Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene 3030779734, 9783030779733

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LIFE WRITING SERIES EDITORS: CLARE BRANT · MAX SAUNDERS

Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene Edited by Ina Batzke · Lea Espinoza Garrido · Linda M. Hess

Palgrave Studies in Life Writing Series Editors Clare Brant Department of English King’s College London London, UK Max Saunders Department of English King’s College London London, UK

This series features books that address key concepts and subjects in life writing, with an emphasis on new and emergent approaches. It offers ­specialist but accessible studies of contemporary and historical topics, with a focus on connecting life writing to themes with cross-disciplinary appeal. The series aims to be the place to go to for current and fresh research for scholars and students looking for clear and original discussion of specific subjects and forms; it is also a home for experimental approaches that take creative risks with potent materials. The term ‘Life Writing’ is taken broadly so as to reflect its academic, public, digital and international reach, and to continue and promote its democratic tradition. The series seeks contributions that address global contexts beyond traditional territories, and which engage with diversity of race, gender and class. It welcomes volumes on topics of everyday life and culture with which life writing scholarship can engage in transformative and original ways; it also aims to further the political engagement of life writing in relation to human rights, migration, trauma and repression, and the processes and effects of the Anthropocene, including environmental subjects where lives may be non-human. The series looks for work that challenges and extends how life writing is understood and practised, ­especially in a world of rapidly changing digital media; that deepens and diversifies knowledge and perspectives on the subject; and which contributes to the intellectual excitement and the world relevance of life writing. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15200

Ina Batzke  •  Lea Espinoza Garrido Linda M. Hess Editors

Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene

Editors Ina Batzke American Studies, Faculty of Philology & History University of Augsburg Augsburg, Germany

Lea Espinoza Garrido American Studies, Faculty of Humanities & Cultural Studies University of Wuppertal Wuppertal, Germany

Linda M. Hess American Studies, Faculty of Philology & History University of Augsburg Augsburg, Germany

ISSN 2730-9185     ISSN 2730-9193 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Life Writing ISBN 978-3-030-77972-6    ISBN 978-3-030-77973-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77973-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Cleo and Cleo

Contents

 Introduction: Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene  1 Ina Batzke, Lea Espinoza Garrido, and Linda M. Hess Part I Responsible Relationality  21  Relationality, Autobiographical Voice, and the Posthumanist Paradox: Decentering the Human in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Life Writing 23 Katja Sarkowsky  The Big Picture: Life as Sympoietic Becomings in Rachel Rosenthal’s Performance Art 55 Christina Caupert  Edges and Extremes in Ecobiography: Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun 97 Jessica White  The Sentience of Sea Squirts123 Clare Brant

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Part II Relational Responsibility 157  Humanity, Life Writing, and Deep Time: Postcolonial Contributions159 Renata Lucena Dalmaso Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk and Critical Posthumanism185 Monir Gholamzadeh Bazarbash  Writing Life on Mars: Posthuman Imaginaries of Extraterrestrial Colonization and the NASA Mars Rover Missions205 Jens Temmen  (Life) Narrative in the Posthuman Anthropocene: Erin James in Conversation with Birgit Spengler225 Erin James and Birgit Spengler Index257

List of Figures

The Sentience of Sea Squirts Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Clavelina—like Hattifatteners in a thunderstorm © Clare Brant A visual puzzle, including sea squirts © Clare Brant Polycarpa aurata © Clare Brant Another visual challenge: what holds sway? © Clare Brant

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Writing Life on Mars: Posthuman Imaginaries of Extraterrestrial Colonization and the NASA Mars Rover Missions Fig. 1

“The Evolution of a Martian.” Image source: NASA. No Rights Reserved210

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Introduction: Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene Ina Batzke, Lea Espinoza Garrido, and Linda M. Hess

Life Writing: A Genre in Trouble? How can life writing, a genre so intimately tied to the human perspective and thus presumably human-centered qua definition, provide adequate perspectives for an age in which humanity’s self-centeredness is considered the driving force behind ecological disasters and global climate change? To reflect the destructive consequences of human behavior on this planet, Eugene Stoermer introduced the term “Anthropocene”:1 Derived from the Greek word for human (anthropos), it acknowledges that our current

I. Batzke (*) University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] L. Espinoza Garrido University of Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany e-mail: [email protected] L. M. Hess University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Batzke et al. (eds.), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77973-3_1

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geological epoch is marked by lasting human impact on Earth’s geology and its ecosystems. While this terminological intervention certainly reinforces humanity’s centrality, in recent years, its adoption into scientific discourse was frequently accompanied by a call to rethink and challenge the role of the human on Earth: not only in the Natural Sciences but specifically in the Humanities, anthropocentric understandings of humans’ allegedly unique subject position have rightfully come under scrutiny. The perhaps severest criticism in this regard has come from the fields of posthumanism and material ecocriticism, where scholars are interested in theorizing beyond the human as well as in critically assessing and dismantling the “exceptional” status that humans have continually attributed to themselves. Some go as far as to propose a philosophy that integrates humans with animate and inanimate matter as one species among many, without any prioritization. Such posthumanist understandings obviously trouble core aspects of (auto)biographical narrative and of life writing studies: decentering the human in works of life writing seems anything but intuitive, given the traditional understanding of the genre as the paradigmatic expression of the autonomous self as the sovereign of knowledge about oneself and one’s world. However, rethinking the place of the human has, in fact, been a core interest of life writing throughout the last decades, even beyond the context of the Anthropocene: While relationality first appeared in feminist life writing studies mainly in the 1980s,2 at the latest since the 1990s, life writing and life writing studies more generally have increasingly foregrounded relational models of life narration and the self and “a broadening of the scope of what is meant by ‘writing.’”3 Already in 1994, at the National Conference on Autobiography, Paul John Eakin argued that all selfhood is relational and that narrative “is the mode in which relational identity is transacted.”4 The focus in the field hence shifted from the notion of “autonomous selves” to the question how humans create identity “relationally.” On the one hand, this shift arguably showed “how the genre of autobiography can lessen its preoccupation with the self and move metaphorically toward the web of life.”5 On the other hand, relationality in these considerations still corresponded to a human other. The “web of life,” in other words, yet had to be extended to include human connections to non-human or other-than-human others. This extension, then, was undertaken during the second decade of the twenty-first century when several scholars proposed more thorough integrations of posthumanism into the study of life writing, hence pushing the boundaries of both the genre and the field even further.6

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Notably, most of the interventions in the field of life writing studies which have recently engaged with posthumanist thought seem to agree that this endeavor inevitably demands a fundamental re-evaluation of several categories that have been central to life writing since its emergence. Cynthia Huff, for example, argues that bringing together these ideas “troubles virtually every tenet of autobiographical practice and criticism – the autonomous self, the pact between author and reader, the foregrounding of the human.”7 In the introduction to their special issue on Life Writing in the Anthropocene, Jessica White and Gillian Whitlock similarly contend that the “material presence of other-than-human life”8 should replace “the human as a principal actant”9 in life writing. This, in turn, has significant implications for conceptualizing not only who/what is narrated, but also how narration works: Louis van den Hengel, for example, connects the “practice of posthuman life writing” with “non-narrative production[s] of new configurations of bodily matter,”10 while Anna Poletti argues that a “turn to matter productively … challenges a focus on autobiography as a narrative act by inviting us to think differently about how autobiographers are engaged by and engage with the materiality of their lives.”11 Instances of such non-narrative productions include Julia Watson’s recent essay on self-portraiture12 and Van den Hengel’s own understanding of performance art as simultaneously “fully autobiographical and radically a-personal.”13 Such examples try to situate the posthuman in life writing by leaving behind the realms of writing “as a technology controlled by humans to gain mastery … in favor of” what Huff calls “a more expansive concept of narrative relating.”14 Re-envisioning life writing through a posthumanist lens thus seems not only to call for prioritizing a focus on relationality and materiality over the focus on the human self that traditional (auto)biography has foregrounded but also to imply that “[c]ritics of life narrative would need to abandon certain pieces of their toolbox, such as the autobiographical pact.”15 These calls for abandonment or reinvention of traditional characteristics of life writing as well as of human modes of expression and categorization more generally provoke the question if life writing as a genre even remains relevant for engaging with the Anthropocene. Additionally, posthumanism’s endeavor to challenge human exceptionalism troubles another category with which life writing research has been grappling for a while, and which seems even more pressing in our current moment: the question of agency, and by extension, the question of voice. Integrating the human with other kinds of animate and inanimate matter

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implies that agency ceases to be regarded as an exclusive property of humans. In fact, it is no longer conceived as “something that someone or something has,” but as a process; an “enactment” between various (and widely divergent) agents.”16 Connected to the notion of agency (and voice) in the context of life writing are three central issues: Firstly, Huff cautions life writing theorists against simply extending the agency of voice in ways that quietly re-center the human, which would lead to situations in which humans ostensibly speak for others, for instance, animals. According to her, life writing scholars must engage in “a politics of subjectivity that emphasizes relationality and process among disparate types of beings,” without, however, evoking such instances of “ventriloquized representationality.”17 Secondly, Whitlock reminds us that human agency is crucial for life writing’s potential to bear testimony to power and its abuse, not only but particularly to the groups that Huff correctly identifies as excluded from the Gusdorfian concept of autobiography, which imagines the genre as explicitly Eurocentric, focused on concerns “peculiar to Western man.”18 Retaining possibilities for minoritized groups to assert agency and bear witness, therefore, remains crucial even if we challenge human centrality. Thirdly, considering humans as just one kind of agent among many others runs the risk of disguising and disregarding the disproportionate ethical responsibility that humans carry for and in the Anthropocene. It is particularly in reference to the latter aspect—to avoid obscuring human responsibility—that we want to revitalize life writing as a highly suitable, even necessary genre to think through the challenges of the Anthropocene. In light of the threat that human behavior poses to all lives on Earth in the current age, challenging human centrality in favor of more a relational understanding of all matter cannot and must not foreclose human accountability. We argue that life writing remains pertinent particularly because the genre’s focus on negotiating the relationality of human and non-human life counters risks of losing a nuanced perception of human responsibility in and for the Anthropocene. Consequently, in the present volume, we aim to think relationality and responsibility conjointly: as our titular “Posthuman Anthropocene” intimates, we engage posthumanist theories such as a relational understanding of all species, but at the same time avert asserting the same agency and particularly responsibility to them, as doing so would diffuse the fatal role (some) humans have played and continue to play in shaping our current planetary life-­ world. For life writing, this means that responsibility can in itself be a form

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of relation because it entails an answer, a response to an “other,” a sense of accountability for human behavior that extends beyond the realms of human life and human benefit. Conversely, we argue that recognizing the relational connectedness of humans to human and non-human others alike heightens the need to take responsibility, in the recognition that we cannot act in isolation. Following the trajectories of posthumanism and ecocriticism, this recognition hence invites us to not only (re-)conceptualize human existence as fundamentally relational but also to embrace humanity’s responsibility to live in a way that does not (further) endanger the human and non-human others with whom our lives on this planet are so closely entangled. Acknowledging this intricate interplay of relationality and responsibility, the contributions in this volume approach life writing in the posthuman Anthropocene, for example, by way of (re-)negotiating the roles of subjectivity, agency, and materiality in life writing. Before we introduce each chapter in more detail, the following sections further expand our framework of thinking relationality and responsibility conjointly, and discuss how research in the field of life writing can benefit from questioning its definitions of “the human” via the lenses of the Anthropocene and posthumanism.

Engaging the Troublemakers: Posthumanism and the Anthropocene Even though the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) are still deliberating whether the designation “Anthropocene” will be officially approved to mark an era of geologic time, it has rapidly become a staple of scholarly debates since Crutzen and Stroemer popularized the term over two decades ago. Its increasing usage, not least in the humanities, bears witness to the recognition that our era is “the epoch of geological time during which human activity is considered to be the dominant influence on the environment, climate and ecology of the earth.”19 While the term thus still awaits official approval by the ICS and IUGS, it already does more than simply designate a geological era: it stands for anthropogenic crisis. Thinking in terms of the Anthropocene simultaneously demands a focus on the human as the purveyor of such crisis in the first place, and a radical decentering of the human as a way of mitigating the crisis. Both

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posthumanist thinkers and ecocritics have insistently challenged anthropocentrism in its perpetuation of human(ist) exceptionalism. Indeed, the idea(l) of an autonomous individual becomes difficult to uphold, as even the presumably firm “boundary between the human and nonhuman world” on which human(ist) exceptionalism relies becomes “fuzzy,” when we consider for example that human bodies themselves are porous.20 Similarly, pointing to Moira Gatens’s statement that the human body is “in constant interchange with its environment” and therefore “radically open to its surroundings and can be composed, recomposed, and decomposed by other bodies,”21 Stacy Alaimo claims that “the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment.’”22 For material ecocritics like Alaimo, the human becomes “enmeshed,”23 “entangled,”24 or “vibrant matter”25 among other vibrant matter, and thus the human as a category appears increasingly obsolete and inadequate. Such views certainly further complicate any conventional assumptions about the autonomously acting individual self, and life writing scholars have to contend with these challenges if they want to negotiate ways in which life writing can productively engage with the posthuman Anthropocene. We believe that attending to non-human others as well as to (the) materiality of and in life writing more generally is a productive avenue of research that has the potential to provide new insights for life writing, posthumanism, and ecocriticism alike. Yet, as we have argued above, such productive and necessary attempts to complicate human centrality in favor of a more relational understanding of matter need to cautiously avoid the risk of implicitly obscuring human ethical responsibility,26 not only in but especially for the Anthropocene. Consequently, instead of advocating for casting aside a focus on humanity altogether, we conceive the human as one site of “distributive agency” within and across a multiplicity of human and non-human, animate and inanimate material formations—with the important caveat that humans’ position within this network is not just the same as that of all other actants, at least not in terms of accountability. As Erin James argues in this volume: “if humans are the problem, if humans are the things that are driving these fundamental and radical changes that we see in the world, then perhaps we should study ourselves.”27 At the same time, we agree that we28 need to overcome the legacies of Humanist divisions of the human and non-human and find ways of taking the radical relationality of human existence into account, but without simply exchanging one kind of universalism for another.

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One pertinent approach for thinking about the Anthropocene—and the posthuman—is to build on the works of postcolonial thinkers and scholars like Frantz Fanon and others who have explicated the mechanisms by which those considered “other” (such as Indigenous and postcolonial subjects) are juxtaposed to and excluded from the category of “the human” variously.29 In the endeavor to overcome notions of human supremacy vis-à-vis other species, it is vital to remember not only that the status of “the human” is not universally granted to all humans but also that this non-universality has led to “unequal human agency, unequal human impacts, and unequal human vulnerabilities.”30 In this context, Kathryn Yusoff has pointed out that, “as the Anthropocene proclaims the language of species life  – anthropos  – through a universalist geological commons, it neatly erases histories or racisms that were incubated through the regulatory structure of geologic relations.”31 In considering how life writing might be equipped to mediate crucial questions of relationality and responsibility in the age of the Anthropocene, Yusoff’s work is a potent reminder that responsibility cannot simply be relegated to “the human.” The fact that “imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialism have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence”32 means that, instead, there are consequential differences to attend to regarding who causes and who suffers damage in the Anthropocene age. Moreover, given the bluntness with which pandemic consequences of willful human ignorance of relationalities and inequalities in terms of global patterns of production, consumption, and environmental crises continuously come to light,33 challenging and theorizing “the human” in ways that can constructively articulate both relationality and responsibility has lost none of its urgency. As Dipesh Chakrabarty argues in “The Climate of History,” a central responsibility of our thinking about the Anthropocene is to find ways to understand humanity in the context of climate change as a species that is experiencing a “shared catastrophe that we have all fallen into,”34 while at the same time remaining mindful that responsibility for this catastrophe is not evenly distributed. Rather, “the unfolding of capitalism in the West and the imperial or quasi-imperial domination by the West of the rest of the world”35 leave no doubt that assuming a universal human would only serve to perpetuate such structures of domination and inequality. In the last three decades, scholars in the field of ecocriticism have likewise traced the unequal impact of anthropogenic climate change and pollution through such concepts as “slow violence,”36 environmental racism,

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and environmental justice. Pondering the implications of these concepts for notions of vulnerability, Rob Nixon agrees with Chakrabarty on the concurrent existence of two crises: “the environmental crisis and the inequality crisis.”37 Highlighting the role of storytelling in this context, he pointedly observes: A crucial imaginative challenge facing us is this: How do we tell two large stories that seem in tension with each other, a convergent story and a divergent one? Set against the collective story about humanity’s geomorphic impacts that will be legible in the earth’s geophysical systems for millennia to come is the story of the human species, a much more fractured narrative. The species-centered Anthropocene meme has arisen in the twenty-first century, a period in which most societies have experienced a deepening schism between the überrich and the ultrapoor. In terms of the history of ideas, what does it mean that the Anthropocene as a grand explanatory species story has taken hold during a plutocratic age? How can we counter the centripetal force of that dominant story with centrifugal stories that acknowledge immense disparities in human agency, impacts, and vulnerability?38

Life writing as a genre has the potential to address these two crises by telling stories that focus on both, the unequal distribution of vulnerability between humans and non-humans, but also among members of the human species itself. Consequently, we consider it crucial to include posthumanism as a critical lens for life writing, insofar as it facilitates not only theorizing beyond the human but also theorizing beyond Humanism and its legacies. Following Rosi Braidotti, we see “the dialectics of self and other and … the binary logic of identity and otherness as respectively the motor for and the cultural logic of universal Humanism,”39 and by contrast, we conceive posthumanism as a way to illuminate “a series of emerging discourses generated by the intersecting critiques of humanism and of anthropocentrism.”40 In further exploring fundamental questions of what discursively and politically constitutes “humanness” vis-à-vis considerations of “nature,” we cannot lose sight of the unspoken and unmarked exclusions of a multitude of humans from the category “human” throughout history and in the present. We have to acknowledge the role that “paradigmatic self-representation [of ‘the human’ as] deeply male-centred and Eurocentric”41 has played not only in Humanism’s definitions of “the human” but also in the field of life writing and life writing research. Via N. Katherine Hayles we argue that posthumanism opens up ways of rethinking these definitions, of thinking about what (being) “human”

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means in the first place: new kinds of cultural configurations that question the authority of the coherent self that bears witness to a stable reality.42 Helpfully, Hayles also reminds us that the notion of the posthuman does not mean the end of humanity or a turn to the antihuman. Instead, it offers resources for rethinking the liberal humanist view of the self and signals the questioning of conceptions of the human that draw on hierarchies of speciesism and anthropocentrism—ideas “that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity that had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice.”43

Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene As the impacts of global warming and a viral pandemic that both thrive on the networks of global capitalism reverberate throughout the world, many have recognized that we can no longer understand ourselves as simply biological agents but must accept our role as “geological agents,”44 who have changed our planet’s future. In this context, the truth of Ursula Heise’s call for a “sense of planet,” an understanding of “global connectedness at various levels”45 is more pressing than ever. This ecocritical “sense of planet” translates to an ethical responsibility for humans to decrease what others have called “humanity’s footprint”—a call to action, one might say, to behave differently, to care for the planet. The dilemma at this point lies in the question how one might focus on human responsibility but also avoid simply returning to an anthropocentrism that is inextricably linked to a fundamental non-recognition of humanity’s relational existence. In turn, thinking in terms of radical relationality, scholars need to guard themselves against slipping into a philosophy of totality that, in equating humans with all living and non-living matter, loses sight of the specificity of human responsibility as well as of blatant inequalities of responsibility and suffering among different groups of humans. Following Rosanne Kennedy, in this volume we propose that it might be precisely the anthropocentrism of life writing and “the approaches critics develop to read it [that] could play a critical role in rethinking the concept and place of the human, and humanistic understandings of ‘the world.’”46 Almost ironically, her idea allows us to follow the trajectories of posthumanism—to challenge the alleged superiority of the human—by turning to a genre that has prominently contributed to the exaltation of the human self. As David Herman argues in Narratology Beyond the

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Human, this turn is productive since any understandings of the very idea of (human) selfhood “are interwoven not only with assumptions about what a human self is and how it emerges over time, but also with broader cultural ontologies, which determine the kinds of selves that are assumed to populate the world, and hence the range of others in relation to whom a given self-narrative takes shape.”47 Hence, while life writing as a genre has traditionally been reserved for expressions and negotiations of human selfhood, it also has the potential to rethink the constructedness and relatedness of such anthropocentric notions of selfhood—particularly if studied through a posthuman(ist) lens. Therefore, the articles in this volume explore how the approaches of life writing studies and posthumanist scholarship might hold one another accountable: by embracing the tensions of the posthuman Anthropocene, life writing can not only expand its own toolbox in productive ways but also enrich fields such as posthumanism and ecocriticism by offering unique approaches to the various entanglements of responsibility and relationality. Throughout our volume, these two terms—relationality and responsibility—thus resurface time and again in the individual chapters as core nodes of contemplating the posthuman Anthropocene. We argue that one can never be separated from the other: Responsibility implies a relation to an other even in its most basic form—Donna Haraway’s response-­ ability48—and understanding the human as relational means considering responsibility to others, human and non-human, to whom we are tied, individually as well as collectively. Accordingly, we grouped the articles in the present volume into two connected clusters: “Responsible Relationality” and “Relational Responsibility.” In presenting these two clusters, we hope to convey that they do not appear as opposed poles but indicate differently weighted, yet intricately connected, considerations of how life writing might provide adequate perspectives for an age of ecological disasters and global climate change. The four contributions in the first cluster, Responsible Relationality, all analyze types of life narratives that focus on human life as relational. They revisit and interrogate several traditional facets of life writing—voice, relationality, time, genre—under the influence of posthumanism and the Anthropocene. In contrast, the three contributions in the second cluster on Relational Responsibility focus primarily on ethical issues and responsibilities, by foregrounding the relevance of postcolonial theory and gender studies as integral parts of the life writing toolbox.

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The first cluster opens with Katja Sarkowsky’s chapter “Relationality, Autobiographical Voice, and the Posthumanist Paradox: Decentering the Human in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Life Writing.” Her contribution discusses the complex interplay between agency, voice, and relationality beyond the human in life writing and asks how and to what effect lives in their entanglement, mutual dependency, and relationality can be narrated and by whom. Focusing particularly on the notion of voice, she examines a number of autobiographical texts by Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko to illustrate the different ways in which “writing relationally” comes to the forefront in these works. Sarkowsky’s contribution demonstrates that these works are not only geared towards decentralizing “hegemonic humanness” but they also turn the materiality of zoe into bios through story and, in this way, expand what counts as narratable life. Christina Caupert’s “The Big Picture: Life as Sympoietic Becomings in Rachel Rosenthal’s Performance Art” expands life narrative beyond the confines of writing and into the realm of performance as growing from and enacting Rosenthal’s autobiographical narratives. The contribution traces Rosenthal’s interest in “The Big Picture” throughout her oeuvre, but especially in her later pieces in which the performer extends theater scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte’s definition of performance as “two groups of people, one acting and the other observing, to gather at the same time and place for a given period of shared lifetime”49 to include not only “people” but also non-human participants. In these pieces, Rosenthal conceives of animals and plants as well as seemingly inanimate objects and intangible primordial forces as powerful agents with which she shares the stage. In light of these aspects, the chapter illustrates how Rosenthal’s work can be productively read as posthuman avant la lettre using Braidotti’s four axes of posthuman subjectivity as lenses of analysis. In the third contribution, “Edges and Extremes in Ecobiography: Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun,” Jessica White discusses Liptrot’s text to expand the small corpus of literary criticism on the genre of ecobiography. She considers ecobiography as an example of how posthumanism influenced life writing structurally and argues that ecobiography is not merely an autobiography of an environment but that it details the overlaps between a human self and that environment. In her analysis of Liptrot’s work, White shows how the internal and external extremes in Liptrot’s life and character blur the traditional division between the human and the other-­ than-­ human world. By attending to this blurriness in Liptrot’s work, White eventually argues that ecobiography is a literary form that

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highlights humans’ indivisibility from the living and non-living world, their fundamental relationality. Finally, she highlights that such forms are critical in a world in which the separation of human and other-than-human has catastrophic environmental ramifications, thus also embracing human responsibility in and for the Anthropocene. In the final contribution of this cluster, Clare Brant engages with different types of what she calls “underwater literature” in her chapter “The Sentience of Sea Squirts.” Brant argues that, in contrast to terrestrial nature writing, underwater literature has not had equally visible ecopoetic traditions, and can thus respond more easily and in innovative ways to the demands and possibilities of posthumanism as well as to ecological crises in the Anthropocene. Drawing on underwater photographs she took as a diver, Brant’s chapter is itself a piece of life writing that connects its readers and the author herself to the objects in these photographs: underwater lives, particularly those of sea squirts. The chapter discusses various discourses around these sea squirts, and thus illustrates how human categories can both glimpse at and obscure the sentience of sea squirts. Against this backdrop, Brant argues that exploring sentient relations with sea squirts does not require humans to actually “feel” them. Rather, she posits, life writing allows us to bring human sentience “to, for, with, from sea squirts, in order to relate a little of the feeling and unfeeling that make up sentience about both as subjects.”50 While the works in focus in all four contributions of the first cluster are still narrated “with the human” or “via the human,” the case studies engage the question how the centeredness of the human can be re-­ envisioned in posthumanist life writing through notions of relationality. They illustrate that the central presence of the human self is profoundly affected by its relationality with the environment (Sarkowsky) and its “becoming-with” fellow species (Caupert), by its imbrications with other inhabitants of the environment (White), or by obscuring established human categories, as Brant exemplifies via her autobiographical yet non-­ anthropocentric investigation into sea squirts. In the second cluster, Relational Responsibility, different forms of relationality still surface. However, the focus of the contributions in this section lies on critically interrogating the universalist notion of “the human” and highlighting nuanced attributions of agency and responsibility. The first contribution in this cluster, “Humanity, Life Writing, and Deep Time: Postcolonial Contributions” by Renata Lucena Dalmaso, is an elaborate postcolonial intervention in the conception of the

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autobiographical self in the Anthropocene. According to Dalmaso, postcolonial life narratives can offer valuable tools to denaturalize humanity’s assumed primary in history because they are composed by subjects accustomed to not seeing themselves as privileged in relation to (H)istory. One of such tools is the introduction of deep time. Discussing Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) and Ailton Krenak’s Ideias para Adiar o Fim do Mundo (2019), Dalmaso uncovers how these postcolonial life writings materialize the bonds of their authors’ limited life span to deep time in ways that can contribute to a better understanding of the entanglement between humankind and a grander temporality. She argues that such narratives can offer valuable insight into the process of challenging epistemologies of privilege within history—a task that life writing research in the posthuman Anthropocene has to commit to as well. The second contribution is “Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk and Critical Posthumanism” by Monir Gholamzadeh Bazarbash. Using posthumanist and ecofeminist approaches, this contribution illustrates how Macdonald’s memoir of her life with the goshawk Mabel challenges boundaries between the human and the non-human in its own advocacy of a becoming-with that decenters the human. Macdonald breaks both with the mold of traditional representation of women as victims and vulnerable beings alongside nature and with masculinist traditions of falconry. As Gholamzadeh  Bazarbash illustrates, with this pronounced feminist critical trajectory, Macdonald’s text thus not only criticizes patriarchal and anthropocentric notions of hierarchy and domination over animals but also offers an alternative that creates empathy for human and non-human others and ponders questions of ecojustice. In the final contribution of the second cluster, “Writing Life on Mars: Posthuman Imaginaries of Extraterrestrial Colonization and the NASA Mars Rover Missions,” Jens Temmen discusses posthuman responsibilities for humanity’s exploration of Mars. Temmen’s article employs two different strategies: On the one hand, he discusses how both the planet Mars as well as the so-called Mars Rovers are humanized through various life writing practices. On the other hand, he examines—distinctly human-­ centered—life writings about space pioneers Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos through a posthumanist and postcolonial lens to expose their complicity in the technoliberal project of space privatization. In light of the challenges of the Anthropocene and the impending uninhabitability of Earth, he thus demonstrates that the utopian idea(l) of space

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exploration—instead of moving beyond the planetary boundaries of Earth—in fact reproduces terrestrial colonial narratives that re-inscribe rather than challenge (Western, male, and anthropocentric) humanist discourses. While his turn towards both human and posthuman life narratives not so much decenters “the human” itself, he illustrates that humanity’s responsibility to end the exploitative environmental and colonial structures it has created extends well beyond the boundaries of ‘our’ planet. In lieu of a conclusion—and as a way of spinning the considerations of the two clusters further—the contributions are followed by an interview in which Erin James and Birgit Spengler discuss the issues raised throughout this volume more broadly by attending to the role of “(Life) Narrative in the Posthuman Anthropocene” from a narratological perspective. James considers that while human and non-human entities exhibit agency, narrative agency is a particular “cognitive affordance” of humans, and one that might be especially productive when attempting to comprehend and also change the ways in which humans perceive their responsibility for the planet. Drawing particularly on her expertise in the fields of econarratology and postcolonial studies, James makes a case for studying the gaps and silences in (life) narratives written by and for humans as a way to “acknowledge an archive of nonhuman representations and ontologies … that resists narrativity.”51 This work, she argues, can help us understand how texts have reproduced anthropocentric world views, and ultimately, to find ways to overcome these views.

Notes 1. Ecologist Eugene Stroemer had used the term Anthropocene as early as the 1980s in talks and lectures, but it began to circulate widely when Stroemer and Paul Crutzen proposed it as a term for recognizing a new geological epoch in the newsletter of the International BiosphereGeosphere Programme (IBGP) in 2000, and when Crutzen subsequently reiterated their proposition in a contribution to Nature in 2002. Lewis and Maslin, The Human Planet, 21. 2. Mary G. Mason’s “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers” (1980) is oftentimes cited as one of the first contributions linking relationality to female autobiography. Other important interventions include Sidonie Smith’s A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography (1987), Julia Watson’s “Toward an Anti-Metaphysics of Autobiography” (1993), and Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982).

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3. Sarkowsky, “Relationality, Autobiographical Voice,” in this volume, 24. 4. Eakin, “Toward a Theory,” 25. 5. Allister, Refiguring the Map, 20. 6. Among these scholars were Cynthia Huff with publications like “After Auto, After Bio: Posthumanism and Life Writing” (2017) and “From Autobiographical Pact to Zoetrophic Pact” (2019) and Gillian Whitlock and G. Thomas Couser who initiated the debate around the possibility of “posthuman life writing” in their special issue “(Post)Human Lives” in 2012. 7. Huff, “After Auto, After Bio,” 279. 8. White and Whitlock, “Life: Writing and Rights,” 3. 9. Ibid., 2. 10. Van den Hengel, “Zoegraphy,” 5–6. 11. Poletti, Stories of the Self, 21. While Poletti focuses primarily on autobiographical texts and their mediation, her call to “pay attention to how autobiographers are engaged in and respond to the wide variety of material lows and interactions that constitute life,” 21, holds true for life writing in a more general sense as well. 12. Watson, “Visual Diary,” 5, 7. 13. Van den Hengel, “Zoegraphy,” 15. 14. Huff, “After Auto, After Bio,” 279. 15. Ibid., 281. 16. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 235. 17. Ibid. 18. Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits,” 29. 19. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Anthropocene.” The term was first adopted by the OED in 2014. 20. Nash, Inescapable Ecologies, 8. 21. Gatens, Imaginary Bodies, quoted in Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 13. 22. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2. 23. Ibid., 19. 24. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 396. 25. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii. 26. See also Whitlock’s assertion in “Post-ing Lives” that “the human subject remains vital for ethical and political reasons,” vi. 27. James, “(Life) Narrative,” in this volume, 227. 28. These deliberations obviously include the question how this “we” is constituted. In its most immediate sense, in this introduction, it refers to us as the editors as white, female scholars of life writing, posthumanism, and ecocriticism employed at European/German universities. In a wider sense, it applies to scholars “like us”—meaning scholars who share a similar situ-

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atedness and who therefore have to be aware that their inquiries are undertaken from a position of whiteness in a Western (post-)industrial nation, and that they have been socialized in the afterlives of Humanism. 29. Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la Terre (1961) and Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) are two of the most famous instances of such explications. Shelley Wright’s International Human Rights, Decolonisation and Globalisation (2001), Sylvia Wynter’s “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom” (2003), and Kalpana Rahita Seshadri’s HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language (2012) are more recent iterations. 30. Nixon, “The Great Acceleration.” 31. Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes, 2. 32. Ibid., xiii. 33. In light of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, various news-outlets as well as scholarly articles have pointed to the close connections between mass farming, meat consumption, and “the emergence and amplification of infectious diseases” (Espinosa, Tago, and Treich, “Infectious Diseases,” 1019). Likewise, scientists have linked the increasing occurrence and dimension of wildfires in the last years in various parts of the world to anthropogenic climate change and human land-management alike. Extensive wildfires in turn expose people not only to immediate but also to long-term consequences such as respiratory diseases, or poor water quality, as well as fueling further climate change through carbon emissions. See https://climate.nasa.gov/ news/2912/satellite-­data-­record-­shows-­climate-­changes-­impact-­on-­fires/. 34. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 218. 35. Ibid., 216. 36. Nixon, Slow Violence. 37. Nixon, “Great Acceleration.” 38. Ibid. 39. Braidotti, “Posthuman Humanities,” 2. 40. Braidotti, “Posthuman Critical Theory,” 12. 41. Braidotti, “Posthuman Humanities,” 2. 42. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 285. 43. Ibid., 286. 44. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 206. 45. Heise, Sense of Place, 55–56. 46. Kennedy, “Humanity’s Footprint,” 171. 47. Herman, Narratology, 25. 48. See Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 34. 49. Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power, quoted in Caupert, “The Big Picture,” in this volume, 56 (emphasis added). 50. Brant, “The Sentience of Sea Squirts,” in this volume, 127. 51. James, “(Life) Narrative,” in this volume, 234.

