Affective Narratives in Times of Environmental Collapses
Description
The prospect of environmental disruptions confronts us with the legacy of previous generations, reluctant politics and aggressive lobbying of extractive industries, yet we are called to act responsibly and think creatively as we are nursed with the hope that innovative and sustainable projects will save the planet. Wedged between grand-arching narratives and individual responsibility, what stories do we tell ourselves that invite suspension and disbelief while comforting ourselves with what Berlant describes as “good-life fantasies” (2)? What narratives can uphold the contradictions between goals of individual life and collective efforts in mitigating environmental disaster and social disruptions?
“Eco-anxiety,” “ecological grief” and “climate trauma” are responses to how fears are wired into a tangle of narratives with which humans tell themselves their hopes and despairs and need to be carefully considered at the site of their inscription. Assembling affective agency of environmental narratives necessarily requires an understanding of subject formation. How do we differentiate the “we” who “now wield a geological force” (Chakrabarty)? If subjecthood, as Puar ponders, is always on the brink of being institutionalized through the “standardization of a method” of inquiry (59), then it seems inadequate to capture an evolving situation spurred by environmental anxieties. We must ask ourselves how we can divest from subject formation while fulfilling the need for subjectivities-in-becoming and narratives able to challenge the usual nation-centered, techno-positive, doomsday storytelling and reproductive futurism.
We would like to discuss the “environmental vantage point [...] that frustrates the distinction between intentionality and unintentionality undergirding imaginaries and practices of refusal” (Swarbrick and Tremblay, 8; Edelman and Berlant, vii–viii). Affects, narratives, and the way the two interweave constitute dynamic relations that are constantly in flux and resist translation into viable roadmaps. Yet, precisely in this sense, fiction and storytelling become spaces where the unstable find respite and where form allows lingering exploration.
We welcome contributions or papers with an interest in:
Climate and social injustice through the perspective of colonial histories, antiblackness, indigeneity, class struggles and Queer ecologies;
The role and responsibility of narrative in relation to epistemological violence and agency of expression, environmental trauma or grief;
Positionality and subject formation in environmental narratives.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Hayden Bytheway is a PhD Candidate at the Cinema Studies Institute in Toronto. Hayden’s research examines cinematic representations of environmental risk, drawing inspiration from various strains of philosophy, including critical theory, pragmatism, existential phenomenology, the philosophy of life and organism, post-continental thought, and aesthetics.
Speaker Bio
Pascal Schwaighofer is a postdoc fellow at the Department of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures at McGill University, Montréal. His research is grounded in environmental humanities, visual culture, and critical theory with a particular focus on modern bee culture and its transdisciplinary influence on literature, linguistics, cybernetics, politics, and ecology.
Speaker Bio
Hui Wong is a PhD student in the department of Film & Media at UC Berkeley. He has written about reclaimed wastewater, air-conditioning, and eco-art in Singapore. His current research concerns infrastructural disasters, postcolonial modernity, subjectivity, mediation, genre, and narrative. They are interested in how the collapse of large technical systems, and their integration into narratives, orient social-psychic-political worlds.
Speaker Bio
Ari Javidi (they/she) is a second-year PhD student in anthropology at McGill University, working at the intersection of psychological and medical anthropology. Coming to anthropology after a five year career in psychotherapy, they are interested in the constellations of environmental imaginaries, psychic life, and political (in)action that animate contemporary practices of tree planting labor as a kind of self-therapeutics. They live in Montreal with their dog, Zoe.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Devin Griffiths is an associate professor of English and Comp. Lit. at the University of Southern California. His first book, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the Darwins (Hopkins), explored how analogy shaped the disciplinary formations of the life sciences and humanities. He is coeditor of After Darwin: Literature, Theory, and Criticism in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge). He is new project is titled “The Ecology of Power: Energy Aesthetics and the Arts of Expression."
Speaker Bio
Emily Lowman studies temporal rhetoric and authority at the intersections of medieval literature and critical media studies. She is currently ABD at the University of Rochester and a Visiting Assistant Professor at St. John Fisher University.
Speaker Bio
Kate Roy, a Pākehā scholar from Aotearoa-New Zealand, teaches in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Germanic Studies at Franklin University Switzerland. She has published on diasporic and (post)colonial literature in German and French, and her current research is focused on comparative studies in postcolonial literatures and cultures, and especially on the learning of critically engaged and ethical teaching and research practices for Postcolonial Studies.