Published by Kyndra Turner
In Progress by Kyndra Turner
“Writing in the Anthropocene from the Global North to the Global South: Mary Shelley’s Frankenste... more “Writing in the Anthropocene from the Global North to the Global South: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Richard Power’s The Echo Maker” has already been accepted for publication in the forthcoming collection Critical Norths: Space, Nature, Theory, edited by Kevin Maier and Sarah Jaquette Ray, which will be published by University of Alaska Press. In this chapter, I argue that by juxtaposing Shelley’s prescient Frankenstein (1818) with Richard Power’s US novel, The Echo Maker (2006) the reader can see how literary texts, both old and new, and, more specifically, American studies, are contributing to growing awareness of the Global North’s long term/large scale human impact on the planet.
Editorial Assistant Work by Kyndra Turner
Talks by Kyndra Turner
My lecture, “Frankenstein: In the Energy and Environmental Humanities Context,” sponsored by Ariz... more My lecture, “Frankenstein: In the Energy and Environmental Humanities Context,” sponsored by Arizona State University’s Energy Solutions Club, focused on how Mary Shelley’s canonical nineteenth century novel, Frankenstein, provides a cultural critique about human practices, such as global commerce and its effects on ecosystems that continue to have explanatory power in the present. For example, I set the novel into the context of the extension of the continental shelf and the race among Northern nations for potential natural resources and trans-Arctic shipping routes. I assert that these connections not only require readers to rethink the global North’s mainstream values, economic priorities, and growing exploitative mentality, but also offers readers insights for understanding how we can use finite global and local resources either in ways that promote justice or in ways that unjustly enclose critical resources to only a few people of means.
As a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, I gave a one-h... more As a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, I gave a one-hour talk on U.S. Popular Culture at Hong Kong Taoist Association Ching Chung Secondary School as part of the U.S. Consulate General Hong Kong School Outreach Program.
Conference Presentations by Kyndra Turner
In this project, I will demonstrate how working across interdisciplinary fields—film studies, cul... more In this project, I will demonstrate how working across interdisciplinary fields—film studies, cultural studies, and literary studies—provide the methodology to look at national borders and ethnic groups from transnational perspectives that help to forge connections that can be useful to audiences living in a globalized world increasingly concerned with “alien” toxins and refuges on the move due to corporate capitalism, environmental degradation, and elitist resource hoarding. Specifically, I examine South African-born Neill Blomkamp’s film, District 9, in which the main character transforms from human to “alien” in a landscape that suggests South Africa and recalls the years in that country when apartheid was practiced. Concerned with society’s tendency to marginalize “otherness,” Blompkamp utilizes the protagonist’s transformation to compel the audience, to use Claudia Sadowski-Smith’s words, to “move beyond dominant conceptualizations of who inhabits and can speak for the border.” Using a sci-fi alien population (metaphorically) to convey the ways in which some human ethnic minority or indigenous groups are made to appear as “outsiders,” redirects the internal focus of identity and boundaries towards a wider, global lens that moves beyond traditional conceptions of national identity and notions of “borderlands” to discussions of the “local and global commons.”
In the essay, “Biochemical Engineering and Environmental Limits and Ethics in Aldous Huxley’s Bra... more In the essay, “Biochemical Engineering and Environmental Limits and Ethics in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Richard Power’s Generosity: an Enhancement,” I read both novels, for what it can tell us about the agency and significance of material forces, such as genetically altered human and nonhuman biological matter and their interface with human corporeality. Following the recent work of material feminist, Stacy Alaimo, I illustrate how predominant conceptions of pharmaceuticals as a “quick fix” are problematic for environmental ethics because it places the environment, “in the distant background where it plays little, if any, role” (Bodily Natures 150). I assert that both authors urge readers to rethink genomics and pharmaceuticals not as commodities for human manipulation and consumption but as matter that is part of the material configuration of the world.
In seeking to respond to Val Plumwood’s challenge “to think differently” and Debra Bird Rose’s ca... more In seeking to respond to Val Plumwood’s challenge “to think differently” and Debra Bird Rose’s call for new forms of “writing in the anthropocene, in this essay, I examine how Toni Morrison’s Sula” stands as a powerful corrective to western-based, dominate discourses that attach wilderness spaces to performances of heterosexual masculinity. Specifically, queer ecology probes the intersection of sex and nature by highlighting, destabilizing, and transforming heteronormative nature relations. Such inquiry is important in the anthropocene as it helps to envision and develop, to use ecofeminist Catriona Sandilands and environmental historian Bruce Erickson’s words, “sexual politics that more clearly includes consideration of the natural world and its biosocial constitution, and an environmental politics that demonstrates an understanding of the ways in which sexual relations organize and influence both the material world of nature and our perceptions, experiences, and constitutions of that world” (5). Thus, Morrison is calling for a queering of social and environmental constructs in order to arrive at a more nuanced and effective sexual and environmental understanding in the anthropocene.
In this essay, I argue that by juxtaposing Shelley’s prescient Frankenstein (1818) with Richard P... more In this essay, I argue that by juxtaposing Shelley’s prescient Frankenstein (1818) with Richard Power’s American novel, The Echo Maker (2006) the reader can see how novels, both old and new, and, more specifically, the environmental humanities, are contributing to growing awareness of the Global North’s long term/large scale human impact on the planet and how the human species might actually act to transform themselves in ways that lead to monstrosity (as metaphorically represented by Dr. Frankenstein’s monster) or in ways that transform the human species into beings that are more aware of an “ethic of care” that sees the planet as truly a “commons” that must be distributed democratically (as metaphorically represented by Power’s character Karin), rather than enclosed for the wealthy few. Thus, such a cultural and ecological analysis of classical literature alongside twenty-first century texts can help readers re-imagine ones’ life, community, and environment in relation to what constitutes a sustainable environment in a globalized world.
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Published by Kyndra Turner
In Progress by Kyndra Turner
Editorial Assistant Work by Kyndra Turner
Talks by Kyndra Turner
Conference Presentations by Kyndra Turner