Peer-Reviewed Articles by Nathaniel Otjen
Environmental Humanities, 2024
This article asks what it means for conservation scientists to label a member of an endangered, e... more This article asks what it means for conservation scientists to label a member of an endangered, endemic species homeless. By considering the boundary-crossing figure of Ho‘ailona, a partially blind Hawaiian monk seal who was declared homeless and translocated six times between 2008 and 2009, the article argues that the language of home points to the ongoing operations of colonialism in Western conservation. Reading the discourse of homelessness offers a methodology for tracing the histories and manifestations of colonial logics as they circulate in conservation science. At the same time, the article considers how Kanaka Maoli articulated a contrapuntal claim to home that positioned Ho‘ailona as belonging in his natal waters and among a multispecies community of caregivers. Bringing together critical homelessness studies and settler colonial studies, the essay examines how settler societies and institutions use endangered marine species to make specific claims to home and, by extension, erase Indigenous claims to place.
Animal Studies Journal, 2023
Despite mounting critiques, extinction continues to be framed as a unidirectional problem where h... more Despite mounting critiques, extinction continues to be framed as a unidirectional problem where humans, through acts of negligence and intent, lead nonhuman species to their demise. In addition to universalizing the actors and processes involved, unidirectional approaches overlook the ways nonhuman beings participate in the extinction of others and the ways extinction continues to impact multispecies communities long after the violent event or the death of an endling. With its focus on how nonhuman animals experience and navigate violence, the field of critical animal studies can illustrate how nonhuman animals contribute to extinction events and how extinction unfolds across distinct groups over extended temporal periods. Placing critical animal studies in conversation with species loss, this article takes up the longleaf pine forests of the US South, an ecological community that was once among the largest in the world and is now among the most endangered. I consider how late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth century naval stores and logging operations used animal labour and the logics of animality to extract longleaf pine and its products. Animal-dependent industries like turpentining and logging, I argue, were part of what John Levi Barnard calls an 'extinctionproducing economy'. Looking at the labour of oxen, mules, and horses, together with the Black and immigrant labourers tasked with providing their care, I ask how animals and their human caretakers become caught up in the wider deaths of others. Acknowledging that the absences resulting from species loss extend beyond the historical events and timeframes that produced them, I then examine how subsequent generations of humans and nonhumans have inherited the loss of longleaf forests. Turning to Janisse Ray's memoirs Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt: The Ecology of Home, I consider her family's involvement in eradicating longleaf forests and how this loss continues to be experienced.
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 2022
Examining personal narratives written by field primatologists, this essay argues that habituation... more Examining personal narratives written by field primatologists, this essay argues that habituation—the process of accustoming a free-living animal to the researcher’s presence—produces “habituated knowledges.” These knowledges and knowledge-making practices recognize other species as co-participants in knowledge production and rewrite the boundaries of the researcher’s self to include nonhuman study subjects.
The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 18 Oct. 2022, https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2126188
Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2020
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2020
Journal of Modern Literature, 2020
Studies in American Indian Literatures, 2019
Otherness: Essays and Studies, 2019
This article examines news and social media representations of the red fire ant, Solenopsis invic... more This article examines news and social media representations of the red fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, that were published during the historic flooding of Houston by Hurricane Harvey in late August 2017. I argue that the narratives produced about the fire ants in popular media perpetuate damaging and inadequate explanations of the species' role in Houston's imagined and material cityscape. In order to understand the various media responses to the ants, I provide a naturalcultural history of the fire ant in the southern United States and offer a literary analysis of these media representations. Arguing that the historical and contemporary discourses about S. invicta fail to theorize this creature's role in socio-material landscapes, I propose two generative models for interpreting and understanding the fire ants in Houston that, when read together, offer a necessary framework for future cohabitation. Revisiting Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of the assemblage, I argue that the fire ants caught up in the floodwaters typify a contemporary assemblage associated with risk. I then use Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt's twin framework of "Ghosts" and "Monsters" to examine the imagined erasure of fire ants from the Houston landscape and the subsequent horror their physical presence evoked. Like a ghost, S. invicta points to our forgetting, and, like a monster, this species forces humans to consider the realities and possibilities of multispecies togetherness. Read alongside one another, the assemblage and Ghosts and Monsters chart a collaborative future of multispecies collectivity that offers ways of thinking and being in the difficult spaces created by contemporary risk society.
Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, 2018
Book Reviews by Nathaniel Otjen
Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Technology, and Culture, 2022
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2020
Journal of the West, 2019
Western American Literature, 2018
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Peer-Reviewed Articles by Nathaniel Otjen
The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 18 Oct. 2022, https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2126188
Book Reviews by Nathaniel Otjen
The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, 18 Oct. 2022, https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2126188