Ecomaterialism

Exposure then, is terribly uneven, across such simultaneously social and material categories as class, race, and the disparities between the global North and the global south. And while much of this book has emphasized the material dimensions of the
exposure, it is crucial to point out that ideological and discursive categories position bodies differently and have material effects. For feminists, LGBTQ people, people of color, persons with disabilities, and others, thinking through how corporeal processes,
desires, orientations, and harms are in accordance with or divergent from social categories, norms, and discourses is a necessary epistemological and political process. For some people this is a matter of survival.The practice of thinking from within and as part of the material world swirls together ontology, epistemology, scientific disclosures, political perspectives, posthuman ethics, and environmental activism. There is no position outside, no straight path, no belief in transparent global systems of knowledge, only modest protests and precarious pleasures, from within compromised locations shadowed by futures that will surely need repair.

Opening night at the theater and the stage is awash with color and spectacle, an awe-inspiring display of set and costume extravagance. Fast-forward eighteen months: this wondrous design has transformed itself into a mountainous ruin, oozing from a gluttonous skip deep in the bowels of the building. These contemporary " theater ruins' " begin relatively harmlessly, hidden behind dusty staircases and at the back of storage units, crowding corridors and littering dressing rooms. But sooner or later, what doesn't make it into the recycle bin is cast off to the land of " away, " where skips overflow into leaching landfills, and, inextricably, into our fragile ecosystems. It is here that we encounter the unsettling reality that our arts practices have consequences.

Of all the terms associated with the material turn, "ecomaterialism"  is the most underdefined, leaving us in doubt as to its being just another label that did not turn into a catchphrase like " new materialisms " or " neomaterialism. " " Ecomaterialism " inevitably leaves us guessing whether it can or cannot be used as a mere synonym for either of these terms, as it not only intersects and overlaps with their discourse, but is also similarly accompanied by a flourish of redefined concepts: matter, agency, nature, human, nonhuman, inhuman, posthuman, objects, things, and relations. Despite this ambivalence, ecomaterialism is currently conceived as a project of theorizing the earth's human and other-than human dwellers in terms of multiple becomings with a detailed consideration of what, in fact, is the major concern of this approach: the global dynamic of crisis ecologies as a result of human-driven alterations of the planetary ecosystems, otherwise known as the compulsive powers of the Anthropocene.

In the past two decades, ecocriticism has moved into central visibility in the humanities, as a vital, interdisciplinary mode of practice that rises to meet the challenges of our changing world, considering the fundamental interconnectedness between humans and their environments. The essays in this anthology will consider how art makers, images, and objects had particular ecological agency: they observed, critiqued, created and maintained resilient and biologically diverse local and global ecologies, just as ecological discourses were taking shape. We welcome proposed 5000 word essays (inclusive of footnotes) by emerging and established scholars whose work integrates the study of nineteenth-century visual culture with ethical and political concerns about fragile global ecosystems, resilient practices and/or nonhuman animal-cultural entanglements, and environmental justice. These essays may span the disciplines of art history, visual and material culture, and the history of science, to articulate and demonstrate engagement with emerging and established critical discourses. We particularly invite contributions that investigate indigenous and global approaches to the visual cultures of the long 19 th century, articulating how eco-materalism may help us rethink traditional historical accounts of spatial and cultural contact, hybridity, and change. In their proposals, authors should specifically affirm how their research contributes to or intervenes in current theories of ecocriticism/ecomaterialism, and how it aligns with or queries the growing, interdisciplinary fields of inquiry across the environmental humanities. To address this, authors might also consider: • What might ecocriticism offer as a new vantage point relative to the study of nineteenth-century art, objects, makers, materials, and practices, and what can art history and visual culture – considered broadly – contribute to enriching the scope of the environmental humanities? • What might a new canon of nineteenth-century visual culture look like if it were framed by the ecological concerns of the Anthropocene? Put another way, how can eco-critical approaches help us expand the disciplinary limits of what has long been considered the purview of 'art,' aesthetics, or visual culture? • How can we better understand the networks of exchange and materialities of objects, representational models, and art-making in the nineteenth century, on both global and local levels, before ecological discourses had a well-articulated language, and before they had taken on their present urgency? • Apart from " illustrating " a growing popular interest in natural history, how did visual culture participate in and enable scientific thinking about the nascent field of ecology? • How could artworks or objects invite ecological thinking by engaging the sensory imaginations of viewers, and/or exceeding the limitations of the visual? • How can the approach you take to your images or objects suggest new avenues of inquiry for other scholars? • How does the engagement of so many 21 st century contemporary artists and critics in ecological art, resilience, global issues of social justice and environmental " slow violence " in the global south encourage new research into art of the long nineteenth century? Timeline: 300-350 word abstracts and CVs are due June 1, 2017 Preliminary drafts of essays requested of selected participants will be due by December 15, 2017.