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Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Allister, Mark Christopher. Refiguring the Map of Sorrow: Nature Writing and Autobiography. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. Banerji, Debashish, and Makarand R.  Paranjape. “The Critical Turn in Posthumanism and Postcolonial Interventions.” In Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, edited by Debashish Banerji and Makarand R.  Paranjape, 1–10. New Delhi: Springer India, 2016. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Braidotti, Rosi. “Posthuman Critical Theory.” Journal of Posthuman Studies 1, no. 1 (2017): 9–25. ———. “Posthuman Humanities.” European Educational Research Journal 12, no. 1 (2013): 1–19. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222. doi:https://doi.org/10.1086/596640. Crutzen, Paul. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415 (2002): 23. doi:https://doi. org/10.1038/415023a. ———, and Eugene Stroemer. “The ‘Anthropocene.’” Global Exchange Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18. Eakin, Paul John. “Toward a Theory of Relational Autobiography.” Keynote address, 1994 National Conference on Autobiography, Hofstra, NY. Expanded and revised in How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Espinosa, Romain, Damian Tago, and Nicolas Treich. “Infectious Diseases and Meat Consumption.” Environmental and Resource Economics 76, no. 4 (2020): 1019–1044. Fanon, Frantz. Les Damnés de la Terre. Paris: F. Maspero, 1961. Gatens, Moira. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London: Routledge, 1995. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Gusdorf, Georges. “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.” In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by James Olney, 28–48. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

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Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Hengel, Louis van den. “‘Zoegraphy’: Per/Forming Posthuman Lives.” In “(Post) Human Lives,” edited by Gillian Whitlock and G.  Thomas Couser. Special issue, Biography 35, no. 1 (2012): 1–20. Herman, David. Narratology beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Huff, Cynthia. “After Auto, After Bio: Posthumanism and Life Writing.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32, no. 2 (2017): 279–282. ———. “From Autobiographical Pact to Zoetrophic Pact.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 34, no. 3 (2019): 445–460. Kennedy, Rosanne. “Humanity’s Footprint: Reading ‘Rings of Saturn’ and ‘Palestinian Walks’ in an Anthropocene Era.” In “(Post)Human Lives,” edited by Gillian Whitlock and G. Thomas Couser. Special issue, Biography 35, no. 1 (2012): 170–189. Lewis, Simon L., and Mark A. Maslin. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. London: Penguin, 2018. Mason, Mary G. “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers.” In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by James Olney, 207–235. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Nash, Linda. Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Nixon, Rob. “The Great Acceleration and the Great Divergence: Vulnerability in the Anthropocene.” Profession 14 (2014). Accessed March 31, 2021. https:// profession.mla.org/the-­g reat-­a cceleration-­a nd-­t he-­g reat-­d ivergence­vulnerability-­in-­the-­anthropocene/. ———. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Anthropocene.” Accessed March 20, 2021. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/398463?redirectedFrom=a nthropocene. Poletti, Anna. Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Book. New York: New York University Press, 2020. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Seshardi, Kalpana Rahita. HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

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Watson, Julia. “Toward an Anti-Metaphysics of Autobiography.” In Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, edited by Robert Folkenflick, 57–79. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993. ———. “Visual Diary as Prosthetic Practice in Bobby Baker’s ‘Diary Drawings.’” In “(Post)Human Lives,” edited by Gillian Whitlock and G. Thomas Couser. Special issue, Biography 35, no. 1 (2012): 21–44. White, Jessica, and Gillian Whitlock. “Life: Writing and Rights in the Anthropocene.” In “Life Writing in the Anthropocene,” edited by Jessica White and Gillian Whitlock. Special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35, no. 1 (2020): 1–20. Whitlock, Gillian. “Post-ing Lives.” In “(Post)Human Lives,” edited by Gillian Whitlock and G. Thomas Couser. Special issue, Biography 35, no. 1 (2012): v–xvi. Wright, Shelley. International Human Rights, Decolonisation and Globalisation. London: Routledge, 2001. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument.“ CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. doi:https://doi. org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

PART I

Responsible Relationality

Relationality, Autobiographical Voice, and the Posthumanist Paradox: Decentering the Human in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Life Writing Katja Sarkowsky

Posthuman Life Writing and the Problem of the Auto/Biographical Voice The posthumanist turn in the humanities poses a challenge for life writing, its underlying paradigms, and its study—and vice versa: Life writing, autobiographical writing in particular, appears to be inherently characterized by the certainty and control of a human voice, the assumption of a coherent autopoietic, even autonomous narrating subject, while posthumanist assumptions question the self-evidence and centrality of this voice and its referent, as well as the distinctiveness and separation of human beings from other life forms. “Lauding human life,” comments posthumanist

K. Sarkowsky (*) American Studies, University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Batzke et al. (eds.), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77973-3_2

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scholar Cynthia Huff, “has been central to biography and autobiography since their inception, but posthumanism destabilizes human centrality in favor of considering matter, the non-human, and the surround in which beings interact.”1 And Stephen Abblitt asks if and how autobiography is possible “when the autos is decentered, the bios is opened to a more multispecies interpretation of life, and even graphe can no longer be assumed.”2 Applying a posthumanist lens to life writing thus raises important questions, such as what counts as narratable ‘life,’ who can ‘tell’ this life, and what form this telling takes. In this context, the distinction between bios and zoe made by Giorgio Agamben in reference to Hannah Arendt’s and Michel Foucault’s reading of Aristotle has come to play a central role, with a focus on zoe and matter in posthumanist thought. This shift to zoe implies a multispecies understanding of life and its myriad forms not adequately captured by an established notion of human life and its distinctiveness as an important framework.3 In the discussion of such challenges to notions of life writing, much hinges on many of posthumanist scholars’ choosing the set of assumptions that underwrite the model of traditional autobiography attributed to Georges Gusdorf as their starting point: the by and large autonomous subject in control of his (and increasingly also her) life and life narrative; life narrative as coherent, temporally linear, and inevitably anthropocentric, even if it sets out to write non-human experiences. This model clearly deserves refuting from a posthumanist perspective; but it is also a model that has already been refuted in the study of life writing at the latest since the 1990s in favor of relational models of life narration and a broadening of the scope of what is meant by writing (Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson, Paul John Eakin, or G. Thomas Couser are just some of the most prominent names in this context).4 If initially women’s life writing or life writing by minoritized subjects as relational forms of self-narration, as body- and community-based, served as poignant examples of refusing models of a male, Western, white, and heteronormative subjectivity and selfhood, the consensus in the field has become that life writing is by necessity relational—even when it seeks to re-enforce notions of autonomy and autopoiesis. The autos, bios, and graphein of “autobiography” have each been effectively opened for the reconfiguration and recalibration of life writing and life narration. The question regarding the possibilities of a “post-humanist, post-­ anthropocentric autobiography,”5 of “sympoiesis”—the ‘becoming-­ with’—instead of “autopoiesis”6 is nevertheless an urgent one, and I

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suggest that it hinges not (anymore) on questions of selfhood and autonomy but on three related aspects of relationality: voice, narrative form, and what counts as narratable life. The question of a narratable life and the aspect of narrative form are closely connected, and one important posthumanist consequence of the problems outlined above has been to broaden the understanding of life writing and life narrative to encompass forms of life expression that currently tend not to be recognized as relevant to the field of life writing, even after its own expansion of the term’s meaning. Louis van den Hengel’s concept of “zoegraphy”7 is an intriguing example of such an attempt. It highlights not only the porous boundaries between the human and other species, between ‘life’ and ‘life forms,’ which Donna Haraway has foregrounded in her influential work since the “Cyborg Manifesto,” the shifting contours of life writing, transmedial performances of ‘life telling’ in, for example, film or social media, and everyday practices of “living autobiographically” (as Paul John Eakin programmatically titled his 2008 volume on the broadening of the conception of life writing);8 it also poses the question how other forms of life expression can be understood in terms of life writing or life narration—that of writing/narrating zoe instead of or in addition to writing/narrating bios. However, even Van den Hengel’s examples, interactive—sympoietic— as they are, are dependent on their readability in human-centered contexts for making them recognizable as life narration. Central to them are matter and its experience, but it is a (human) voice that translates becoming-­ matter into narrative, and experience is understood—for instance by Joan Scott—not as a process of immediacy but as discursively produced.9 I thus want to suggest it is the interpretation—the readability and translation— of such alternative forms of writing as both bios and zoe that poses a central conceptual problem to the posthumanist study of life narration, a posthumanist paradox; it is a question of who speaks and of voice. Giving voice to life and life experiences appears inevitably bound to the human voice, even if narratives seek to capture more-than-human lives and worlds (as, e.g., in animalography). As Huff argues, “neither non-human animals nor machines possess a human voice or experience their worlds via the technology of natural human language,”10 assuming an other-than-human voice thus tends to reinforce the epistemological and ontological centrality of the human in life writing, even in texts or other narrations that seek to do otherwise. This is no less the case if, as in Van den Hengel’s examples, a performance seeks to escape the confines of ‘text’ altogether. A central tenet of both posthumanism and material ecocriticism and the impact

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both clearly have on the study of life writing is their shared emphasis on the corporeality of being and the expressiveness of matter—an emphasis that problematizes the role, perspective, and possibilities of interpretation as well as that of the interpreter. In her discussion of matter and the production of meaning, Serenella Iovino crucially asks: “How do we see the stories of nature as they co-emerge with the interpreter’s gaze, forming a ‘reciprocity’ through which reality is ‘actively’ constituted?”11 At least in a field of study that seeks to understand what counts as ‘life’ (both bios and zoe or yet other concepts of vitality/energy/dynamic) and how and to what effect lives in their entanglement and mutual dependency and relationality can be narrated and by whom, the question of who makes heard what is expressed in, as, and through ‘life’ remains a central point—and perhaps the central conceptual dilemma. So whereas further broadening the conceptualizations of life, life writing, and life narration is certainly an important consequence of posthumanist and ecocritical claims to decenter the human in our understanding and experience of the world, I suggest that there is another consequence: recognizing life writing and narration, autobiographical life writing in particular, as a specific mode of cultural expression that remains bound to a human voice and human perspective from which, to put it bluntly, escape is impossible. Christopher Peterson has pinpointed the paradox of the posthumanist insistence on the human as a fiction when he asks us to appreciate that “the human  – however misrecognized and misnamed  – remains the zero point of our relation to alterity. The phantasm of human exceptionalism cannot be so easily vanquished because its error is also its ‘truth.’ The human that declares the fallacy of its own exceptionality can do so only from the position of its phantasmatic centeredness.”12 In the practice and study of life narrative and life writing, this paradox finds its manifestation in perspective and positionality, but most obviously in the bio-graphical/zoe-graphical voice, either the voice of the narration or (and/or) the voice of its interpretation. Such recognition does not eliminate the fundamental question of what discursively and politically constitutes ‘humanness’ in relation to ‘non-­ humanness’ and the implications and problems of such a distinction. Neither does it automatically associate the human voice in life writing and its situational exploration or even assertion of agency (a crucial point for minoritized groups and individuals) with the narrowness and the inevitable desire for mastery often assumed by critical posthumanists.13 As Gillian Whitlock rightfully reminds us, the legacy of Enlightenment gave rise not

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only to “the masterful ‘I’ of autobiography but also to the collective ‘I’ of testimony.”14 Rather, such recognition allows for critically reflecting on the possibilities of the kind of radical decentering of the human that Huff calls for,15 and it serves as a reminder of a very fundamental response-­ ability of voice. “Sympoiesis,” writes Donna Haraway, “does not wait for single actors or authors,”16 but neither does it entirely dispense with them, however fictional the ‘individual’ or the ‘human’ might be. The porosity of species boundaries, the multilayeredness of relationality and of entanglements, complicates questions of accountability and answerability, but it does not eliminate them. Voice, as a physical process of sound production and as a metaphor of agency, is crucial to such accountability. Voice does not have to be human, but it remains a central element of the effective fiction of the human as a node of interpreting the world. Even if human language, in Huff’s envisioning of non-anthropocentric life writing, “would be replaced by diverse communications and interactions,”17 there remains a process of reading and translation that may not be exclusive or privileged among the myriad types of narratives and stories of life and “worlding,”18 but that nevertheless remains indispensable as long as there exists the living and effective fiction of the human. Despite the obvious conventionality of much of contemporary life writing and narratives in (and maybe after) what has been called the “age of memoir,”19 the kind of decentering and de-privileging of the human that critical posthumanist scholars in the field call for already exists—and not only in the more experimental or co-creative forms of life writing as discussed by Van den Hengel or Haraway. Such writing, I want to propose, although seemingly static in its focus, for example, on textual expression, often allows drawing out the complexities of a narrative voice that reflects the relationality and co-emergence of life while simultaneously displaying a keen awareness of positionality; a voice that negotiates and calibrates its own decentering in an ongoing dynamic of interaction with its situatedness and the ‘being-with’ that produces it. In the following, I am interested in the question of what kind of “cultural work”20 such life narratives do or seek to do and how they can contribute to decentering the human by way of voice; ‘cultural’ I do not understand in juxtaposition to ‘nature,’ but I regard both as part of a sociability of being that exceeds but does not bypass the human and is mediated by a voice of self- and world-­ interpretation. Storytelling, understood not as simply ‘relaying’ but in the comprehensive sense of shared world-making (“sym-narration,” as Donna

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Haraway calls it in her recent work21) is an integral part of life narrative, and it exceeds the immediacy of the material. The example on which I want to focus is the body of life writing produced by Laguna author Leslie Marmon Silko, an oeuvre that not only encompasses a memoir, but also letters, essays, and two “photo-­narratives,” as critic Hertha Wong has called them.22 Looking at the texts both individually and, more importantly, in relation to one another, I suggest that Silko has developed an autobiographical narrative voice that cannot be easily aligned with Philippe Lejeune’s notion of the autobiographical pact—the identity of author, narrator, and protagonist in life writing— that posthumanist critics like Huff want to see abandoned.23 Distinct and recognizable, this voice is nevertheless a pluralistic and relational voice to the constitution of which its interaction with other—both human and non-human—voices is paramount. This interaction is manifest both in terms of the narratives’ content and their form, in the ways in which they evoke a sense of being-with and becoming-with through story and its reiteration of place and materiality, and the ways in which they interlink with each other, with Silko’s fiction, and with the writing and storytelling of others. Silko’s autobiographical writing presents a prominent example of a kind of Indigenous life writing that highlights the emplacement of the individual and her community on the land as well as the storiedness of relation. In the context of this contribution, I would like to foreground both the challenges and the opportunities Silko’s autobiographical work presents to the study of life writing as a social practice in the Anthropocene and the ambivalent role of voice in decentering the human. Silko’s interrelated life narrations both manifest and produce a web of relations that seem to support posthumanist notions of decentering and de-privileging the human in favor of “sym-narration”24 and “equal consideration of zoe”;25 in Silko’s work, I suggest, zoe is materiality, life, turned into ‘storied materiality,’ bios, via the narrative process. At the same time, Silko’s autobiographical work affirms the inevitability of positionality, voice, and a reciprocal obligation that hinges on the situational provisionality of the human as a narrator of her entangled life.

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Turning Zoe into Bios: Storytelling and the Interplay of Genres in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Autobiographical Work Leslie Marmon Silko’s life writing work spans a time period of some thirty years and includes the early collection Storyteller (1981), Silko’s letter exchange with poet James Wright (published in 1986 as The Delicacy and Strength of Lace after Wright’s death), the photo essay Sacred Water (1993), her essay collection Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1996), and her memoir The Turquoise Ledge (2010). Each of these texts tests the boundaries of genre, albeit to different degrees, with Storyteller and Sacred Water being arguably the formally most experimental of the texts discussed here and the letter correspondence between Silko and Wright and Turquoise Ledge the most conventional in terms of genre expectations. The essays collected in Yellow Woman fall somewhere between these poles. The radicality of Silko’s approach to and enactment of an autobiographical voice that does not take autos, bios, or graphein for granted as pointing to a putative autonomous subject ‘writing’ her ‘own’ ‘life’ fully emerges when these texts are read as autobiographical manifestations that intertwine with and point toward one another and focus on interconnectivity and embeddedness not only in the ‘what’ of the autobiographical narration but also in its ‘how.’ Relationality, it might be said, is established on both the level of the individual text’s content—the kinds of stories of relation it tells, the perspective chosen to narrate or show them, the specific form of the text, its production—and its interplay with the other texts, for example, by citing and cross-referencing them. The pronounced interrelation between these texts serves, I suggest, to illustrate a processual and intertextual understanding of what life writing can mean beyond individualist narration. While such interrelation comes as no surprise in a body of autobiographical work produced over three decades, I do not regard the specific choice of reiterated instances as self-­ evident or banal; stories of the narrating subject, her relations, the land, or of ancestors are told and retold—at times slightly differently—in different life writing contexts, suggesting an ongoing process of narration that is not repetitive but that shifts perspective and voice ever so slightly depending on the specific focus of the text, its form, and its addressee.26 The interplay of different genres and the creation of an autobiographical narrative voice across works and genres is not Silko’s prerogative, of course. Writers as different as Mary Oliver, Richard Wagamese, Audre

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Lorde, Fred Wah, or André Aciman have also integrated this kind of multifaceted voice into their broader work, each to different effects. And one might legitimately ask whether this does not simply constitute an expectable intertextual web of references in the work of prolific writers who are active in more than one creative genre. Although this is certainly the case, I argue that when looking at the connection between autobiographical voice and relationality, such references help understand autobiographical voice as not limited to established autobiographical genres and as potentially plural. This plurality is crucial for asserting that the voice does not refer to an autonomous subject and thus does not inevitably center such a human agent, but to a speaking subject that is contextually differently centered, and at times even decentered. Such a shift in perspective toward and emphasis on plurality takes seriously the claim that Lejeune’s autobiographical pact does not hold, but neither is it entirely abolished. There is a persona speaking that cannot be conflated with the author, but that nevertheless—rather than drawing on author-ity—asserts “narrative agency.”27 In this context, as Tyra Twomey has emphasized, it is of little importance how a literary work is classified in terms of genre; in light of the long-standing debate about Indigenous autobiography, she suggests that “rather than focusing on the nature of the literary work, to truly understand these texts we must focus on the nature of the work accomplished by the act of creating the literature.”28 Approaching genre as “the textual result of purposeful rhetorical action rather than as a tool for literary definition,” she continues, helps understand Indigenous autobiographical storytelling as a “rhetorical response,”29 a “situated response,” as she calls it elsewhere in the text.30 I would add that such a perspective allows focusing on the function of the autobiographical mode in Indigenous writing in its combination of a human perspective with the decentering move of engaging with the world that does not rely on or form an imagined anthropocentric core, but a web of relations. Deanne Reder, pace Robert Warrior, has called autobiographical storytelling a crucial part of an “intellectual Indigenous tradition” of engaging with the world,31 and while the above outlined decentering and creation of embeddedness is not at play in all Indigenous life writing—Indigenous autobiographers not only draw on numerous autobiographical conventions, but also choose to tell ‘their’ stories in so many different ways that defining such relationality as characteristic of Indigenous life writing runs the danger of essentialization—it is often the result of such broadly conceived

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storytelling as a potential counter-model to settler colonial conventions and expectations. In this context, Silko’s autobiographical texts, I suggest, can therefore serve as a particularly apt example of a type of life writing that—in its genre-mixing, its strategies of emplacement, its emphasis on the embeddedness of the individual in a synchronic and diachronic community, and its centralization of story—seeks to decenter human subjectivity in favor of a broad conception of life, place, environment, connection, and time.32 A recurring constellation in Silko’s autobiographical work is the connection between place, story, and the kinship relation between different species. Unlike proposed by some of the approaches in posthumanist and ecocritical life writing that indicate the necessity to move away from bios in order to fully acknowledge the centrality of zoe in understanding the range of contemporary life stories and as a consequence of moving away from anthropocentrism, Silko’s texts require an approach that looks at the way in which zoe becomes bios—and in which bios is not exclusively human. Referring to human subjectivity, Adriana Cavarero has argued that “both the written and the oral put into words above all the uniqueness of an identity which, only in relation, is bios instead of zoe.”33 Cavarero highlights the centrality of relation for bios; the posthumanist emphasis on zoe as “the dynamic, self-organizing structure of life itself”34 suggests that relationality is equally crucial for zoe and, what is more, fundamentally questions the opposition between bios and zoe. Rosi Braidotti has charged scholars in the humanities for upholding the distinction between bios as human and zoe as non-human, maintaining instead that this “opposition is too rigid and no longer tenable.”35 In her own reevaluation of the power of zoe and her conception of the posthuman subject, Braidotti then goes on to claim that “where bios is anthropocentric, zoe is non-­ anthropocentric.”36 By so doing, she replaces the humanist emphasis on bios with a posthumanist emphasis on zoe as the more encompassing term for life, relegating bios to a humanist past that needs to be overcome in favor of a new kind of posthuman, encompassing relationality and kinship. I maintain that this means throwing the baby out with the bathwater; contra Braidotti, I consider the distinction between zoe and bios—if understood not as an opposition that attributes bios only to humans—extremely productive, particularly for the study of life writing and life narration. I want to argue that life-story-telling as done by Silko turns zoe into bios. This is not meant to imply that zoe does not count; rather, it suggests that zoe and bios are not categorically distinct and that story brings forth bios

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from zoe, again and again.37 Understood in the context of such a continuum, bios is not ‘anthropocentric’—understood as storied life and storied materiality, it provides a dynamic, narrative ordering of zoe. In this understanding, it is, however, a practice of readable world-making bound to the translation of an embedded human voice. This voice is decentered, but it is distinct; it is provisional and constantly in the making; it may not be a single voice but collective voicing; it may or may not be aware of its status as but one kind of giving form to life’s constitutive relationality. I regard Silko’s life writing as an important exploration of the possibilities of such a relational and embedded voice. Before focusing in more detail on the relation of story, voice, and materiality in Silko’s autobiographical works and on this shift from zoe to bios by way of story and relation, I will briefly look at each of Silko’s life writing texts individually and at their interconnection in order to illustrate the kind of relational and decentering autobiographical voice Silko has developed in the course of the past decades and the way it reflects (upon) the porosity of boundaries between human and non-human life forms. It does so not only without giving up on the human voice, but by even emphasizing its function as a necessary translation of the urgency of relationality.

Memory, Imagination, and Storytelling: Writing Life in Relation Storyteller (1981), the earliest of Silko’s life writing projects is, in many ways, also the most radical. Storyteller has been widely read as an autobiographical text, but it defies any conventional definition of an autobiography or even its broader generic cousin, life writing. The book is a compilation of autobiographical and family narrations, poems, short stories, and photographs. Some of the poems had already appeared in Silko’s novel Ceremony four years prior; others present autobiographical narrative in verse. Stories about family include those about individuals as well as relaying stories told by these individuals, thus creating layers of storytelling and retelling that not only place the autobiographical narrator in a familial and communal context of relations, but also present her as belonging to a line of storytellers. The book’s dedication can be read as a programmatic self-positioning in this regard: “This book is dedicated to the storytellers/as far back as memory goes and to the telling/ which continues and through which they all live/and we with them.”38 There is no

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autobiographical ‘I’ here; the communal ‘we’ encompasses the ‘I’ that does the telling and retelling presented in this book. If the dedication appears vague about what type of book this is, not indicating its autobiographical characters, the first section—in verse—introduces not so much an autobiographical occasion for this book but the beginning of a telling ritual: “There is a tall Hopi basket . . . Inside the basket are hundreds / of photographs taken since the 1890s around Laguna. / . . . It wasn’t until I began this book / that I realized that the photographs in the Hopi basket / have a special relationship to the stories as I remember them.”39 From the beginning, telling—word-image—is connected to visual imagery. As Cynthia Carsten has observed, Silko “experiments with multiple genres – fiction poetry, historical narrative and memoir – within a single work,” not only reconfiguring “the structural boundaries of Euro-American literary genres,” but also “subvert[ing] the Euro-American aesthetic expectations of temporal continuity and chronology of plot.”40 Carsten reads this experimentation thus in terms of aesthetic subversion, even though I would contend that the aesthetic expectations and the structural boundaries that she sees subverted are not as strict and fixed as her argument suggests. That said, Carsten’s observation is important when understanding the different sections of the text—each in its own right, but particularly in conjunction—as attempts to write (rewrite, write anew, and write with) both bios and zoe. So, I agree with the many scholars who have shown that and how the volume Storyteller constitutes an innovative approach to autobiographical storytelling in its mixture of genres, its placement of the individual in a communal context and a particular landscape, and its harking back to the polyphony of oral storytelling (Krupat; Carsten; Wong). As Paul John Eakin has argued, Silko’s transmission of other people’s stories, stories that are in turn versions of a shared body of myths and legends, is properly understood as an act of self-definition. In Storyteller, there is a radical equivalence between self and other at the level of narrative: Silko’s own story and the stories of others are one and the same. Storyteller: this is what she does and who she is.41

Eakin makes a crucial point about equivalency. Yet, I suggest that when viewed in the context of and connection with Silko’s other autobiographically voiced texts, an even more complex voice emerges across time. Retelling and the changes to a story are central to it. As the autobiographical narrator explains at one point late in Storyteller: “I know Aunt Susuie

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[sic] and Aunt Alice would tell me stories they had told me before but with changes in details or descriptions. The story was the important thing and little changes here and there were really part of the story. There were even stories about the different versions of the stories and how they imagined these differing versions came to be.”42 This applies to the autobiographical story, too; the story in its multiple versions, neither of them ‘inauthentic,’ is part of an autobiographical process of creating such as voice that is both itself and not itself. One of the passages in Storyteller that connects it to other life writing texts is an excerpt from a letter that Silko wrote to the late poet James Wright, relaying the story of a feisty rooster on her farm.43 The Delicacy and Strength of Lace (1986), edited by Anne Wright, collects the correspondence between Silko and Wright, from a formal note of praise that he sent to the young writer to congratulate her on her first novel Ceremony in 1978 to his death in January 1980. Letters—and the digital epistolary successors—are probably the most obviously relational types of life writing; at the same time and in this context of this contribution, they may also appear as the ultimate documentation of an exchange between human persons. Usually associated with privacy, they historically have nevertheless often been considered as part of a public or at least semi-public deliberation on the issues covered, and they range from the formal to the extremely personal. Letters, as scholars have pointed out, have many functions, including explicitly political ones such as mobilization or protest; the correspondence between Silko and Wright belongs to a common but very specific subgenre of epistolary exchange, namely, the correspondence between two writers, initially meant as a personal communication, and then later edited and published. The letters collected in Delicacy document a short but intense friendship that begins formally and quickly moves to a very personal exchange of the two correspondents; the formality, as Anne Wright notes in her brief introduction to the letters, began to cease with Silko relaying the story of the rooster (the very episode that she included in Storyteller). What is less common about this particular correspondence is that the friendship implicitly and explicitly expressed in these letters, notes, poems, and stories was created in and through this exchange; Silko and Wright met only twice in their lives, once at a conference long before they began writing to one another and then at Wright’s deathbed. As Clare Brant has argued, “in letters, subjectivity is actively relational yet transposable into community”;44 here, the letters clearly are not simply an expression of the personal but a construction of subjectivity through the

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exchange and its reciprocity. In the context of the argument made in this contribution, the letters present literally a form of dialogic life writing. While the individual voices remain distinct, the very process of their exchange shows Silko’s autobiographical voice interacts with another’s; dialogue is not reported or transformed into a story, it is performed with the potential open-endedness of possible direction.45 Of the works discussed here, it is the most obviously anthropocentric in the sense that— given its form and address—its relationality seems restricted to humans. Read in conjunction with the other texts, however, and regarding the subject matter of many of the letters, the autobiographical voice in its constant reaffirmation of relation to the addressee but also to the places and more-than-human encounters she relates, even in this more traditional example emerges as embedded in a relationality that exceeds the human and, indeed, living beings. This embeddedness is more pronounced in Sacred Water (1993), as is the decentering of the human subject. This embedding and decentering is the result of both the book’s multimediality and the importance of its materiality. Sacred Water was produced by Silko herself in a limited edition and published after she completed her dystopic novel Almanac of the Dead (1991). This slim book combines, as its subtitle indicates, “pictures and narratives,” photos of water, plants, rocks, animals, and landscape around Silko’s stretch of land near Tucson with short, narrative episodes of memories, mythical stories, and observations of minute details of her surroundings. Water is clearly a leitmotif, but as such it associatively links seemingly disparate elements and episodes. As Laura Coltelli has argued, “the story of this water becomes a collective story, forming the bond with the innumerable narrations that speak of Indian land, narrations that are always encompassed within a cyclical time deriving its continuity and cohesion from interpretation of the landscape.”46 Yet, like Storyteller, Sacred Water connects these different stories by way of an autobiographical narrative voice, and it does so with a more obviously distinct voice than the earlier text. The interplay between the photographs and the narratives—a point I will further discuss—is, like in Storyteller, not illustrative, but the connection is more immediate: While in Storyteller, for example, images of a particular place and the story connecting to that place tend to be separated, in Sacred Water they tend to correspond directly in their arrangement. The structure of the text is striking in its decentered framing of humans— including the autobiographical voice—in the landscape. Sacred Water begins with an almost imagist rendering of a seemingly timeless (and

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human-less) scene: “Spring rain clouds follow early/morning gusts of wind, and sudden drops/of temperature./ By dawn, the smell of rain is heavy/in the air. The sun is masked in cumulus/ layers of pearl blue.”47 There is a voice that narrates the clouds and the dawn, but no autobiographical ‘I.’ If at the beginning of the text the human voice seems to merge with the described scene and the photo’s imagery of it, the human voice is a collective one, simultaneously decentered in the very possibility of its finiteness: “Whatever may become of us human beings, the earth will bloom with hyacinth purple and the white blossoms of the datura.”48 The final ‘word’ of the book is a photo of a desert plant (presumably a jumping cholla cactus). The stories of water and its centrality for life in the desert narrated in the book—life, both bios and zoe, in general—make, by visual-­ narrative performance rather than its mere contents, the autobiographical speaking subject a decentered human voice that oscillates between positions of an observer, a part of the landscape, a voice remembering, and an admonisher—overall, a boundary-porous self-in-relation. This kind of porosity finds a manifestation in some of the essays collected in Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit (1996) as well. Taken as a collection, these essays more generally work by way of what might be called an ‘autobiographical mode’ to varying extents, using the autobiographical voice and perspective to lend additional credibility to the related experience and considerations. The collection compiles widely anthologized essays such as “Interior and Exterior Landscapes” or “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective” as well as lesser-known or more explicitly autobiographical essays like “The Border Patrol State,” “Old and New Autobiographical Notes,” or “An Essay on Rocks,” the latter—like Storyteller and Sacred Water—including photographs. The essays thus for the most part are not personal essays, the essay subgenre most directly associated with the autobiographical. Yet, when taken together, they present a range of what might be called autobiographically grounded engagements with the topics at hand, highlighting the oscillating focus between the personal and the communal, the locally and culturally specific and the universalizing. The essay, as critics have pointed out, is a “notoriously flexible and adaptable form. It acts as if all objects were equally near the center and as if all subjects are linked to each other.”49 The essay, as “thinking in process,”50 offers a “persuasive mode in which a degree of subjectivity is assumed but usually as a function of the author’s corresponding expertise and authority.”51 Silko’s essays fit with this tradition of the essay’s complex relation to and use of the autobiographical

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voice, but their voice (or voices) also relate to Silko’s other life writing texts. Neither in autobiography nor in essays are the narrator’s and the author’s voice simply to be conflated, even though this is what the autobiographical pact appears to offer, but each draws their authority from this conflation. The voice/s in Silko’s essays confidently make the autobiographical a grounding of argument and observation, a crucial element in knowledge production that is both personal and collective, that decenters its speaking subject in the process of observation without eliminating it and without implying the possibility of an objective position. On the contrary, these voices, in their use of the autobiographical but in their claim of a narrative agency that goes beyond it, insist on the situatedness of all knowledge production—and in its material positionality. At some point in Storyteller, the narrator muses over how “sometimes what we call ‘memory’ and what we call ‘imagination’ are not so easily distinguished.”52 This lack of a clear-cut boundary between the two and the ensuing ‘imaginary’ quality of life writing (rather than its focus on ‘fact’) has been an important insight of both scholars of life writing and autobiographers themselves. Silko—within her individual autobiographical works and when taking these works as an interrelated, interconnected body of self life-writing in relation that decenters its very narrator in favor of relationality and embeddedness—makes this insight central to her locating life narrative in the larger framework of ‘storytelling.’ For her and in the contexts that she invokes, storytelling is a crucial cultural practice of world-making and world-relation that embeds the teller in a web of story relations and kinship across time and in place. Much has been written on Silko’s connection of storytelling and place; in the context of this essay, I will focus only on a specific aspect that I regard as particularly important for the question at hand: the creation of an autobiographical voice within and across work that seeks to decenter the human while recalibrating the human voice as a narrative vehicle. In this regard, Silko’s memoir Turquoise Ledge (2010) showcases most directly the productive tension between memoir conventions and human decentering. Once more a distinctly place-centered text, it is told from an autobiographical present on the narrator’s farm outside Tucson and harks back to the places of her youth, the landscape of Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico. Going beyond ecobiography as “autobiographical narrative centered on place”53 and a presentation of a narrative ‘I’ as both “ego- and ecocentric,”54 Silko’s memoir presents a prime example of an autobiographical account that places the subject in a web of relations—a range of

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different animals, but also rocks and plants as well as spirit beings provide a sense of embedded, non-privileged human selfhood. As Nathanael Otjen has rightly observed, “Silko depicts herself as just one inhabitant among many more-than-human beings and things that cocreate and belong within the Sonoran Desert.”55 Animals and the land in its minute features are central to the account given, and the depiction of cohabitation and co-­ creation is signaled already in the memoir’s structure, with each part focusing on a particular aspect of the shared environment across time: community, animals, rocks, and what Silko calls “star beings.” This is an obvious insistence on an understanding of narrative “worlding,” as Pheng Cheah calls it that encompasses not only the material but also the spiritual and thereby questions a “Eurocentric modern secular subject of humanity.”56 Part two of the memoir is a particularly illustrative example of how humans and their relations to animals are presented as co-creating species of a shared life-world. Entitled “Rattlesnakes,” it zooms in on the autobiographical narrator’s cohabitation with a number of rattlesnakes on her farm, paying tribute, by way of the detailed description of diverse interaction, to the individuality, even personhood of the rattlers. At the beginning of this section, Silko describes her first encounter with one of the resident snakes: A big black and white Western diamondback rattlesnake lived near the old corral; what interested me at once was its calm demeanor. No coiling or rattling when we met, the snake made me feel welcome here. He knew I was a friend of snakes. I was careful to watch for him around the hay barn where he got fat on packrats. If I found the big snake in the shade of the corral fence when I was making repairs, he patiently tolerated a gentle lift in the bowl of the shovel for a more out of the way place in the shade.… He kept me company for my first two summers in Tucson, but after the summer of 1980 when I was away in New Mexico most of the time, he left.57

Note the shift in pronoun from “it” to “he”—from this point onward gendered pronouns are used to refer to snakes. The intimate ways in which the narrator depicts the snakes and her relations to them presents them as “companion species,” if not even downright “companion animals” in Haraway’s sense of what she calls “biosociality” and kinship.58 But the memoir places the individual not only in a particular location and its webs of connection, thereby highlighting the materiality of

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emplacement, it also positions the memoirist in a web of temporal relations. Part one of The Turquoise Ledge, entitled “Ancestors,” recalls her family’s histories (Laguna, Mexican, Cherokee, Euro-American) intersecting at Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico as well as evokes the intertwinement of the land, human cultivation, and stories around Tucson, Arizona. The retrospective narrative of autobiographical memory, interwoven with accounts of the autobiographical narrator’s relation to her present environment, thus presents the individual story as part of a long narrative of tribal and familial emplacement, of connection to the land through stories—a central topic not only in Silko’s autobiographical writings—notably Storyteller and essays such as “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective”—but also in her fiction, particularly in her earliest novel Ceremony (1977) and the Gardens in the Dunes (1999). These temporal connections are not only genealogical in the sense that they place the present individual in a long family line of tribal kinship; this line of descent is literally part of the present as much as it is part of the past and thus fundamentally deconstructs the sense of linear time that tends to characterize autobiographical writing. In her reading of Silko’s memoir, Annette Angela Portillo argues that it best be seen as a form of testimonio in which the narrating ‘I’ is not individual but collective.59 I agree with the assessment that Silko in effect writes a text on behalf of the environment, but the polyvocality of her autobiographical writings emerges most prominently when reading the different texts in relation to one another. In The Turquoise Ledge, the human voice is speaking on behalf of an almost cosmological collective, but it remains distinct as the story of an individual; Silko herself says as much when she states that she did not intend “to write about others but instead to construct a self-portrait.”60 But this distinct voice is also part of an evocation of kinship connections that locate the human in, not above or outside webs of connection that exceed the human, that question the fixity of the boundaries between humans and other species, humans and the land, spiritual and material, past, present, and future. So, despite the seemingly conventional form of the memoir, the text nevertheless writes place probably more prominently than it writes human subjectivity. Where it does, this human subjectivity relates inextricably to matter, the more-than-human companion species, and to a notion of place that is both a part of and exceeds the environment.

