This chapter examines literary relations in human rights contexts, where the production and consu... more This chapter examines literary relations in human rights contexts, where the production and consumption of such narratives relies on a public circulation of affect that divides the world into “comfort zones” and zones of risk, vulnerability and disposability. By focusing on the specific narrative strategies deployed in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Dave Eggers’ collaborative “fictional autobiography” of Sudanese Lost Boy Valentino Achak Deng, What is the What, and Evelyn Amony’s I am Evelyn Amony (edited by Erin Baines), I explore the extent to which collaborative storytelling strategies enable authors to move past sympathetic self-projection or “post-humanitarian” responses. Each text signals the problem of circulation and reception of stories by intentionally drawing attention to the pressure to produce narratives along certain discursive lines in order to make the story available to a particular culture of reader, who in turn comes to the story with pre-formed assumptions about “Africa” and “Africanness.” The question of vulnerability— and literary engagements with it—is both political and contextual. The texts under consideration in this chapter engage self-consciously with complex acts of storytelling, where writing and reading constitute sites of conflict and tension as well as of hope and reparation. In the context of the ethics of humanitarian writing in relation to questions of political agency, I inquire to what extent the effect of the adopted storytelling strategies amount to an empowering of the vulnerable subject, such that they are more or less able to exercise political agency under particular conditions. The complex explorations of truth, voice and representation that emerge from these texts raise important questions about the possibility of ethical and political solidarity across boundaries of various kinds in the 21st century. Self-reflexive and political engagements with these questions can inform how we consume narratives of suffering and tragedy, while keeping the geopolitics of both imagination and vulnerability in mind.
This article examines the relationship between legal, political and media discourses surrounding ... more This article examines the relationship between legal, political and media discourses surrounding the much publicized return of Canadian Guantánamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr. Three main figures of return appear here: first, Khadr’s literal return to Canada, his country of birth, in September of 2012. This homecoming has sparked lively political, legal and public debates about Canadian citizenship, which lead to a second form of return: the return of racism, in its contemporary “post-racial,” colour-blind and/or civilizationalist forms, that permeate debates surrounding Khadr’s (and his family’s) membership in Canada. Finally, I consider what happens when Khadr is neither successfully assimilated nor “excreted” by the state or by its imaginary community of citizens. This return, which I figure as a kind of troublesome indigestion, is revealed on the rare occasions when Khadr’s own words have been made public, when he insists on speaking as a rights-bearing citizen and a normal Canadian ...
Abstract In this paper, I offer a provisional look at some of the ways that belonging, participat... more Abstract In this paper, I offer a provisional look at some of the ways that belonging, participation, and affective relations are being reconfigured through young people’s relationship to social media as an important site of popular culture in South Africa, where the increasing ubiquity of digital devices is clearly shifting the nature of everyday relationships that shape their individual and collective sense of self. Despite concerns about the digital divide, the reality is that most young people in South Africa are already accessing social media platforms via their cell phones. Therefore, it is no longer a question of mere access to technology (although in many places, access is still a key issue) but the quality of access. Exploring the everyday and popular realm of social media as a site of “emergent consciousness” for youth, I suggest that it is important to think about the relationship between two senses of “stickiness”—both when it comes to the economic entanglement of users, as well as the degree of their affective investment in social networks—when understanding social media as providing a platform for an “intimate public sphere,” a contested and contradictory terrain that can ultimately be both potentially dangerous and emancipatory.
Tekoporá Revista Latinoamericana de humanidades ambientales y estudios territoriales, 2021
Anxieties around failed parenting are linked to humanity’s failed stewardship of the planet in ma... more Anxieties around failed parenting are linked to humanity’s failed stewardship of the planet in many recent Anthropocene narratives, yet the figure of the biological human child, as *the* signifier of futurity draws attention to the difficulty of imagining the future in non-heteronormative, non-Western, and non-anthropocentric terms. Reproduction is nothing if not a replication of self, of forms of life that are like us. In order to recuperate an alternative model of care from its anthropocentric lineage, I examine how Anacristina Rossi’s feminist sci-fi story “Abel” (2013) and Samantha Schweblin’s gothic horror novella Distancia de Rescate (2014) perform radical critiques of the idea of reproductive bodies, while at the same time opening out to signal non-binary possibilities of life, offering species-level critique while at the same time remaining rooted in local geographies. These stories embrace the negative implications of Anthropocene thinking, challenging, reflecting, and perp...