Camillo Sbarbaro’s poetry functions as a ‘missing link’ between Giacomo Leopardi’s lyric and modernist literature, propelling the creation of a Leopardian lineage into Italian twentieth century poetry, from Montale to Vivian Lamarque. It does so by contaminating the lyric subject with a disenchantment towards the modern world and, concurrently, by bringing forward a ceaseless idea of modernity. This dialectic between a premodern and a modern sensibility not only is central to Leopardi’s poetry, as discussed by Guido Mazzoni, but it also has a pivotal role in Sbarbaro’s work.
It is well-known that Sbarbaro was an eager reader of Leopardi’s poetry. Lexicographical studies have demonstrated the permeability of Leopardian lexical resources in Sbarbaro’s poetry, while a similar approach was also taken with metrical structures. The majority of these studies have been carried out by focusing on the reception of Leopardi’s Canti into Sbarbaro’s Pianissimo. This has limited the critical reading of the consonance between the two authors to the poetry only. No attention has been given to the influence of Leopardi’s thought on Sbarbaro’s broader production, which includes also prose texts such as Trucioli, Liquidazione, and Fuochi Fatui.
My paper aims to reassess the many ways Sbarbaro innovates the modern self – not limited to lyric poetry - through an ecocritical analysis of the various references to Leopardi’s thought. This will shed new light on the contaminations between the two authors and beyond. I will do so by focusing on an often-overlooked aspect of the connection between the two poets: the relationship between man, nature, and sound.
The dialectic between sound and silence in nature constitutes a central feature in lyric poetry since, at least, the Romantic era. The novelty of Leopardi’s – and consequently of Sbarbaro’s approach - consists of three different degrees of interaction between the subject and nature via a ‘soundscape’, a landscape characterised by the presence or absence of sounds. The very first moment deals with the presence of sounds in nature in the form of ‘canto’, which elicits a fascination towards poetry. This acts as a sort of palingenetic drive on a pre-modern subject. The second aspect consists of the absence of sound. Silence allows the subject to acknowledge the existence of ‘cose vuote’ in nature, empty metaphors that make the subject aware of separate perceptions of nature and therefore of reality. In this sense, this modern sensibility makes the subject independent from the masses and isolates them. The third deals with the notion of echo produced by certain natural objects, such as the ‘ginestra’ for Leopardi or the ‘licheni’ for Sbarbaro. These natural objects are able to produce a reverberation of sounds that provides the subject with symbols of resistance and resilience. The silence of nature is eventually turned into something meaningful and communicative.

The ecological turn of the last decade has led to a renewed interest in exploring found objects and reclaimed materials in the performing arts. For many scenographers, inspiration for repurposing these ‘leftovers’ comes from the serendipitous relationships that arise from them – a way of rethinking our connection with materials and challenging preconceptions about that which we throw away. This paper investigates key conceptual thinking and theoretical ideas around contemporary notions of materialism, value and upcycling through the scenographer's relationship with material vestiges and societal debris. Using examples from my practice-led research, I explore my own serendipitous and often uncanny relationship with ‘leftover’ things, including how their unique materiality and context informs my work. From the journey of ‘the find’ (recycle centres, tip shops, car boot sales, dumpster diving and road side pickups) to processes of making and transformation, I reveal how these discarded objects or ‘leftovers’ have inspired intimate and thrilling performance spaces. Through the process of becoming alert to the material's capacities and sensitivities, I examine how the once deemed ‘mundane’ and ‘undesirable’ can be saved from obscurity and transformed into objects and experiences of ‘higher purpose’. The paper demonstrates that we can renew our notions of debris and waste, and argues that ingenuity and creativity are fundamental components of sustainability. The notion of ‘leftovers’ challenges us to embrace the potential of ecological practice; to think about what is possible in a world of increasingly limited resources, rather than what is not