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Narrating the ‘Corporeality of Being’ and the ‘Expressiveness of Matter’ The ‘environment,’ as ecocritics have rightly highlighted, is not just the natural environment; it is a much broader concept of surroundings and umwelt. In Silko’s life writing, the environment tends to be ‘nature’ rather than, for example, urban environs; it thus appears to fit with a more conventional understanding of nature writing. But this would be a misleading categorization. ‘Nature’ in Silko’s work is neither romantic nor sublime; nor is it exclusively material. It is a material and a storied space of relationality, a physical space of more-than-human cohabitation in which animals, rock formations, plants, and more are part of an ongoing narrative of specific places; these narratives include those of human endeavors as well as mythological stories. At the same time, it is a space inscribed by both historical and contemporary processes of destruction and pollution; they, too, are part of the storied materiality of the landscape that forms the space of Silko’s life narratives. Although generally located in the broader space of the Southwestern borderlands, Silko oscillates between two specific places in particular, Laguna Pueblo and Paguate in New Mexico; and her ranch outside Tucson, Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert. The ways in which she narrates the specificity of the place differs between these two environments: Laguna and Paguate are storied spaces inscribed by family and tribal stories as well as memories of childhood and family members; they are storied spaces across time. To some contrast, the place near Tucson is a place she explores, seeking for traces of stories, but focusing much more strongly on the relations forged not so much by storytelling across generations but rather by physical interaction and sharing space in the present. In this section, I will focus on how Silko addresses questions of place, materiality, and corporeality in her life writing and suggest that they are crucial to her understanding of the human self as part of a web of relations, but also that her approach to the environment differs from that of other examples of environmental life writing in its strong emphasis on the land not only as material but as storied. Materiality and corporeality in Silko’s life writing blur the boundary between the material and the non-material, and this blurring is constitutive of how relationality is established and reaffirmed in her writing. The emphasis on the ‘corporeality of being’ and the ‘expressiveness of matter’ is a central tenet of material ecocriticism and the impact it has on

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the study of life writing. The expressiveness of matter significantly problematizes the role, perspective, and possibilities of interpretation—and of the interpreter. Hence, in her discussion of matter, interpretation, and the production of meaning, Serenella Iovino crucially asks: “How do we see the stories of nature as they co-emerge with the interpreter’s gaze, forming a ‘reciprocity’ through which reality is ‘actively’ constituted?”61 In this context, she notes an important shift of perspective that is central to ecocritical approaches: matter (and thus ‘nature’) is not an object of detached scrutiny but agentic.62 Humans are agents, but not alone in their agency. This clearly resonates with the ways in which Silko and other Indigenous writers have described tribal cosmologies, the interconnectedness of life, and the embeddedness of humans as non-privileged beings in this web. In her essay “Interior and Exterior Landscapes,” Silko suggests that the term ‘landscape’ is misleading if it implies the viewer’s capacity to comprehend a portion of a territory in a single view, for it “assumes the viewer is somehow outside or separate from the territory she or he surveys. Viewers are as much a part of the landscape as the boulders they stand on.”63 Like other agents in the environment, humans cannot take on a positionality ‘outside’ of it; they are necessarily and always a part in a web not only of relations but also of mutually constitutive action. The study of life writing since the 1990s has foregrounded this relationality, while it took the individual autobiographical ‘I’ as a necessary center of such constitution at the same time; a strategic individualism, we might say. Experimental or collaborative forms of life writing have questioned the inevitability of this centeredness, and like the challenges proposed by posthumanist perspectives, they tended to struggle with the question of voice and perspective. As indicated in the beginning of the contribution, I regard this as an important and productive struggle to understand the possibilities and effects of voice and the relation it has to concepts of the human not as a center, but as a vehicle of narratively constituted, shared, more-than-­ human life-worlds, and its multifaceted materiality. This complex interplay of voice, expressiveness, and interpretation in Silko’s work, of the storied materiality as narrated by an autobiographical voice, comes to the fore maybe most prominently in her use of photography. She has written about photography in her more personal essays such as “An Indian with a Camera” and “On Photography,” and she has used it, as became clear in section “Memory, Imagination, and Storytelling: Writing Life in Relation,” in a number of her texts to visually complement the autobiographical narrative voice, most clearly in her short piece “An

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Essay on Rocks,” but also in Storyteller and Sacred Water. I take Silko’s use of photography in her life writing as a creative strategy that foregrounds differentiated forms of storytelling, highlights the materiality of both the depiction of the environment and the production of that depiction, and that complicates the relation between ‘the expressiveness of matter’ and its translation by way of a narrative voice that oscillates between the identifiably individual and the presumably collective. What is important for the context of this contribution is Silko’s insistence on the interplay of the photographer and the photographed, the constitution of meaning in a reciprocal process of image production. In “On Photography,” she relates the process of such production in a way that, on the one hand, insists on the photographer as an identifiable agent in this process and, on the other hand, as one who is acted upon: In the summer and fall of 1980, I felt strangely inclined to take roll after roll of black-and-white film with a cheap autofocus camera. Obsessively, I photographed the dry wash below my ranch house. Stone formations with Hohokam cisterns carved in them appeared as sacred cenotes, and flattop boulders looked as if they were sacrificial altars. Then, after the summer storms, I began to photograph certain natural configurations of stones and driftwood left by the floodwater. The photographic images of the stones and wood reminded me of glyphs. I could imagine there were messages left in these delicate arrangements left in the wake of the flash flood. As I began to look at the prints, I realized each roll of film formed a complete photo narrative, although that had not been my intention when I pressed the shutter release. Most of the narratives were constructed from the images of the “glyphs” I “saw” in the debris in the bottom of the arroyo.64

I cite this passage at length since it narrates a process of production set in motion, but not controlled by an acting agent. What could simply be read as the description of a creative process, in which the artist produces work that she had not planned, is, I suggest, a multilayered narrative of an interaction that has the photographer perform a double ‘reading’ of the landscape and the images of the landscape. The narrative of the place emerges through the narrative of the photographs and—in the essay itself—the narration of a discovery and translation process in which the autobiographical subject is both an agent who “imagines,” “sees,” “realizes,” and “is reminded of” and a participant who looks upon a process that is not under her full control (beginning with the very process of deciding to take the pictures). The imaginative act by which the autobiographical subject

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‘reads’ the natural constellations around her pays tribute to both the materiality of these surroundings and their immersion in a storytelling process. The interplay between the material surroundings and the autobiographical voice, of the co-agentic creation process of the human subject and her web of relations is, of course, particularly pronounced in Silko’s two “photo-text narratives”65, Storyteller and Sacred Water. Hertha Wong has offered a comprehensive and careful reading of both texts in her recent Picturing Identity. She reads both unequivocally as self-narrations that work by way of the interplay of text and image, and in both, the land is a, or perhaps even the central focus, but with regard to different landscapes: Laguna Pueblo in Storyteller and the Sonoran Desert around Tucson in Sacred Water. The latter, in its geographical focus thus more closely connected to Turquoise Ledge than to Storyteller, relates Silko’s “relationship with the long history of human, animal, plant, and geological life in the desert, a kind of photo-book eco-autobiography,”66 but that—unlike Storyteller—in its imagery does not depict humans at all: the images show plants, clouds, water, rocks, toads, and snakes; the human agent is relegated to the narrative voice and its reminiscences only. Silko herself has called the text her “experiment”67 with text and image, with the image decidedly being non-illustrative; they “don’t serve the text,” she says, but “form part of the field of vision for the reading of the text and thereby become part of the reader’s experience of the text.”68 There are, as in Storyteller, mythological stories and connections in the book and there is, as argued above, an autobiographical narrator in Sacred Water whose voice often remembers the past. But all in all, the book is very much about the present, a present not in the logic of linear time, but a present in place where different time frames overlap. Much more strongly than Storyteller, I want to suggest, Sacred Water is thus about the immediacy of the text and its experience by the reader; it is about the materiality of its subject matter—and of the depiction of this subject matter, namely, the book itself. Sacred Water, as briefly discussed in section “Turning Zoe into Bios: Storytelling and the Interplay of Genres in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Autobiographical Work,” was produced by Silko herself in different handmade editions. Coltelli has highlighted the book as an object, the fragility of its make, of the cardboard paper, the binding, the glue.69 Each of the editions is slightly different, with the processes of revision regarding both the content and the make of the books. These changes are relevant insofar as, on the one hand, “the written texts may continue to evolve in

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somewhat the fashion of oral texts,”70 likening the process to storytelling.71 On the other hand, each edition also differs in its design from the previous one, connecting directly to the land near Laguna; one edition is covered in handmade “Blue Corn paper, which is made in Albuquerque, and actually contains bits of blue corn,” another in “white Volcanic Ash paper, which contains small amounts of fine ash obtained from the volcanos just west of Albuquerque.”72 So the book materially combines land and landscapes, the land of childhood and memory, and the land of the autobiographer’s current residence.73 This may serve as a crucial reminder to both the autobiographer and the reader that the land is bound up in not only cyclical processes of growth and death, of emergence and decline, but also pollution and destruction. I would like to close this section with a brief discussion of the way in which Sacred Water—in this aspect also very much like Turquoise Ledge—draws attention to how, when forgetting or disregarding the reciprocal relation to the land and the web of more-than-human kinship relations, humans act as agents of destruction. Silko addresses individual destructiveness as well as the principle of destruction that she so foregrounded in Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead. The very title of the book—Sacred Water—points to a necessary life-force in the desert, but Silko also uses ‘water’ as its leitmotif to illustrate the fragility and preciousness of life, the way in which water both acts and is acted upon as indicative of a larger framework of responsibilities in an interconnected life-world: “We children were seldom scolded or punished for our behavior. But we were never permitted to frolic with or waste fresh water. We were given stern warnings about killing toads or frogs. Harm to frogs and toads could bring disastrous cloudbursts and floods because the frogs and toads are the beloved children of the rain clouds,”74 the autobiographer remembers. At another point, she relates the story of a dinner guest whose sons and dog smashed the toads in her rain water pool,75 an act of senseless destructiveness on the immediate, but in light of the previous quote also cosmological level. Once again, the autobiographical memory not only stands in a web of more-than-human kinship connections across time but also evokes a broader framework of ongoing destructiveness. Sacred Water harks back to Spanish colonization and the colonizers’ misconception of what constitutes a treasure (water, not gold),76 and it explicitly picks up on environmental disasters (e.g., Chernobyl) and their local and global consequences. Silko highlights the role of humans as actors who have a choice: to

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understand their place in the overall web of kinship relations and act with according care, reciprocity, and responsibility, or to assume an illusionary sense of control and mastery. The already cited ending of the book affirms the transitory character of human agency in the larger structure of place in time. But by ending with an image, not a word, it also continues to tackle the question I see at the heart of Silko’s autobiographical work: how to relate the autobiographical voice and its constitutive anthropocentrism to human decentered embeddedness in more-than-human relationality. Silko’s combination of image and narrative, her frequent retelling of story, on the one hand, points to the open-endedness of the storytelling process; on the other, it also can be read as a repeated attempt to ‘get it right,’ to draw out the appropriate story from matter by different means.

Strategic Anthropocentrism? Responsibility and the Autobiographical Voice So, the understanding of humans, their environment, perspective, and embedded situatedness as presented in and through Silko’s autobiographical work expands the understanding of voice: in this interconnected web, humans are not the only actors and not the only ones speaking; agency and voice extends not only to animals but also to rocks and plants. At the same time, Silko encounters the complexity of how to tell a/the/one’s story from a particular positionality within the world without either centering the autobiographical voice in an illusion of control or pretending to speak as a voice from nowhere. The question is, then, how this encompassing sense of active life and story can be made comprehensible, how it can be decoded and interpreted from a necessarily limited human perspective; how, to quote Jane Bennett via Iovino, “to give voice to a vitality intrinsic to materiality”77 and, as suggested above, to turn zoe into bios through story and narrative. If nature is agentic, the narrator translates and pays tribute to this agency; this agency simply ‘is,’ but it becomes intelligible and makes sense to humans by way of story (or competing stories) only. Silko’s view of the constitutional embeddedness of the onlooker and the reciprocity of creative and interpretative processes has a decisive impact on how the interplay between the expressiveness of materiality, the ‘storiedness’ of matter, and the positionality of the interpreter are foregrounded in her work, shifting between as well as within individual

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texts. Silko’s is not just an invocation of an interconnected life-world but also of the responsibilities that come with it. ‘Responsibility,’ I believe, is an important element in the discussion of autobiographical life telling. For Silko, the environment is not centered on the human, but neither are humans an element to be best disavowed. Writing in a different context, Kyle Powys Whyte points out that while Indigenous conservationists “may embrace the value of species such as the polar bear – even when we may have never interacted with one – it is also true that we are unlikely to invoke the polar bear in the absence of also invoking the species’ significance to particular human and nonhuman communities with whom it has long, local, complex, and unique relationships.”78 Whyte argues that contemporary destruction, from an Indigenous perspective, has been going on for centuries. “We consider the future from what we believe is already a dystopia,”79 he writes, and his understanding of the close link between settler colonialism and anthropogenic environmental change concurs with Silko’s own framing of contemporary destruction in the context of settler colonialism. Such framing does not deny the agency of Indigenous peoples, but it highlights ‘responsibility’ in its dual sense of obligation and responsiveness that I consider crucial for the discussion of autobiographical voice in the Anthropocene. In an article published in 2009 but still highly relevant in this regard, Dipesh Chakrabarty notes a shift in the position humans occupy in the world, from a biological agent to a geological force.80 That force needs to be accountable—and in order to be so, it needs an identifiable voice, also in life writing. I would thus like to return to the initial questions of this contribution and close by reflecting on the possibilities of a narrative voice that is non-­ anthropocentric in its directness and positionality without denying its anthropocentric voicing. Put bluntly, I set out to affirm life narrative and life writing as concepts bound to particular cultural practices that are ‘human,’ provisional and contested as this term is. This does not mean to deny the specific stories of the more-than-human, the expressiveness of matter, and that voice and language as properties are not a ‘human’ prerogative. But I mean to argue that life narrative and life writing, understood as a process of selecting as well as omitting elements of experience and becoming and of combining them into a specific story of an interconnected life, is an interpretative mode of relating to the world in which the human, however temporarily, returns to itself as the “zero point of our relation to alterity” and a “phantasmatic centeredness.”81

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This ‘strategic (or inevitable?) anthropocentrism’ does not necessarily equal subscribing to a hierarchization of species, as my reading of Leslie Marmon Silko’s work has hopefully shown, but it allows for an expression of minoritized voice as well as an acknowledgment of human responsibility, and it can make space for the agency of the more-than-human. As I set out to show in the previous sections, Silko’s is an example of life writing which decenters the human and acknowledges the fragility of boundaries between more-than-human beings without giving up on a human voice and an interpretative positionality. Interpretation and narrative perspective do not necessarily have to imply an illusion of mastery; the narrating ‘I’ and the always provisional self which it references is neither autonomous nor autopoietic—it is indeed “sympoietic,”82 but sympoiesis does not foreclose the positionality of telling, however shifting. The shifts of this voice, as I sought to show, have it oscillate on a range of positions, from the fairly conventional individualistic ‘I’ in Turquoise Ledge, which nevertheless is strongly invested in affirming its “companionism”83 with and connectedness to the more-than-human, to an ‘I’ that not only is embedded in a more-than-human community across time but also voices itself as a testimony to this layeredness of temporal and spatial relations, as in Sacred Water. Taken together, what emerges in this work that covers a period of thirty years is a voice that is pluralistic and fluid, yet remains discernible and identifiable in its assertion of an always provisional self, an ‘I’ that speaks itself without denying the porosity of its boundaries. This voice reflects its own constant becoming, and it indeed offers a unique contribution to “understandings of humanity as a shifting mode of being.”84 Silko’s life writing serves as an example that the affirmation of a human voice does not mean its privileging but rather the acknowledgment of its position in a web of relations. It thereby also allows to contextualize some of the posthumanist claims and their challenges to life writing. The posthumanist focus on zoe resonates with Indigenous knowledge systems, as for instance Braidotti occasionally acknowledges85 without, however, further exploring the potential implications of Indigenous intellectual traditions and practices for posthumanist thought and, in particular, the impact of the centrality of story on her dismissal of bios as ‘anthropocentric.’ By contrast, Haraway strongly focuses on storytelling as a communal practice, including Indigenous storytelling as a practice of “situated worlding.”86 Yet, her focus on “sympoieisis,”87 important as it clearly is, appears to leave little room for the productive tension between the affirmation of the individual

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human voice and its decentering in this process. Silko’s complex construction of an autobiographical voice thus offers one way of tackling what I have called in the beginning of this contribution the posthumanist paradox of life writing. Her life writing thus serves as a crucial reminder not only of the possibilities of the genre to transform itself without dismissing the human voice but also of the necessity for a renewed calibration of bios and zoe—not as opposites that stake the human against the non-human, but as different materialities and forms of life.

Notes 1. Huff, “After Auto, After Bio,” 279. 2. Abblitt, “Composite Lives,” 507. 3. Some critics, such as James Finlayson, have challenged Agamben’s reading of Aristotle. Finlayson contends that Aristotle did not propose such a clear-­ cut juxtaposition of bios as (political) human life and zoe as ‘bare life’ but that he applied bios also to non-human life. He consequently rejects Agamben’s far-reaching ideological conclusions and his assertion that such an opposition “articulate[s] a paradigm of politics that dates back to Aristotle and ancient Greece” (Finlayson, “‘Bare Life’ and Politics,” 105). I find Finlayson’s argument convincing. Yet, the prominence of this juxtaposition in the humanities and the way in which it has been taken up in posthumanist scholarship does not hinge (anymore) on the claim of its origin in Aristotle’s philosophy or a proclaimed continuity of ancient Greek and contemporary Western social organization; the juxtaposition has taken on a conceptual life of its own that, as Rosi Braidotti has put it, traditionally reserves bios for human life and zoe for “the wider scope of animal and non-human life” or even as “the dynamic, self-organizing structure of life itself” (Braidotti, The Posthuman, 60). In the context of this contribution, I will work with this distinction, if in a slightly modified form that I will elaborate on below. 4. In some of her most recent writing on the topic, Cynthia Huff acknowledges that life writing scholarship has moved away from such notions. See Huff, “From the Autobiographical Pact to the Zoetrophic Pack,” 447. 5. Ibid., 508. 6. Haraway, “It Matters,” 566. 7. Hengel, Zoegraphy, 1. 8. Eakin, Living Autobiographically, 9. See Scott, “The Evidence of Experience.” 10. Huff, “After Auto, After Bio,” 280. 11. Iovino, “Living Diffractions,” 71.

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12. Peterson, Monkey Trouble, 6. 13. Huff, “After Auto, After Bio,” 279. 14. Whitlock, “Post-ing Lives,” xi. 15. Huff, “After Auto, After Bio,” 281. 16. Haraway, “It Matters,” 572. 17. Huff, “After Auto, After Bio,” 281. 18. See Cheah, “Worlding Literature.” 19. Couser, Memoir: An Introduction, 142. 20. Tompkins, “Sensational Designs,” xi. 21. Haraway, “It Matters,” 573. 22. Wong, Picturing Identity, 59. 23. Huff, “After Auto, After Bio,” 281. In a 2019 article, Huff proposes to replace Lejeune’s autobiographical pact with a notion of the “zoetrophic pack,” with “zoetrophic” connoting “the flourishing of all life forms” and “‘pack’ suggest[ing] multiple members” (Huff, “Autobiographical Pact,” 446). While I find this suggestion very productive to challenge the notions of singular perspective, autonomy, linearity, and truth implied in Lejeune’s concept, I do not see it offer an alternative regarding the reader’s expectation of life writing, autobiography in particular. I regard Silko’s autobiographical work as playing with these expectations and, precisely by inviting the reader to engage in the promise of Lejeune’s pact, undermine its supposed stability—regarding truth, linearity, autonomy, and voice—and expand understandings of relationality. 24. Haraway, “It Matters,” 573. 25. Huff, “After Auto, After Bio,” 281. 26. As indicated previously, in all of these texts, there are close links to Silko’s fiction; the overlaps between fiction and non-fiction are characteristic, even programmatic for her work. While I will occasionally mention such overlaps and cross-references, not only in thematic concerns but also in obvious intertextual relations and citations, my focus will nevertheless remain on her life writing in order to draw out the construction of a relational autobiographical voice. Among these texts, neither her letters nor her essays have received attention as autobiographical writing. The only type of life writing that I will leave out of my discussion are the interviews Silko has given, arguably a life writing/telling genre in its own right. Also, for reasons of availability—or rather lack thereof—I will not take into account the chapbook Rain Silko published in 1996. 27. Iovino, “Living Diffractions,” 72. 28. Twomey, “More Than One Way,” 48. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 34. 31. Reder, “Indigenous Autobiography in Canada.”

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32. Relationality has often been seen as a central aspect of Indigenous life writing as well as women’s life writing; although I acknowledge the specificity of Silko’s position as a Laguna woman writer and artist who explicitly and confidently draws on Laguna stories and traditions, and although I seek to highlight the centrality of such references and understandings of interconnectedness for Silko’s work, my argument here does not seek to assert relationality per se as ‘Indigenous’ or ‘female.’ I follow Paul John Eakin, Sidonie Smith, Julia Watson, and others in the conviction that life writing is inherently relational, even if a text implies or explicitly sets out to follow the Gusdorfian model of the autonomous subject. 33. Cavarero, Relating Narratives, 85. 34. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 60. 35. Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 10. This is an important claim that in effect highlights what critics of Agamben’s influential juxtaposition have pointed out: that this juxtaposition has no grounding in Aristotle, who did not restrict the term bios to humans but also applied it to other social species. See Finlayson, “‘Bare Life’ and Politics,” 108. 36. Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 50. 37. This, I contend, is equally the case in the kind of example Van den Hengel discusses: the storying of zoe produces bios in the act of telling and retelling. 38. Silko, Storyteller. 39. Ibid., 1. 40. Carsten, “Storyteller,” 107. 41. Eakin, How Our Lives, 73. 42. Silko, Storyteller, 227. 43. Ibid., 226–227. 44. Brant, “Devouring Time,” 9. 45. This open-endedness at the time of the exchange is, of course, diminished by the possibility that the letters might have been selected and/or edited and that thus the published version is more strongly a re-presentation of a process, not the process itself. But then, every published autobiographical text doubles the process of autobiographical storytelling as an act of narrative choice, of selection, omission, and combination. 46. Coltelli, “Silko’s Sacred Water,” 27. 47. Silko, Sacred Water, 3. 48. Ibid., 76. 49. Lopate, quoted in Twomey, “More Than One Way,” 41. 50. Lennon, “The Essay, in Theory,” 71. 51. Cardell, “Essays as Life Writing,” 2. 52. Silko, Storyteller, 227. 53. Farr, “American Ecobiography,” 94. 54. Ibid., 97.

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55. Otjen, “Indigenous Radical Resurgence,” 136. 56. Cheah, “Worlding Literature,” 87. 57. Silko, The Turquoise Ledge, 82–83. 58. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto, 5. 59. Portillo, Sovereign Stories, 87. 60. Silko, The Turquoise Ledge, 1. 61. Iovino, “Living Diffractions,” 71. 62. Ibid., 72. 63. Silko, Yellow Woman, 27. 64. Ibid., 181. 65. Wong, Picturing Identity, 62. 66. Ibid., 73. 67. Silko, Yellow Woman, 169. 68. Ibid. 69. Coltelli, “Silko’s Sacred Water,” 24. 70. Silko, Yellow Woman, 27. 71. Coltelli, “Silko’s Sacred Water,” 25. 72. Silko, Yellow Woman, 205n1. 73. For detailed discussions of these handmade editions and their effect, see Coltelli, “Silko’s Sacred Water,” and Wong, Picturing Identity, Chap. X. 74. Silko, Sacred Water, 6. 75. Ibid., 64. 76. Ibid., 29. 77. Iovino, “Living Diffractions,” 72. 78. Whyte, “Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now,” 207. 79. Ibid. 80. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 206. 81. Peterson, Monkey Trouble, 6. 82. Haraway, “It Matters,” 266. 83. Abblitt, “Composite Lives,” 509. 84. Whitlock, “Post-ing Lives,” vii. 85. Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge, 110. 86. Haraway, “It Matters What Stories Tell Stories,” 570. Haraway also recognizes the importance of an Indigenous sense of disaster, the destruction of life-worlds, and the need to persevere in what is already a dystopia (Whyte, “Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now,” 207) as an important corrective of a Western sense of the uniqueness of the present moment. See Haraway, “It Matters What Stories Tell Stories,” 569. 87. Ibid., 566.

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Works Cited Abblitt, Stephen. “Composite Lives: Making-With Our Multispecies Kin (Imagine!).” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 34, no. 3 (2019): 507–518. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. ———. Posthuman Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. Brant, Clare. “Devouring Time Finds Paper Toughish: What’s Happened to Handwritten Letters in the Twenty-First Century?” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 21, no. 1 (2006): 7–19. Cardell, Kylie. “Essays as Life Writing: The Year in Australia.” Biography 42, no. 1 (2019): 1–8. Carsten, Cynthia. “Storyteller: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Reappropriation of Native American History and Identity.” Wicazo Sa Review 21, no. 2 (2006): 105–126. Cavarero, Adriana. Relating Narratives. Storytelling and Selfhood. Oxon: Routledge, 2000. Kindle edition. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222. Cheah, Pheng. “Worlding Literature: Living with Tiger Spirits.” diacritics 45, no. 2 (2017): 86–114. Coltelli, Laura. “Leslie Marmon Silko’s Sacred Water.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 8, no. 4 (1996): 21–29. Couser, G.  Thomas. Memoir. An Introduction. New  York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. ———. Living Autobiographically. How We Create Identity in Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Farr, Cecilia Konchar. “American Ecobiography.” In Literature of Nature. An International Sourcebook, edited by Patrick D.  Murphy, 94–97. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998. Finlayson, James Gordon. “‘Bare Life’ and Politics in Agamben’s Reading of Aristotle.” The Review of Politics 72, no. 1 (2010): 97–126. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: The Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. ———. “It Matters What Stories Tell Stories; It Matters Whose Stories Tell Stories.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 34, no. 3 (2019): 565–575. Hengel, Louis van den. “‘Zoegraphy’: Per/Forming Posthuman Lives.” In “(Post) Human Lives,” edited by Gillian Whitlock and G.  Thomas Couser. Special issue, Biography 35, no. 1 (2012): 1–20. Huff, Cynthia. “After Auto, After Bio: Posthumanism and Life Writing.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32, no. 2 (2017): 279–282.

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———. From the Autobiographical Pact to the Zoetrophic Pack.” a/b: Auto/ Biography Studies 34, no. 3 (2019): 445–460. Iovino, Serenella. “The Living Diffractions of Matter and Text: Narrative Agency, Strategic Anthropomorphism, and How Interpretation Works.” Anglia 133, no. 1 (2015): 69–86. Lennon, Brian. “The Essay, in Theory.” diacritics 38, no. 3 (2008): 71–92. Otjen, Nathaniel. “Indigenous Radical Resurgence and Multispecies Landscapes: Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Turquoise Ledge.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 31, no. 3–4 (2019): 135–157. Peterson, Christopher. Monkey Trouble. The Scandal of Posthumanism. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Portillo, Annette Angela. Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories: Native American Women’s Autobiography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. Reder, Deanne. “Indigenous Autobiography in Canada: Uncovering Intellectual Traditions.” In The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature, edited by Cynthia Sugars, 170–190. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience.” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773–797. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Sacred Water. Narratives and Pictures. Tucson: Flood Plain Press, 1993. ———. Storyteller. New York: Arcade Publishing 1981. ———. The Turquoise Ledge. New York: Penguin, 2010. ———. Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit. Essays on Native American Life Today. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. ———, and James Wright. The Delicacy and Strength of Lace, edited by Anne Wright. St. Paul: Grey Wolf Press, 1986. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs. The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Twomey, Tyra. “More Than One Way to Tell a Story: Rethinking the Place of Genre in Native American Autobiography and the Personal Essay.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 19, no. 2 (2007): 22–51. Whitlock, Gillian. “Post-ing Lives.” In “(Post)Human Lives,” edited by Gillian Whitlock and G. Thomas Couser. Special issue, Biography 35, no. 1 (2012): v–xvi. Whyte, Kyle Powys. “Our Ancestors’ Dystopia Now. Indigenous Conservation and the Anthropocene.” In The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, edited by Ursula Heise, Michelle Niemann, and Jon Christensen, 206–215. London: Routledge, 2017. Wong, Hertha Dawn. Picturing Identity. Contemporary American Autobiography in Image and Text. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

The Big Picture: Life as Sympoietic Becomings in Rachel Rosenthal’s Performance Art Christina Caupert

Rachel Rosenthal (1926–2015) was a pioneer of performance art. She also was a woman with a mission. Like many of her performance peers, particularly those with an interest in storytelling, Rosenthal drew extensively on her own life as raw material for her pieces. “I used to say,” she remarked in 1989, reflecting on the body of work she had been creating, “that … if you really saw all these pieces, you would have the whole autobiography, the whole history of my life, and it’s true. There were few aspects that I didn’t touch on.”1 Yet although the autobiographical constituted an integral part of her work, Rosenthal was hardly guilty of indulging in the sort of solipsistic navel-gazing of which performance artists have sometimes been accused.2 At the core of her art lay what she called “The Big Picture,” a term which, for her, described the evolutionary and ecological entanglement of all lives on our planet, both with each other and with the Earth C. Caupert (*) University of Augsburg, Augsburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Batzke et al. (eds.), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77973-3_3

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itself. Her performance pieces attest to her desire to bring this fundamental interconnectedness to bear in her work in order to share a sense of it with her audience. Evidently, then, Rosenthal’s pieces are tied to her life in ways that have little to do with either excessive egotism or anthropocentric self-­absorption. On the contrary, they proceed from a vigorous awareness that embodied relationality, both within and between species, is a key factor in enabling and sustaining any human ‘self.’ In terms of its very mediality, performance—Rosenthal’s preferred field of creative activity—is based on the bodily co-presence of artists and spectators, making it an art form that not just draws on but merges with lived, relational, interactional reality. As theater scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte explains, performance requires “two groups of people, one acting and the other observing, to gather at the same time and place for a given period of shared lifetime.”3 However, Rosenthal extends this definition beyond ‘people’ to include non-human participants as well. In her pieces, she conceives of animals, plants, ideas, seemingly inanimate objects, and intangible energies as powerful agents and co-performers. Both on the level of presentation and on the level of representation, Rosenthal’s performances of her own life turn out to hinge on such a boundless profusion of multiform others that she becomes discernible as a blurry, nonunitary, irreducibly relational self, which emerges from a vast ancient flow of generative interdependencies. This flow is akin to what Rosi Braidotti calls zoe, “the dynamic, self-organizing structure of life itself,”4 which she describes as a “transversal force that cuts across and reconnects previously segregated species, categories and domains.”5 The concept of the Anthropocene, Braidotti maintains, provides a sharp reminder that human life, or bios, cannot meaningfully be separated from zoe, its wider, non-human matrix.6 Although Rosenthal’s pieces predate both Braidotti’s posthuman theory and the popularity of the term “Anthropocene,” they exhibit an acute appreciation of this crucial insight. In fact, Rosenthal’s performance work is based on notions that overlap with Braidotti’s to such a degree that it seems justified to call Rosenthal a posthumanist avant la lettre. This is most obviously true of her work from the 1980s onward, when her subject matter began to move beyond the conventionally autobiographical and toward more comprehensive, multi-­ scale investigations of the intimate liaison between herself, the human, and the non-human. Even her earlier pieces, however, reveal posthumanist tendencies, such as Rosenthal’s skepticism of the idea of a unitary, autonomous human subject, her fascination with the power of zoe, and,

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furthermore, an awareness of the vital necessity of connecting and interacting with human and non-human others—in Donna Haraway’s words, of engaging in “sympoiesis,” or “worlding-with, in company.”7 Rosenthal thus created a deeply relational, ecologically conscious form of autobiographically grounded performance art, which allows “The Big Picture” of the elementary material-semiotic interdependence between individual lives and life at large to become visible.