Tekoporá Revista Latinoamericana de humanidades ambientales y estudios territoriales, 2021
This issue of Tekopora: Latin American journal of environmental humanities and territorial studie... more This issue of Tekopora: Latin American journal of environmental humanities and territorial studies presents a diverse selection of contributions that contribute to the understanding of the various problems that emerge from the representations of the relationship between culture and nature within specific environmental contexts of Latin America. The rise of the environmental humanities in recent years coincides with the turn towards the “Anthropocene”, a term proposed by chemist Paul J. Crutzen and biologist Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000 to describe the time when climate change and other anthropogenic effects position humanity as a geological force, capable of transforming the planetary system and leaving its mark written in the geological strata of the earth, something that is evident on various scales. This new understanding of the human in relation to its planet has been the catalyst for vital questions about the positioning of the subject in the discourse of species, history, enviro...
In 1993, not just one but two movies about dinosaurs were released: Jurassic Park and the much le... more In 1993, not just one but two movies about dinosaurs were released: Jurassic Park and the much less well-known Carnosaur. In 1997, there were two major volcano movies (Dante’s Peak and Volcano); in 1998, two asteroid movies (Deep Impact and Armageddon); and in 2006, two films about 19th-century stage magicians (The Prestige and The Illusionist). More recently, in 2021, two ecohorror films about fungus—In the Earth and Gaia—were released, in another instance of a phenomenon known as ‘twin films’, movies addressing the same topic being released at the same time. This is not uncommon, and sometimes this happens simply as a result of Hollywood competition between studios or producers, but in the case of In the Earth and Gaia, as both Ashley Kniss and Allison Mackey note in their reviews, there may be something larger going on.
Este trabajo propone leer "Las voladoras" (2020) junto a "Nuestra piel muerta" (2019) como ejempl... more Este trabajo propone leer "Las voladoras" (2020) junto a "Nuestra piel muerta" (2019) como ejemplos contemporáneos de un ecogótico andino feminista. Las visiones es-peculativas de Ojeda y García Freire, leídas en conjunto, nos invitan a repensar los mecanismos de abyección (de lo femenino, de la naturaleza, de lo indígena) que han sido naturalizados dentro de modelos patriarca-capitalistas. Utilizan estrategias narrativas para realizar una resignificación de la monstruosidad. Las relaciones sen-sual-afectivas de los protagonistas con aves, artrópodos y otras criaturas no-humanas —«las cosas que usted llamaba inútiles» (García Freire, 2019, pp. 15-16)—ponen en primer plano nociones de cuidado, intimidad y parentesco, pero sin caer en el futurismo reproductivo frecuentemente ensayado en narraciones especulativas que centralizan la figura del niño. En estas, la muerte y la putrefacción predominan y el «futuro» de sus jóvenes protagonistas es incierto, en el mejor de los casos. Abrazan-do las potencialidades que ofrecen modos especulativos para sacudir paradigmas vigentes, la promesa de crear mundos nuevos sobre la piel muerta de los viejos va más allá de lo figurativo, invitándonos a considerar que de la destrucción de mode-los caducados se podría gestar y nutrir algo mejor.
Este artículo examina compromisos con el modo gótico de escritoras de ambos lados del Río de la P... more Este artículo examina compromisos con el modo gótico de escritoras de ambos lados del Río de la Plata. El cuento “Bajo el agua negra” de Mariana Enríquez y la novela Mugre rosa de Fernanda Trías utilizan figuras de niños monstruos, ríos tóxicos y cuerpos mutados para involucrarse no solo con injusticias sociales y criticar modelos de producción, sino también para señalizar un camino hacia una ética de cuidado multiespecie. A través de protagonistas liminales que representan y desafían modelos antropocéntricos, ambas autoras demuestran una naciente y liminal conciencia antropocénica. Las historias materiales de lo no-humano estallan de manera inquietante y demuestran una agencialidad siniestra que es imposible de ignorar, resonando con la ecocrítica feminista y materialismos poshumanistas. Sin embargo, lejos de despertar un horror que abrume e inmovilice al lector, estas visiones especulativas ambiguas y abiertas señalan que podría surgir algo más esperanzador de la destrucción de vi...
