the postcolonial nonhuman subject matter by identifying the novel’s subversive negotiations through the tropes of language, embodiment, genre, and everyday environmentalism. I analyse how the contextualisation of the postcolonial nonhuman not only critiques human exceptionalism but destabilises the constructedness of borders in terms of an immaterial myth projecting an otherworldly possibility, trans-corporeality positing inescapable interconnectedness between humans and all living and non-living matter, and everyday environmentalism broadening the definition of environment to contest nature-culture dualism. I also argue that this ecofiction’s allegorisation of Manasa Devi’s myth through the unseen boundaries that she seeks to retain problematise a simplistic understanding of borders as limiting. My paper thus analyses how this reconceptualisation through the postcolonial nonhuman blurs borders and their ordering of the world and posits, instead, a relational living that dismantles constructedness of hierarchies while paying heed to (b)orders for ecological sustainable living. PubDate: 2022-10-29 DOI: 10.37536/ECOZONA.2022.13.2.4671 Issue No:Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Amit Baishya Pages: 41 - 57 Abstract: While Namwali Serpell’s novel The Old Drift can be read as a fictional account of colonial and post-colonial Zambian history, this article focuses on the text’s exploration of Anthropocene time—geobiochemical and planetary temporal scales that predate human histories, while also gesturing towards futures where Homo sapiens may be absent. This article focuses on deep temporality in the novel via the use of mosquito and Moskeetoze (mosquito-like microdrones) narrators. While mosquitoes facilitate encounters with the deep past and of entangled human-nonhuman histories, the Moskeetozes enable representations of the vicissitudes of the “Anthrobscene” (Parrikka) and the creative potentialities of improvised life that emerge in hazardscapes in the Global South. Additionally, The Old Drift gestures towards a speculative planetary future where mosquitoes and Moskeetozes integrate to evolve new forms of swarm intelligence and forms of life. PubDate: 2022-10-29 DOI: 10.37536/ECOZONA.2022.13.2.4709 Issue No:Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:English Brooks Pages: 58 - 76 Abstract: Current human migrations and nonhuman extinctions on massive scales compel us to more carefully apply interspecies concepts of mobility to understanding the roles played by geopolitical borders, as well as the various, ongoing forms of colonialism that have produced and continue to perpetuate these borders. This essay applies bioregional, material, decolonial, and borderlands ecocriticism to historicize prevention through deterrence enforcement measures in the Mexico-US border region, and discusses several significant entanglements of interspecies actors in migratory contexts, exploring a range of ways that nonhuman nature has been and continues to be deployed materially against migrants. In historicizing US enforcement tactics, the essay tracks the distribution of human agency from settler colonial, ethnonationalist, and neoliberal US policy makers, to armed paramilitary human bodies, then into structures of the built environment, and, finally, to the ways that agency is further diffused across complex webs of multiple kinds of human and nonhuman actors—plants, animals, landforms, watercourses, climate and weather conditions, and so on. While in some instances, nonhuman animals are deployed against migrant and other indigenous and mestizo people, in other multispecies entanglements, animals participate in the revelation and denunciation of state sponsored violence, leading to larger questions of the status of other nonhuman animals in the borderlands. The essay’s primary focus is on illustrating the practical untenability of, and the severe harm done in, continuing to regard the borderlands from settler colonialist or human exceptionalist positionalities. PubDate: 2022-10-29 DOI: 10.37536/ECOZONA.2022.13.2.4701 Issue No:Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Marta Sofía López Pages: 77 - 91 Abstract: The underlying assumption when speaking about the postcolonial nonhuman is that the other-than-human refers to what could be called, broadly speaking, the “natural world,” as opposed to “the human-as-Man,” but still usually understood in (Western) secular terms. Nevertheless, from the perspective of African onto-epistemologies, the nonhuman can also refer to the spiritual world, or to the diverse assemblages between the “natural,” the human and the sacred. Freshwater (2018) and Dear Senthuran. A Black Spirit Memoir (2021), by Akwaeke Emezi, open up a space of “border gnoseology,” where contemporary Anglo-American discourses on transsexuality intersect with African ontologies and epistemologies, specifically with the well-known figure of the ogbanje and the sacred python as an avatar of Ala, the Earth goddess in Igbo culture, to produce a radically subversive embodied subjectivity. The ideas of movement, transing, tranimalcy and (transatlantic) crossing conspire to dismantle conventional Eurocentric humanist views on selfhood and identity. Reading Emeke on their own terms also requires revisiting alternative notions of temporality beyond secular, cisheteronormative, modern time, as well as an understanding that the sacred and the spiritual are indeed essential to the worldview and the processes of subjectivation of millions of people across the globe. PubDate: 2022-10-29 DOI: 10.37536/ECOZONA.2022.13.2.4669 Issue No:Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Sara Buekens Pages: 92 - 108 Abstract: In this paper, I will argue that the literary mode of magical realism proves particularly apt to reflect the indeterminacies, instabilities, and ambiguities that mark the