Rosenthal’s Performative Sympoietics “Performance artists,” says renowned writer-performer Holly Hughes, “are often folks for whom ‘the personal is political’ remained a vital challenge, rather than a piece of seventies’ kitsch.”8 Hughes’s observation is certainly true of Rosenthal, though it actually was in 1975 that the latter, then in her late forties, first started out as a performance artist. Looking back, Rosenthal later described that year as an important turning point in her life. It was the year her mother died, leaving her feeling both orphaned—her father had died twenty years before—and liberated, distressed but free to “air those shameful secrets”9 she had previously felt an obsessive urge to hide. Only through her performance work, Rosenthal professed, was she finally able to develop a functional, reasonably coherent sense of self and coordinate facets of her self-experience that she had been accustomed to consider unacceptable or, at the very least, incompatible. “I have done more transformation through my actual art than through … therapy,” she asserted.10 As private as this kind of achievement seems, Rosenthal also wanted her art to contribute to the cultural and, broadly, political transformations she thought necessary. She typically designed her works as communal rites of passage: collective sensory, affective, and intellectual journeys whose effects—regenerative and empowering, but at the same time often challenging and provocative—encompassed her audiences as much as herself. Disclosing her personal traumas, compulsions, and vulnerabilities in the artistically “depragmatized,”11 yet fully embodied environment of the performance space helped her establish an intimate connection with her spectators, opening up opportunities for intense experiences of interrelatedness. Rosenthal characterized her interest in exploring autobiographical material—on which she relied most heavily in her earlier pieces, but which always remained a significant feature of her work—as “trying to affect an audience by reaching the universal through the very deeply personal.”12

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Her audiences responded well to this approach. As she related, “people would come up to me after most of my performances and state that I touched them in ways that they … understand. They have been through similar experiences or they can see correspondence [sic] between their experiences and mine, and through that process of sympathizing they also get the catharsis that I’m offering.”13 To a great degree, then, the success of Rosenthal’s performances was equivalent to mobilizing her spectators’ capacities for empathetic relationality. Although this process, as Rosenthal’s comment implies, frequently involved the audience’s recognizing something of themselves in the artist, her hybrid, polyphonic, collage-like aesthetics thwarted any superficially reassuring sense of community based on homogeneity or easy harmony. Both formally and thematically, her pieces showed oneness to be inextricably contingent on multiplicity, identity on difference, selfhood on otherness, and stability on change, making frictions and turbulences inevitable. Rosenthal’s performances provided memorable occasions for synaesthetically experiencing bonds of interconnectedness across such gaps of difference and, simultaneously, for feeling the cathartic, energizing effects of this experience, which she was hoping to pass on, through her spectators, into the wider culture to bring about constructive change. While Rosenthal’s concept of art bears obvious traces of modernist and postmodernist influences, closer inspection also reveals an affinity to certain elements of romanticism, one example being her idea of the role of the artist. Interestingly, despite Braidotti’s mistrust of romanticism,14 this streak does not conflict with Rosenthal’s posthumanist leanings. Viewing artists, very much in Romantic fashion, as “conduits for the inventiveness of Nature, of the Cosmos,”15 she in fact disavows notions of art as an exclusively human activity indicative of human autonomy from or control over nature. Instead, she considers artists as manifestations and collaborators of the vital generativity of the Earth itself. Art-making, she posits, requires tapping into the elemental creative forces animating the planet, for which, consciously or unconsciously, artists display both a heightened receptivity and an increased permeability. This latter aspect refers to the responsibility Rosenthal ascribes to artists of channeling what Braidotti would call zoe—the life-sustaining, polymorphic, transformative power pertaining to those elemental forces—into wider society and keeping it culturally available, giving art its ethical potential.16 Yet if artists at least partially owe the ability to perform this task to the non-human world, performance artists also owe it to, and share it with,

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their audiences. While this is ultimately true of any art form, it becomes especially palpable in theater and performance art. As Fischer-Lichte explains, spectators are no mere ‘recipients’ of some independently existing product but participants in an event that could not take place without them. “For a performance to occur, actors and spectators must assemble to interact in a specific place for a certain period of time … [T]heir bodily co-presence creates a relationship between co-subjects. Through their physical presence, perception, and response, the spectators become co-­ actors that generate the performance by participating in the ‘play.’”17 Even though the roles of artist(s) and audience are rarely symmetrical, both sides co-create the interactional “feedback loop” (Fischer-Lichte) that is the actual performance event. Hence, performance is a prime example of what Haraway calls “sympoiesis” or “making-with.” If, as Haraway claims, “bounded individualism … has finally become unavailable to think with, truly no longer thinkable”18 in light of the challenges of the Anthropocene, performance offers a versatile and innovative experimental ground for learning to think—and feel—differently. Haraway’s coinage “sympoiesis” both builds on and reinterprets the influential systems-theoretical term “autopoiesis” (often translated as “self-organization,” literally “self-production”) in that it highlights that “[n]othing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing.”19 Among the variety of insights the concept of sympoiesis brings together, Haraway particularly spotlights biologist Lynn Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis. According to this initially spurned, but now widely accepted theory, the evolutionary formation of new, more complex forms of life is not merely driven by random mutations, divergence, and the negative force of natural selection, but also crucially depends on the constructive, aggregative effects of symbiosis. Marked by the close interactional cohabitation of dissimilar organisms, symbiosis can lead to the emergence of new species by means of the incorporation and fusion of different entities. Margulis asserts that this process is what gave rise to eukaryotic cells and, subsequently, to the evolution of such complex biological systems as multicellular organisms, including fungi, plants, and animals. Seen in this light, to conceptualize living things as fully separate, individual units is to fail to understand the conditions of their very existence. As Haraway points out, “[c]ritters do not precede their relatings; they make each other through semiotic material involution, out of the beings of previous such entanglements.”20 Precarious though it is (as not only the crises of the Anthropocene and the global Covid-19 pandemic have made abundantly

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clear), life on Earth cannot flourish without “the intimacy of strangers, … practices of critters becoming-with each other at every node of intra-action in earth history.”21 Although Rosenthal died before Haraway introduced the term, her work leaves no doubt that she was keenly aware of the power of sympoiesis, which her performances both addressed as a theme and employed as a functional principle. Trans-species interdependence, for example, was a subject permeating her work. In some instances, she subversively poked fun at human pretensions to autonomy and lofty preeminence, displaying her characteristic sense of irony and irreverent, earthy humor. Thus, on one occasion, she wryly discussed the microorganisms living in our intestines and their role in the creation of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, in the human gut. Citing James Lovelock’s Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), then still a rather recent publication, she confronted her spectators with the conclusion: “That should take some hubris out of our sails! From the Gaian perspective, we may be only as important as our farts.”22 At other times, her performative reminders of the interrelations between human and non-human forms of life took the—equally characteristic—shape of hauntingly ceremonial invocations. In one of her final pieces, for example, she testified to the awe-inspiring reality of human embeddedness in the flow of life, which is both vulnerable and persistent, familiar and strange: “How fragile our life is! How fragile is life! A long long line of living links us to the first cells, in time, and yet is spatially present in our bodies. Under the skin a universe unfolds. We are filled with the precariousness and tenacity of life.”23 The carefully crafted, aesthetically enhanced language of this speech, made by a white-clad, almost seventy-­ year-­old Rosenthal walking slowly toward the audience “as if on a tightrope,”24 exerts its full impact in the context of a live performance, where it converges with the shared corporeal presence of artist and spectators, poignantly and meaningfully intensifying bodily awareness.

Toward a Posthuman(ist) Sense of Self Performance is, by its very nature, an emphatically sympoietic art form, which is generated and shaped by the mutually affective feedback loop emerging from the co-presence of artists and audience.25 Correspondingly, it is an art form that is very much alive to the “intimacy of strangers,”26 on whose changeable and unpredictable dynamic it relies to realize its potential. Especially in her later pieces, Rosenthal tied these affordances of the

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form of performance to explicitly ecological, anti-anthropocentric subject matters in order to communicate her understanding of the basic principles underlying the functioning of “The Big Picture”—ubiquitous relationality, ineluctable interdependency, and constant interactional transformation—while simultaneously engaging them. However, even in her earlier, more narrowly autobiographical pieces, she arguably employed the sympoietic quality of performance art in ways that point to her affinities with posthumanism, indicating as they do the discrepancy between her self-­ experience and the combination of individualism, universalism, and rationality that characterizes the liberal humanist concept of subjectivity. One case in point is her early piece Charm (1977). The piece establishes a connection between Rosenthal’s lifelong manic binge-eating episodes and the unsettling incongruity of her childhood experiences, which included both extravagant privileges and nightmarish ordeals. This incongruity is visualized by the set design, which divides the stage into two disparate parts, one lushly furnished, the other bare. An assemblage of grotesque, outlandish figures, engaged in “threatening, teasing, lewd”27 interactions, populate the bare part of the performance area, while Rosenthal, bejeweled and flamboyantly dressed in a velvet gown, satin stole, and plastic high heels, occupies the furnished one, seemingly without noticing the presence of the nightmare figures. A male servant, who keeps bringing her trays loaded with delicacies throughout the entire performance, seems to establish the missing link between the different worlds represented by the stage partitions, wearing black tails and a bow tie, a maid’s cap, a pink apron, mesh tights, and pumps. At first daintily feasting on, then greedily wolfing down a disconcerting amount of French pastries, Rosenthal shares her childhood memories while shifting more and more into the still-affected perspective of the little girl. As she relates, Rosenthal spent the first years of her life—the interwar period—in Paris, surrounded by servants and luxury. Born to Russian Jewish émigrés, she was the daughter of a stylish socialite who, as a young woman, had managed to flee from the Bolsheviks, and a self-made millionaire who had built up a business dealing in pearls and precious stones. Although her family lived “in an atmosphere of exquisite beauty,”28 there was a dark, disturbing underside to their “charmed life,”29 which they were trying hard to ignore. Eager to please and aware of the great importance her parents attached to a cheerful home life, little Rosenthal learned to keep her fears and worries locked up inside herself. Thus, even though her nannies bullied her and bad-mouthed her mother and father behind their backs, she

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did not dare tell them about it. To “belong,”30 she felt, she had to disavow anything crude or disagreeable and give the impression of invariable, adorable delightfulness, which she managed to do at great cost and with mixed results: “By the time I was three, my face was convulsed with nervous tics (her face twitches). I had chronic insomnia. The doctor said that I was a nervous child and forbade me to play with children my own age because it would get me too excited.”31 In a move that marks a typical feature of her work, Charm calls attention to the manifold interconnections between past and present, but also to the specific situatedness of the micro-history of Rosenthal’s life within meso- and macro-historical contexts, such as, in Charm, the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Nazis, and World War II. The latter calamities appear as revealing examples of the deeply unsettling events among which Rosenthal’s family lived and which her parents were desperately trying to disavow. They are introduced into the piece as Rosenthal is telling a story that seamlessly segues from a description of the relentless beauty rituals her mother regularly went through in her opulent boudoir to the distressing recollection of finding her mother in bed crying, implying a connection between both memories (and, incidentally, suggesting a high degree of skillful narrative structuring rather than a random string of thoughts). As Rosenthal explains to the audience, her mother’s sister, who lived in Poland, had died: “Something to do with the Nazis … I didn’t understand what that was. (Gorges through the next few lines.) And strangely enough, for the next few days I expected somebody would say something. But nobody mentioned anything. … Can you hear? Can you see me? Thank you!”32 In terms of Rosenthal’s performative approach to subjectivity, this is an instructive scene. On the level of representation, Rosenthal’s frantic food intake here and throughout the piece appears as a psychosomatic manifestation of the continuing feelings of isolation and confused disconnectedness which her experiences, including her parents’ reluctance or inability to let her in on what is going on, have induced in her. On the level of presentation, it is both a controlled, deliberately staged bodily contribution to the story she is telling and a real-life instance of massive overeating, performed by a person with an actual eating disorder. As art and life, meaning and materiality interpenetrate, Rosenthal’s ‘self’ seems to scintillate “between being absent and present; real and not real,”33 multiplying and disappearing at the same time. Autobiographical performances,

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performance scholar Deirdre Heddon underlines, create “what is best described as a persona.”34 She explains, it is difficult to tell where the persona begins and ends. … It would be more accurate, then, to refer to the identities constructed in [performance], since there is no single, cohesive subject being represented. The contradictions and ambiguities are crucially important devices in … suggesting the inherent complexity of subjectivity, of “being” a person. If autobiography enables the production of subjectivity, then [performers often use it] strategically to construct a “self” that is multiple, complex and perhaps ultimately unknowable.35

Charm is exemplary for how Rosenthal’s early performances disrupt ideas of stable, unitary identities by exposing the rifts, shifts, and indeterminacies necessarily underlying enactments of subjectivity. At the same time, her concept of selfhood differs from “performativity” in a strictly Butlerian sense in that Rosenthal did not entirely dismiss the experiential viability of such notions as “interiority,” “substance,” and “authenticity,” putting strong emphasis on their fluidity and interactional emergence instead.36 Thus, she stated on various occasions that she regarded her early pieces as attempts at performing redemptive “exorcisms” through finally “revealing herself”37 after feeling locked up in pretending all her life. However, as theater critic Una Chaudhuri points out, “what distinguishes Rosenthal’s autobiographical work from others is not just what telling the stories of her past does for Rachel … but rather what they allow her to establish between herself and her audience, the work of connection and communication they accomplish.”38 As a matter of fact, Rosenthal’s pieces suggest that relationality and meaningful forms of exchange, such as those facilitated by performance art, are what enables subjectivity in the first place. Charm accentuates this point by way of the chorus-like questions “can you all see me? … Can you all hear me?”39 which Rosenthal keeps asking the audience. An appeal for the affirmation of their collective act of communication rather than an expression of special solicitousness, those questions allude to the empowering effects of mutual recognition and punctuate a process of sympoietic, community-building becoming. Strikingly, at the actual performance event (unlike most of Rosenthal’s later pieces, Charm was presented one time only), the audience found ways of getting in touch with Rosenthal that went beyond responding to her questions. After the event, without having been invited to do so, some

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of the spectators flocked on the stage to finish the leftover food, unperturbed by all the crumbs that had fallen from Rosenthal’s lips and fingers.40 Evidently, the material, transcorporeal interchange involved in the “thick copresence”41 on which live performance events are based, and which has become so palpable, in a threatening way, in times of a pandemic, is part of what constitutes the embodied synergism and shared sensory-affective experience of performance. It brings to mind what Haraway has uncannily called the “cultivation of viral response-abilities”42 through storytelling. In light of these observations about Rosenthal’s early, autobiographical performances, Rosenthal’s concept of selfhood is taking shape as being attached to the factors of sympoietic relationality, embodiment, situatedness, and fluidity. While this view of subjectivity clearly diverges from humanist ideas of the subject, it corresponds to key tenets of posthumanism. In her theory of the posthuman, Braidotti rejects all notions of “unitary identities indexed on [the] Eurocentric and normative humanist ideal of ‘Man,’”43 including the “universalistic belief in individualism, fixed identities, steady locations and moral ties that bind,”44 in favor of a posthumanist and post-anthropocentric subjectivity she describes as “nomadism.” “Rigorously materialist, my own nomadic thought defends a post-individualistic notion of the subject, which is marked by a monistic, relational structure,” she writes. “Yet, it is not undifferentiated in terms of the social coordinates of class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and race.”45 Associating the mobility of nomadic life with a cross-cutting (intersectional, transversal, polyglot), non-linear subjective agility, Braidotti elaborates, “the figuration of the nomad renders an image of the subject in terms of a non-unitary and multi-layered vision, as a dynamic and changing entity.”46 These aspects, too, resonate strongly with Rosenthal’s early performance art. Her feminism unmistakably informs her pieces across the board, and her critical attention to class differentials shows, for instance, in Charm, where her own persona’s unflatteringly condescending behavior toward the character of the servant (for example when she thanks him for another load of pastries with the words “Merci, mon petit chou”)47 appears as a wry comment on the socioeconomic circumstances into which she had been born. Moreover, Rosenthal can certainly count as a “nomad” in Braidotti’s sense, not just because of her Jewish Russian-French family’s flight to the United States via Portugal, Spain, and Brazil or the multilingualism mirrored in her pieces but also because of the wealth of heterogeneous sources and forms of knowledge on which she drew, which ranged

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from ancient myth to cutting-edge science (quantum physics, earth science, life science). And lastly, Rosenthal seems to have anticipated Braidotti’s proposal to figure the subject “in terms of a non-unitary and multi-layered vision, as a dynamic and changing entity.”48 Arguably, the way in which she structured most of her pieces in terms of a variety of different personae succeeding, overlapping, interfering with, and metamorphosing into each other offers just such a vision. A description, by Chaudhuri, of Rosenthal’s handling of her characters—whose very deployment is indicative of the strong influence of theater on Rosenthal’s particular brand of performance art—may serve as an illustration: Rosenthal can play so many different characters, and types of characters, and in such quick succession, that this has become one of her primary structuring devices. With few exceptions, her performances involve her playing several contrasting characters, either in succession or moving back and forth between them. The first time in a piece when Rosenthal transforms herself from one character to another is invariably exciting and marvelous, as when she puts off the robes of [a] graceful masked girl performing a delicate fire ritual to become [a] brutal soldier lobbing grenades (Traps) … However, varied and engaging as they are, Rosenthal’s characters are not like the characters of naturalistic drama. They are not ‘wellrounded’ psychological beings with detailed biographies. It is more for their emotional and ideological positions, for their orientation toward and response to the pressing issues of our time, that Rosenthal is interested in them … The many characters she plays have porous identities, so that they often seem – momentarily – to be Rachel herself, and they often change into (not merely from) each other.49

There are clear affinities between important aspects of posthuman subjectivity and the sense of self becoming apparent even in Rosenthal’s earlier pieces, but it was in the work she created in the 1980s and 1990s that her performances ultimately crossed the threshold into posthuman art. While Rosenthal’s personal relationship with the non-human world seems always to have been close, it was then that she made it a signature theme of her art, motivated by her concern about the increasingly visible environmental degradation. Destabilizing anthropocentrism, exploring an ethics of ecological interrelatedness, and calling attention to the awe-inspiring, yet precarious, fact of our “Planet of Life,”50 “without losing the art aspect,”51 became the professed goals of her work, which she characterized as centering around “the issue of humanity’s place on the planet.”52

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While Rosenthal’s pieces are contingent on their own historical and discursive contexts and some of the concepts she built upon have lost traction, they nevertheless continue to resonate with contemporary ecocritical theory in enriching and provoking ways. Braidotti’s concept of zoe, in particular, offers a useful lens for investigating her work (and vice versa). Combining cultural critique with the philosophically grounded construction of an alternative vision, Braidotti replaces exceptionalist conceptions of the human with a co-dependent, egalitarian one, which is organized around the centrality of neither anthropos nor the autonomous individual but of zoe, that is, the “materialist and vitalist force of life itself, … the generative power that flows across all species.”53 This dynamic life force, she holds, springs entirely from the potentiality of matter. Because zoe is at the bottom of all functions of life, including ‘higher’ cognition, all living things belong to it, but no single entity can claim it as its own. Braidotti thus conceptualizes the core of life as impersonal, non-human, and, indeed, “inhuman”54 in the ceaseless, relentless streams of its ‘chaosmic’ (Braidotti) becomings, which also include death and the extinction of consciousness. Braidotti makes a point of adhering to the concept of the subject, which she—like Rosenthal—considers a valuable dimension of lived experience and an indispensable locus of ethical and political responsibility,55 but she reframes human subjectivity in terms of its dependence on and embeddedness in generative ‘living matter’ along the entire nature-culture continuum. Her theory of the posthuman embraces the productive opportunities inherent in the disintegration of humanist conceptions of the subject, which she regards as beyond repair in light of their blatant incompatibility with the scientific, technological, and economic realities of the present day. Accordingly, she seeks to promote a shift in the mapping of subjectivity away from the parameters of autonomy, individualism, and species toward those of radical relationality, porosity, and kinship. “My focus,” she explains, “is on … the extent to which [the posthuman predicament] opens up perspectives for affirmative transformations of both the structures of subjectivity and the production of theory and knowledge. I have labelled these processes as ‘becoming-animal, becoming-earth and becoming-­machine.’”56 At a later point in her book, she adds what could be called a fourth axis for modeling posthuman subjectivity: death, that is “the becoming-imperceptible of the subject,”57 with the help of which Braidotti seeks to chart the space of the posthuman to the very edge of the subjectively thinkable. Since these axes provide four useful lines of

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orientation that are consistent with Rosenthal’s themes and concerns, in what follows, I will examine distinctive patterns of such posthuman becomings in a selection of Rosenthal’s later performance pieces.

Becoming-Machine Whereas Braidotti is an avowed, if critical, technophile, who from her location in the twenty-first century understands becoming-machine primarily as a way of actualizing “the relational powers of a subject”58 and stresses its “liberatory and even transgressive potential”59 even as she problematizes the dynamics of biotechnological capitalism, Rosenthal was much more ambivalent in her attitude toward the implications of machinism and technoscience. On the one hand, Rosenthal was well aware of the benefits and comforts of technological devices. Consequently, she regularly deployed technical equipment in her performances (lighting systems, projectors, live cameras, record players, tape recorders, assorted stage props), both for atmospheric effect and to counteract simplistic impressions of presence and authenticity. On the other hand, she was deeply skeptical of the ever-growing, technologically amplified human influence on the infinitely complex more-than-human interrelations forming “The Big Picture.” Laying this ambivalence open in her piece Pangaean Dreams (1990), she forces herself, in an antagonistic dialogue between ‘Herself’ and the ‘Autonomous Being’ (a monstrous, growling personification of the excruciating pain she has been going through as a result of her advancing osteoporosis, played by herself), to admit her love of “time-saving machines, films, TV, newspapers, trains and planes and telephones,” let alone “the pill.”60 Her unsettlement at being confronted with these imputations, which she is unable to deny, indicates her anxiety that she might be compromising her integrity as a self-identified “eco-feminist and an Earth worshiper.”61 For, as the Autonomous Being tells her, they betray her own implication in the ‘man-made’ predicaments she is supposedly trying to help redress. Referring to the amenities helping Rosenthal through her daily life as “MEN’s little gifts,”62 he accuses her that “MEN made this world and you live in it.”63 Of course, even though the piece is ironically invoking the stereotype of the man-hating feminist, cheap, binary polemics are not what the piece is driving at. As a matter of fact, it explicitly addresses Rosenthal’s own non-binary gender identity when the artist declares, androgynously dressed and with her trademark bald head,64 “I

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am a gay man in a woman’s body,”65 visually reaffirming this subject position through her appearance. What the piece does, in a playful and revealing manner, is to exploit the fact that in various Indo-European languages, including English, French, and Russian (the languages Rosenthal grew up with), the word ‘man’ is a homonym meaning both ‘male human’ and ‘human being’ in general, a fact to which Braidotti repeatedly draws attention as an example of the exclusionary and identity-erasing effects of false universalisms. The piece thus codes the word “MEN” as a reference to the post-Enlightenment structure of subjectivity which Braidotti, quoting Cary Wolfe, describes as “[t]he Cartesian subject of the cogito, the Kantian ‘community of reasonable beings,’ or, in more sociological terms, the subject as citizen, rights-holder, property-owner, and so on”;66 the all-caps spelling in the script underlines this special significance. Correspondingly, the Autonomous Being states that “MEN created the ego, MEN snatched us from the jaws of nature, MEN negated Chaos, Ereshkigal [i.e., the Mesopotamian goddess of the underworld] and Death. MEN invented Linear Time.”67 A figuration of her agonizing physical pain, the Autonomous Being confronts Rosenthal with her own entanglement in this subjectivity by making her aware of her difficult and deeply uneasy relationship to her corporeality. At the same time, he intensifies her awareness of her involvement in the tumultuous workings of zoe: You see Nature through your mind, not your senses. … Stick your nose in it, girl, it stinks! Check out her bowels. It’s brutal down there … The chthonian is only interested in might, sex and survival … The life cycle is inexorable. You deteriorate and hurt. One moment you’re admiring a seascape, the next thing you know a tidal wave snatches you up, a temblor crushes you, lava engulfs you … a tornado twists you … You yearn for a Father birth: Athena from the head of Zeus; Adam, the Sky-­ God’s clay sculpture … You humans hate your mothers: to be born between two legs, where shit and pee come from … ! … And you! You avoided motherhood like the plague … And you like living in a country that uses showers and deodorants. And you LOATHED your periods …68

While the Autonomous Being evidently knows Rosenthal well and succeeds in hammering a key fact of zoe-based being home to her, he is

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ridiculously incapable of nuance or differentiation. His views therefore hardly represent an absolute and incontrovertible truth to end all debate. He does, however, teach Rosenthal to see both herself and “The Big Picture” of life from a new perspective; indeed, his place on the stage is a shaft of light. Hence, his advice to Rosenthal, “You’ve got all these reasons to stay on your throne, up in your head. You should come down for a roll in the dung now and then … do you good,”69 seems at least worth considering. Seen in this light, practices of becoming-machine may appear to promote the reinforcement of a legacy of dismissive rejections of corporeality, and thus of the working of zoe.70 Another example of Rosenthal’s take on the matter of becoming-­ machine is the science-fiction piece filename: FUTURFAX (1992), in which she voices her growing doubts about excessive techno-optimism. The dystopian piece, set on Rosenthal’s 86th birthday in 2012,  starts while the audience is still getting seated. Against a background noise of “ominous throbbing,”71 suggestive both of menace and of a beating heart, a taped, disembodied male voice declaims an endlessly repeating monologue that calls to mind the “Ode to Man” from Sophocles’s Antigone: “The pinnacle was reached in man. / Man is the climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation. … / The world is chaotic. It awaits Man to give it order. / To give it order, Man must first conquer the world, conquer nature, conquer creation.”72 Thus, the stage is set for the piece’s theme and its tragic potential. As the lights come up, the audience finds Rosenthal in the setting of a tellingly ramshackle home, “carved out of a warehouse or other industrial place,”73 pointing to the damaged state of the Earth and evocative of the concept of the “Capitalocene.”74 She worriedly peeps out the window, then, in celebration of her birthday, “triumphantly”75 and ceremoniously takes four carrots out of a bag. While she scrapes them, she informs the audience in a conversational tone about the havoc being wreaked all around her by climate change, environmental disasters, and epidemics. When she gets a surprise fax (state-of-the-art technology in 1992, if not in 2012, and one example in the piece of technology as a means of connectivity), she is excited to realize that it comes from the future and that some people are still alive in the year 2092. Nature, however, has become unfit for human habitation and virtually disappeared from the experience of these survivors, who live in giant glasshouses that harbor artificially recreated landscapes, not unlike the facilities of the Biosphere 2 research project.76 Weather is simulated; animals are high-­ tech products of genetic engineering, used as odorless pets or headless,

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tube-fed providers of “flesh food.”77 As Rosenthal is reading the fax, the spectators learn what it says, bit by bit, through hearing a tape recording of three female voices speaking in unison, presumably the senders of the message, although the content of the fax implies that a computer-based AI system has assisted them in writing it. That these voices speak with an American, a British, and a Japanese accent, respectively, again anticipates the concept of the Capitalocene, which captures not only the fact that “our ecological crises have been precipitated not by humans in some undifferentiated and generalized way, but more specifically by the global spread of capitalism and its socio-economic-ecological injustices,”78 but also that people living in the highly technological societies of wealthy Northern hemisphere countries—that is, those with the greatest responsibility for the global environmental crisis—are both less vulnerable to its effects and better equipped to adapt to them. Providing a brief history of the future, the fax expresses consternation and incomprehension at earlier people’s “BARBARIAN INABILITY TO PERCEIVE THE BIG PICTURE”79 of the vital interconnectedness of all elements of life on earth, which is what led to the “Great Calamity” that is afflicting the world in 2012, on Rosenthal’s time level. Yet while the senders of the fax inform Rosenthal that “ALL IS WELL NOW, WE HAVE PULLED THROUGH AND WON THE DAY,”80 the survivors’ mental horizons, too, bear signs of extreme impoverishment. Deprived of any contact with nature except in the form of products of their own making, their world is characterized by great sterility, conformity, and standardization—and so are their minds. They are appalled by rumors claiming that outside the safe environment of their glasshouses, there are no “NEAT ROWS OF GENETICALLY CLONED TALL TREES WITH THEIR BRANCHES ALL ANGLED AT THE SAME DEGREE, GROWING LUSH AND GREEN IN PREDICTABLE WAYS.”81 Under these circumstances, excepting the ‘primitive’ practices of a handful of ‘deviants’ who have escaped from the compound out of incurable boredom and are trying to survive in the most adverse conditions, both art and religion have vanished. This has cleared the way for the exclusive rule of instrumental reason, as the senders of the fax report in a mélange of grandiosity and loneliness: WE KNOW NOTHING OF THINGS THAT ARE NOT CREATED BY OURSELVES. … ALL THERE IS IS US. …

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WE HAVE NO NEED FOR DOMINATION, SINCE ALL THINGS OWE THEIR EXISTENCE TO US. … WE ARE PROUD OF THE PROGENIES OF OUR COLLECTIVE BRAIN, AND WE SPEND OUR TIME AND ENERGY FABRICATING, CONTROLLING, FINE-TUNING, AND CALIBRATING ALL THERE IS.82

Not only does the piece question the viability and sustainability of a world completely dependent on the saving grace of human technology (it ends with a final, purely computer-generated fax announcing the imminence of the virus-induced death of the human species), it also sends a mixed message about the total conceptual fusion of nature and culture. “Domination is not a viable position when nothing confronts us as Other,”83 Rosenthal pensively repeats to the audience, gazing at her raised hands, which metonymically point to the concept of homo faber, or “Man the Maker,” while simultaneously visualizing the danger of getting lost in a short-sighted, anthropocentric self-absorption. Indeed, the hidden presence of a deadly, mutating virus within the sealed-off glasshouse environment implies that it is impossible to shut out the uncontrollable Other of nature because it permeates the human itself, which makes the proclaimed “End of Nature”84 a blind delusion. Nevertheless, abolishing ‘domination,’ or exploitative relationships, between human and non-human agents is indeed one of the urgent ethical imperatives suggested by “The Big Picture.” The piece clearly endorses this view, yet it seems skeptical that the rule of homogenizing, commodifying, utility-oriented ‘techno-logic’ is the way to get there. In point of fact, filename: FUTURFAX stages a kind of becoming-machine that reproduces rather than erases structures of exclusion and oppression. After all, not only do the glasshouse people stigmatize ‘deviants,’ they also justify the creation of living things shockingly reduced to the function of providing meat by denying them animal status. Thus, Rosenthal, in an on-stage act of becoming-machine, transforms into the character of a “robotic docent … with a snobbish and superior attitude”85 and declares unsympathetically, “flesh food can no longer be termed ‘animals’ since most is pooled and the rest is headless.”86 Becoming-machine is shown to result in making-machine as Rosenthal’s persona, fully immersed as she is in a completely purpose-oriented and technologically mediated world, fails to recognize the force of zoe flowing through both the non-human creatures’  bodies and her own. In effect, this amounts to a paradoxical

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reinforcement of Cartesian mind-body dualism: Hypnotized by the “head-­ magic”87 of technoscience, the robotic persona  defines those  creatures entirely in terms of their unidentifiability and their missing heads, enabling her to reduce them to their potential use value and treat them as machines. Insofar as becoming-machine contributes to a marginalization of the body and its affective power, the piece thus shows it to be ethically untenable.