CS36: Genealogías latinoamericanas de las Humanidades Ambientales: derivas, cruces y caminos , 2022
This article examines regional engagements with the gothic mode by contemporary writers on either... more This article examines regional engagements with the gothic mode by contemporary writers on either side of the Río de la Plata. The short story “Bajo el Agua Negra” (Mariana Enríquez, 2016) and the novel Mugre Rosa (Fernanda Trías, 2020) both feature figures of monstrous children, toxic rivers, and mutated bodies not only to criticize historical and contemporary social injustices and dominant models of production, but also to imagine a multispecies ethics of care. Through liminal protagonists who simultaneously represent and challenge anthropocentric models, Enríquez and Trías demonstrate a nascent Anthropocene awareness. In both texts, the emergence of non-human storied matter as embodied agency is impossible to ignore, resonating with feminist ecocritical and materialist posthumanist thinkers. However, far from awakening a horror that overwhelms and immobilizes the reader, these ambiguous and open-ended speculative visions indicate that something more hopeful might emerge from the destruction of old models.
Este artículo examina compromisos con el modo gótico de escritoras de ambos lados del Río de la Plata. El cuento “Bajo el agua negra” de Mariana Enríquez y la novela Mugre rosa de Fernanda Trías utilizan figuras de niños monstruos, ríos tóxicos y cuerpos mutados para involucrarse no solo con injusticias sociales y criticar modelos de producción, sino también para señalizar un camino hacia una ética de cuidado multiespecie. A través de protagonistas liminales que representan y desafían modelos antropocéntricos, ambas autoras demuestran una naciente y liminal conciencia antropocénica. Las historias materiales de lo no-humano estallan de manera inquietante y demuestran una agencialidad siniestra que es imposible de ignorar, resonando con la ecocrítica feminista y materialismos poshumanistas. Sin embargo, lejos de despertar un horror que abrume e inmovilice al lector, estas visiones especulativas ambiguas y abiertas señalan que podría surgir algo más esperanzador de la destrucción de viejos modelos.
Each left home in the morning as if making a long journey, untangling themselves from the seaweed... more Each left home in the morning as if making a long journey, untangling themselves from the seaweed of other shores wrapped around their parents …They were born in the city from people born elsewhere.
Given the proliferation of representations of child soldiers in contemporary socio-political, leg... more Given the proliferation of representations of child soldiers in contemporary socio-political, legal, and cultural discourse, I explore how the figure of the African child soldier is being mobilized and challenged in the twenty-first century by considering what imaginative and unsettling cultural and political work is being performed in a selection of autobiographical and fictional narratives: Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone (2007), Senait Mehari's Heart of Fire (2006), Emmanuel Jal's Warchild (2009), Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation (2005), Chris Abani's Song for Night (2007), and Delia Jarrett-McCauley's Moses, Citizen, and Me (2005). How are we to hear the voice of the child soldier, as a quintessential figure of the voiceless, when it asserts itself within an imagined transnational community of writers/readers of literature? I suggest that, even though they participate in an ethically and market-based economy of humanitarian consumption, the relational and indirect narrative strategies in these texts trouble the already troubled relationship between the spaces where child soldiers are being used and those where narratives about them are being consumed. Although there are no guarantees as to how these texts are taken up by readers, they at least have the potential of coaxing the reader into confronting difficult questions about the limits of "universal" human rights and into recognizing a need to radically rethink planetary relations.
