Thursday, Mar 28, 2024
5:30PM to 7:00PM
Humanities Quadrangle 134
The colloquium invites participants and audience members to think together about the theories, methodologies, stories, and concepts we use when we apprehend, think, and write histories of multiscalar, multispecies, and multitemporal entanglements, in these troubled times.
Troubled times, such as those manifested through extractivism and the destruction of habitats, pandemics, or through violence stemming from the rise of authoritarian governments, have shown the limits of humanocentric thought. Commenting on the task of humanist scholarship in the face of such troubling times, Dipesh Chakrabarty observes that analytical categories like agency, the globe, and the division between natural and human history, to name a few, are inadequate for simultaneously engaging with history in two different time scales: the “now-time” of human history in its entanglement with “the long now of geological and biological time scales” (7). In her critical engagement with the notions of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, Donna Haraway raises the question of what happens when classic presumptions in Western thought (e.g., human exceptionalism and bounded individualism), become unavailable to think with (30). Haraway ties the capacity to think with the cultivation of response-ability, which “is about both absence and presence, killing and nurturing, living and dying—and remembering who lives and who dies and how in the string figures of naturalcultural history” (28).
Haraway’s and Chakrabarty’s observations about the necessity of examining what thoughts we use in our approach to the complex entanglements of human and other-than-human lives and histories inform the rationale for this conversation. Environmental Humanities has been described as both a mode of inquiry and a field (Neimanis et al. 2015). Some of its practitioners understand it as an “interdisciplinary movement that is responsive to a world reconfigured by climate change and its effects, from environmental racism and global migration to resource impoverishment and the importance of the nonhuman world” (J. Cohen & S. Foote, 2021). Working with those understandings, this colloquium invokes the response-ability of the humanities for breaking down the epistemic bifurcation of nature in knowledge practices of environmental colonialism, extractive capitalism, and other modes of adversariality toward the lives of humans and of the more-than-human. That task requires being vigilant about the complicity of the humanities in anthropogenic habits of thought. This colloquium is driven by a concern with habits of thinking that presume separability, inhibiting the kinds of expansive, dynamic, and relational deliberation necessary for life in troubled times. Thus, it seeks to attend to the theoretical and methodological questions implicit in apprehending, thinking, and writing histories of multiscalar, multispecies, and multitemporal entanglements.
Bracketing the apocalyptic metanarratives of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, we propose instead a working notion of the present as:
times of multispecies, including human urgency: of great mass death and extinction; of onrushing disasters, whose unpredictable specificities are foolishly taken as unknowability itself; of refusing to know and to cultivate the capacity of response-ability; of refusing to be present in and to onrushing catastrophe in time; of unprecedented looking away. (Haraway, 35)
The rationale of the colloquium is thus to think collectively of alternative approaches to habits of thinking that distinguish between two realities: “the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness” (Whitehead 21). We invite participants and the public to consider the tools we most need to apprehend and tell yet other stories about our complex entanglements with humans and more-than-humans.
Panelists are invited to engage with any of the questions discussed in these works:
Keywords: Monoculture, Caribbean, Cuba, plantation, weeds
… is a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University. Previously, she served as Postdoctoral Associate at Yale Environmental Humanities and the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration after earning her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. Her current book project examines representations of “weedy” plants in the Caribbean in the aftermath of plantation slavery. She is also working on a digital humanities project mapping literary representations of plant life in the region, accessible at www.botanicalimaginaries.com.
Prof. Cole will present “Thinking with Life at the Limits of the Caribbean Plantation.”
Donna Haraway has described the plantation as a site of “multispecies forced labor” in which complex arrays of life forms are radically simplified and the generation time of all actors is altered (Haraway and Tsing 5). Anna Tsing, speaking in conversation with Haraway, has described one of its characteristic traits as the simultaneous disciplining of people and of plants (Haraway and Tsing 6). Extending and complicating current theorizations of the Plantationocene, this paper examines the diverse forms of life that thrive at the edges of Caribbean monoculture plantations, among rows of cultivated crops, in the soil that sustains them, and in the fallow land abandoned plantations leave behind. Monoculture, I argue, always depends upon the uncultivated life forms at its margins. “Weedy” plants and mycorrhizal fungi offer alternative possibilities for multispecies lifeways when cash crop economies fall apart. I consider the stakes of thinking with the noncommercial life forms at the limits of Caribbean monoculture plantations, building upon Haraway’s and Puig de la Bellacasa’s theorizations of “thinking-with” as a mode of engagement with multispecies lifeworlds (Haraway 30; Puig de la Bellacasa 201). What does it mean to think with organisms that have not evolved for human consumption but whose lifeways are intricately enmeshed with our own? How do such life forms become subject to new modes of extraction in the ruins monoculture leaves behind? Do they have the power to dislodge what Vandana Shiva terms “monocultures of the mind?”