Becoming-Animal While Rosenthal was skeptical of becoming-machine, she eagerly sought to support processes of becoming-animal. In Braidotti’s terms, becoming-­ animal concerns a transformation of subject structures in the direction of “the displacement of anthropocentrism and the recognition of trans species solidarity on the basis of our being … embodied, embedded and in symbiosis with other species.”88 Although Braidotti adopts the expression from Deleuze and Guattari, she clarifies that she does not feel bound to their way of using it.89 Haraway, in her explorations of the practices of “becoming-with” that constitute cross-species relationships, goes even further and declares that she has “no truck” with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, which, she states, is less interested in actual animals than in animals as rhetorical figures, which they construct around a false dichotomy of “wild” vs. “domestic” and to which her own project is very much opposed.90 Whereas, as she maintains, “little house dogs and the people who love them are the ultimate figure of abjection for D&G, especially if those people are elderly women, the very type of the sentimental,”91 Haraway draws particular attention to “the daily, the ordinary, the affectional”92 processes of interspecies relationality and the complex sympoietic acts of embodied communication they involve. Rosenthal’s own engagement with human-animal interactions was based on a posthumanist attentiveness to concrete material-semiotic realities and ethical-­ political issues but also extended to artistic questions of creativity and the imagination. In her private life, Rosenthal was always surrounded by a multitude of companion animals, many of whom also found their way into her work. Her piece Leave Her in Naxos (1981), for example, included a series of slides of the loves of her life, one of which showed her cat Dibidi, who had survived an accident that left her paraplegic at age six, lived to the age of eighteen, and died in Rosenthal’s arms. “[S]he taught me how to live, and she taught me how to die,” Rosenthal stated.93 At the end of Traps

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(1982), a piece about the human tendency to push one’s luck in the face of foreseeable catastrophes, which she attributed to destructive zero-sum thinking and a reductionist failure to attune to the systemic interrelatedness of “The Big Picture,” she introduces the audience to her rat Tatti Wattles. To find a way out of our destructive behavior patterns, she suggests, we need to change how we perceive ourselves in relation to the world surrounding us. After listing a variety of scientific findings indicating that “at the very basic core of my being where I am nothing but a dance of particles, every one of these particles is mysteriously connected to every other particle in the universe,”94 she proceeds to translate these fundamental affinities, which form the nucleus of zoe, into the dimension of lived experience. Declaring that “so long as there are untapped sources of tenderness and affection in this world, even coming from the most unlikely places, we are not to give up the day,”95 she brings out her rat, an animal likely to inspire disgust and fear in some spectators due to its stereotypical association with dirt and disease. As she places him on her shoulder and they begin to circle the performance space together, Chopin’s Etude Op. 25, No. 1 (the “Aeolian Harp” Etude) begins to play, a gentle, rippling piece which centers on arpeggios and, thus, musically  implies a sort of interconnectedness. Simultaneously, the spectators are presented “slide projections of ROSENTHAL’s hands holding TATTI, combing him, petting him, etc., focussing on the affectionate bond between them.”96 In this way, Traps turns into an étude of its own in that it provides an opportunity, for all co-participants, to ‘practice’ and evolve their skills of relating across difference, affectively and bodily. Drawing on the basic structure of performance—that is, its functional principle of sympoietic relationality—and putting it to work on the stage (between the performers) as well as beyond the stage (between performers and spectators), the piece anticipates Haraway’s insight that “[a]n embodied communication is more like a dance than a word.”97 As Haraway explains, “all the actors become who they are in the dance of relating, not from scratch, not ex nihilo, but full of the patterns of their sometimes-joined, sometimes-separate heritages both before and lateral to this encounter. All the dancers are redone through the patterns they enact.”98 This is where the transformative power of Rosenthal’s performances lies. In the ardent consciousness-raising piece The Others (1984), a scathing indictment of human cruelty toward non-human animals, Rosenthal harnesses this transformative power to initiate concrete, practical change. Addressing a multitude of socially accepted forms of violence against

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animals, she provides the audience with both personal, anecdotal accounts of human callousness and aggression in animal contexts and an extensive collection of facts and figures about practices taking place in factory farming, meat and fur production, and animal testing and experiments. Over the course of the performance, she morphs seamlessly into a dizzying array of characters and personae ranging from her childhood self to her role as activist-educator, from helpless bystander to witness giving testimony, and from various types of (presumptuous, greedy, coolly casual, or ruthlessly self-righteous) animal tormentors to terror-stricken animal. Combining expansive empathy with critical (self-)analysis in a characteristically bidirectional move, she seems to recognize parts of herself in all those positions. Rosenthal’s decision to represent, that is, embody and ‘speak for,’ a non-human animal is bound to raise some questions, at least from a twenty-first-century perspective. Among animal studies scholars, anthropomorphism is a highly contested practice because, on the one hand, “animals cannot ‘speak back’—neither to humanist hegemonies or to anything else. To make them speak is not to write their faces; it is usually to write ours, to indulge that anthropomorphic reflex that is all too often rooted in an anthropocentric outlook.”99 On the other hand, as Claire Parkinson points out, rejections of anthropomorphism are likewise often grounded in anthropocentric views, notably in the dualistic denial of feeling and consciousness to non-human animals;100 moreover, she draws attention to widespread, often gendered “pejorative alignments between empathy, anthropomorphism and sentimentality”101 that delegitimize emotional responses toward animals and are often accompanied by charges of emotional manipulation. “The reductive assumption that is then allied to such thinking,” she remarks, “supposes that emotion cannot exist in conjunction with reason.”102 Rosenthal is clearly well aware of the situation Parkinson describes. “I am what they call a ‘bleeding heart humaniac,’ aka ‘little old lady in tennis shoes,’”103 she wryly tells her spectators as she appears on stage, dressed in a long red bathrobe and black jogging shoes. Still, driven by a haunting sense of responsibility and complicity, she feels the urge to give testimony, with an assemblage of people and dogs “lined up and watching [her] like a jury.”104 In a series of highly physical struggles, she therefore fights both against her urge to look away from the images of suffering animals she is confronted with and against the adverse structural conditions keeping her tongue-tied, in particular the pervasive tradition of human/animal dualism maintaining that “1. Only man is

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rational. / 2. Only man possesses language. / 3. Only men are objects of moral concern.”105 Under the weight of these impediments, she actually seems to be “sinking into quicksand,”106 descending into the orchestra pit and slowly disappearing from view. Rosenthal thus problematizes her position as speaking subject, staging it as located at the intersection of a complex set of power relations within the politics of representation: in a position of dangerous power as she feels herself ethically called upon to ‘speak for’ others who cannot speak for themselves, yet, at the same time, in a position of (relative) powerlessness insofar as the subject position from which she is speaking—that of a ‘little old lady’ with a ‘bleeding heart’—is associated, in the discourse of Cartesian dualism, with frail corporeality, irrationality, insignificance, and speechlessness (“Only man possesses language”). It is from this ambivalent subject position that Rosenthal’s persona takes the risk of trying to speak, and it is the embodied, objectified ‘otherness’ women and animals share, to differing degrees, within a dualistic framework, that she stages in her performative becoming-animal. In the process, she asserts her own voice and agency as a woman, an activist, and an artist, while simultaneously seeking to point beyond herself and destabilize dualist structures by anthropomorphically visualizing the embodied blending of human and non-human animals. To accomplish this, Rosenthal does not keep the stage for herself. The large number of co-performers with whom she shares the stage in The Others includes a total of more than forty live animals—“dogs, cats, reptiles, birds, farm animals, research animals, pet rats, exotics, horses, and pigs,”107 all of whose names are made known to the audience in a ritualistic ceremony at the end of the performance. In one of the performances of The Others, all animals came from a local shelter, and the occasion of the performance was used to find them new homes. “All dogs and cats were thus adopted,” the performance script states.108 Rather than making its animal participants disappear behind some imposed role, the piece seeks to enhance their visibility by offering them a stage to perform themselves and introduce their own, non-human dynamic. “When onstage, the animals were left to just be themselves,” Rosenthal later explained. “The unmounted horse walked, the monkeys scrambled around on and off their attendant person, the birds perched on hands, a turkey pecked at seeds on the floor, the boas were draped around necks.”109 The presence of an “attendant person” for each animal demonstrates that the human necessarily remains a reference point and co-determining factor in any artistic exploration of the non-human; indeed, masking the human involvement

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would detract from the political dimension of the piece. Rosenthal draws additional attention to the inevitable element of human filtering by projecting live video footage of the animals on a large screen. In spite of this trace of irreducible difference, however, the animals make their bodily presence poignantly tangible, presenting themselves in their vitality, beauty, and individuality rather than being reduced to their precarious vulnerability or the capacity to feel pain and suffer. Charging the performance space with their different appearances, sounds, smells, and movements, they invite visceral, affective responses in their—equally embodied, equally zoe-embedded—human co-participants, both on and off the stage. “Bodies affect and are affected,” Parkinson stresses. “Undoing the centrality of the rational, speaking human subject … the affective turn enables an acknowledgement that humans and other animals are affected by one another, a relationality that posits a different type of connection between interacting entities.”110 In enabling and encouraging affective, relational trans-species encounters, the piece ultimately raises the question if, outside of dualist discourses, it really is the non-human animals who cannot ‘speak’—or if it is the human animals who do not listen.

Becoming-Earth Another axis along which, according to Braidotti, a posthuman restructuring of subjectivity needs to take place is that of becoming-earth. This “shift towards a planetary, geo-centred perspective,” she contends, “is a conceptual earthquake of an altogether different scale than the becoming-­ animal of Man.”111 Focusing, in this context, on issues pertaining to climate change and the Anthropocene, Braidotti primarily tackles the question of how to respond efficiently to these global challenges without either resorting to an exclusively “negative kind of bonding” based entirely on a sense of catastrophe and shared vulnerability or relying upon a generalizing concept of “common humanity” that dismisses and ignores “all the power differentials that are still enacted and operationalized through the axes of sexualization/racialization/naturalization.”112 Again Haraway pursues a related, yet differently accentuated line of thinking. Playing with the etymological links between ‘human’ and ‘humus’ that identify humans in terms of earthly beings, she highlights the task of “becoming human, becoming humus, becoming terran”113 as a way of “stay[ing] with the naturalcultural multispecies trouble on earth.”114 Accordingly, her version of becoming-earth is different from Braidotti’s in that it involves a strong

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element of tangible materiality and ‘muddiness.’ Both perspectives are valuable for discussing how Rosenthal experimented with processes of becoming-earth in her own work. Earth figured prominently in several of Rosenthal’s pieces, whether as substance, planet, system, or goddess. Repeatedly, her stage settings included piles of soil. Linking them to her characteristic self-explorations, she visualized human groundedness in the ‘vital,’ that is, life-giving and life-sustaining matter of earth. Rachel’s Brain (1987), for example, a piece about the meaning of reason and the relationship of body and mind, features as its central object a cauliflower head, which Rosenthal uses to represent her brain (and, by extension, the human brain) in a visual pun.115 “Enlightenment undernourishes me,”116 she laments in the role of the about-to-be-beheaded Marie Antoinette,117 whose two-foot-high wig and repelled hostility toward the body illustrate her one-sided identification with her high-order cerebral functions: I am a thought machine! Je pense donc je suis. La tête c’est moi. … The others are below. The others, foraging in the dirt for grubs are beasts. … Only my head has weight. My body is inexistent, but I hate it nonetheless. Remnant of a filthy past, of connections I’d rather forget, of organic fallibility I choose to ignore. Reminder of bloody wombs, smelly placentas, disgusting semen, tampons, cramps, solitary pleasures, taped fingers, the rod …118

The piece marks an attempt at relocating the mind, that elusive center of self-consciousness, in the depths of the physical world, reclaiming mental properties for the body as a whole and, furthermore, extending the mind beyond the supposed boundaries of the individual, into its manifold interactions with its environment and its ties to the evolutionary past. Though unfolding throughout the piece, this view of the mind and the thinking subject is concentrated in Rosenthal’s ritualistic act of literally and symbolically bringing the mind, in the shape of and embodied by the cauliflower head, back down to earth. She empties a bowl of soil, which has all along been sitting behind a black box that has blocked it from view, onto the stage, implants the cauliflower in the heap of earth, and waters it while

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accompanying the procedure with a chant, with a musician supporting her. Reminiscent of a kind of healing ceremony, the scene creates a sensuous atmosphere that is not fully translatable into the abstract language of the Logos (the word/reason); its experience is conditional on, and affects, the inextricably interconnected functions of both physical and mental faculties. As Kate Rigby explains: Recognizing our somatic susceptibility to the impressions that something, someone, or someplace make on us, our own emotional affectedness by the atmospheres they generate, we recognize ourselves as sharing with them a physical existence as a bodily being. Recovering a sense of our own corporeality, we discover that we are ecological selves, existing in environments and with others by whom or which our psycho-somatic disposition is inevitably inflected.119

In this manner, Rosenthal’s ‘becoming-humus’ foregrounds the complex interactions between cognitive, sensory, and affective processes, all of which are ultimately grounded in the body and, therefore, in matter. In chanting—that is, in uniting speech and song—Rosenthal and the musician merge the potential of the Logos with experiential, sensory-aesthetic qualities, thus experimenting with integrated, holistic ways of ‘making sense.’ Importantly, this undertaking is aimed at counteracting an overpowering hegemony of “cortical”120 thinking, not at simply dismissing it. As a matter of fact, Chaudhuri remarks that “Rosenthal sometimes comes across as a professor herself, giving lectures accompanied by slides or placards, … because she believes passionately that ideas are vital to our survival, and that it is the duty of artists to disseminate the best scientific and philosophical ideas of our times.”121 It is detached, one-sided, uncoupled rationalism that Rosenthal considers destructive and, in effect, irrational, both on a small and a large scale. Alluding to her long-standing binge-­ eating problem, her stage persona enters into a farcical argument with her stomach, which keeps telling her that it is full while she insatiably shreds piece after piece of cauliflower in a blender, insisting that “I know I’m hungry because my head tells me I’m starved! … The appestat is in the brain.”122 As the piece implies, Rosenthal sees a similar mechanism of disavowed feedback relations at work in the voracious desires manifesting themselves in the excesses of consumerism and capitalism in wealthy industrialized countries. “Where go the wastes? … Where goes the

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garbage?”123 her stomach remonstrates, but her persona is relentless in her linear, unidirectional logic. “I don’t give a shit. I’ll think of something. Tomorrow’s another day! … Toss it in the Third World!”124 she replies. Conscious of the “linked metabolisms … of economies and ecologies, of histories and human and nonhuman critters,”125 Rosenthal hints at the second of Barry Commoner’s famous “four laws of ecology and economic production,” “everything must go somewhere,”126 and at the fact that, where there is a sharp power divide, those perceived as Other, as cut off from oneself, are often those on whom unwanted side effects are imposed. In this sense, her process of ‘becoming-humus’ stretches beyond personal concerns and encompasses a suggestion of ‘becoming-terran.’ To explore large-scale processes of becoming-earth, however, Rosenthal most frequently engaged the metaphor of Gaia. A complex, polysemous figuration, the Gaia paradigm oscillates between several partially conflicting frames of reference and aspects of meaning. Scientifically, the Gaia hypothesis, as put forward by atmospheric chemist James Lovelock in collaboration with Lynn Margulis, states that all of Earth can plausibly be regarded as one self-regulating, evolving system, which has been emerging from the interactions of the planet’s living and nonliving matter. Organisms began to evolve through symbiogenetic fusions and exchanges with their inorganic environment; both poles have since been modifying and co-­ creating each other in ways that have proved conducive to sustaining and developing life but are now being disturbed by the large-scale systemic consequences of human activities. Mythologically, Gaia (ancient Greek for “Earth”) refers to the most primeval of the Greek deities, older than all the Olympian gods and goddesses and associated with chthonic cults. This Gaia is the ancestress of all that lives, an archetypal mother figure who arose from chaos and gave birth to all matter. Rosenthal, who considered the existence of life on Earth “the sacred fact in our consciousness,”127 a source of awe, wonder, and inspiration, preserved this mythic background in her work and linked it not only to the scientific Gaia hypothesis but also to the image of the “Triple Goddess” (comprising the aspects of Maiden, Mother, and Crone), a popular figure in New Age feminist spirituality who personifies the “animating and life-generating energy that flows through and interconnects all things”128 and represents both the nexus between unity and multiplicity and the (fully immanental) cyclical principle of growth, decay, and renewal. In her typical manner, Rosenthal brings all of these aspects together— sometimes in a dialogue, sometimes in a fusion—and connects them to

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her own life. Gaia, Mon Amour (1983), for instance, a meditation on the tension between the forces of merging and individuation, combines memories of Rosenthal’s difficult relationship with her mother with a mythologically inspired reimagination of changing cultural attitudes toward Gaia, leading her back in time to face the trial of an ancient sacrificial fertility rite. The piece features an earthen sculpture representing the ‘Mother’— Gaia as much as Rosenthal’s human mother. In the persona of a homeless “bag lady” with a clown nose, Rosenthal smacks the figure with a twig, disgustedly challenging her to “[f]ight back! Don’t take this lying down!”129 Then suddenly interrupting herself, she expresses dissatisfaction with her performance and decides to “start over again.”130 All goes dark, then the sound of a bomb is heard, followed by silence, a Geiger counter, whale sounds, and chanting. When the lights come back on, Rosenthal has transformed into Gaia. Surrounded by recreations of Stone-Age ‘goddess’ sculptures, she crawls, with animal-like movements, through a large pile of garbage, then stands and addresses the audience. Quite literally, then, her personification of Gaia makes clear what Bruno Latour describes as one of the greatest strengths of the Gaia metaphor (which, as he writes, is actually a composite of “many contrary metaphors”131), namely that “what, as far as we remember, had constituted a solid but distant and faithful background … has now become … an actor, at least an agent, let’s say an agency whose irruption or intrusion upon the foreground modifies what it is for the human actors to present themselves on the stage.”132 Correspondingly, Rosenthal-Gaia tells the spectators in a loud, angry voice that, although she is now considered “synonymous with dirt,”133 she was once known as Gaia, “the first and most powerful of the Gods.”134 From an account of her divine feats—manifestations of the generative powers of zoe—she segues seamlessly into a more Lovelockian self-definition as “[a] self-regulating cybernetic system. / All of my biota … work unwittingly together to sustain optimum conditions for all of life on my Body”135 before presenting herself in yet another light: “I am the Matrix. / You are in and of my Body. / I am the Mother. / I am the Daughter. / I am the Lover. / But scorned, I am also Lilith, the Maid of Desolation.”136 Again bringing to mind Latour’s vindication of the Gaia metaphor, Rosenthal’s invocation of Gaia thus illustrates that “[w]hereas you could consider ‘geo’ from the outside standpoint of a disinterested observer, with ‘Gaia’ you are inside it while hearing the loud crashing of outside/inside boundaries.”137

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As not only Latour’s recent remarks indicate, Gaia has attracted renewed ecocritical interest in the wake of the rising popularity of the notion of the Anthropocene. Both paradigms indeed direct critical attention to a number of the same environmentally relevant issues, including global systemic interdependencies, interrelations between small-scale and large-scale events, and the dimension of deep time. This explains why Rosenthal’s pieces, which were created before the term was widely known, resonate with some of the central ideas of the Anthropocene.138 In spite of these overlaps between the two paradigms, however, Gaia primarily seems to find favor with scholars who are critical of the concept of the Anthropocene. Isabelle Stengers, for example, contends that speaking of Gaia underscores that the signified phenomenon “is, and will remain, what can be called a ‘being,’ existing in its own terms, not in the [human] terms crafted to reliably characterise it.”139 In Gaia, Mon Amour, Rosenthal keeps calling this element of unknowability to mind with the help of meaningful, yet enigmatic sounds, such as whale songs or gongs. Haraway, to give another example of an Anthropocene critic, considers Gaia a productive figuration in the context of her own project of “making kin in the Chthulucene,” as she puts it in the subtitle to one of her books. Disapproving of the connotations suggested by the term “Anthropocene,” which focuses on “anthropos” (human/male/“upward looking one”)140 and does not figure “the rich generative home of a multispecies earth,”141 Haraway seeks to contextualize the concept as signifying a disruptive event within the much wider and older framework of the “Chthulucene,” which is her name for “the dynamic ongoing symchthonic forces and powers of which people are a part, within which ongoingness is at stake.”142 Glimpses into the history-in-progress of the Chthulucene, Haraway asserts, are offered by “myriad names … telling of linked ongoing generative and destructive worlding and reworlding in this age of the earth,”143 among them “Gaia, Tangaroa, Medusa, Spider Woman, and all their kin.”144 That Rosenthal fully shares this orientation toward the “symchthonic forces” of the Earth is evident from the multitude of more-than-human and other-­ than-­human actants populating her pieces. Like Haraway, she also joins Gaia to a variety of other ‘chthonic’ mythological beings, including not just Lilith but also Baba-Yaga, Turandot, Kali, and Ereshkigal.145 The figure of Gaia has thus returned in contemporary ecocriticism, but it remains a controversial metaphor, especially if coupled to indications of ‘goddess spiritualism.’ Unlike Haraway, who suggests in a tongue-in-­ cheek remark that “[i]t is very hard for a secularist to really listen to the

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squid, bacteria, and angry old women of Terra/Gaia,”146 Braidotti expresses deep skepticism toward spiritually charged environmentalism. Examining the example of deep ecology, to which she considers the Gaia paradigm to belong, Braidotti arrives at the conclusion that the approach is problematically essentialist.147 Coming from a different direction, Greta Gaard voices similar concerns. In a nuanced analysis that is wary of overgeneralizations, she points out that “[c]elebrations of ‘the feminine role,’ the ‘feminine principle,’ or the ‘feminine values’ of goddess spirituality homogenize and essentialize women, equating sex and gender while erasing critical differences like race and class.”148 In Rosenthal’s case, arguably, allusions to ‘feminine’ principles or values are neither exclusively aligned with a specific sex nor with a specific gender; rather, they seek to transform the cultural imaginary by decentering the universalizing category of autonomous, self-identical, capital-M ‘Man’ with the help of a counternarrative of plurality, relationality, and fluidity structured around ‘women.’ While this strategy may still, in some ways, amount to a perpetuation of binary logic, what is much more problematic in Rosenthal’s work is her erasure of the persisting divides of racialized (and to a lesser degree, sociocultural) difference. Gaia, Mon Amour, for example, opens with a prerecorded voice-over poem, a monological address to Gaia, which evokes a series of images of sexualized violence and ends in the lines: “we can do it we can do it / for we are the Master Race / … Stop that whimper or we’ll mace you / for we are the Master Race!”149 The inadequacy of the undifferentiated “we” speaking in this poem is glaring. In suggesting that all of humanity is united in the murderous exploitation of Gaia, the poem homogenizes differing degrees of responsibility. As Haraway rightly observes, “Species Man did not shape the conditions for the Third Carbon Age or the Nuclear Age. The story of Species Man as the agent of the Anthropocene is an almost laughable rerun of the great phallic humanizing and modernizing Adventure.”150 To make matters worse, even though the word “race” can mean “species,” the expression “Master Race” clearly points toward discourses of racial supremacy. As a result, the poem, aiming to, criticize brutal anthropocentric arrogance, ends up making  invisible the racialized oppression that people of color continue to be subjected to. Inadvertently, Rosenthal’s work thus provides examples proving Braidotti right in her warning that some versions of becoming-earth threaten to obscure or make light of oppression and power differentials within the human population of Earth. It would have gained from Braidotti’s careful reminder that “[w]e—the dwellers of this planet at this point in time—are

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confronted by a number of painful contradictions: we are interconnected but also internally fractured by structural injustices and discrepancies in access to resources. Instead of new generalizations, we need sharper focus on the complex singularities that constitute our respective locations.”151

Becoming-Imperceptible: Zoe, Death, and Metamorphosis In her attempt to rework subjectivity in a posthuman, non-­anthropocentric way, Braidotti emphasizes the manifold interdependencies of the human not only with the more-than-human and the other-than-human but also with the “inhuman.” Following Lyotard, she describes the inhuman as the “inner core of structural strangeness … the non-rational and non-­volitional core”152 which is, paradoxically, what makes humanity possible in the first place. Identifying death, or the “becoming-imperceptible of the subject,”153 as “the inhuman within,”154 Braidotti asserts that posthuman forms of subjectivity need to incorporate the phenomena of death and dying as manifestations of the unremitting flow of zoe, which necessarily encompasses transformations that amount to degeneration, disintegration, and the dissolution of any bounded, subjective self. “[C]onfronting the thinkability of a Life that may not have ‘me’ or any ‘human’ at the centre is actually a sobering and instructive process,”155 Braidotti points out, but although she acknowledges the pain, fear, and grief inevitably arising from the fact of mortality, she refuses to reduce dying to the aspects of vulnerability and negativity. Instead, she insists that “[w]e need to re-­ think death, the ultimate subtraction, as another phase in a generative process,”156 more concretely encouraging readers to consider death as “the furthest frontier of the processes of intensive transformation or becoming … that is to say a reversal of all that lives into the roar of the ‘chaosmic’ echoing chamber of becoming.”157 Learning to recognize life and death as a continuum, she maintains, is an ethical task that enables compassionate care, an awareness of cosmic relationality, and an affirmative acceptance of transience, or the practice of “amor fati.”158 Rosenthal used her art to grapple with the certainty of death from a similar perspective and in strikingly intense, poignant ways. As performance critic Bonnie Marranca explains: “If one of the most profound philosophical implications of theater is the moment-to-moment dying of the performer’s body

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before the eyes of the audience, Rosenthal carries this thought to an extreme by making it the subject of her performance.”159 Death and dying, or the “disappearance of the individuated self,”160 are events that ultimately go over human heads; in Rosenthal’s words, “[p]erformance SI, concept NO.”161 Her piece L.O.W. in Gaia (1986) stages an epiphanic moment of insight into the reality of her own mortality. Based on a vacation Rosenthal took in the Mojave Desert, the piece takes an ironic look at Rosenthal’s adventures as a “cheery eco-tourist, all cozy and self-satisfied in her minivan.”162 Arriving full of naively romanticizing hopes “to merge, to melt, to fuse … to be ignited, amazed, enchanted … to gaze into the Great Face,”163 preferably without mixing up her busy schedule, she does come across a boulder that seems to have a face. In this inhuman visage, which the audience gets to see in slides, Rosenthal recognizes the face of the Crone, the ruthless and deadly aspect of the Triple Goddess, whom she regards as one exemplification of Gaia. Overwhelmed by the realization that she is about to turn sixty, she starts to turn into the Crone herself. Speaking at first with the feeble voice of a very old woman, then in an increasingly terrifying, powerful, and irresistible roar, she tells her spectators, “I am the Crone. … I am your Death. … You never wish to see me, for I remind you, in all my weakness, that I am stronger than you. … You are mine.”164 Changing her tone yet again, she beckons in a soft, grandmotherly tone, “Come to me now. Come … come … come …”165 The desert, a liminal space between life and death, has thus opened Rosenthal’s eyes to her own existence at the same threshold. Now conscious that death is inescapably inscribed into her very body, she takes out a lipstick and labels her vaguely skull-like shaven head with a blood-red “60,” indicating the limited time she has left before crossing that gateway. While L.O.W. in Gaia thus shows Rosenthal in the face of death, Pangaean Dreams (1990) tries to think beyond it and reconnect her dying with “The Big Picture” of, as Braidotti puts it, “the multiple dynamic forces of zoe that do not coincide with the human, let alone with consciousness.”166 The piece opens with Rosenthal entering the stage in a wheelchair, carrying crutches. Listing a long series of fractures and other illnesses, she grumpily informs the audience that “1990 was the year my body broke up … A major dismemberment episode!”167 After months of raw, harrowing agony, which brought her to the edge of suicide, she has come to think of her pain as a “live-in lover” who is offering her “more sensation than any Dionysian, sado-masochistic fantasy could ever

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provide.”168 Trying to make sense of her ordeal, she decides to treat her “dismemberment” as a quasi-shamanic—and, therefore, potentially productive—rite of passage. In shamanism, the ability to travel into spiritual other- or underworlds is often the result of an initiation process involving “either a mysterious illness or a more or less symbolic ritual of mystical death, sometimes suggested by a dismemberment of the body,”169 which empowers initiates to enhance their perceptive and communicative faculties and to act as an intermediary between the different worlds. Similarly, Rosenthal now feels prepared to take the audience on a “shamanic journey”170 into the collective unconscious.171 Accompanied by an evocative soundscape and video projections of “very abstract dizzying shots of hands, faces, etc.,”172 the journey leads into “the bowels of the Earth,”173 through chthonic caverns and tunnels, along the food chain and the forces of Eros and Thanatos, deep into the evolutionary and geological past. When she finally reaches the Mesozoic era, Rosenthal comes across the ancient supercontinent of Pangaea (literally “all Earth” or “all Gaia”) and envisions it being formed and torn apart again by the chaotic, titanic forces of plate tectonics and continental drift. Herself metamorphosing into an oceanic plate, she expressionistically falls in line with the slow-moving “rhythms of geology”174 and understands, in between screams of pain, that even the seemingly solid, immovable ground beneath our feet, the crust of the Earth itself, is based on conditions of constant evolution, recycling, and self-renewal. Recognizing the turbulent fracture zones of the mid-­ocean ridge as both her “spine” (her central supporting structure) and a dragon or snake (a symbol of ouroboric transformation), she embraces her transformative disruption in a Nietzschean sort of affirmative amor fati that Braidotti, too, claims as an element of posthuman subjectivity: My spine is the Ridge, the Creator, the Dragon of Genesis, the Snake. … My vertebrae rifted and the break is filled with molten marrow, squeezed through red hot convulsions and painful realignments. I suffer that in exchange for Life. … I accept. I nod YES. My body is crushed, quartered and ground. … I won’t go on forever and I fight for my life.175

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On her return from this aesthetic-spiritual journey of re-membering herself (she has literally been digging up replica of bones from a pile of earth and assembling a ‘body’ over the course of the performance), back in her own renewed skin, Rosenthal finds herself invigorated and able to take heart. Importantly, however, as Chaudhuri stresses, Rosenthal “conducts the ritual for the group,”176 that is, for—and with—her audience. It is not exclusively for her own benefit, then, but also on behalf of her assembled spectators, that she recognizes the zoe-driven cycle of creation, destruction, and recreation as a crucial, enabling fact of the “The Big Picture.” Retrieving the crutches and wheelchair she had resentfully pushed away before, she demonstrates that she is learning to accept her own inextricable involvement in the continuum of life and death. She is acutely aware that it will mean the dissolution of her subjective self in the not-­too-­distant future, but she knows that her extended self is interwoven with all manifestations of life on Earth—and she is determined to savor every moment until her time has come to make the ultimate posthuman transformation: The millennium approaches. I grow older. The plates move. As one moves, all move. That’s the law of Chaos and I accept. I nod YES. I will live my allotted time torn apart by my duality, kicking and screaming all the way. With the violent love of Gaia. With fear and trembling, and tender care. With the Pangaean dinosaur ensconced in my brain. In the Earth. Of the Earth. In the world. Of the world. Eating and shitting and dreaming and loving, whole or broken (hey, nobody’s perfect), until I die!177

Melting the symptoms of her own aging into the deep history of the planet, Rosenthal draws on autobiographical material to create what Marranca calls a “cosmography of herself.”178 She thus makes her audience aware that, although performers may well be said to be dying before their spectators’ eyes, they are also living—and thus: transforming—before them, and with them. “Making friends with the impersonal necessity of death is an ethical way of installing oneself in life as a transient, slightly wounded visitor,” Braidotti writes. “We build our house on the crack, so to speak.”179 Aptly, Rosenthal imagines this crack as a dynamic plate boundary, constantly moving on the strength of ancient elemental forces.

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Conclusion: Rosenthal’s Posthumanism Laying the groundwork for a theory of posthuman subjectivity, Braidotti defines the posthuman subject as a transient concentration of, and within, radically more-than-human, zoe-based flows of becoming, “a relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity, that is to say a subject that works across differences and is also internally differentiated, but still grounded and accountable.”180 Posthuman accountability, she adds, is situated, embodied, and embedded, “based on a strong sense of collectivity, relationality and hence community building.”181 Braidotti thus conceives of posthumanism as a project aiming to transform prevailing understandings of the meaning of subjectivity, emphasizing that such an enterprise “mobilizes more than the cognitive or epistemic qualities of a subject. It also calls for its affective or intensive resources.”182 Sometimes falling short of Braidotti’s theoretical reflections, sometimes challenging them, and often enriching them, all in all, Rosenthal has made a powerful contribution to the posthuman project in the form of her sympoietic, embodied, passionate, and dazzlingly creative performance art. While even her earlier, more conventionally autobiographical pieces undermine notions of subjectivity based on humanistic ideals of universality, individualism, and disembodied, transcendent reason, it is in her later pieces, in which she interweaves the history of her own life with the histories of zoe, that she truly ventures into the terrain of the posthuman. Exploring these pieces along the axes of becoming-machine, becoming-animal, becoming-earth, and becoming-­ imperceptible—which Braidotti has proposed as tools for mapping posthuman subjectivities—opens up useful perspectives on Rosenthal’s art and documents its continuing relevance. Taking audiences on journeys that are intellectual as well as affective, spiritual as well as material, Rosenthal’s performance art experiments with post-anthropocentric forms of subjectivity which affirm the fact of transversal ecological relationality even as they call for humans’ active acceptance of ethical-political responsibility.

Notes 1. Rosenthal, “Oral History Interview.” 2. See Heddon, Autobiography and Performance, 4. 3. Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power, 38 (emphasis added). 4. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 60. 5. Ibid.

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6. See Braidotti, “The Critical Posthumanities,” 381. 7. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 58. Emphasizing assemblages, mixing, and earthbound “becoming-with,” Haraway considers herself “a compostist, not a posthumanist,” 97. Nevertheless, she has had great influence on posthumanism and, on her part, acknowledges being “nourished by much generative work done under that sign,” 32. Large parts of Haraway’s work resonate with Rosenthal’s art, especially since  the former’s focus has started to shift from cyborgs to companion species, and provide important points of reference for this paper. 8. Hughes and Román, “O Solo Homo,” 8. 9. Rosenthal, “Taboo Subjects,” 63. 10. Ibid., 75. 11. See Iser, The Act, esp. 79, 109. 12. Rosenthal, “Conversation,” 569. 13. See Ibid., 570. 14. See Braidotti, The Posthuman, 50, 85, 195. Some of Braidotti’s misgivings seem to rest on a reductive understanding of Romanticism. Thus, she does not acknowledge the Romantic undertones in her own assertion that “[w]hat we humans truly yearn for is to disappear by merging into [the] generative flow of becoming, the precondition for which is the loss, disappearance and disruption of the atomized, individual self,” 136. 15. Rosenthal, The DbD Experience, 102. 16. See ibid., 102–103. 17. Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power, 32. 18. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 5. 19. Ibid., 58. 20. Ibid., 60. 21. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 60. The phrase “intimacy of strangers” derives from Lynn Margulis. See Symbiotic Planet. 22. Rosenthal, Pangaean Dreams, 183. Of course, in light of current climate science and the significance of technologically generated greenhouse gases, this joke has not aged well. 23. Rosenthal, Zone, 56. 24. Ibid. (italics in the original). 25. See Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power, 38–39. 26. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 60. See note 20. 27. Rosenthal, Charm, 22 (italics in the original). 28. Ibid., 18. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 26. 31. Ibid., 28 (italics in the original). 32. Ibid., 24 (italics in the original).