Geopolitical divisions within current manifestations of global capitalism make it difficult to im... more Geopolitical divisions within current manifestations of global capitalism make it difficult to imagine a view of citizenship that is not based on exclusion but on local-global connections; given that the vast majority of people most at risk in contemporary global contexts are children, it is important to distinguish between the plight of real children and how the figure of “the
This chapter examines literary relations in human rights contexts, where the production and consu... more This chapter examines literary relations in human rights contexts, where the production and consumption of such narratives relies on a public circulation of affect that divides the world into “comfort zones” and zones of risk, vulnerability and disposability. By focusing on the specific narrative strategies deployed in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Dave Eggers’ collaborative “fictional autobiography” of Sudanese Lost Boy Valentino Achak Deng, What is the What, and Evelyn Amony’s I am Evelyn Amony (edited by Erin Baines), I explore the extent to which collaborative storytelling strategies enable authors to move past sympathetic self-projection or “post-humanitarian” responses. Each text signals the problem of circulation and reception of stories by intentionally drawing attention to the pressure to produce narratives along certain discursive lines in order to make the story available to a particular culture of reader, who in turn comes to the story with pre-formed assumptions about “Africa” and “Africanness.” The question of vulnerability— and literary engagements with it—is both political and contextual. The texts under consideration in this chapter engage self-consciously with complex acts of storytelling, where writing and reading constitute sites of conflict and tension as well as of hope and reparation. In the context of the ethics of humanitarian writing in relation to questions of political agency, I inquire to what extent the effect of the adopted storytelling strategies amount to an empowering of the vulnerable subject, such that they are more or less able to exercise political agency under particular conditions. The complex explorations of truth, voice and representation that emerge from these texts raise important questions about the possibility of ethical and political solidarity across boundaries of various kinds in the 21st century. Self-reflexive and political engagements with these questions can inform how we consume narratives of suffering and tragedy, while keeping the geopolitics of both imagination and vulnerability in mind.
This article examines the relationship between legal, political and media discourses surrounding ... more This article examines the relationship between legal, political and media discourses surrounding the much publicized return of Canadian Guantánamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr. Three main figures of return appear here: first, Khadr’s literal return to Canada, his country of birth, in September of 2012. This homecoming has sparked lively political, legal and public debates about Canadian citizenship, which lead to a second form of return: the return of racism, in its contemporary “post-racial,” colour-blind and/or civilizationalist forms, that permeate debates surrounding Khadr’s (and his family’s) membership in Canada. Finally, I consider what happens when Khadr is neither successfully assimilated nor “excreted” by the state or by its imaginary community of citizens. This return, which I figure as a kind of troublesome indigestion, is revealed on the rare occasions when Khadr’s own words have been made public, when he insists on speaking as a rights-bearing citizen and a normal Canadian ...
Abstract In this paper, I offer a provisional look at some of the ways that belonging, participat... more Abstract In this paper, I offer a provisional look at some of the ways that belonging, participation, and affective relations are being reconfigured through young people’s relationship to social media as an important site of popular culture in South Africa, where the increasing ubiquity of digital devices is clearly shifting the nature of everyday relationships that shape their individual and collective sense of self. Despite concerns about the digital divide, the reality is that most young people in South Africa are already accessing social media platforms via their cell phones. Therefore, it is no longer a question of mere access to technology (although in many places, access is still a key issue) but the quality of access. Exploring the everyday and popular realm of social media as a site of “emergent consciousness” for youth, I suggest that it is important to think about the relationship between two senses of “stickiness”—both when it comes to the economic entanglement of users, as well as the degree of their affective investment in social networks—when understanding social media as providing a platform for an “intimate public sphere,” a contested and contradictory terrain that can ultimately be both potentially dangerous and emancipatory.
Tekoporá Revista Latinoamericana de humanidades ambientales y estudios territoriales, 2021
Anxieties around failed parenting are linked to humanity’s failed stewardship of the planet in ma... more Anxieties around failed parenting are linked to humanity’s failed stewardship of the planet in many recent Anthropocene narratives, yet the figure of the biological human child, as *the* signifier of futurity draws attention to the difficulty of imagining the future in non-heteronormative, non-Western, and non-anthropocentric terms. Reproduction is nothing if not a replication of self, of forms of life that are like us. In order to recuperate an alternative model of care from its anthropocentric lineage, I examine how Anacristina Rossi’s feminist sci-fi story “Abel” (2013) and Samantha Schweblin’s gothic horror novella Distancia de Rescate (2014) perform radical critiques of the idea of reproductive bodies, while at the same time opening out to signal non-binary possibilities of life, offering species-level critique while at the same time remaining rooted in local geographies. These stories embrace the negative implications of Anthropocene thinking, challenging, reflecting, and perp...