Keywords: Latin America, Anthropocene, plants, extraction, worldmaking
… is Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at Rice University and Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University as well as a writer, ecocritic, and public intellectual with a particular focus on literature, media, and the environment in Latin America. Her most recent publications are the co-edited volumes The Latin American Ecocultural Reader (2020), Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (2021), Un gabinete del futuro (2022) and Turbar la quietud (2023), the authored monograph Visualizing Loss in Latin America: Biopolitics, Waste, and the Urban Environment (2023), the novels Ischia (trad. from Spanish, 2023) and Cocodrilos en la noche (2020; 2023), the bilingual poem collection El cero móvil de su boca / The Mobile Zero of Its Mouth (2020) and the hybrid book Aquí no hubo ni una estrella (2023).
Prof. Heffes will present “Subversive Flora: Nutritive Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin America”
In this working paper Prof. Heffes will look at the countereffect of a wide number of recent publications and art productions where the garden, gardening, vegetal life and the “botanical imaginary” (Wylie 2021), as well as alternative figurations of flora and plants, nourish aesthetic worldmaking. These writings and visual artifacts catalyze what I define as a “nutritive aesthetics” that intentionally or unintentionally aims to mitigate the collapsing effect of our anthropogenic present. While the negative effects of contaminant substances had and continue to have a detrimental effect on human and non-human species, these works focus on microorganisms, extinction, and organic/non organic entanglements. They respond to violence ––whereas the silent one caused by the gradual effect of toxicants, or the brutal one triggered by ongoing practices of extractive imperialism––by evoking life and vitality in multiple and microorganic forms.
… is the author of a number of books, among them Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life (1996), Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion (1999), Creole Religions of the Caribbean (with Margarite Fernández Olmos, 2003; 2nd ed. 2011), Literatures of the Caribbean (2008) and of the forthcoming Extinctions: The Ecological Cost of Colonization in the Caribbean (Liverpool University Press). She is at work on “Troubled Sea: Ecology and History in 21st Century Caribbean Art,” for which she received an Arts Writers Grant from the Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation and on Where the River Meets the Sea: Visualizing Climate Change in the Dominican Republic, for which she received a Clark Art Institute Fellowship in 2022. Prof. Paravisini-Gebert has co-edited a number of collections of essays, and is the author of numerous book chapters and articles. She co-edits Repeating Islands, a popular blog on Caribbean culture, with her Ivette Romero-Cesareo.
Prof. Paravisini will present, “Caribbean Eco-fictions: Multilayered Stories of the Caribbean Environment.” You can download the paper here.
In “Frogs,” a chapter from her 2013 novel Claire of the Sea Light, Edwidge Danticat tells of Gaëlle, a young woman who—while pregnant with a daughter whom she knows will not survive—collects and buries the remains of some of the many frogs that have fallen victim to a deadly viral epidemic. Drawn to the frogs, she ignores her husband’s warnings that their death represents “a sign that something more terrible is going to happen,” and swallows a tiny frog that will remain forever within her. Both her empathy for the threatened frogs and her consumption of one tiny specimen—the salient cruxes of this poignant and enriching bond—point to a turn towards multispecies thought in fiction and art addressing environmental and biodiversity losses in the Caribbean region in the past two decades. In the hybrid organism that results from the union of Gaëlle, her doomed unborn daughter, and the small frog, Danticat reminds us of how in a world threatened with massive biodiversity losses, as Thom van Dooren has argued, “we are required to cultivate new competencies for seeing and understanding how living beings make sense of their worlds, perhaps even to develop new modes of human/animal intercultural co-becoming.”
The crisis of extinction facing the Caribbean region has been exacerbated in recent years by the surging impacts of climate change—stronger and more deadly hurricanes, catastrophic biodiversity losses, loss of topsoil, deadly mudslides, and the bleaching of coral reefs—which have left the land, as described by Haitian author Frankétienne, “scarred by a cascade of natural and man-made disasters.” Frankétienne, whose focus, in both his writings and art, has been on underscoring the interconnectedness of everything and everyone, has been a main inspiration for writers like Danticat and Rita Indiana, whose novels have addressed the need for multispecies approaches to the problems of biodiversity losses in the region. Frankétienne’s proposal echoes van Dooren’s experiences with the preservation of the Hawaiian forest snail, Achatinella lila: “We are called to care as a work of mourning; a work of bearing witness, of keeping faith with the dead and dying, of reckoning with what has been and will still be lost.” Most importantly, perhaps, it anticipates and embraces Emanuele Coccia’s interpretation of the process or metamorphosis as “not just the key to understand the identity of an individual but also to understand the identity of all the individuals belonging to a single species, as well as all the species altogether.” In this presentation, I want to focus on the emerging conversation about the centrality of multispecies thought in the changing approaches to stemming extinctions and preserving habitats in the Caribbean region. Drawing from the work of Frankétiene, van Dooren, and Coccia, I look at the richness of literary and artistic contributions to this inspiring dialogue in a broad range of works as varied as Pedro Cabiya’s Wicked Weeds and Didier Williams’ Cursed Borders.