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33. Heddon, Autobiography and Performance, 41. 34. Ibid. (italics in the original). 35. Ibid., 43–44 (italics in the original). 36. Rosenthal’s choice of words and images does not always sit comfortably with various of today’s leading cultural theories, with whose intellectual premises and sensibilities she indeed is not in full agreement. However, her concepts are far more complex and dynamic than her terminology may suggest to contemporary readers. As performance scholar Deirdre Heddon rightly observes, “[a] risk particularly attending autobiographical performance is that the sign ‘autobiography’ serves as an authenticating symbol which underwrites an appeal to an unproblematised truth … The assumed authenticity that attaches to experience serves to equate it with ‘authority’ and personal experience can easily become an unwitting but persuasive guarantor of ‘truth’” (Heddon, Autobiography and Performance, 25–26). Rosenthal’s pieces, however, consistently complicate the truth value of both her experiences and their representation, as I hope to show below. She moreover acknowledged that “the end result of the honesty and truthfulness I try to put into recreating my life is a total mythology. That was really an interesting discovery for me … It’s made up of the same ingredients, and yet it is a complete fabrication” (Rosenthal, “Rachel Rosenthal,” 31). 37. See Rosenthal, “Oral History Interview.” 38. Chaudhuri, “Introduction,” 3 (italics in the original). 39. Rosenthal, Charm, 20. 40. Rosenthal, “Oral History Interview.” 41. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 4. 42. Ibid., 114. 43. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 27. 44. Ibid., 39. 45. Ibid., 87. 46. Braidotti, “Writing,” 176–177. 47. Rosenthal, Charm, 24 (italics in the original). 48. Braidotti, “Writing,” 176–177. 49. Chaudhuri, “Introduction,” 10–11 (italics in the original). 50. See Rosenthal, The DbD Experience, 27. 51. Rosenthal, “Oral History Interview.” 52. Rosenthal, Zone, 58. 53. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 103. 54. Ibid., 131. 55. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 102. Rosenthal’s adherence to the concept of the subject becomes apparent indirectly through her work and interviews. 56. Ibid., 66.

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57. Ibid., 138. 58. Ibid., 92. 59. Ibid., 58. 60. Rosenthal, Pangaean Dreams, 186. 61. Rosenthal, “Oral History Interview.” 62. Rosenthal, Pangaean Dreams, 186. 63. Ibid. The use of the masculine pronoun for the “Autonomous Being” in the sentence containing this quotation corresponds to the usage in Rosenthal’s script. 64. Rosenthal’s bald head, which she first shaved live on stage during Leave Her in Naxos (1981) in “a kind of ritual of dying, of letting go, to allow for rebirth” (Rosenthal, Leave Her in Naxos, 64), soon became her trademark, which she kept for twenty-five years. As she explained, “before doing it, I thought, ‘Well, I’ll let it grow back.’ And then as I saw myself [in] the mirror, I thought, ‘I look now the way I feel.’ It was me. It was the way I felt I truly am” (Rosenthal, “Arrival Story”). 65. Rosenthal, Pangaean Dreams, 186. 66. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 1. The source Braidotti provides (http:// www.carywolfe.com/post_about.html) is no longer available. 67. Rosenthal, Pangaean Dreams, 186. 68. Ibid., 184–186. 69. Ibid., 186. 70. Undeniably, the situation is presenting itself from a somewhat different angle in 2021, when resorting to digital communication technology has become a means both of minding the body, and of making people painfully aware of what technology cannot replace. 71. Rosenthal, filename, 201 (italics in the original). 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., 202 (italics in the original). 74. The term “Capitalocene,” made popular by scholars such as Jason W. Moore and Donna Haraway, stresses the role of capitalism—including, but not limited to, capitalist industrialization—in causing and exacerbating large-scale environmental problems. 75. Ibid. (italics in the original). 76. Biosphere 2 is the name of a large research facility in Southern Arizona. Designed as a materially closed, artificial biosphere, it consists of a series of giant, interconnected glasshouses containing replicas of various ecosystems, for example, farmland, a rain forest, a savanna, and a swamp. In the early 1990s, Biosphere 2 was the location of long-term experiments involving groups of “bionauts” who volunteered to live inside this hermetically sealed environment. 77. Ibid., 212.

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78. Arons, “Tragedies of the Capitalocene,” 17. 79. Rosenthal, filename, 213. The script uses all-caps typography to indicate the contents of the fax. 80. Ibid., 211. 81. Ibid., 215. 82. Ibid., 217–218. 83. Ibid., 218. 84. Ibid., 213. 85. Ibid., 212 (italics in the original). 86. Ibid. 87. Rosenthal, Pangaean Dreams, 185. The term “head-magic” derives from Camille Paglia. 88. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 67. 89. See ibid., 66. 90. See Haraway, When Species Meet, 27–30. 91. Ibid., 30. 92. Ibid., 29. 93. Rosenthal, “Oral History Interview.” 94. Rosenthal, Traps, 91. Rosenthal’s somewhat Emersonian choice of words indicates the Romantic influence on her work, as does her inclusion of Chopin. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid., 92 (italics in the original). 97. Haraway, When Species Meet, 26. For a dancer’s perspective on Rosenthal’s portrayals of human-animal relationships, see Rohman, “Effacing the Human.” 98. Haraway, When Species Meet, 25 (italics in the original). 99. Chaudhuri, “(De)facing the Animals,” 15. 100. Parkinson, Animals, 2. 101. Ibid., 9. 102. Ibid. 103. Rosenthal, The Others, 219. 104. Ibid., 220 (italics in the original). 105. Ibid., 219. 106. Ibid. (italics in the original). 107. Rosenthal, “Animals Love Theatre,” 5. 108. Rosenthal, The Others, 238. 109. Ibid. 110. Parkinson, Animals, 8. 111. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 81. 112. Ibid., 87–88. 113. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 40.

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114. Ibid. 115. Obviously, a head of cauliflower looks similar to a brain. Rosenthal might also be playing on Sartre’s well-known dictum, from “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (1946), that a human being is not a cauliflower. 116. Rosenthal, Rachel’s Brain, 117. 117. Historically speaking, the choice of Marie Antoinette as a personification of rationalism and the Enlightenment is odd. Presumably, what led Rosenthal to make that choice was the symbolic potential of the combined facts of Marie Antoinette’s decapitation and her era’s penchant for outrageous wigs and headdresses (in Rachel’s Brain, Marie Antoinette’s two-foot wig is crowned with a model of a three-master frigate). At the same time, however, the figure of Marie Antoinette also serves as an alter ego pointing to Rosenthal herself. Growing up in her luxurious Parisian home, she says in Charm, she learned early on that “to be charming you mustn’t be curious about the body,” 26. 118. Rosenthal, Rachel’s Brain, 116. 119. Rigby, “Gernot Böhme’s Ecological Aesthetics,” 144. 120. Rosenthal, Rachel’s Brain, 116, 132. 121. Chaudhuri, “Introduction,” 9. 122. Rosenthal, Rachel’s Brain, 126–127. 123. Ibid., 126. 124. Ibid. 125. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 49. 126. Commoner, The Closing Circle. Quoted in Foster, “The Vulnerable Planet,” 32. 127. Rosenthal, The DbD Experience, 27 (italics in the original). 128. Rigby, “The Goddess Returns,” 26. 129. Rosenthal, Gaia, Mon Amour, 144. 130. Ibid. 131. Latour, “Gaia,” 70. 132. Ibid., 62. 133. Rosenthal, Gaia, Mon Amour, 145. 134. Ibid. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid., 145–146. 137. Latour, “Gaia,” 62. 138. For example, as has often been noted, the concept of the Anthropocene and of humankind as a geological force involves thinking in terms of the “future perfect continuous” in that it projects “virtual geologists of an unknown … future who would gather and contemplate data … testifying for a change deserving a name, and who would come to the conclusion that this change was not, this time, caused by ‘natural forces’” (Stengers,

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“Accepting,” 138). To a degree, Rosenthal anticipates this intersection of time frames when, in L.O.W. in Gaia (1986), she stages an irradiated “40th-century monster” digging around in ancient nuclear waste bearing the radiation hazard symbol, which he does not understand. 139. Stengers, “Accepting,” 137. 140. See Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 183n45. 141. Ibid. 142. Ibid., 101. The Greek word khthôn, from which both the term chthonic and Haraway’s coinage Chthulucene are derived, means “earth,” “ground”. 143. Ibid., 51–52. 144. Ibid., 101. 145. Rosenthal, Gaia, Mon Amour, 150. 146. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 185n56. 147. See Braidotti, The Posthuman, 84–86. 148. Gaard, “Ecofeminism Revisited,” 36. 149. Rosenthal, Gaia, Mon Amour, 142. 150. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 47. 151. Braidotti, “The Critical Posthumanities,” 387. 152. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 108–109. 153. Ibid., 136. 154. Ibid. 155. Ibid., 121. 156. Ibid. 157. Ibid., 136. 158. Ibid., 131 (italics in the original). 159. Marranca, “A Cosmography of Herself,” 63. 160. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 137. 161. Rosenthal, Gaia, Mon Amour, 144. 162. Chaudhuri, “Introduction,” 10. 163. Rosenthal, L.O.W. in Gaia, 96. 164. Ibid., 101–102. 165. Ibid., 102. 166. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 138 (italics in the original). 167. Rosenthal, Pangaean Dreams, 176. 168. Ibid., 177. 169. Eliade, Shamanism, 54. 170. Rosenthal, Pangaean Dreams, 178. 171. In his definition of the collective unconscious, C. G. Jung states that it “is not to be thought of as a self-subsistent entity; it is no more than a potentiality handed down to us from primordial times in the specific form of mnemonic images or inherited in the anatomical structure of the brain.

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There are no inborn ideas, but there are inborn possibilities of ideas” (Jung, “Relation,” 80–81). Rosenthal worked with archetypes and Jungian imagery ever since her early days in improvisational theater (see Rosenthal, The DbD Experience, 15). 172. Rosenthal, Pangaean Dreams, 178 (italics in the original). 173. Ibid. 174. Ibid., 188 (italics in the original). 175. Ibid. 176. Chaudhuri, “Introduction,” 5. 177. Rosenthal, Pangaean Dreams, 195. 178. Marranca, “A Cosmography of Herself,” 62. 179. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 132. 180. Ibid., 49. 181. Ibid. 182. Braidotti, “Transposing Life,” 75.

Works Cited Arons, Wendy. “Tragedies of the Capitalocene.” Journal of Contemporary Drama in English 8, no. 1 (2020): 16–33. Braidotti, Rosi. “The Critical Posthumanities; or, Is Medianatures to Naturecultures as Zoe Is to Bios?” Cultural Politics 12, no. 3 (2016): 380–390. ———. The Posthuman. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2013. ———. “Transposing Life.” In Clones, Fakes and Posthumans: Cultures of Replication, edited by Philomena Essed and Gabriele Schwab, 61–78. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. ———. “Writing as a Nomadic Subject.” Comparative Critical Studies 11, no. 2–3 (2014): 163–184. Chaudhuri, Una. “(De)Facing the Animals: Zooësis and Performance.” The Drama Review 51, no. 1 (2007): 8–20. ———. “Instant Rachel.” Introduction. Rachel’s Brain and Other Storms, edited by Una Chaudhuri, 1–13. London: Continuum, 2001. Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Translated by Saskya Iris Jain. London: Routledge, 2008. Foster, John Bellamy. “The Vulnerable Planet.” In Environmental Sociology From Analysis to Action, edited by Leslie King and Deborah McCarthy, 25–37. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. Gaard, Greta. “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-Placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism.” Feminist Formations 23, no. 2 (2011): 26–53.

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Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. ———. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Heddon, Deirdre. Autobiography and Performance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Hughes, Holly, and David Román. “O Solo Homo: An Introductory Conversation.” In O Solo Homo: The New Queer Performance, edited by Holly Hughes and David Román, 1–15. New York: Grove Press, 1998. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978. Jung, C. G. “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry.” In Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, edited and translated by Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull, 65–83. Vol. 15 of The Collected Works of C.G.  Jung. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. Latour, Bruno. “Why Gaia Is Not a God of Totality.” In “Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene,” edited by Nigel Clark and Kathryn Yusoff. Special issue, Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 2–3 (2017): 61–81. Margulis, Lynn. Symbolic Planet. A New Look at Evolution. New  York: Basic Books, 1998. Marranca, Bonnie. “A Cosmography of Herself: The Autobiology of Rachel Rosenthal.” The Kenyon Review 15, no. 2 (1993): 59–67. Parkinson, Claire. Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters. London: Routledge, 2020. Rigby, Kate. “Gernot Böhme’s Ecological Aesthetics of Atmosphere.” In Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, edited by Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby, 139–152. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. ———. “The Goddess Returns: Ecofeminist Reconfigurations of Gender, Nature, and the Sacred.” In Feminist Poetics of the Sacred: Creative Suspicions, edited by Frances Devlin-Glass and Lyn McCredden, 23–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Rohman, Carrie. “Effacing the Human: Rachel Rosenthal, Rats and Shared Creative Agency.” In Performing Animality: Animals in Performance Practices, edited by Lourdes Orozco and Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, 168–186. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Rosenthal, Rachel. “Animals Love Theatre.” The Drama Review 51, no. 1 (2007): 5-7. ———. “Arrival Story: Rachel Rosenthal.” As told to Jeremy Rosenberg, 5 Jan. 2012. KCET. “Arrival Stories.” Accessed March 3, 2021. https://www.kcet. org/history-­society/arrival-­story-­rachel-­rosenthal. ———. Charm. In Rachel’s Brain and Other Storms, edited by Una Chaudhuri, 15–31. London: Continuum, 2001.

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———. “Conversation in Two Parts with Rachel Rosenthal.” By Elaine Barkin. Perspectives of New Music 21, no. 1/2 (1982-1983): 567–581. ———. The DbD Experience: Chance Knows What It’s Doing! edited by Kate Noonan, London: Routledge, 2010. ———. filename: FUTURFAX. In Rachel’s Brain and Other Storms, edited by Una Chaudhuri, 201–219. London: Continuum, 2001. ———. Gaia, Mon Amour. In Rachel’s Brain and Other Storms, edited by Una Chaudhuri, 139–159. London: Continuum, 2001. ———. Leave Her in Naxos. In Rachel’s Brain and Other Storms, edited by Una Chaudhuri, 55–65. London: Continuum, 2001. ———. L.O.W. in Gaia. In Rachel’s Brain and Other Storms, edited by Una Chaudhuri, 95–112. London: Continuum, 2001. ———. “Oral History Interview.” By Moira Roth, September 2–3, 1989. Smithsonian Institution. “Archives of American Art.” Accessed March 14, 2021. www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-­history-­interview-­rachel-­ rosenthal-­13200#transcript. ———. The Others. In Animal Acts: Performing Species Today, edited by Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes, 217–238. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. ———. Pangaean Dreams: A Shamanic Journey. In Rachel’s Brain and Other Storms, edited by Una Chaudhuri, 175–196. London: Continuum, 2001. ———. “Rachel Rosenthal.” Interview by John Howell. Performance Art Magazine, no. 2 (1979): 26–31. ———. Rachel’s Brain. In Rachel’s Brain and Other Storms, edited by Una Chaudhuri, 115–133. London: Continuum, 2001. ———. “Taboo Subjects: An Interview with Rachel Rosenthal.” Conducted by Alexandra Grilikhes. In Rachel Rosenthal, edited by Moira Roth, 60–76. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. ———. Traps. In Rachel’s Brain and Other Storms, edited by Una Chaudhuri, 115–133. London: Continuum, 2001. ———. Zone. The Drama Review 45, no. 1 (2001): 31–58. Stengers, Isabelle. “Accepting the Reality of Gaia: A Fundamental Shift?” In The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, edited by Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne, 134–144. London: Routledge, 2015.

Edges and Extremes in Ecobiography: Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun Jessica White

The dramatic opening of Amy Liptrot’s ecobiography The Outrun (2016) signals how, from the moment Liptrot—the delivered child—enters the world, she is surrounded by extremity: Under whirring helicopter blades, a young woman holds her newborn baby as she is pushed in a wheelchair along the runway of the island airport to meet a man in a straitjacket being pushed in a wheelchair from the other direction. That day, the two twenty-eight-year-olds had been treated at the small hospital nearby. The woman was helped to deliver her first child. The man, shouting and out of control, was restrained and sedated. Orkney – a group of islands at the north of Scotland, sea-scoured and wind-­ battered, between the North Sea and the Atlantic – has a good provision of

J. White (*) UniSA Creative, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Batzke et al. (eds.), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77973-3_4

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services … One thing it does not have, however, is a secure unit for people certified mentally ill and a danger to themselves and others.1

Her father, diagnosed at fifteen with manic depression (now known as bipolar disorder), is the man in the straitjacket and Liptrot is the baby held by her mother in the wheelchair. Her birth has triggered a manic episode in her father, and he is being airlifted to Aberdeen hospital for treatment. The line break before the next paragraph creates a physical distance which the reader’s eye must cross, preparing them for an understanding of how the world of Orkney, particularly its isolation, impacts on its inhabitants. This third paragraph introduces the islands of Orkney and creates a link between the extremes of the man’s mental state and the islands which, as the phrase “sea-scoured and wind-battered” suggests, are shaped by the forceful waves and wind.2 The vignette also highlights the theme of legacy through the image of parents and child, a significant connection because Liptrot inherits her father’s tendency toward extreme emotional states. In dwelling upon relationships between internal and external nature in The Outrun, introduced in this opening section, this chapter responds to Cynthia Huff’s encouragement to attend to posthumanist approaches to life narrative which counter “ventriloquized representationality in favor of a politics of subjectivity that emphasizes relationality and process among disparate types of beings.”3 It examines how Liptrot’s relationships with her external world, including her parents and partner, and Orkney’s wind, rocks, water, and birds, shape her sense of self. I read Liptrot’s representation of these relationships through the lens of ecobiography, a form which details the connections between a human and their ecosystem and which reflects on how these connections mold a self. Ecobiography reveals— whether unwittingly or not—the inseparability of the human and their ecosystem and this, in keeping with the tenets of posthumanism, decenters the human in the narrative. As Liptrot grows into a young woman on Orkney, she longs to escape her island home and eventually runs headlong into the heady experiences of London. The move exacerbates her drinking habit, pushing it into a full-blown addiction, and she finds that her ecosystems in London—both her network of social relationships and the physical environment—cannot support her. She returns to Orkney to reconnect with its natural environment and manage her desire for alcohol. External nature becomes a means for her to moderate her internal nature as she takes up swimming in Orkney’s icy seas and begins a research project counting endangered

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corncrakes. She concludes her book with a reference to the ways wind and water are harnessed for power in Orkney, suggesting that she has learned to live with her own nature. Liptrot’s reconnection with the ecosystems of Orkney, and in particular her search for corncrakes, reveals the correlation between an endangered human self and endangered species. Scientists have indicated that the sixth mass extinction is accelerating, with extinction rates now hundreds or thousands of times faster than the “normal” or “background” rates of the last tens of millions of years.4 When a species disappears “a wide range of characteristics is lost forever, from genes and interactions to phenotypes and behaviors.”5 As humans are not only the primary cause of this mass extinction but also inextricably linked to and shaped by their non-human environment, I would add that, with every species lost on this planet, we also lose a part of ourselves. Against this shadow of loss, ecobiographies such as Liptrot’s are a literary form that has the potential to remind us of these interconnections. Rather than positing, as much nature writing does, that the natural world is merely backdrop or inspiration, it shows that humans are never alone in nature, but that they are always bound up with, affected by, and responsible to other species and the non-human environment. The genre thus invites us to move beyond nature writing to rethink the very concept of “the human” as a relational being that is inextricably linked to and neatly embedded in its material surroundings.

Introducing Ecobiography In “After Auto, After Bio,” Cynthia Huff notes that “[l]auding human life has been central to biography and autobiography since their inception, but posthumanism destabilises human centrality in favour of considering matter, the non-human, and the surroundings in which beings interact.”6 One of its defining features includes the assumption that “subjectivity includes relations to a multitude of non-human ‘others.’”7 With its roots in feminism, it also emphasizes “the feminist notion of embodied and embedded locations.”8 Focusing on humans’ relationships with non-­ human matter effectively decenters the human and, in turn, challenges the traditional foundations of autobiography. The Greek etymology of the term autobiography—autos denotes “self,” bios denotes “life,” and graphe denotes “writing”—provides a concise definition of “self life writing,”9 but what “self” and “life” are thought to signify has changed radically in the last few decades. Linda Anderson notes

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in her survey of autobiography, which has been recognized as a distinct genre since the late eighteenth century, that, from its inception until the mid-twentieth century, it denoted “a unified, unique selfhood which is also the expression of human nature.”10 This understanding of selfhood, she argues, also underpinned the “centrality of masculine – and, we may add, Western and middle class  – modes of subjectivity.”11 However, as Gillian Whitlock reminds us, the approaches of “[f]eminism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, queer theory, postmodernism, disability studies – all have influenced recent criticism by raising questions about the status of the human subject and subjectivity.”12 Posthumanism continues to engage these questions, particularly by illuminating the relationships between humans and non-humans. In life writing, several scholars have meditated on how relationships between the human self and matter pose a challenge to anthropocentrism. Cynthia Huff and Joel Haefner’s analysis of animalographies—narratives in which “the human author ventriloquizes the animal’s voice allegedly to tell his story”13—alongside Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, demonstrates that “[t]he companion species cannot speak; the posthuman perhaps cannot speak,” but relationality—the relationships humans have with companion species—“can be spoken to.”14 Relationality also emerges in zoegraphy, a form which, as Louis van den Hengel illustrates in his discussion of bioart, encourages the perception of lives not as “human” or “other” but rather as a “continuous production of new relationalities.”15 John Ryan proposes a relationality between plants and humans that allows for phytography, or the “writing of plants – as our writing about their lives and their writing about themselves and, possibly, about us in relation to them.”16 Meanwhile, Leigh Gilmore interrogates memoirs of pain to demonstrate how pain “shapes the relationships we have to our bodies and with others” and prompts a consideration of how identity can be represented when it is “interpenetrated and altered by disease and pain.”17 These are but a few instances of how posthumanism can shape life narratives, and I highlight them to demonstrate their emphasis on relationships between, and the blurring of boundaries of, human and non-human lives.18 Ecobiography, too, exhibits these characteristics, but rather than representing a relationship between a human and one other (e.g., a companion animal, a work of bioart, or a tree), it dwells on the relationships between a human and their ecosystem. The genre’s focus on these relationships encourages readers to think of themselves not as separate to an ecosystem, but rather as entwined with it. It invites them to acknowledge

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that, to maintain their selves, they must also be responsible toward this ecosystem. An ecosystem is an “interacting system made up of all the living and nonliving objects in a specified volume of space,” in which the living and nonliving objects are given equal status.19 For example, a nonliving particle of clay and the living plant drawing its nutrition from that clay are both parts of the same ecosystem.20 Ecobiography, therefore, illuminates not only the lives of human and non-humans in that ecosystem but also their equal importance, thereby challenging the anthropocentrism of traditional life writing narratives.21 The term “ecobiography” first appeared in Cecilia Konchar Farr and Philip Snyder’s 1996 essay “From Walden Pond to the Great Salt Lake: Ecobiography and Engendered Species Acts in Walden and Refuge.” The authors describe ecobiography as “a life-story constructed according to a pattern divined internally through the Self’s interaction with the external environment, especially Nature, the multiple exchanges of which (re)present a kind of ecosystem of the Self.”22 In these life stories, they continue, “it is impossible to tell where the Self ends and Nature begins or where Nature ends and the Self begins: ego and eco are inextricably intertwined.”23 In 2001, Smith and Watson included a definition of ecobiography in Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, describing it as “life writing that interweaves the story of a protagonist with the story of the fortunes, conditions, geography, and ecology of a region and reflects on their connection (sometimes failed) as a significant feature of the writing.”24 The key word in this definition is “reflects,” and it is this verb which distinguishes ecobiography from environmental history (and from Mark Cioc’s The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000). While both environmental history and ecobiography detail interactions between humans and their natural world in the past, ecobiography presents the narrator’s personal, and often emotional, meditations on this interaction. Nearly a decade passed before scholars returned to ecobiography, when Smith and Watson expanded and reprinted their Reading Autobiography in 2010. In their updated definition of ecobiography, they provided a wider range of examples, including Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-­ Proof Fence (1996). This is an account of three First Nations Australian girls who, due to the forcible removal of First Nations children from their families to assimilate them into white culture (later known as the Stolen Generations), were taken from their homes at Jigalong in Western Australia

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and moved to government settlements at Moore River in the south. The girls escaped and walked 1600 kilometers along the rabbit-proof fence (erected to keep rabbits out of Western Australia) to get back home. Smith and Watson observe that this story “can be read as an ecobiography of children living off the land in their attempt to escape violent severance from their homeland.”25 This is significant because it recognizes that the deep history of First Nations people’s inhabitation of their countries in Australia has created an abiding relationship between themselves, their fellow beings, and the places they inhabit.26 These relationships between human, non-human, and place nod to Stacey Alaimo’s conceptualization of posthumanism as a form of “situated theorizing” which operates “through a kind of grounded immersion rather than bodiless flight.”27 Alaimo’s phrasing serves to join theory with the earth, or ground, and with the body, which echoes ecobiography’s focus on the ways in which the self is inflected by information that the body receives from its environment. This, in turn, evokes corporeal feminist Elizabeth Grosz’s metaphor of the Möbius strip, the inverted three– dimensional figure eight, which she uses in Volatile Bodies: “The Möbius strip has the advantage of showing the inflection of mind into body and body into mind, the ways in which, through a kind of twisting or inversion, one side becomes another.”28 Thus, she argues, “all the effects of subjectivity, all the significant facets and complexities of subjects, can be as adequately explained using the subject’s corporeality as a framework as it would be using the conscious or the unconscious.”29 While Grosz explores subjectivity in relation to gender and sexuality, environment also has an indelible bearing on one’s responses. The environment pours through our body, our mind receives it, shapes it, and responds accordingly. An ecobiography is then a piece of life writing which shows the porousness of body, mind, and environment. Against this theoretical backdrop, I will now turn to Liptrot’s reflection on the world in which she was raised to contemplate the impact of Orkney’s ecosystem on her construction of self.

Human/Nature After traveling north until they could find a farm they could afford, Liptrot’s parents moved to the west coast of the largest island of the Scottish archipelago, known as Mainland. Liptrot was thus raised in an “edge place,”30 inundated by the powerful winds emanating from the North Sea. This archipelago off Britain’s northeast coast has around

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twenty islands with a total population of 22,270, according to the 2019 census. It has been described as a place where one might slip “off the top of many British maps,”31 indicating its remoteness, at least for Liptrot who is later drawn to the capital of the United Kingdom. Her story does not follow the conventional chronological cradle-to-­ grave structure often found in traditional autobiography. Although the Prologue begins with Liptrot’s arrival in the world, the first chapter charts Liptrot’s return to Orkney after her time in London. The work then delves into Liptrot’s history, creating a circular movement that demonstrates the relationships between her past and present selves, and between these selves’ experiences of two vastly different places: Orkney and London. This is signaled in the opening line of Chapter One, titled “The Outrun”: “On my first day back I shelter beside an old freezer, down by some stinging nettles, and watch the weather approach over the sea. The waves crashing do not sound very different from the traffic in London.”32As the chapter continues, Liptrot introduces the conceit that ties these aural relationships together: that of the outrun. The term “outrun” denotes the rough grazing land on the furthest reaches of a property. It is “only semi-tamed, where domestic and wild animals co-exist and humans don’t often visit so spirit people are free to roam.”33 This suggests a liminal place, one that is between the human and otherworldly, between domestic and wild, between managed and unconstrained. It is an apt introduction to Liptrot’s story which describes her attempt to find a place that satisfies her desire for sensory extremes, without pushing her body completely over the edge. Not surprisingly, edges feature often in The Outrun. The farm is rimmed by the island’s cliffs, where things can literally fall off the edge. Liptrot describes a collie pup that “set off chasing rabbits in a gale, did not notice the drop and was never seen again,”34 while a neighbor, leaving his tractor running to open a gate, forgot to put the handbrake on; “[h]e could not run fast enough to catch it as it accelerated  and, with unstoppable force, the expensive machine plunged over the edge of the cliff and smashed into the Atlantic.”35 These falls prefigure Liptrot’s later descents into alcoholism and depression in London, indicating how Orkney’s environment and the trajectory of her life are knitted together. A racing pup, or else a tractor moving with “unstoppable force,” also illustrates Orkney’s astonishing weather, which is so forceful it can be said to have agency. As Laura Watts describes in Energy at the End of the World:

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[W]ords such as “wind” and “windy” are redefined in Orkney. They are no longer mild inconveniences, but powerful enough to close schools for safety reasons – there is a risk that small children will get blown away – and to stop the ferry from bringing in fresh food for several days, leaving the supermarket shelves bare and people reaching into the chest freezer.36

The wind is an entity that shapes humans’ behavior, encouraging them to keep children at home and be resourceful with food. Liptrot observes that “[t]he westerly gales are the worst, bringing the sea with them, and tonnes of rock can be moved overnight, the map altered in the morning.”37 Humans in Orkney must negotiate with the elements to rewrite their maps and establish where they are now located; the weather requires constant mindfulness and interaction. Liptrot and Watts’ descriptions of the wind’s decentering of humans by swaying and shaping them points to the agency of matter, one of posthumanism’s hallmarks. As Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann note, “agency assumes many forms, all of which are characterized by an important feature: they are material, and the meanings they produce influence in various ways the existence of both human and non-human natures.”38 Political theorist and posthumanist scholar Jane Bennett demonstrates this in the opening of Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, in which she meditates on items collected in a storm drain outside a bagel shop in Baltimore: a man’s plastic work glove, pollen, a dead rat, a plastic cap, and a smooth stick of wood. As she encounters these things, Bennett writes, they shimmied back and forth between debris and thing—between, on the one hand, stuff to ignore, except insofar as it betokened human activity (the workman’s efforts, the litterer’s toss, the rat-poisoner’s success), and, on the other hand, stuff that commanded attention in its own right, as existents in excess of their association with human meanings, habits, or projects. In the second moment, stuff exhibited its thing-power: it issued a call, even if I did not quite understand what it was saying.39

This call beckons Bennett, prompting the recognition that the things are impacting on her—she is disgusted by the rat, for example. They are not merely passive, inanimate objects; rather, they compel a reaction. The effect of this, she argues, is that “the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated. All bodies become more than mere objects.”40 In The Outrun, the weather and geology of the islands are bodies too. They affect

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Liptrot and her father not only externally, but also internally, mirroring and perhaps calling to their natures.

Inherited Nature Some people on the west coast of Orkney, including Liptrot’s father, “say they experience tremors or booms sometimes, low echoes that seem strong enough to vibrate the whole island while at the same time being quiet enough to make them wonder if they imagined it.”41 Liptrot, considering the island’s geology, wonders if the booms are caused by waves traveling into coves deep in the island’s rocks, trapping and compressing air at a high pressure. When the wave leaves, the “air bubble explodes, causing a boom.”42 Explanations include sonic booms produced by aircraft from the Ministry of Defense, stationed nearby, undertaking training, or “other, hard to grasp, even ghostly, island forces”43 such as the mythical sea monster, the Stoorworm. The connotations of these booms, of forces seeking a release, also correspond to her father’s highs. Both suggest a moment in which a force beyond the self—be it waves or a jet engine—bursts out. Similarly, the reference to the legendary Stoorworm, whose teeth are said to have formed the islands of Orkney, Shetland, and the Faroes, suggests that her father’s mental illness comes from another realm, beyond everyday life. There is a sense that he, like his daughter, inhabits an edge place like the outrun, visited by sprites. Liptrot mentions her trepidation that a conversation with her father about the tremors, which veers from their usual exchanges about farm life, might signal another of his manic episodes. She refers to the presence of his episodes during her childhood as the “rumblings of mental illness under my life,”44 recalling the booms deep in the island’s rocks. In her musings, she recounts how, when she was eleven, her father was so ill that he went round the farmhouse smashing all the windows one by one. The wind flew through the rooms, whisking my schoolwork from my desk. When the doctor arrived with tranquilisers, followed by the police and an ambulance, I yelled at them to go away. He’d been taken by something beyond his control.45

Liptrot does not want her father to be sedated, because she loves him and accepts his nature. She may also, as signified by her link between the wind that disturbs the order of her life (indicated by the schoolwork whirling

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from her desk) and the external force that takes her father, conflate herself with him. His removal might then portent a removal, or suppression, of her own nature—an occurrence which, as I outline below, eventually unfolds. Liptrot references this conflation more explicitly when staying with her father on the farm after she has spent a decade away. She accompanies him to the outrun to tend to some livestock and her father describes how, in a moment of mania, he once slept there when he was high. Reflecting on this, Liptrot writes, “[a]t the end of the day, crouched away from the wind beside the freezer again, rolling a cigarette and eyeing the livestock, I have become my father.”46 She is referring not just to her physical location on the outrun but also to her recent experiences in London, where her craving for extremes of sensation, and her tendency to addiction, drive her deeper into alcohol. Liptrot muses that her drinking was “in part an attempt to attain the manic states I’d experienced through my father … In a way, my drunkenness was an attempt to emulate and even impress, although I didn’t succeed, my dad: I was wild and free and alive.”47 This connection between father and daughter once again recalls Grosz’s description of the Möbius Strip, not only through the ways in which the body becomes the mind and vice versa but also through the endlessness of this inflection as it is passed down through inheritance. Liptrot reinforces the theme of inheritance when she yokes the island’s energy to her family’s history. She suggests that the “rumblings” of mental illness in her life were “amplified by the presence of my mother’s extreme religion and by the landscape I was born into, the continual, perceptible crashing of the sea at the edges,” then adds, “[e]nergy never expires. The energy of waves, carried across the ocean, changes into noise and heat and vibrations that are absorbed into the land and passed through the generations.”48 The reference to her birth into Orkney’s landscape (recalling the Prologue, suffused with the energy of her father’s mania) and to the persistence of the waves, carried through generations, suggests that Liptrot has inherited Orkney’s constant energy. This association is reinforced through the blurring of matter, with the waves transmuted into vibrations that charge through the soil and into, it is inferred, Liptrot and her father. For Liptrot, the question then arises of how to manage this energy in herself.