Tekoporá Revista Latinoamericana de humanidades ambientales y estudios territoriales, 2021
This issue of Tekopora: Latin American journal of environmental humanities and territorial studie... more This issue of Tekopora: Latin American journal of environmental humanities and territorial studies presents a diverse selection of contributions that contribute to the understanding of the various problems that emerge from the representations of the relationship between culture and nature within specific environmental contexts of Latin America. The rise of the environmental humanities in recent years coincides with the turn towards the “Anthropocene”, a term proposed by chemist Paul J. Crutzen and biologist Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000 to describe the time when climate change and other anthropogenic effects position humanity as a geological force, capable of transforming the planetary system and leaving its mark written in the geological strata of the earth, something that is evident on various scales. This new understanding of the human in relation to its planet has been the catalyst for vital questions about the positioning of the subject in the discourse of species, history, enviro...
In 1993, not just one but two movies about dinosaurs were released: Jurassic Park and the much le... more In 1993, not just one but two movies about dinosaurs were released: Jurassic Park and the much less well-known Carnosaur. In 1997, there were two major volcano movies (Dante’s Peak and Volcano); in 1998, two asteroid movies (Deep Impact and Armageddon); and in 2006, two films about 19th-century stage magicians (The Prestige and The Illusionist). More recently, in 2021, two ecohorror films about fungus—In the Earth and Gaia—were released, in another instance of a phenomenon known as ‘twin films’, movies addressing the same topic being released at the same time. This is not uncommon, and sometimes this happens simply as a result of Hollywood competition between studios or producers, but in the case of In the Earth and Gaia, as both Ashley Kniss and Allison Mackey note in their reviews, there may be something larger going on.
Este trabajo propone leer "Las voladoras" (2020) junto a "Nuestra piel muerta" (2019) como ejempl... more Este trabajo propone leer "Las voladoras" (2020) junto a "Nuestra piel muerta" (2019) como ejemplos contemporáneos de un ecogótico andino feminista. Las visiones es-peculativas de Ojeda y García Freire, leídas en conjunto, nos invitan a repensar los mecanismos de abyección (de lo femenino, de la naturaleza, de lo indígena) que han sido naturalizados dentro de modelos patriarca-capitalistas. Utilizan estrategias narrativas para realizar una resignificación de la monstruosidad. Las relaciones sen-sual-afectivas de los protagonistas con aves, artrópodos y otras criaturas no-humanas —«las cosas que usted llamaba inútiles» (García Freire, 2019, pp. 15-16)—ponen en primer plano nociones de cuidado, intimidad y parentesco, pero sin caer en el futurismo reproductivo frecuentemente ensayado en narraciones especulativas que centralizan la figura del niño. En estas, la muerte y la putrefacción predominan y el «futuro» de sus jóvenes protagonistas es incierto, en el mejor de los casos. Abrazan-do las potencialidades que ofrecen modos especulativos para sacudir paradigmas vigentes, la promesa de crear mundos nuevos sobre la piel muerta de los viejos va más allá de lo figurativo, invitándonos a considerar que de la destrucción de mode-los caducados se podría gestar y nutrir algo mejor.
Este artículo examina compromisos con el modo gótico de escritoras de ambos lados del Río de la P... more Este artículo examina compromisos con el modo gótico de escritoras de ambos lados del Río de la Plata. El cuento “Bajo el agua negra” de Mariana Enríquez y la novela Mugre rosa de Fernanda Trías utilizan figuras de niños monstruos, ríos tóxicos y cuerpos mutados para involucrarse no solo con injusticias sociales y criticar modelos de producción, sino también para señalizar un camino hacia una ética de cuidado multiespecie. A través de protagonistas liminales que representan y desafían modelos antropocéntricos, ambas autoras demuestran una naciente y liminal conciencia antropocénica. Las historias materiales de lo no-humano estallan de manera inquietante y demuestran una agencialidad siniestra que es imposible de ignorar, resonando con la ecocrítica feminista y materialismos poshumanistas. Sin embargo, lejos de despertar un horror que abrume e inmovilice al lector, estas visiones especulativas ambiguas y abiertas señalan que podría surgir algo más esperanzador de la destrucción de vi...