Set in 1978, David Vann’s Goat Mountain (2013) follows an unnamed eleven year old male narrator on a hunting trip in Northern California. Exploding with poison oak and pine needles, the mountain is described as a veined muscle, the trees as charred meat, and the landscape as bleeding. Using the work of Stacy Alaimo, Heather Sullivan, and Tim Morton this paper will demonstrate how Vann creates a ‘new reflexivity’ between species and environment through the blurring of the human and the nonhuman.
Trans-corporeality is evoked as strange, dangerous, and transformative as the human body becomes less-than-human. Breaking down the human/nonhuman binary, the human and nonhuman animal bodies and the environment become a zone of intra-action down to a biological and fluid level. Instead of just illustrating green imagery associated with ecocriticism, the narrative transforms bodies and the landscape into scenes of red imagery. Therefore, creating a material connection between organs, vessels, vertebrae, roots, and stomata. This illuminates the fluidity between the human and the nonhuman using the toxicity of poison oak and the fleshy material of the buck corpse. Through images of monstrous mutation and metamorphosis, the partial fusion of bodies is illustrated as a ‘choreography of becoming’ animal. Creating a synthesis of species, the boy’s bleeding skin becomes part of the environment and buck’s body throws down roots. This suggests that the boy’s body and the buck become one, like two plants which have grafted together. Exploring the California chaparral, this paper will investigate how human and nonhuman animals are illustrated in terms of injury and toxicity.

mornings in the unknown future. Who shall repair this now. And how the future takes shape too quickly. The permanent is ebbing. Is leaving —Jorie Graham, “Sea Change” Conserving This, Conserving That Just a few lines from jorie graham's poem “sea change” evoke anxiety about unpredictable futures that arrive too soon, in need of repair. The abrupt departure of a sense of permanence may provoke the desire to arrest change, to shore up solidity, to make things, systems, standards of living “sustainable.” Having worked in the environmental humanities and in science studies for the last decade and having served as the academic cochair of the University Sustainability Committee at the University of Texas, Arlington, for several years, I have been struck by how the discourse of sustainability at the turn of the twenty-first century in the United States echoes the discourse of conservation at the turn of the twentieth century, especially in its tendency to render the lively world a storehouse of supplies for the elite. Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt's head of forestry, defined forests as “manufacturing plants for wood,” epitomizing the utilitarianism of the conservation movement of the Progressive era, which saw nature as a resource for human use. By the early twentieth century Pinchot's deadening conception of nature jostled with other ideas, such as those of aesthetic conservation and the fledgling science of ecology. Pinchot was joined by the Progressive women conservationists, who claimed, as part of the broader “municipal housekeeping” movement, that women had special domestic talents for conservation, such as “turning yesterday's roast into tomorrow's hash.” Many Progressive women conservationists not only bolstered traditional gender roles but also wove classism and racism into their conservation mission, as conservation became bound up with conserving their own privileges. The anthropocentrism of the Progressive women conservationists is notable. As a participant in the First National Conservation Congress stated in 1909, “Why do we care about forests and streams? Because of the children who are to be naked and bare and poor without them in the years to come unless you men of this great conservation work do well your work.” During their conventions the discourse of conservation was playfully and not so playfully extended to myriad causes, including conserving food, conserving the home, conserving morals, conserving “true womanliness,” conserving “the race,” conserving “the farmer's wife,” and conserving time by omitting a speech (Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground 63–70).

This paper was presented on May 15, 2015 at the first annual EcoMaterialisms Graduate Conference at UC Irvine, titled “EcoMaterialisms: Organizing Life and Matter.” The conference was the result of a yearlong, graduate-directed research collective I organized with my fellow graduate students on the historical development of the so-called New Materialisms. Participants in the research collective represented nine departments across the Schools of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Arts.

This paper further develops my earlier work, undertaken with my advisor Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, to think through ‘the body’ in Deleuze’s work and in relation to the concept of ‘uncanny meat’ I had begun to develop. Large sections of this paper can be found in my essay “Uncanny Meat,” published in Caliban: French Journal of English Studies in 2016, though the project’s title was at that moment “Zoophilia: Toward a Concept of Uncanny Meat.” I have include slides from the PowerPoint for the presentation at the end of the essay.