Lizabeth, in your essay you attend to the turn toward “multispecies thought in fiction and art addressing environmental and biodiversity losses in the Caribbean region in the past two decades”. In your study of Caribbean novels and artistic works, you find that the stories they tell respond to what what Thom van Dooren describes as “the cultivation of new competencies for seeing and understanding how living beings make sense of their worlds, perhaps even to develop new modes of human/animal intercultural co-becoming.’” If I understood correctly, it seems that the cultivation of such competencies and the understandings they promise regarding development of interspecies co-becomings can be seen in stories that model empathy with non-human species at risk of extinction, as in Gaëlle’s identification with the virally epidemic stricken frogs in Danticat’s novel. It also seems that, as you discuss in your analysis of Rita Indiana’s La mucama, development of “new competencies for seeing and understanding” take the form of acts of care that imply directly engaging with the ecological work of restoration. In Indiana’s novel, restoring the “poisoned and lifeless Caribbean sea” involves the metamorphosis of the protagonist with the sea anemone, which is possible the protagonist’s “faith in “a spectrum of African-derived Caribbean religiosities.” Lastly, you suggest that the “reenactment of traditions and care for the minutiae of everyday life” that is embodied by women, as visually articulated by Galanis’s Into the Ether, is vital to the work of ecological restoration. You read these cultural products as expanding our imaginary such that it is possible to see in the multilayered stories of extinction and work of preservation that the lot of the human species is not only tied to that of other species, but that its survival may require creating other kinds of ontologies, and perhaps cosmologies, in which human beings are “just one among many other species.” First, did I understand your argument? And second, would you be able to say more about how the notion of “care” changes in the context of the threat of extinction and the turn toward multispecies histories. For example, does it forgo moralism, including social contract perspectives?. Does it turn instead toward pragmatism? Can you say more about what Caribbean fiction and creative works tell us about how “care” is being reconceived?
Hannah, your essay engages powerfully with a narrative that has been used to tell the story of monocultures and of extinction in the Caribbean. By thinking with the weedy plants, which you show are inseparable from monocultures, you add a significant layer to that story that opens possibilities for telling yet other stories, such as the story of resilience by indigenous and enslaved african populations who cultivated food on the margins of the plantation and “nourished a traditional folk culture grounded in reverence for the earth and its gifts such as yams and other roots.” In your discussion of the life trajectory of marabú, you thicken the story of monocultures, acknowledging that the economic appropriation of marabú could be read as an example of capitalism’s resilience, or, as you opt to do, we can find in this phenomenon a “more inspiring narrative,” one that evidences “the possibility that Caribbean societies can develop new multispecies lifeways out of the damaged ecologies that plantation agriculture has left behind.” You show that there are yet other stories to tell about the planationocene that allow for an appreciation and acknowledgement of “broader networks of biodiversity” comprising plants, people, and animals. My question for you is about your process. The narrative of “monocultures”is a compelling narrative for telling the stories of the effects and legacies of extractive capitalism in the Caribbean and Latin America. In reading your work, it became clearer to me that, as Haraway has said, it makes a difference what stories we use to tell stories. I realized that if we stay with the story of monocultures, which is obviously useful, we risk not pushing the boundaries to discover what other stories can be told and what can be thought. Can you say more about the process that led to “focusing on [particular] “weeds” to reorient scholarship toward futures beyond the logic of monoculture,” and “toward the varied life that rises up in its wake?”
Gisela, in your essay you consider the potential that word-making has in the project of worldmaking in the context of ecological devastation. You consider the poetry collection of Mexican poet Maricela Guerrero to develop a notion that you call “nutritive aesthetics.” Prior to reading your paper, I had never considered that an aesthetic could be nutritive. As I understand it, this aesthetic emphasizes worldmaking through the creation of new connections between words and “the tiniest organism of the cell,” showing, perhaps, that we (and our word-making and worldmaking) are not separate from nature. The power of nutritive aesthetics seems to lie in its potential for challenging “the legacy of an imposed and hegemonic grammar” through the creation of an alternative language that is interwoven with the language of non-humans (e.g., trees and rivers). Could you elaborate on how this aesthetic is nutritive, and on how the word “nutritive” is being used in this particular context? Is it nutritive because it develops a language that enables us to experience and explore nonhuman forms of being? You mentioned the language of trees. Is nutritive aesthetics limited or constrained by human language? In other words, how is the language of non-humans registered within a linguistic paradigm that has been developed by humans?