CS36: Genealogías latinoamericanas de las Humanidades Ambientales: derivas, cruces y caminos , 2022
This article examines regional engagements with the gothic mode by contemporary writers on either... more This article examines regional engagements with the gothic mode by contemporary writers on either side of the Río de la Plata. The short story “Bajo el Agua Negra” (Mariana Enríquez, 2016) and the novel Mugre Rosa (Fernanda Trías, 2020) both feature figures of monstrous children, toxic rivers, and mutated bodies not only to criticize historical and contemporary social injustices and dominant models of production, but also to imagine a multispecies ethics of care. Through liminal protagonists who simultaneously represent and challenge anthropocentric models, Enríquez and Trías demonstrate a nascent Anthropocene awareness. In both texts, the emergence of non-human storied matter as embodied agency is impossible to ignore, resonating with feminist ecocritical and materialist posthumanist thinkers. However, far from awakening a horror that overwhelms and immobilizes the reader, these ambiguous and open-ended speculative visions indicate that something more hopeful might emerge from the destruction of old models.
Este artículo examina compromisos con el modo gótico de escritoras de ambos lados del Río de la Plata. El cuento “Bajo el agua negra” de Mariana Enríquez y la novela Mugre rosa de Fernanda Trías utilizan figuras de niños monstruos, ríos tóxicos y cuerpos mutados para involucrarse no solo con injusticias sociales y criticar modelos de producción, sino también para señalizar un camino hacia una ética de cuidado multiespecie. A través de protagonistas liminales que representan y desafían modelos antropocéntricos, ambas autoras demuestran una naciente y liminal conciencia antropocénica. Las historias materiales de lo no-humano estallan de manera inquietante y demuestran una agencialidad siniestra que es imposible de ignorar, resonando con la ecocrítica feminista y materialismos poshumanistas. Sin embargo, lejos de despertar un horror que abrume e inmovilice al lector, estas visiones especulativas ambiguas y abiertas señalan que podría surgir algo más esperanzador de la destrucción de viejos modelos.
Each left home in the morning as if making a long journey, untangling themselves from the seaweed... more Each left home in the morning as if making a long journey, untangling themselves from the seaweed of other shores wrapped around their parents …They were born in the city from people born elsewhere.
Given the proliferation of representations of child soldiers in contemporary socio-political, leg... more Given the proliferation of representations of child soldiers in contemporary socio-political, legal, and cultural discourse, I explore how the figure of the African child soldier is being mobilized and challenged in the twenty-first century by considering what imaginative and unsettling cultural and political work is being performed in a selection of autobiographical and fictional narratives: Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone (2007), Senait Mehari's Heart of Fire (2006), Emmanuel Jal's Warchild (2009), Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation (2005), Chris Abani's Song for Night (2007), and Delia Jarrett-McCauley's Moses, Citizen, and Me (2005). How are we to hear the voice of the child soldier, as a quintessential figure of the voiceless, when it asserts itself within an imagined transnational community of writers/readers of literature? I suggest that, even though they participate in an ethically and market-based economy of humanitarian consumption, the relational and indirect narrative strategies in these texts trouble the already troubled relationship between the spaces where child soldiers are being used and those where narratives about them are being consumed. Although there are no guarantees as to how these texts are taken up by readers, they at least have the potential of coaxing the reader into confronting difficult questions about the limits of "universal" human rights and into recognizing a need to radically rethink planetary relations.
Geopolitical divisions within current manifestations of global capitalism make it difficult to im... more Geopolitical divisions within current manifestations of global capitalism make it difficult to imagine a view of citizenship that is not based on exclusion but on local-global connections; given that the vast majority of people most at risk in contemporary global contexts are children, it is important to distinguish between the plight of real children and how the figure of “the
La ficción climática (clima ficción o cli-fi) se ha convertido en un modo de producción cultural ... more La ficción climática (clima ficción o cli-fi) se ha convertido en un modo de producción cultural importante en el siglo XXI. Este estudio ofrece algunas apreciaciones sobre el estado actual de un campo en rápido crecimiento y, por lo tanto, difícil de precisar. Después de acercarnos a una definición de la ficción climática basada en sus orígenes, sus afinidades literarias, y algunas cuestiones estéticas y éticas relacionadas a la forma de la narrativa en sí, este trabajo intenta rastrear la articulación de un inconsciente climático en una amplia selección de textos, proporcionando una cronología del desarrollo de la ficción climática como modo cultural estrechamente vinculado con el desarrollo de la ciencia climática. Hasta hace relativamente poco la ficción climática ha sido un corpus notoriamente occidental y anglófono, pero también veremos como la cli-fi rápidamente esta empezando a ganar terreno en todo el mundo. En última instancia, como criaturas de la narración tendemos a pensar en historias en lugar de hechos, números o ecuaciones. Lo que nos permite la imaginación, y sobre todo la ficción, es generar empatía, y por esta razón tiene el potencial de inspirar la acción.