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Running over the Edge As well as being a noun, “outrun” is also a verb, meaning “[t]o run beyond the fixed limit or point of; to go beyond or exceed (a circumscribed thing) in action.”49 This suggests another meaning which Liptrot does not specifically reference, but to which the book as a whole alludes; the attempt to outrun the self. As a child, Liptrot sought extremes, climbing “up stone dykes and onto shed  roofs. [She] threw [her] body from high rafters onto hay or wool bags below.”50 While a teenager, she swallowed magic mushrooms and tried to bite the cathedral, her mouth “on one of its red-stone pillars.”51 She wanted to “drink, fuck and photograph everything,”52 but would end up in a state with someone calling her parents. She wanted to “experience things and no discipline was going to stop [her].”53 However, there were limits to the excitement she could find on Orkney, and, as a young woman, all she wanted was to get away to “the hot pulse of the city.”54 In London, her childhood taste for heights and extremity continued. She “plunged [herself] into parties – alcohol, drugs, relationships, sex – wanting to taste the extremes, not worrying about the consequences, always seeking sensation and raging against those who warned me away from the edge. [Her] life was rough and windy and tangled.”55 Her body, conditioned by the constant feel of Orkney’s winds, and by the tremors beneath the earth, still “chased the sensation of escape.”56 It is as though, bound to Orkney and the extremes of its environment, she could not connect easily to a new ecosystem. Although she had wanted to leave the island, she writes that “Orkney and the cliffs held me, and when I was away I always had, somewhere inside, a quietly vibrating sense of loss and disturbance. I carried within myself the furious seas, limitless skies and confidence with heights.”57 Liptrot’s reference to “vibrations” recalls, once more, the inheritance from her father and Orkney, and its mention here heightens the sense that all is not well with Liptrot, away from her weathered, island home. There is a sense of premonition, then, when she introduces the defining relationship of her time in London: “The first time he saw me I was climbing on top of a phone box.”58 She was outside an empty shop on Kingsland Road, in which a rap group had performed. After climbing on the phone box, she “sat on the pavement and told passers-by [she] was going to the beach. [She] could feel the tremors.”59 Although Liptrot did not meet the man who would become her partner that night, she found out later that

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he had written about her online. He mentioned that he was concerned about her, but found her interesting, and she made sure their paths crossed again. Liptrot’s reference to climbing high—both physically and in terms of her altered state through drugs—recalls the heights of the cliffs near the outrun, over which the dog and neighbor’s tractor fell. This, together with the reference to tremors, which connect her to her father and to Orkney, and the mention of the man’s concern, suggests from the start that the relationship will be unsettled. Initially, however, Liptrot and her partner are happy. Just as she describes her connection with her father in metaphors drawn from the natural world, Liptrot refers to her relationship with this man in terms that summon energy. Together they watch electrical storms, the “thunder and lightning over London” from his bedroom window.60 While the drama of the natural world is a point of connection for Liptrot, there is a sense of distance in this description, for she is watching the weather rather than being in it. As with her searches around the city for something that resembles the heights and air of Orkney, she cannot quite reach where she wants to be. It adds to the sense of premonition, because Liptrot’s drinking habit comes between her and her partner, and their relationship falls apart. Liptrot’s descriptions of her depression, anxiety, and dipsomania that accompany the breakdown of her relationship suggest that she has outrun a sense of who or what she is: “The searing panic was something beyond me and I ignored all rules and safety measures to follow it, a slave to the habit of pain … I had gone beyond and didn’t know how to get back.”61 Her repetition of “beyond” suggests that she realizes she has overstepped the boundaries that keep her in check, and that she is in free fall. She signs up for rehab and, once she improves, she decides to return home.

Beyond Ourselves Back on Orkney, Liptrot finds a job working with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, tracking a threatened species known as a corncrake. These birds have inhabited the island for thousands of years, but in the last century they have been decimated due to mechanical farming methods, particularly mowers, as Liptrot writes: Most corncrakes live in fields intended for hay or silage and when the mowers come to cut the grass, the birds – particularly the chicks – are usually killed. Corncrakes move away from the mower into the ever-decreasing area

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of uncut grass, and are eventually caught in the middle of the field and mown to death on the final swathe.62

This reads as a metaphor for humans’ unrelenting persecution of animal species as a whole. It also  recalls Liptrot’s recognition of the mowing down of her self in London when she excused herself from a party to go home to drink alone “at a faster pace than the drinks were coming there. That evening [she] chose alcohol over friends and had crossed a line. After this, [she] crossed lines quicker and quicker, choosing to drink despite warnings from work, doctors, family and the law.”63 There is a sense in both passages of a pressure closing in on vulnerable bodies, with both birds and Liptrot unable to maintain their lives. In highlighting the relationship between vulnerable birds and humans, Liptrot’s ecobiography makes clear that non-human lives constitute our own, signaling the importance of humans’ responsibility toward these lives. Liptrot becomes obsessed with corncrakes, reading scientific papers about them and their migration patterns, setting up a Google alert for mentions of the birds, and changing her ringtone to the corncrake’s call.64 She consults with farmers to discuss options for helping the birds survive, such as moving their mowers in a “corncrake friendly” pattern: from the inside of the fields outwards, giving the birds more of a chance to escape.65 She refers to herself as the “Corncrake Wife”—a term which farmers, who refer to women (regardless of marital status) as “wives,” use to announce her arrival when she comes to speak to them. The term, although amusing, references the intimacy between Liptrot and the birds. Liptrot’s travels around the island at night, when few other cars are on the road, reinforces the sense that her relationship with the birds is a special one, not least because it is saving her and their lives. Desperate for a bottle of wine after a night of looking for corncrakes, she comments wryly, “it’s a good thing the island has no twenty-four-hour off-licences.”66 Tracking the bird between one and three in the morning is not only Liptrot’s path toward continuing rehabilitation but also an acknowledgment that she and the birds could share the same fate. Her body becomes a metaphor for ecology, demonstrating how an ecosystem can lose resilience after repeated assaults upon it. She writes, “the corncrakes are struggling against death and somehow it is as if my fate becomes intertwined with that of the bird. I’m trying to cling to a normal life and stay sober. They are clinging to existence.”67 In recounting her relationships with

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vulnerable creatures, Liptrot shows her readers that the non-human world also needs support to survive. Just as, at the book’s opening, the aural relationship connected London and Orkney, so too does a rare corncrake’s call scramble Liptrot’s orientation. She gets out of her car and moves toward the call until she can “pinpoint its location by ear,” but in her confusion she loses her own location: “Dusk blends into dawn and [she] can’t say whether the day is ending or beginning.”68 Then, by the summer light of 3  am, she reads her map, which “reveals where [she had] been all along. It’s just [her] familiar island.”69 Liptrot’s destabilization recalls the indeterminate space of the outrun and her tendency to lose herself in another world of sensation. In this instance, her use of the map and the growing light for guidance, however, show that she is moving out of this indeterminacy and toward a stronger sense of self. Swimming in the icy waters of the North Sea is another way that Liptrot attempts to control her desire for alcohol. For her, she writes, the “motivation is  the same but my methods of dealing with the way I feel are changing. I used to confuse my neurotransmitters on a Friday night in a hot nightclub. Now I shock my senses on a Saturday morning in a biting sea, plunging warm skin into cold water, forcing a rush of sensation, cleansed.”70 Queer theorist Mortimer-Sandilands suggests that “[f]ocussing ecological attention on the skin … forces us to pay bodily attention to the complex physiological and social relations by which our bodies bleed into the world and the world into us.”71 Liptrot echoes this in her description of snorkeling when she enters “a new ecosystem, stimulating [her] thoughts and senses, shaking [herself] out of sad routine.”72 The cold water, embracing Liptrot’s skin, forces her into a different mode of being, one that, with the mention of “cleanse,” suggests she is responding to a more supportive ecosystem than that which she inhabited in London. The reference to “plunge” also recalls earlier mentions of this word, such as the tractor plunging over the cliffs edging the farm,73 and Liptrot plunging herself into parties.74 Here, however, she falls and is embraced by the ocean. The word’s progression from associations of danger to safety is another indication of Liptrot’s recovery and the importance of Orkney’s ecosystem in sustaining this recovery. The cold water entering Liptrot’s pores also indicates the porousness of human bodies and how they are influenced by the world around them. It seems a perfect metaphor for ecobiography, a form that shows a body seeking sensation and pushing against boundaries. Might not this form,

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which shows the blurring of human and other, the way an octopus “can taste with all of its skin,”75 threaten that ideal of the unique, unified and universal subject, so long the preserve of autobiography?

Writing Back to Life Ecobiography not only illuminates the ways in which we are bound to our environment, it also helps the writer to situate themselves in their world. Liptrot’s ecobiography is a cleverly crafted piece of work, with strong thematic threads pulling together the material on Orkney’s ecology and geography, Liptrot’s family history, and the story of her addiction. In writing about herself, Liptrot comes to understand and recognize that many of the forces that compelled her behavior are beyond her control. Alcohol, sex, and drugs offered her a dissolution of herself, and in rehab she recounts how she “missed the moment when inhibitions gave way, and [her] heart ached for that brief enlivenment.”76 She puts barriers between herself and alcohol, but still finds it “hard to be restrained.”77 Life writing brings her back to herself by articulating the destruction of the ecosystem she inhabited and how non-human lives helped her rebuild it. Liptrot’s Prologue, as well as foreshadowing her account of personal extremity, also prepares the reader for understanding the role of nature plays in restoring herself. Toward the end of the Prologue she writes: “This May evening, as daisies shut their petals for the night, guillemots and kittiwakes return to the cliffs with sand eels for their chicks, and sheep shelter beside drystone dykes – it is my story’s turn to unfold.”78 Liptrot nestles her story among plants, birds, and animals to highlight the indivisibility of herself and the non-human world and also in recognition that those non-humans have their own stories too. Only when the daisies have closed their petals, the birds have nourished their young, and the sheep are safely sheltered can she begin to outline her own story. She recognizes that not only does nature have agency and the capacity for narration but also that humans must wait their turn to tell their own stories. Liptrot’s prose is clear and powerful, sweeping the reader into the work and carrying them along the highs and lows of her journey. In this, the text signals the ways in which Orkney’s forces are harnessed for energy. Places such as Orkney that are placed on the edge of the world are more resilient than cities, which are

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unable to live or breathe without a myriad of lifelines from the surrounding world to feed them, heat them, and take their waste away. Edges can survive without cities (Orkney does every time the lifeline ferry stops). But cities cannot survive without their edges; there is a reason why post-apocalyptic stories feature people fleeing the broken infrastructures of the city, heading for the resilient edge.79

Liptrot, too, living on the edge, becomes resilient, a store of energy that manifests in the power of her clear, vivid prose. Fittingly, the final chapter of The Outrun is titled “Renewables.” It dwells on the energy of Orkney’s wind and waves and how they are being used to power the island. Ethnographer Laura Watts describes this energy in terms similar to Liptrot’s: The islands’ weather has its own agency. It is more than just energy awaiting capture and exploitation; it’s a species of trouble, roaming at will around the landscape. The environmental resource is visible. Its energy is in your face, on your tongue. It is not deterministic but it has effects: people are energy-aware as a physical reflex. In these Energy Islands, people see and feel energy; they talk about energy and complain about it. It is as bound to you as a sheepdog is to a farmer.80

Watts’ reference to the weather as a “species” (reinforced by the mention of sheepdog), suggests it is a companion, a creature with which one continually engages. It evokes Donna Haraway’s The Companion Species Manifesto, which explores the co-constitution of humans and dogs to tell a story, as she did in her earlier Cyborg Manifesto, to tell “a story of cohabitation, coevolution and embodied cross-species sociality.”81 The weather in Orkney is not background, but an animate force—an object, to recall Jane Bennett—that shapes the beings in its folds, and which humans in turn also shape. The energy produced by this force is also used to feed Orkney’s power grid, which sometimes creates so much power that it must be diverted into electric cars, otherwise it risks breaking the cable to the United Kingdom’s National Grid. This setup recalls the overflow of Liptrot’s father’s energy during his manic periods, which threatens to break him. It is an overflow with which Liptrot herself must also be content.82 The energy companies interested in buying Liptrot’s father’s farm wish to harness the energy of

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waves beyond it, just as Liptrot has harnessed her own energy. She still pursues “heightened states,”83 but does so with “greater self-knowledge”84 as she explains: “I want to have a story but I have to do it sober. I am choosing strength and beauty and creation. Like the electricity devices, I’m trying to find the right way to harness the powers and to achieve my aims without being destroyed by the very energy I desire.”85 While Liptrot uses the singular “I” here, her story is a cautionary tale not just for one person, but for all of humanity. This caution can be applied to the energy companies, too, whose imbrication in capitalist networks means that money and utility take precedence over nature, often with devastating effects (e.g., through deforestation and mining). The sociality to which Haraway refers,86 whether engendered by canine or cyborg, may not always apply. What the turbines do show, however, is that Liptrot’s body is part of an ecosystem populated by both living and nonliving creatures. As such, forms such as ecobiography that make use of a posthuman approach to the body and how it interacts with the world, are a means to challenge representations of nature writing which assume that the human is a singular, unattached, unsupported entity. In this, ecobiography can avoid some of the pitfalls of nature writing in the twenty-first century.

“New” Nature Writing The genre of nature writing, commonly assumed to have sprouted from British curate Gilbert White’s 1789 Natural History of Selbourne,87 remains dominated by white, male Europeans. In 2014, the Wainwright Prize was created to celebrate nature writing and encourage exploration of the outdoors. The only prize of its kind in Great Britain for a full-length work, it is awarded for a narrative “driven with a subject that must be related to nature, the outdoors or travel writing (not guidebooks) covering Great Britain and Northern Island as a theme.”88 In the seven years since its inception in 2014, it has only been won by a woman once— by  Amy Liptrot  for The Outrun. Of the fifty-four  shortlisted writers, twenty are women.89 Kathleen Jamie injects some irony into this issue in her review of nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places (2007): “What’s that coming over the hill? A white middle-class Englishman! A Lone Enraptured Male! From Cambridge! Here to boldly go, ‘discovering,’ then quelling our harsh and lovely and sometimes difficult land with his civilised word.”90

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She critiques the lone, wealthy, white man who communes with nature, rather than articulating the web of life, human and non-human, that supports and shapes him. Beyond her focus on gender, Jamie’s review also points to another issue that nature writing in the twenty-first century struggles with: it still seems to follow in the footsteps of an eighteenth-century curate that is entangled in colonial fantasies of exploring “untouched” nature. The 102nd edition of the British literary magazine Granta, published in the summer of 2008, is often taken as a starting point in discussions about what constitutes “new” nature writing. In his introduction, editor Jason Cowley observes that newer works “share a sense that we are devouring our world, that there is simply no longer any natural landscape that is unchanged by humans.”91 However, this overlooks the point that many landscapes which are seen to be “natural” are in fact managed by humans. As Bunurong, Yuin, and Palawa writer Bruce Pascoe in Dark Emu and historian Bill Gammage in The Biggest Estate on Earth have outlined, what the British saw in Australia as grassy estates were in fact formed by a considered pattern of mosaic burning. Cowley’s comments indicate a way of viewing an environment which is conditioned by a British point of view that still translates into the genre of nature writing today. A few months after her review of Macfarlane’s work, Jamie published her essay “Pathologies” to explore what nature writing might otherwise constitute. She recounts how she attended a conference about human relationships with other species in which the speakers articulated their concerns about humanity’s need to “reconnect” with nature. One speaker told a gripping tale about an encounter with sea lions, another about a transforming experience with polar bears. Yet, Jamie muses, this “foreshortened definition of ‘nature’” does not encompass “our own intimate, inner natural world, the body’s weird shapes and forms, and sometimes they go awry. There are other species, not dolphins arching clear from the water, but bacteria that can pull the rug from under us.”92 To further investigate the bacterial and microscopic, Jamie contacted a clinical consultant in pathology at Dundee. When given the opportunity to examine the make-up of cells under a microscope, she describes what she saw as looking from a great height down at a pink river – rather, an estuary, with a north bank and a south. There were wing-shaped river islands and ­furthermore it was low tide, with sandbanks exposed. It was astonishing, a map of the familiar: it was our local river, as seen by a hawk.93

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Jamie’s strategy in likening the human body to a landscape is deliberate. She demonstrates that nature is not beyond the human body but is part of it, right down to its cells and bacteria. She locates landscape within the body’s skin rather than beyond it. Jamie’s sense of nature writing takes a posthuman turn, focusing on the matter that makes up the human. Jamie’s approach echoes Liptrot’s observations regarding how, when she moved away from Orkney, she still carried within herself its landscape of wild seas, wind, and heights. It highlights the limitations of considering nature as backdrop or inspiration to the human world, illustrating how nature both constitutes and impacts on the human self. Echoing Mortimer-­ Sandilands’ observation that our bodies “bleed”94 and blend into the world, both Jamie’s and Liptrot’s works highlight that nature is never external but rather, like the ocean that enters Liptrot’s pores, shock her into a new awareness of her surroundings and of how to interact with those surroundings.

Conclusion We are in the grip of the sixth mass extinction, and humans’ excessive consumption of resources will destroy us by disturbing and depleting the ecosystems upon which we rely. The 2020 Living Planet Report, produced by the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, indicates that in all regions of the world, vertebrate wildlife populations have fallen on average by more than two-thirds since 1970. The global populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and reptiles have also dropped by sixty-eight percent between 1970 and 2016.95 Against these phenomenal losses, ecobiography becomes an important form for raising awareness of human dependence on non-human lives. A counterpoint to nature writing which suggests that nature is merely a source of inspiration, it shows that the natural world is not external to humans; rather, it constitutes, enlivens, and supports us. The strength of Liptrot’s writing in The Outrun lies in the skillful evocation of her body’s fulsome responses to her ecosystems. Through this, she draws a parallel with the responses of other bodies, such as corncrakes. In seeing how she pushes her body to the edge, readers can empathize with what happens to non-human lives when they, too, are pushed toward extinction by forces beyond their control. She also, in writing about the force of other non-human entities such as wind and waves, shows that the forces that constitute human life are many and varied. As posthuman

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scholars have noted, this matter has agency, and humans must negotiate with it to maintain their place in the world. And if this place depends upon corncakes, bacteria, sea, and wind, then it behooves writers to include these lives in the stories they construct about humans.

Notes 1. Liptrot, The Outrun, xiii–xiv. 2. Ibid., xiii. 3. Huff, “After Auto, After Bio,” 280. 4. Ceballos, Ehrlich, and Raven, “Vertebrates on the Brink,” 1. 5. Ibid. 6. Huff, “After Auto, After Bio,” 279. 7. Braidotti, “Posthuman Critical Theory,” 340. 8. Ibid. 9. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 1. 10. Anderson, Autobiography, 4. 11. Ibid., 3. 12. Whitlock, “Post-ing Lives,” v–vi. 13. Huff, “After Auto, After Bio,” 279. 14. Huff and Haefner, “His Master’s Voice,” 168. 15. Bioart is the generation of assemblages of bodies, technologies, and selves. Van Den Hengel, “Zoegraphy,” 8. 16. Ryan, “Writing the Lives,” 99. 17. Gilmore, “Agency Without Mastery,” 84. 18. For other examples of posthuman life writing, see Whitlock and Couser, eds., “(Post)Human Lives,” and White and Whitlock, eds., “Life Writing.” 19. Weathers, Strayer, and Likens, Fundamentals of Ecosystem Science, 3. 20. Ibid. 21. For a more extensive discussion of the form’s genealogy, see White, “From the Miniature.” 22. Farr and Snyder, “From Walden Pond,” 198. 23. Ibid., 203. 24. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 268. 25. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography (2nd ed.), 161. 26. Indeed, much writing and oral stories by Australian First Nations peoples are ecobiographical—for example, Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey’s Moon and Rainbow, Kim Scott and Hazel Brown’s Kayang and Me, or Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s Stradbroke Dreamtime—because they detail and dwell upon relationships with their ecosystems. This is not to say, however, that Australian First Nations’ life narratives are limited to ecobiography; it also

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chronicles the disastrous impacts of colonization and assimilation over the past 230 years. 27. Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground, 10. Alaimo’s approach to “situated theorizing” draws on Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledges” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. Haraway underscores the importance of acknowledging the partiality of perspective. She argues for “the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity” (Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 1991 195). While I disagree with Haraway’s focus on the primacy of vision, or a “view,” given that blind or vision-impaired people can acquire situated knowledge from their surroundings, I appreciate her approach for its illumination of the way the body is always emplaced through its senses and not floating free in an undefined space. 28. Grosz in turn has adopted this idea from Lacan. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, xii. 29. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, vii. 30. Watts, Energy at the End, 40. 31. Ibid., 2. 32. Liptrot, The Outrun, 1. 33. Ibid., 2. 34. Ibid., 3. 35. Ibid., 7. 36. Watts, Energy at the End, 38. 37. Liptrot, The Outrun, 5. 38. Iovino and Oppermann. “Introduction,” 3. 39. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 4. 40. Ibid., 13. 41. Liptrot, The Outrun, 10. 42. Ibid., 11. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 13. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 7. 47. Ibid., 213–214. 48. Ibid., 13. 49. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “outrun (v.).” 50. Liptrot, The Outrun, 20. 51. Ibid., 38. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 17. 55. Ibid., 20. 56. Ibid., 41.

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57. Ibid., 50. 58. Ibid., 35. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid., 36. 61. Ibid., 59. 62. Ibid., 129. 63. Ibid., 56. 64. Ibid., 130. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 129. 67. Ibid., 132. 68. Ibid., 128. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 200. 71. Mortimer-Sandilands, “Eco Homo,” 33. 72. Liptrot, The Outrun, 260. 73. Ibid., 7. 74. Ibid., 20. 75. Ibid., 274. 76. Ibid., 79. 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., xiv. 79. Watts, Energy at the End, 33. 80. Ibid., 41. 81. Haraway, Manifestly Haraway, 96. 82. I am grateful to the editors for this point, as well as their many other excellent suggestions. 83. Liptrot, The Outrun, 273. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid. 86. Haraway, Manifestly Haraway, 96. 87. Armbruster, “Nature Writing,” 156. 88. See https://wainwrightprize.com/about-­the-­awards/. 89. To redress this imbalance, the Nan Shepherd Prize has been established with the aim of providing “an inclusive platform for new and emerging nature writers from underrepresented backgrounds” (Nan Shepherd Prize). 90. Jamie, “A Lone Enraptured Male.” 91. Cowley, “Introduction,” 9. 92. Jamie, “Pathologies,” 39. 93. Ibid., 41–42. 94. Mortimer-Sandilands, “Eco Homo,” 33. 95. Almond, Grooten, and Petersen, eds., Living Planet Report 2020.

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Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Almond, Rosamund E.A., Monique Grooten, and Tanya Petersen, eds. Living Planet Report 2020 – Bending the Curve of Biodiversity Loss. Gland: WWF, 2020. Anderson, Linda R. Autobiography. London: Routledge, 2011. Armbruster, Karla. “Nature Writing.” In Keywords for Environmental Studies, edited by Joni Adamson, William A.  Gleason, and David Pellow, 156–158. New York: NYU Press, 2016. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter a Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Braidotti, Rosi. “Posthuman Critical Theory.” In Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, 339–342. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018. Ceballos, Gerardo, Paul R. Ehrlich, and Peter H. Raven. “Vertebrates on the Brink as Indicators of Biological Annihilation and the Sixth Mass Extinction.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 117, no. 24 (2020): 13596–13602. Cioc, Mark. The Rhine: An Eco-Biography, 1815–2000. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002. Cowley, Jason. “Introduction.” In “The New Nature Writing,” edited by Jason Cowley. Special issue, Granta 102 (2008): 7–13. Farr, Cecilia Konchar, and Philip A. Snyder. “From Walden Pond to the Great Salt Lake: Ecobiography and Engendered Species Acts in Walden and Refuge.” In Tending the Garden: Essays on Mormon Literature, edited by Eugene England and Lavina Fielding Anderson, 197–212. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996. Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2011. Gilmore, Leigh. “Agency without Mastery: Chronic Pain and Posthuman Life Writing.” In “(Post)Human Lives,” edited by Gillian Whitlock and G. Thomas Couser. Special issue, Biography, 35, no. 1 (2012): 83–98. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 1994. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ———. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books, 1991. Hengel, Louis van den. “‘Zoegraphy’: Per/forming Posthuman Lives.” In “(Post)Human Lives,” edited by Gillian Whitlock and G.  Thomas Couser. Special issue, Biography 35, no. 1 (2012): 1–20.

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Huff, Cynthia. “After Auto, After Bio: Posthumanism and Life Writing.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32, no. 2 (2017): 279–282. ———, and Haefner Joel. “His Master’s Voice: Animalographies, Life Writing, and the Posthuman.” In “(Post)Human Lives,” edited by Gillian Whitlock and G. Thomas Couser. Special issue, Biography 35, no. 1 (2012): 153–169. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. “Introduction: Stories Come to Matter.” In Material Ecocriticism, edited by Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, 1–18. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. Jamie, Kathleen. “A Lone Enraptured Male.” London Review of Books 30, no. 5 (2008). Accessed March 8, 2021. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-­paper/v30/ n05/kathleen-­jamie/a-­lone-­enraptured-­male. ———. “Pathologies: A Startling Tour of Our Bodies.” In “The New Nature Writing,” edited by Jason Cowley. Special issue, Granta 102 (2008): 35–50. Liptrot, Amy. The Outrun. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2016. Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona. “Eco Homo: Queering the Ecological Body Politic.” Social Philosophy Today 19 (2007): 17–39. Noonuccal, Oodgeroo, and Bronwyn Bancroft. Stradbroke Dreamtime. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1993. Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? Broome, WA, Australia: Magabala Books, 2014. Pilkington, Doris. Follow the Rabbit Proof Press. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996. Roughsey, Dick. Moon and Rainbow: The Autobiography of an Aboriginal. Sydney: Reed, 1971. Ryan, John Charles. “Writing the Lives of Plants: Phytography and the Botanical Imagination.” In “Life Writing in the Anthropocene,” edited by Jessica White and Gillian Whitlock. Special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35, no. 1 (2020): 97–122. Scott, Kim, and Hazel Brown. Kayang and Me. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Press, 2005. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. ———, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Watts, Laura. Energy at the End of the World: An Orkney Islands Saga. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018. Weathers, Kathie, David L. Strayer, and Gene E. Likens. Fundamentals of Ecosystem Science. San Diego: Academic Press/Elsevier, 2013. White, Jessica. “From the Miniature to the Momentous: Writing Lives through Ecobiography.” In “Life Writing in the Anthropocene,” edited by Jessica White and Gillian Whitlock. Special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35, no. 1 (2020): 97–122.

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———, and Gillian Whitlock, eds. “Life Writing in the Anthropocene.” Special issue, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 35, no. 1 (2020). Whitlock, Gillian. “Post-ing Lives.” In “(Post)Human Lives,” edited by Gillian Whitlock and G. Thomas Couser. Special issue, Biography 35, no. 1 (2012): v–xvi. ———, and G.  Thomas Couser, eds. “(Post)Human Lives.” Special issue, Biography 35, no. 1 (2012).

The Sentience of Sea Squirts Clare Brant

Introduction As part of a big project exploring how humans represent lives underwater, both human and marine, I propose in this article to explore ways in which life writing can engage with one instance of marine lives: sea squirts. Marine biology has a literature and literary history which has yet to be fully appreciated, and in it are writers who enthuse about what Donna Haraway calls critters: Critters is an American everyday idiom for varmints of all sorts. Scientists talk of their “critters” all the time; and so do ordinary people all over the U.S., but perhaps especially in the South. The taint of “creatures” and “creation” does not stick to “critters”; if you see such a semiotic barnacle, scrape it off. In this book [Staying with the Trouble], “critters” refers promiscuously to microbes, plants, animals, humans and nonhumans, and sometimes even to machines.1

C. Brant (*) Centre for Life-Writing Research, King’s College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Batzke et al. (eds.), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77973-3_5

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What counts as a “semiotic barnacle” begs many questions. In a thoughtful critique, Kevin Karpiak suggests the Antebellum South, where the term “critters” originated, confers a taint too.2 For the purposes of incorporating marine creatures—including barnacles—into life writing, I prefer for now the term “small lives”: it insists on aliveness and points to those questions of scale which Anthropocene-minded criticism brings into question.3 Scale is not a new concern, though ecological thinking is newly attentive to it. The joys and significance of small lives became a maxim for the early twentieth-century marine taxonomist David Starr Jordan: “The little ones, even though not beautiful, meant more to me than a hundred big ones all of a kind. A special proof of scientific as distinguished from aesthetic interest is to care for the hidden and insignificant.”4 But aesthetics does care for the relatively hidden and insignificant. Today, for instance, macro photography serves both science and aesthetics. There are various definitions of macro; most agree it indicates the size of the subject in the photograph is greater than life size. It can also mean a photograph larger than the size of its subject (like a wall-sized photo of a shrimp). I use macro in a general sense common among divers, to mean close ups that change the scale of the subject, especially small lives.5 Turning small things into big ones by extreme close ups—now in video as well as photography—brings into play questions of scale, pattern, colour definition, contingency and abstraction. All these aesthetic components are transposable to sea squirts: in what follows, I will argue that it is possible to make a literary equivalent to macro photography through life writing which looks closely in an intellectual sense at its small life subject. It seems a reasonable guess that most readers will not have met sea squirts before. I introduce them first by a short discussion of suitable language, involving planetary reach and its smallest components, then by recounting my own introduction to them in a sequence of life narrative which might be described as an instance of environmental encounter. A diver’s sentience towards sea squirts, part science and history of science, part aesthetic, part none of the above, is followed by more thinking about language, specifically utilitarian discourses around sea squirts which box them into human-centred categories. Then I turn to aesthetics to provide a poetics which to some extent can only be felt through human responsiveness, but which at least restores some sentience to sea squirts. I end

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with suggesting a link in these kinds of sentience, human and sea squirt, to sentient ecology in life writing which is newly aware of posthuman possibilities.

Sea Squirts, Life Writing, Language Why am I writing about sea squirts? They epitomize for me the small life forms that do not usually get noticed or thought about. Training in the UK for divers who want to contribute to citizen science does include courses devoted to sponges, bryozoa, hydrozoa and other small constituents of sea life, but these are intended to teach identification rather than spark philosophical or literary encounters. I might have chosen something else, but I met some unforgettably beautiful sea squirts which challenged, I thought, how we look at reefs. Donna Haraway remarks that “coral reef worlds are achingly beautiful. I cannot imagine it is only people who know this beauty in their flesh.”6 Sea squirts set me thinking afresh about beauty and relationality; in return, I give them title prominence. Methodologically my subject means moving between disciplines, though it also increases the suitability of life writing as a method. Several lives are the focus of my discussion: those of sea squirts (not all, just some); mine, as scholar, poet and diver; humans, in various forms, and the life of our planet, here not Planet Earth but the Blue Planet. In recent work on how we think about life on Earth, the whole planet, powerful thinkers favour Earth as prime territory, territory itself being an earth-related word. Bruno Latour proposes a new way of looking at Earth in the form of the Terrestrial, neither Copernican nor Lovelockian. He does so to enable a politics of “bringing us down to earth.” One difficulty is that his idea of the Terrestrial is relentlessly earthed in the Earth: the period opening up before us is indeed a new epoch of “great discoveries,” but these resemble neither the wholesale conquest of a New World emptied of its inhabitants, as before, nor the headlong flight into a form of hyper-neo-modernity; instead, they require digging deep down into the Earth with its thousand folds.7

There is no recognition that this Earth is seven-tenths water. In reading Latour’s metaphors, I find myself wondering where marine life fits in. Is it possible to translate this symbolic language into marine equivalents? For instance, Donna Haraway’s enjoyable provocation that we are all humus or compost8 would need to become we are all detritus—which doesn’t

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sound so good. The process of deposition of organic detritus on the seabed is known as marine snow, which sounds better, except it also reminds us that in a human-heated Earth, snow is vanishing in the Anthropocene. Cynthia Huff’s powerful reconfiguration of life narrative in posthuman forms also proves difficult to adapt to underwater: “critical posthumanism does not envision a world where humans transcend their environment to float free, unmoored from earth” is workable as a metaphor, but trickier when relating to the literal world of underwater where humans are more than figuratively unmoored from earth.9 More helpful to underwater life writing are authors who take up slippery subjects—fungi and water—using the idea of entanglement: human lives entangled with animals, plants, fungi; human complications evident in commodification, supply chains, rhetorics and practices of consumption, in which different kinds of power and powerlessness are entangled, amongst other things.10 One might use the word tangle—“Oh! what a tangled web we weave”11—but all these authors are drawn to entangle, meaning to be caught in something which makes escape difficult. Like ensnare and enmesh, the word preserves a constituent of the trap—tangle, snare, mesh—which en enables. We’re caught in a planetary mess of our own making: how do we get out of it?12 Grammar points us to prepositions as a way out of—and also into—our entanglement. Michel Serres argues that “prepositions construct language by loading with signification the spatial and temporal meanings they designate.” He uses them as the means “to weave a network of meaning” which marks out a subject, sheds light on it and sets it ablaze13: I add up from plus to plus with plus by and for, unite them and launch them in such a way that this moving combination, striped with flashes of meaning, characterizes our singularity; I equal without-with-for-by, in variable proportions and finenesses.14

It is tempting to joke that this looks like a case where to plus to equals for. But prepositions are a serious business for Serres, who sees them as a means to undo certain fixities whose rigidities work, he thinks, like traps. Preferring a more mobile approach to identity politics as well as ecology, he sees prepositions as an important means of repositioning. Preposition comes from praeponere, to put in front of, a precedence that establishes a relation in both space and time.