current climatic situation, particularly in the context of oil extraction in West Africa, emphasizing the unexpected and often invisible character of ecological problems and granting a particular agency to natural elements as they respond to harmful human activities. Based on a reading of Bessora's Petroleum (2004) and Helon Habila's Oil on Water (2010), which are set in the context of oil extraction in Gabon and the Niger Delta respectively, I will show that magical realism, by its transgression of traditional antinomies and various ontological levels, and by its presentation of an inherently hybrid universe, allows us to see the invisible and complex interrelationships of the different factors at the origin of the environmental crisis, such as capitalism and the global trade in natural resources. Moreover, this literary mode allows for the attribution of direct agency to the natural world as well as to oil, without intermediary, through the use of personification and active verbs. The result is an essentially hybrid universe, which evokes the more-than-human rhythms of landscapes and elements, where the agentivity of an environment that is both artificial and natural not only adds to the confusion of the characters but also visualizes the harm done to nature. PubDate: 2022-10-29 DOI: 10.37536/ECOZONA.2022.13.2.4678 Issue No:Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Graham Huggan Pages: 109 - 118 Abstract: This short piece focuses on the work of the German “celebrity conservationist,” Bernhard Grzimek, situating it in the context of historical and contemporary debates about the political and ecological importance of national parks. Grzimek’s role in the creation of Bavarian Forest National Park may not be as well-known as his public ministrations on behalf of the wild animals of the Serengeti, but in several ways his work in and for these two national parks, engaging with the fraught politics of the period, was intertwined. The essay looks at some of these overlaps, using them to make the case for national parks as complex geopolitical formations in which human and animal interests alternately collide and converge. The essay also makes the case for national parks as multi-scalar entities that need to be understood – politically and ecologically – in both local and global, both national and transnational terms. Finally, the essay cites the multiple roles of Grzimek to re-examine the ambivalent role of the celebrity conservationist as a media spokesperson and publicity-conscious advocate for the world’s wildlife. PubDate: 2022-10-29 DOI: 10.37536/ECOZONA.2022.13.2.4525 Issue No:Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Timothy Ryan Day Pages: 119 - 138 Abstract: This work of ecocritical narrative scholarship weaves analysis of Richard Powers’ The Overstory—specifically its invocation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth—with a discussion of biosemiotics, metaphor, emergence, and the narrative of my own family’s pandemic-inspired move to a national park in the mountains outside of Madrid. The essay investigates the juncture between the human holobiont—the space in and around the human body that constitutes shared habitats for symbionts—, the holobiont of pine trees, and the human umwelt. In other words, this piece focuses on the spaces in which bacteria, fungi, and the biological origins of semiosis and language converge. I seek to present a clearer perception of the natural world rooted in narratives of emergence that foreground connections—literary, natural, metaphorical, and material. The form of this paper—the latticework that emerges from the interweaving of literary analysis, biosemiotic and ecocritical theory, and personal narrative—is also part of its content. Through its focus on the intersection of narrative, biosemiotics and material ecocriticism, this work calls into question the very nature of literary metaphor and investigates how the material of literature literally ties us to our environment. Through an exploration of the phenomenological parallel between textual motion in literature, viral motion in nature, and the movement of people through natural and social environments, this document challenges the very idea of metaphor, proposing in its stead an insistence that story, consciousness, and organisms converge in the same material space creating patterns of resemblance that speak to the kinship of all biological systems. PubDate: 2022-10-29 DOI: 10.37536/ECOZONA.2022.13.2.4398 Issue No:Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Jemma Deer Pages: 139 - 153 Abstract: Fungi generate and demand subterranean thinking: thinking beyond the visible, thinking that makes connections between things previously supposed to be separate or individual. This article traces an extended subterranean metaphor that likens human language to fungal networks, showing how thinking fungally can transform how we conceive of the strange, underground life of language and our entanglements in it. The article opens with a brief exploration of the relevant mycological science and the ways in which “symbiotic” metaphors shape and transform human thinking. I then offer a close reading of Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s beautiful reflection on the relations between memory, language and landscape, The Grassling: A Geological Memoir (2019). I show how Burnett is attuned to what I call “the buried life of language”: its subterranean or invisible connectivities, its undoing of notions of individuality and centrality, and its dispersed and incalculable mode of co-creation that troubles assumptions about human agency. I argue that the etymological and lyrical mode of The Grassling invites us to recognise what lies below the surface of land, language and consciousness, and to thereby unravel some of our restrictive anthropocentrisms. PubDate: 2022-10-29 