Feminist Posthumanism in Contemporary Science Fiction Film and Media: From Annihilation to High Life and Beyond (Bloomsbury Press), 2023
In this chapter, we examine how the “end” of humanity is figured through a reconceptualization o... more In this chapter, we examine how the “end” of humanity is figured through a reconceptualization of human reproduction in recent science fiction films fundamentally invested in contemplating the future of the human species, Claire Denis’ High Life (2018) and Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja’s Aniara (2018). While both of these films reflect what Eva Horn has identified as “one of mankind’s most ancient fantasies,” we argue that they each imagine the end of the world in very different registers. Claire Denis’ affective technique, including her nonlinear and alienating editing, sensual camera, and claustrophobic interiors, cinematically creates what Karen Barad calls “intra-actions,” where the primacy of the human is constantly undermined.2 This decentering of the human sparks a suspension of anthropocentric concepts, as sex, reproduction, and parenthood are put into question in ways that move beyond a Cartesian logic. By contrast, Aniara, with its continuity editing and narrative structure, still takes human experience as central, rehearsing the science fictional trope of a lifeboat spaceship only to undo it in favor of extinction and total destruction. Hence, in these films we see two forms of posthumanist cinema: High Life provides a posthumanist experience through refusing to succumb to Humanist logic and anthropocentric technique, while Aniara plays with generic conventions only to disturb them by leaving no space for humans to survive their apocalypse.
This chapter examines literary relations in human rights contexts, where the production and consu... more This chapter examines literary relations in human rights contexts, where the production and consumption of such narratives relies on a public circulation of affect that divides the world into “comfort zones” and zones of risk, vulnerability and disposability. By focusing on the specific narrative strategies deployed in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Dave Eggers’ collaborative “fictional autobiography” of Sudanese Lost Boy Valentino Achak Deng, What is the What, and Evelyn Amony’s I am Evelyn Amony (edited by Erin Baines), I explore the extent to which collaborative storytelling strategies enable authors to move past sympathetic self-projection or “post-humanitarian” responses. Each text signals the problem of circulation and reception of stories by intentionally drawing attention to the pressure to produce narratives along certain discursive lines in order to make the story available to a particular culture of reader, who in turn comes to the story with pre-formed assumptions about “Africa” and “Africanness.” The question of vulnerability— and literary engagements with it—is both political and contextual. The texts under consideration in this chapter engage self-consciously with complex acts of storytelling, where writing and reading constitute sites of conflict and tension as well as of hope and reparation. In the context of the ethics of humanitarian writing in relation to questions of political agency, I inquire to what extent the effect of the adopted storytelling strategies amount to an empowering of the vulnerable subject, such that they are more or less able to exercise political agency under particular conditions. The complex explorations of truth, voice and representation that emerge from these texts raise important questions about the possibility of ethical and political solidarity across boundaries of various kinds in the 21st century. Self-reflexive and political engagements with these questions can inform how we consume narratives of suffering and tragedy, while keeping the geopolitics of both imagination and vulnerability in mind.
Tekoporá [N.04] Del 1 de marzo al 31 de julio de 2020 estará abierta la convocatoria a trabajos q... more Tekoporá [N.04] Del 1 de marzo al 31 de julio de 2020 estará abierta la convocatoria a trabajos que integrarán el cuarto volumen a ser publicado en julio de 2021. La temática eje de este número será: Escrituras del ambiente, el paisaje y el territorio: ecocrítica y estudios culturales en América del Sur. Se aceptarán trabajos de calidad provenientes de la crítica literaria, la epistemología, la filosofía, la ética y la antropología que dialoguen con las Humanidades Ambientales. Aquí algunos ejes:
- Geopoética: naturaleza y paisaje en América del Sur - Debates teóricos; ecocrítica: teorías y métodos - Ecocrítica postcolonial - Ecología y género: movimientos ecofeministas, ecomasculinos y ecoqueer - Estudios humano no-humano: lo animal, lo vegetal y ecosistemas literarios - “Deep Ecology,” lo posthumano y nuevos materialismos - Representación de la naturaleza en la literatura infantil y juvenil - La naturaleza en la literatura especulativa, fantástica y mitológica - Representaciones de la Antártida, el Amazonas, los Andes y la Patagonia y otros paisajes y ecosistemas representativos de América del Sur en la imaginación literaria. - Ecologías y epistemologías indígenas - Eco-poética: música y poesía en el Antropoceno - Ecología, artes figurativos y literatura - Ecocriticismo azul: el significado del océano y ecologías marítimas costeras - Ecogreen studies: naturaleza, literatura y medio ambiente - La ecopedagogía y la ecopsicología - Pensamiento, identidad y diversidad cultural en la percepción de la naturaleza - Enfoques estéticos sobre entornos urbanos y su impacto en vidas humanas y no humanas - Crítica filosófica, estética y fenomenológica del medio ambiente. - La ética ambiental
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Este artículo examina compromisos con el modo gótico de escritoras de ambos lados del Río de la Plata. El cuento “Bajo el agua negra” de Mariana Enríquez y la novela Mugre rosa de Fernanda Trías utilizan figuras de niños monstruos, ríos tóxicos y cuerpos mutados para involucrarse no solo con injusticias sociales y criticar modelos de producción, sino también para señalizar un camino hacia una ética de cuidado multiespecie. A través de protagonistas liminales que representan y desafían modelos antropocéntricos, ambas autoras demuestran una naciente y liminal conciencia antropocénica. Las historias materiales de lo no-humano estallan de manera inquietante y demuestran una agencialidad siniestra que es imposible de ignorar, resonando con la ecocrítica feminista y materialismos poshumanistas. Sin embargo, lejos de despertar un horror que abrume e inmovilice al lector, estas visiones especulativas ambiguas y abiertas señalan que podría surgir algo más esperanzador de la destrucción de viejos modelos.
Este artículo examina compromisos con el modo gótico de escritoras de ambos lados del Río de la Plata. El cuento “Bajo el agua negra” de Mariana Enríquez y la novela Mugre rosa de Fernanda Trías utilizan figuras de niños monstruos, ríos tóxicos y cuerpos mutados para involucrarse no solo con injusticias sociales y criticar modelos de producción, sino también para señalizar un camino hacia una ética de cuidado multiespecie. A través de protagonistas liminales que representan y desafían modelos antropocéntricos, ambas autoras demuestran una naciente y liminal conciencia antropocénica. Las historias materiales de lo no-humano estallan de manera inquietante y demuestran una agencialidad siniestra que es imposible de ignorar, resonando con la ecocrítica feminista y materialismos poshumanistas. Sin embargo, lejos de despertar un horror que abrume e inmovilice al lector, estas visiones especulativas ambiguas y abiertas señalan que podría surgir algo más esperanzador de la destrucción de viejos modelos.
- Geopoética: naturaleza y paisaje en América del Sur
- Debates teóricos; ecocrítica: teorías y métodos
- Ecocrítica postcolonial
- Ecología y género: movimientos ecofeministas, ecomasculinos y ecoqueer
- Estudios humano no-humano: lo animal, lo vegetal y ecosistemas literarios
- “Deep Ecology,” lo posthumano y nuevos materialismos
- Representación de la naturaleza en la literatura infantil y juvenil
- La naturaleza en la literatura especulativa, fantástica y mitológica
- Representaciones de la Antártida, el Amazonas, los Andes y la Patagonia y otros paisajes y ecosistemas representativos de América del Sur en la imaginación literaria.
- Ecologías y epistemologías indígenas
- Eco-poética: música y poesía en el Antropoceno
- Ecología, artes figurativos y literatura
- Ecocriticismo azul: el significado del océano y ecologías marítimas costeras
- Ecogreen studies: naturaleza, literatura y medio ambiente
- La ecopedagogía y la ecopsicología
- Pensamiento, identidad y diversidad cultural en la percepción de la naturaleza
- Enfoques estéticos sobre entornos urbanos y su impacto en vidas humanas y no humanas
- Crítica filosófica, estética y fenomenológica del medio ambiente.
- La ética ambiental