Issue No:Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Anna Chiafele Pages: 154 - 173 Abstract: L’ultima bambina d’Europa (The Last Girl of Europe), written by Francesco Aloe, is a captivating example of Italian cli-fi. Inspired by Pulitzer-prizewinning American novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy, L’ultima bambina d’Europa narrates the story of a young Italian family traveling southbound in an exhausting voyage toward Africa; presumably, there the sun is still visible, the wind is softly blowing, and water and food supplies have not run out, at least, not yet. In this article, I will analyze some of the main cli-fi topoi and I will connect them to the narrative and rhetorical construction employed by the author. Specifically, I will focus on the effect of estrangement, which will encourage readers to embrace a less anthropocentric gaze. Through the perspective of the main protagonists - mother, father and their daughter Sofia - readers will become aware of the gluttonous nature of capitalism that functions only for a few. In their voyage, these three characters traverse a barren and devastated landscape void of temporal and spatial references. However, in this unspecified gloomy future scenario, readers will recognize the ruins of our current society and of our petroculture, heavily influenced by the American model of consumerism. Sofia’s parents, who seem to suffer from “petro-melancholia” (LeMenager, Living Oil 102), recollect nostalgically the petrochemical culture in which they grew up. This is in stark contrast with Sofia’s perspective; she has no recollection of a capitalist society. Finally, this analysis will underline Aloe’s prowess in situating death among the living, the place where it rightfully belongs. PubDate: 2022-10-29 DOI: 10.37536/ECOZONA.2022.13.2.4710 Issue No:Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Nerea González Calvo, Atxu Amann Alcocer Pages: 174 - 192 Abstract: San is the main character of the 1997 epic fantasy film Princess Mononoke written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and animated by Studio Ghibli. The intellectualized interpretation of a paradigmatic and polyhedral fictional character like San, and her qualification as post-humanist, allows us to introduce a series of tropes (activism, ecology, performativity and network) that are the result of situations translated into a gender sense. San is in this way understood as an embodied reality: she is a post-humanist figuration of an ambitious theoretical assemblage that incorporates the approaches and practices of many authors who feed each of the aspects that define this activist, ecofeminist and more than human princess, in a narrative that is definitely far from the canons of humanism and its dual imaginary. From a gender perspective, this article uses the practice of storytelling as a strategy to share situated knowledge of reality. It raises the need to create fictional stories that feed on careful thinking to give access to science to an important community of receivers. Assuming that the suppression of what is habitual can be a powerful way to knowledge, it shows a piece of animation as a study case, where the animated graphic development gives agency to all kinds of elements that inhabit conflictive territories as an architectural field of human and non-human experiences. By means of a reading of Princess Mononoke from post-humanist discourses that perceive life within care networks and outside the limits of human otherness, this article shows how from narrative practices it is possible to talk about activism against capitalism, extractivism, colonialism and necropolitics through a body in the midst of a process of industrialization, in the generalization of wage labor and in the expansion of hetero-patriarchal violence. PubDate: 2022-10-29 DOI: 10.37536/ECOZONA.2022.13.2.4412 Issue No:Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:R. Sreejith Varma Pages: 211 - 212 Abstract: This is a nature poem set against the backdrop of a couple sitting near a riverside. PubDate: 2022-10-29 DOI: 10.37536/ECOZONA.2022.13.2.4704 Issue No:Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Katsiaryna Nahornava Pages: 229 - 234 Abstract: This review essay focuses on the animal question and the role that cultural and literary representations of other-than-human animals may have in raising awareness of the severity of the situation and eventually developing a more egalitarian and empathetic society. This paper reviews two different approaches to the issue: an innovative empirical study of the impact that narratives may have on our attitudes towards other species conducted in Poland by Wojciech Malecki, Piotr Sorokowski, Boguslaw Pawlowski, and Marcin Cienski and presented in Human Minds and Animal Stories: How Narratives Make Us Care About Other Species; and a qualitative interdisciplinary research on the animal question in Spain in Spanish Thinking About Animals edited by Margarita Carretero-González. PubDate: 2022-10-29 DOI: 10.37536/ECOZONA.2022.13.2.4399 Issue No:Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Michael O'Krent Pages: 235 - 237 Abstract: Book review of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. PubDate: 2022-10-29 Issue No:Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Uwe Küchler Pages: 241 - 243 Abstract: Book review of Hope Matters: Why Changing the Way we Think is Critical to Solving the Environmental Crisis. PubDate: 2022-10-29 DOI: 10.37536/ECOZONA.2022.13.2.4784 Issue No:Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Sean Matharoo Pages: 244 - 247 Abstract: Book review of Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene. PubDate: 2022-10-29 DOI: 10.37536/ECOZONA.2022.13.2.4856 Issue No:Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022)
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