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Not only do prepositions construct language by loading with signification the spatial and temporal meanings they designate, a little like rocks assemble a wall or atoms form inert or living objects, but these little elementary pieces of language, these atoms of signification, make up subjects as well. When we say “relation,” we are needlessly substantivizing, we are abstracting the set of acts described or concretely carried out by: from, with, for …15

This seems a promising approach for sea squirts. Exploring sentient relations with sea squirts does not mean having to establish their sentience in a scientific sense, as an ability to feel; it means bringing human sentience to, for, with, from sea squirts, in order to relate a little of the feeling and unfeeling that make up sentience about both as subjects.

Meetings with Sea Squirts The first time I met sea squirts was during a weekend off Dorset, on the coast of England where south becomes south west. The weather was fine, and I was happy. I hadn’t been diving long and many things were new, including the challenge of managing a scuba kit and myself in it. We jumped off a local boat in buddy pairs into the cold calm sea. As we descended through greenish water, I realized the light was clear enough to perceive a topography and a little more of how things fitted together. The bottom was sand and rock, and on one of the big rocks there was a ledge. It had something on it, a clump of translucent tubes with bright white openings at their ends. They swayed together, like stems of flowers in the wind. As a child, I had avidly read the Moomin books by Tove Jansson. In one story were the Hattifatteners, small white creatures who had no faces and could not talk, but who were responsive to touch and to electricity.16 The sea squirts’ translucent tubes waved around with an energy like Hattifatteners in a thunderstorm. And they were beautiful, as smooth and assured as glass test tubes. I was happy to stop and watch them, but I was paired for the day with someone who wanted to tour, so after lingering as long as I could, we moved on, and then I forgot about the translucent tubes because I saw a blob of purply-red jelly, just as fascinating. When we were back on the boat, I shyly asked a veteran what the tubes might be. Light bulb sea squirt, he said, probably. Of course! They were like light bulbs in cylinder shape. On dry land I looked them up: Clavelina lepadiformis. I did not look the Latin up because it did not occur to me then to do so: the name was a key in itself, enough for my purposes. I was

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not sure what my purposes were, other than to know what I was looking at. Lightly alliterative, Clavelina had a poetic ring which to me was proof of its enchantment. I learnt too that the purple-red blob was a marine snail like a slug but with a small internal shell: a sea hare, so named for an echo of ears in its head tentacles. It acquires its colour according to the seaweed it eats; the one I saw had feasted on red seaweeds. I learnt too that they deposit pink eggs in long threads like pink spaghetti. But I remembered Clavelina17 (Fig. 1). As I went on diving, I became interested in sessile life forms. Among UK club divers that was a bit eccentric: you went for the adventure, for the thrill of being able to fly through water, for the excitement of big things like wrecks or the moving attractions of fish. Small stuff was considered dull in comparison. On drift dives, which we usually did on the weekend’s second dive, there was little chance to stop and look because the current took you forward. Sometimes it was gentle motion, like a moving walkway at an airport; sometimes it was hectic, an exhilarating rush. One drift dive,

Fig. 1  Clavelina—like Hattifatteners in a thunderstorm © Clare Brant

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again off Dorset, saw us carried unstoppably over a great trench filled with starfish in pinks, purples, orange. Representations of starfish are usually single: I had never imagined so many starfish together or seen so many at once. At the time I wished simply for a longer look: what were they doing? They were climbing all over each other, three or four deep. Were they breeding? I read later that starfish can gather in great numbers to breed or feed. Even though I dived the area again in other summers, I never saw that phenomenon again. Nor did I meet Clavelina or sea hares. You never dive into the same sea twice, as Heraclitus might have said. Sessile organisms counter some of the fleetingness of underwater meetings, in that they stay where they are. That was very helpful to a novice, and even more so to a novice photographer shaky with excitement. Along with features of terrain like rocks and gullies, sessile organisms provide reference points—they’re still there on the way back, though they’re usually too small to navigate by. Their lowliness on our scale of recognition makes them easy to overlook. We can’t see the processes by which they filter, feed, repair, reproduce, so we think they do nothing. They grow too slowly to attract notice, though some are showy—Clavelina moluccensis can be a startling vivid blue, a much stronger colour than its informal name of bluebell tunicate suggests. One variety has a blue rim and white rings, as if a wire slinky had been pushed into a little glass bottle. Eye-­ catching sea squirts tend to be found on coral reefs, but where so much else is eye-catching and excitingly mobile they disappear into a multi-­ coloured background. In a poem on reef life, I described sea squirts in the seventh of eleven stanzas: current is slack, humming come hither to sea squirts small and giant, young and old they sway in the wind, white dotted with green floral washing on a breeze-jigged line

These were Didemnum molle, a mumbly mouthful for a creature easier to know by its vernacular names, the tall urn or green barrel sea squirt. “Tall” here is relative to lowliness: what I clumsily call big ones are about as long as fingertip to wrist. I loved them: on Indian Ocean reefs I met them in curious groups, some similarly sized, some dominated by tall, some a bobbly assemblage of small. “Groups of transparent zooids are joined at the base by short stolons…”18 But what were the relationships in these groups? Parent and offspring? Ancient, mature, young? The green

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barrel sea squirts resembled living ceramics, as if they had been spun on a wheel and wobbled. Each body, officially known as a tunic, was white, delicately and not quite evenly patterned with pores. Around the rim was an intense lime green which also coloured the interior. If you peered inside, you could just see the calcareous spicules which strengthen the opening. The colour of a colony comes from its symbiotic algae: it looked as if ceramic slip had been poured into a vessel and overslopped the lip, making a few drips on the outside in the process. Underwater looking is governed by cultural conventions which are rarely discussed. Photographic conventions dominate even more since digital tools enabled divers to make their photographs fit those conventions through post-dive editing on laptops or smartphones. I have occasionally killed post-dive conversations by saying I like sponges, or that on the last dive I saw a really interesting flatworm. I have sometimes done that deliberately, to counter hierarchies of attention in which many small life forms simply don’t figure (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2  A visual puzzle, including sea squirts © Clare Brant

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Here is an image from a reef in the Coral Triangle. One might call it a rock, except that its substrate is coral, not rock. Where do you look first? What do you see? How do you make sense of it, as a representation? There’s no law that says everyone has to see it the same way. It’s like a Dutch painting, said one viewer, helpfully evoking life arrayed as cornucopia. I see the orange first, nodules of soft coral which are softening towards feeding, for which they will fluff out into fullness as the bursts of purple soft corals are doing. I see the strange vase-like shapes, tunicates or sea squirts, like vessels of antiquity, their dark openings like periscopes reaching out to the sea. I see an extraordinary profusion of life—no inch of surface is bare; all is covered with sponges filling in and spreading out, with forms of pink-veined red, splodgy white, bulbous grey-brown, tubular blue. I see the delicate feathers of hydroids crowning the top towards the current side, and the arms of a black feather star dangling out, lightly interested in what might be passing. There are a few small fish, mere specks in the blue, but this lump is speaking of sessile life, active and at rest. Perspective and composition are applied in the photograph much as they would be on land; one might shift the centre fractionally left to create more symmetry, but fractional off-centredness evokes that happenstance which governs underwater looking. You just happen to see things: you see some things and you miss many others. The viewer position is as midwater as the photographer, accounting for slight blur (in the bottom right-hand corner). There is nothing to tell you of spatial relationship between this lump and a reef. The light, entirely natural, is exquisitely clear and still. The presence of bright colour sparks an idea of the beautiful but that seems disturbed by the convergence and divergence of orange, purple, yellow, white, and all against a pale blue whose intensity undoes ideas of pale. It conforms to no colour conventions of harmony or contrast in land aesthetics, except perhaps in recognizing orange and blue as complementary, warm and cool. There is a great deal of life going on, including organisms you can’t see. The lump will look different when the current changes and at night. Its bioscape is healthy. It is an instance of abundance. I am not sure what else this photograph can do: can it evoke emotions, or emotional acts of wonder, attention, care? Can care in looking—caring about precision and atmosphere—join up with eco-narrative so as to revitalize how we comprehend ocean life? Can new comprehension actively produce protection for this vital element so endangered by human lack of care? The image shows how things can grow: poking up, spreading, jostling, pendant, filled out, and all of these at once. The fish specks

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introduce motion, faster than the diurnal movements of the life forms below, but the focus here is on subtler rhythms. This lump, like many other parts of reefs in this area, is hospitable to tunicates. The yellow, blue and white ones are everywhere. Each one has its own colouring. Some have one dominant colour; others look like a Florentine master of marbling had dipped them in inks and swirled their colours. Or suminagashi, meaning “floating ink,” a Japanese form of marbling on paper from the twelfth century. Their official name is Polycarpa aurata. Their vernacular names include golden sea squirt, ink spot sea squirt, gold mouth sea squirt. In German they are Gold-Seescheide, gold sea sheath. They were officially classified in 1834 by Quoy and Gaimard, although there are subspecies distinguished later which have other proper names. Joseph Paul Gaimard was a French surgeon and naturalist, whose later travels included expeditions to Iceland, Greenland and Lapland. In 1826, he sailed on a royalty-­ backed ship of discovery, the Astrolabe, which voyaged on a Pacific circumnavigation lasting three years. On this, the first (of three) voyages, they went to New Zealand, Fiji, New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Caroline Islands and the Moluccas. Jean René Constant Quoy was a naturalist, surgeon, zoologist and anatomist who afterwards had a distinguished career in naval medicine. How they came across colourful sea squirts is unclear, though sea squirts live in a range from the shallows to 18 m down, so can be encountered near the surface (Fig. 3). Sea squirts have two distinct openings: in one, fine hairs beat to make a current which wafts particles and water into the main cavity, where a stomach extracts and processes food. Excess water is then squirted out of the other opening. It’s a simple arrangement: inhalant, exhalant siphons. If you get close to a Polycarpa aurata, you can see it has a deep yellow inner skin and distinct cross-hairs. These are cilia, used to create a current so particles are drawn in and sent on their way to a stomach. Tunicates are hermaphroditic; the larvae they produce swim for a few days at most, and then settle somewhere. Some sea squirts are solitary, some social, some colonial. Aurata tend to gather in small groups, twos or threes, each member separate, but within nodding distance of each other, or more intimately close—gregarious, as Paul Naylor suggests, a word also used for the clustering of mushrooms from a common mycelium.19 Since tunicates can’t run away, they use chemical defences against predators. They can bore into rock. They evolved very quickly but in doing so, simplified, leading to much debate now as to “just how vertebrate the ancestral tunicate was.”20 Yet in their larval stage, sea squirts still have a notochord, a

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Fig. 3  Polycarpa aurata © Clare Brant

cartilaginous rod that supports the body: hence they are part of the phylum of Chordata, things with backbones—as humans are. Sea squirts are our relatives. The names of tunicate, ascidian and sea squirt have different registers. Tunicate indicates an organism belongs to the subphylum Tunicata, whose other members comprise Larvacea and Thaliacea (salps), both pelagic or free-swimming inhabitants of the ocean; they too are filter feeders, like sea squirts. “The Ascidiacea is the most diverse class of tunicates with ca 3000 recognized species, with representatives found in all marine habitats.”21 I am mostly using sea squirt because the vernacular register seems to offer more approachability, consonant with and desirable for posthuman life writing. Yet ascidian is a word whose history proves eloquent of older hunts for names both exact and evocative of resemblance, which is also a means of bringing together human and marine worlds. Ascidia was used by the naturalist and traveller Thomas Pennant in 1777  in his British Zoology to describe marine animals he found off Scarborough: “Animals of

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this genus have the faculty of squirting out the water they take in.”22 Ascidians were further described by Samuel Pickworth Woodward in his treatise on the Mollusca.23 Charles Darwin praised the treatise and its author—“He is a very good man in his way, and his generalizations on Shells are really capital.”24 Woodward was adopting the term from William Kirby, who picked up current usage: “The Tunicaries or Ascidians as some call them” featured in his treatise On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation of Animals, and in Their History, Habits and Instincts.25 Kirby is better known as the progenitor of entomology or insect studies; with William Spence he published an Introduction to Entomology which effectively established the subject. He was a Tory High Church man who believed in revelation as part of natural history, and who somehow got on with Spence, who was a rationalist. All these writers and others established ascidian as a term. It comes from Greek askidion, the diminutive of askos, meaning a leather bag or wine skin.26 Images of wine skins on ancient Greek vases show a siphon-like opening and rounded, bulgy bagginess—just like a sea squirt. While some posthumanist scholars wish to sideline Eurocentric scientific tradition for its male-centredness and inscription of other hierarchies that privilege humans, and privilege some kinds of humans over others, I think it important to remember the dissidents, churchmen and dissident churchmen who in different ways challenged creationism. Through scientific biography, life writing can also demystify science to show its human constructedness. It may well be, to borrow Adrienne Rich’s conclusion to “Diving into the Wreck,” “a book of myths/in which/our names do not appear,” but “[t]he words are purposes./ The words are maps.”27 By researching how these words and maps came about, we recuperate a history of ideas valuable in themselves and indicative of a lingua franca which, despite the ebb in the status of classical languages, continues in the practice of science today. Taxonomy still gives us a system of naming which usefully enables us to distinguish specific forms of life. Although DNA barcoding is coming to supplement taxonomy, it is currently an additional tool, not yet a full replacement. Scientists see that taxonomy is a descriptive science;28 life writing scholars can investigate those descriptive elements as part of understanding the human better, and hence how the human could become posthuman. What alternative name would you choose for ascidians?

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The Uses of Sea Squirts Besides their appearances in marine biology and biochemistry, sea squirts feature in other discourses as well. I’ll outline three: tunicates as pest; as food; as pharmacopoeia. Each discourse positions nature in terms of its use to humans, a paradigm so entrenched it seems intrinsic to the conceptual architecture of the Anthropocene. As Arne Naess puts it, “[a]rguments in favor of human beings carry immeasurably more weight than those in favor of anything else.”29 Pests Some fast-growing crowding species of ascidians are defined as pests. “Since 1970, a new invading tunicate species has been reported about every five to six years in Atlantic or Gulf waters and every three to four years on the Pacific Coast.”30 At least nine species of tunicates are currently defined as invasive in Pacific North West waters. They spread rapidly and are easily transported by boating gear and aquaculture. They foul surfaces of boats, fishing nets, water intakes, docks, and buoys, making them costly to control, and their ability to smother shellfish beds and sensitive marine environments is a significant threat to other marine life.31

The primary fouled things here are human-made; the secondary are other marine lives. Human means and human objects accelerate their spread, and the costs of control are reckoned in terms of human economy. But what’s even more significant here is a discourse around pests. The Pacific Northwest is renowned for its natural environment. Diverse plant and animal communities thrive in our ecosystems. Unfortunately, these natural communities and systems are increasingly threatened by aquatic invasive species, a form of biological water pollution. Harmful nonnative plants and animals are moving into our coasts, waterways, and wetlands, degrading habitats, displacing desirable species, damaging infrastructure, contaminating water resources, and necessitating expensive control treatments.32

Control sounds consonant with sensible conservation policy. But what is a natural community? Indigenous in one place, if a species moves it becomes

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an immigrant, usually seen militantly (by humans) as an invader. “Invasive species” has become a common term to describe new arrivals, especially if associated with detrimental effects. Useful for being readily understood beyond a scientific community, the term’s popularity masks some muddles about its meaning—some think it best restricted to species introduced by humans, others not. Not all introduced species are “invasive,” though that is the dominant term: they can also be described as “exotic,” “alien,” “colonizing,” or “naturalized,” terms that borrow from cultural constructs of race and citizenship in human terms, which leave a colonial imprint on biology in ways that enable simple, and simplistic, stigmatizations.33 The Oxford English Dictionary drafted additions to “invasive” in 2003—“Of a plant: tending to spread prolifically or uncontrollably; encroaching upon or replacing other vegetation.”34 It is curiously silent about non-plant species such as sea squirts. Trying to sort out an exact and more dispassionate alternative terminology, Robert Colautti and Hugh MacIsaac argue: Indeed the very terms used to describe NIS are misnomers in that nonindigenous species are actually nonindigenous populations of species. In other words, the same “species” that are nonindigenous, naturalized, or invasive in one area are native somewhere else. A focus on invasions at a population level has important implications for both invasion ecology and ecological theory.35

Although there may be a biological basis for discourses of threat and damage, for instance in a warming Arctic,36 sea squirts are an unexpected example of cultural mobility. By that I mean not just that they can cross oceans, but that they can exemplify what Michel Serres insists is the “crude opposition” between local and global. He argues that human movements around the world and across borders “filter and percolate so much that I would readily define culture itself as this process of filtering and percolation, therefore as a process of acquisition, of digestion, in short, of acculturation.”37 Serres gives a helpful example of how influences spread between seventeenth-century authors in different European countries. One channel brings Spanish drama to Corneille, writing in Rouen, yet despite English ships anchoring near where Corneille wrote, Shakespeare’s plays do not reach him. A shorter channel than that from Spain, the English Channel gets blocked. “This defines an original expanse, neither

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global nor local, neither homogenous nor sporadic. We have to change spaces in order to understand the ‘cultural,’” Serres concludes.38 Returning to the theme in relation to himself as a human itinerant, Serres argues that “there can be no life without roads. The word ‘viability’ is said for the one and the other.” Including roads of the sea, he repeats: “Sine via non vita. There can be no life without roads.”39 Sea squirts are filter feeders, and some travel the roads of the sea. A solitary sea squirt with a leathery tunic and a tapering club-shaped body, Styela clava in Europe is, ironically, an emigrant from the North-West Pacific. Becoming itinerant reverses its status: Styela clava is a non native marine species originally from the north western Pacific. It was found in Plymouth Devon in 1953 (Carlisle, 1954) and was possibly introduced on the hulls of war ships following the end of the Korean war in 1951. Styela clava is a fouling pest on ships hulls and oyster beds, and the transport of oysters and any movement of ships probably aided its rapid dispersal (Eno et al., 1997). The distribution of Styela clava was examined recently by Davis & Davis (2004). They reported another 40 new records of this species in European harbours, including new records in the Channel Isles, France and Spain.40

Filtering as it goes, Styela clava hitches a ride and goes south. Sine via non vita? But if they take a road counter to human interests, sea squirts become pests to be expelled. Food Certain sea squirts can provide a higher feeding place for small anemones who take up residence on them as an elevated dining table. If some are warty, leathery and tough, nonetheless many humans eat them with relish. At least one ascidian is touted as an aphrodisiac. “Piure, or pyura chilensis, which is also known as a sea squirt, or ‘poor man’s Viagra,’ might look like an alien hiding inside a living rock, but it is one of Chile’s oldest and most controversial delicacies.”41 As part of Chile’s culinary heritage, piure can be served with lemon, a salsa verde, smoked, dried, in soups, in pasta and more—chefs are inventive with it. In Korea and Japan, diners enjoy sea pineapple, meyongge in Korean, hoya or aboya in Japanese. Halocynthia roretzi, the variety used in aquaculture, is eaten raw or cooked: beneath its tunic is orange flesh, said by aficionados to taste of the ocean. A

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manufacturer of hoya sauce promotes it as gastronomically complex. “Sea pineapple is a rare ingredient characterized by surprising taste notes: sweetness, salinity, bitterness, acidity and umami … On the palate, it expresses very powerful and iodized notes similar to sea urchin tongues.” It is high in iron, zinc, potassium and other nutrients;42 hence it can be fed to aquacultured fish like trout to improve them as human food.43 But aquaculture makes it a pest to its own species: a disease called soft tunic syndrome leaks out to kill wild populations.44 Halocynthia aurantium is known as the sea peach. It is orange or red, barrel-shaped, with two siphons on top, a bit like ears on a child’s winter hat. The sea peach, when eaten, is grainy and melts in your mouth in the wrongest way possible. Much like an onion, when cutting a sea peach one’s eyes will tear. The sea peach tastes much like sour milk. When mixed with cream, making sea peaches and cream, the sour milk taste is balanced out …45

Naming marine creatures after forms familiar on land is very common— there are sea grapes, sea apples, sea onions, sea potatoes, sea cucumbers. You can extend a great British breakfast underwater by meeting a baked bean sea squirt and a fried egg anemone.46 Analogy evokes palatability, in the case of the fruity sea pineapple and sea peach. Analogical thinking also extends human culture into sea life in a figurative way, casting marine lives in terrestrial terms and establishing through analogy that it is fine to eat these creatures—whose creature-ness is denied by comparing them to fruits. Served up in the right language, sea squirts become food for us. Pharmacopoeia Ascidians are “prolific producers of a wide variety of biologically active secondary metabolites from cyclic peptides to aromatic alkaloids. Several of these compounds have properties which make them candidates for potential new drugs to treat diseases such as cancer.”47 Since ascidians can tolerate high levels of heavy metals, especially vanadium, which is thought to play a part in defence against predation or in metabolic processes, they are useful for studying water quality and the effects of pollutants. Ascidians, along with sponges and bryozoans, produce a rich variety of secondary metabolites presumably to avoid predation and as an anti-fouling

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mechanism. These include cyclic peptides and depsipeptides and many different types of aromatic alkaloids. Many of these metabolites are not produced by the ascidian themselves but by endosymbiotic micro-organisms. Palanisamy and coworkers have provided a comprehensive treatise on approximately 580 ascidian compounds isolated from 1994 to 2014 … dealing with their structure and reported biological activity (antibacterial, antiinflammatory, anti-viral, anti-diabetic, anti-proliferative, anti-parasitic).48

Analysis of the complex biochemistry of ascidians has led to identification of a number of substances with pharmacological potential, tested and approved in drugs treating myeloma, sarcoma and other cancers. What ascidians create and use to increase their own chances of survival and competitiveness is proving useful to humans: “with respect to antitumor agents, several promising molecules have been isolated from these sea creatures.”49 Ecteinascidia turbinata, the mangrove tunicate, is a translucent orange sea squirt abundant in Cuba and found in the Caribbean. It produces an alkaloid, ET743, first isolated in 1986 and known also as trabectedin, that is especially effective in treatment for late-stage ovarian cancer.50 As is usual in marine natural products development, obtaining sufficient amounts of ET743 has been a significant challenge due to its restricted natural availability (1 g from 1 ton of tunicate). Methods of producing ecteinascidins by in-sea culture of E. turbinata have been evolved …, and much synthetic effort has been directed towards the synthesis of ecteinascidins.51

It is possible that ET743 is present in mangrove environments more generally, since one research project found it also in mangrove roots, snappers and sediments: “We are studying the marine geochemistry of this ecosystem so a broth can be developed and tested for producing this marine natural product.”52 Projects like these focus on human health, with human self-interest explicitly tied to national self-interest. “The discovery of ET743, a natural product harvested from the marine environment, is part of a significant endeavor by the United States National Institutes of Health to sample a range of earth’s organisms for medicinal activity.”53 Although it is possible to produce ET743 in a lab using bacteria, the tunicates which produce it—and need it—are in an environment under threat from humans. Mangroves on the coast of south-east Florida can only retreat so

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far inland before they hit immoveable human obstacles, and the rising sea level is likely to drown them: “The rate of rise is now three times faster than it was for the past several thousand years … This acceleration can be attributed to human-caused global warming.”54 Even ascidians viewed as pests have medicinal potential: Microcosmus exasperatus is a solitary ascidian found across the tropics and now as an invasive species in the Mediterranean, which it probably reached via the Suez Canal.55 When not being seen as a potential pest, it is being studied as an anti-inflammatory.56 Another study showed Microcosmus exasperatus had remarkable positive effects on liver damage, diabetes and infertility in laboratory rats.57 Life writing scholars may well ask, what’s in this name? It was chosen in 1878 by Camill Heller, an Austrian Professor of Zoology.58 I found nothing in his account of it to explain exasperation, either in him or the ascidian; he is using exasperare in its non-figurative meaning, to roughen.59 Marine invertebrate alkaloids do different things: some change how enzymes in cells behave; some inhibit DNA-damaging activity. Optimists think a better understanding of their biochemistry could lead to reproducing combinations of these activities in ways that would become new treatments for cancer in humans. As one scientist puts it, “Due to their extraordinary capacity to produce a variety of complex chemical substances, marine organisms, and molluscs in particular, have become a hotspot of research over the past twenty years.”60 So sea squirts supply a pharmacopoeia for humans. Unexpectedly perhaps, there is some science disinterestedly interested in tunicates. Because ascidians have a compact genome, they have attracted genome sequencers and been used as a model species in development biology.61 Study of their evolution may one day prove useful to ascidians themselves. Otherwise, as pest, food and pharmacopoeia, sea squirts are relentlessly bound into categories of human culture which exploit them for human uses. This bondage is true for many other forms of marine life too. Posthuman life writing can push back against this prepositional tyranny that assumes marine lives are for humans.

Aesthetics and Poetics In thinking with sea squirts, I find myself puzzled by some aspects of kin-­ making. For all that decentring the human into posthuman is desirable as a rethink which may help to slow the disasters and genocides of the

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Anthropocene, that decentring takes place in and through intractably human-centred apparatus. Academia, for starters, has its own politics of relationality in terms of access, (de)colonization, content, public engagement and so on. We want to believe life writing scholarship is relevant, and we have to work out how that relevance contributes to positive and remedial ecological action. Arne Naess suggests one way: Those who are serious about somehow decreasing unsustainability locally, regionally, or globally may contribute to the effort in specialized jobs (e.g., as researchers) or as generalists, showing as much as explaining their choices in life. They are then to be classed as practicing philosophers, whatever their degree of ignorance of academic philosophy. Sometimes this ignorance may be an advantage.62

It’s possible that an article like this can effect something, in making some humans care more about sea squirts, for themselves, or as representative species of “lower” life forms which are also lives, and to think of that as necessary work to encompass more of the world that we need to recognize in order to act differently and ravage it less. Would the old term of consciousness-­raising do as well? In representing encounters which try to reposition inter-species relations, I find myself wondering how wise it is to junk some of the structures that historically attend the making of human knowledge. I’m still seduced by practices, established in the Enlightenment, of identification, classification and description; it is hard to untangle them from wonder, which can focus, increase and refine attention. Knowing how identification and naming come about leads to life writing trails, mostly unexplored, along the frontiers of science. It is possible too that caring about sea squirts is underpinned by anthroplasticity, by which I mean an imagining of the life of other life forms through metaphors which arise from human culture: thus light bulbs, wine bags and Florentine marbling enable a language of resemblances, one inescapably drawn from human culture but which can help humans engage with difference. In Anthropocene Poetics, David Farrier proposes that “tropes such as metaphor, apostrophe or citation all involve a turn or swerve that sets new associations in motion.”63 Discussing Mark Doty’s use of metaphors for jellyfish—balloon, heart, flower, condom and parasol—to catch their orbicular form, Farrier sees something evading capture, retreating as the poem advances. Yet this, he says, is in itself a diffractive pattern, a dynamic “inherent to any poetics of kin-making: a turn toward the animal, an

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inclining toward the reality of shared concerns and collaborative world-­ making even while the animal itself turns away from any fixed shape.”64 Perhaps this paradigm can fit sea squirts, in two respects. One is that most varieties of sea squirts have openings which line up with—encircle—the O of apostrophe. Marine biologists may call those openings siphons; kin-­ makers can extend apostrophe into the O of elegy (to inscribe ecological loss and rouse to action), or to the encirclement of attention itself (to raise awareness of otherness, part of decentring the human). A second application of swerve could be to the synergy of wobble. Sea squirts and divers alike can be buffeted by current, much as animals and humans can be comparably stirred and excited by strong wind. Shape is paradoxical here, in that sea squirts are usually rooted in a rock, invisibly secured by a stolon; that stolon or connective matter enables sea squirts to keep a fixed place in their colony. Yet individuals move their shapes too, movement one can describe as sway, dance or wobble. In humans, wobble usually implies off-balance, off kilter, uncentred, even a prelude to topple. That nicely expresses decentring: sea squirts could then be making visible to us our own imaginaries of stability, including the stability of self-­ centredness. One urban dictionary defines wobble positively, as a sensory transmission which causes one’s body to teeter, rock or lean repetitiously: “A sensation caused by listening to certain styles of Drum and Bass or Dubstep music.”65 The wobble board, a thin, moderately stiff sheet that wobbles at a varying frequency, produces an eerie sound nonetheless pleasing to many humans.66 If a tremble in a human voice (“her voice wobbled”) is an anxious thing, other oscillatory wobbles are joyful. They play with boundaries, as an instance from the British classic television show Dr Who shows nicely: “A big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff” was how the Tenth Doctor described time to Sally Sparrow through a DVD Easter egg. Though he quickly admitted that the sentence had “got away from [him],” the term was soon thereafter applied to an invention of his, the timey-wimey detector.67

The ease of wobble rhymes and pararhymes (wibbly wobbly) suggests rhyme itself is a kind of wobble, a playfulness whose movement is more important than direction. Acoustic wobble also characterizes the famous theme tune to Doctor Who; written in 1963 by Ron Grainger and realized

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by Delia Derbyshire, it has later variants that “wobble” the signature components of the original.68 In a brilliant discussion of the aesthetics of wobble, Anirudha Dhanawade begins by discussing a sound installation by the artist Douglas Murphy, in which oscillations of platefuls of jelly are turned into wobbling sounds which are also sounds of wobbling. Picking up nineteenth-century naturalists’ attention to jellyfish and jellied plasm in cells, Dhanawade shows how they represent active jellyfish as vivacious, “their movements indicative of a state of unselfconscious pleasure and a joy simply in being alive.”69 This child-like energy persists, says Dhanawade, in twentieth-­ century advertisements which picture jellies as carnivalesque, anarchic bodies, linking the dynamism of being alive to playful naughtiness and a delight in the sheer silliness of material being. The jellies burble ludicrously too, going “wa-wa­wa” or “blib-blob-blib-blob,” their wobbles making waves of exuberant gibberish. They are at once caricatures and happier versions of us, liberated from humdrum constraints, the tedium of reality, and the grown-up obligation to make sense all the time … jelly’s wobbly aesthetics reveal just how profound and even salvific such childish, innocent silliness can be.70

Dhanawade’s analysis brings out how the jouissance of jelly can add some fun to posthumanism, playfully subverting the usual stability of human-­ centred language, and hence creating possibilities for new, less unequal relations. Thinking about play can be hard work. I broke off from my research one evening for a customary walk. As I resurface, I find I do a kind of sifting, joining, forgetting, turning over, which merges into recognizing, noticing, tuning to the world. Walking my neighbourhood streets, waiting for my deerhound to finish sniffing a lamp post, I looked around, as one does, and noticed on the rooftops across the street a colony of chimney pots. They were clustered together much like sea squirts, and with similar variations of size. Chimney pots have no wobble at all. They are rigid, emphatically. Yet these chimney pots seemed to move something. Attention? Admiration? The space around them? They held sway, a phrase I tucked away to look up later. Their shapes were plain: the Victorian builders of my neighbourhood favoured simplicity in buff or terracotta, with occasional flourishes of crown shapes, rolled rims or ribbed decoration. I knew from the Royal Palace at Hampton Court that chimney pots

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could dazzle: “The famous Tudor ‘Swizzle Stick’ chimney pots stand out on the rooftops of Hampton Court Palace. Should one get that excited about Tudor chimney pots? Yes, yes you should. They’re gorgeous.”71 The chimney pots I was looking at were set in a common base of mortar, like the hard base or substrate favoured by sea squirts. The analogy seemed to stop there, except that clusters of chimney pots and sea squirts are not what you might usually notice first on a streetscape or a reefscape, yet once you have noticed them, they can command your attention. Both chimney pots and sea squirts, by being easy to overlook, question how visual conventions reinforce human centredness (Fig. 4). The image below is an instance of some assumptions about looking. At the time, I thought I was photographing the scorpionfish. Only later, when sea-squirt-mad thanks to writing this piece, did I realize that Didemnum molle was in the foreground and that the scorpionfish’s exquisite camouflage mimics not just nearby coral but also its sea squirt neighbours. Looking again reveals that the apparent focus on a single subject is

Fig. 4  Another visual challenge: what holds sway? © Clare Brant

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not stable; also present is a set of relationships which change what you might think a subject is. Those relationships can be hidden, as in camouflage; they can also be human-constructed, for instance by an aesthetic which values colour relationships. Nonetheless, we make pictures serve human power, usually of identification or interpretation. Relaxing such claims to power means becoming open to other forms of influence. Sway is one of them. What holds sway here? Sway as a noun comes from Middle English sweighe (spelled variously, first use c.  1374), meaning power or influence. Sway as a verb followed c. 1400. In quite a complicated braid of different senses which evolved from the Renaissance on, noun and verb express meanings of power, force, motion. To hold sway is to exert power; to be swayed is to be influenced. Sea squirts are influenced by current, which can make them wobble. In calm conditions, they move less, but their presence, once you recognize it, can hold sway. The question of how we are swayed by conventions of looking is an important subject, especially in cinema studies, which I can only touch on here.72 Images from underwater usually—not always—reproduce assumptions about the human gaze determining significance.73 Since much of underwater life is still relatively unfamiliar, photography usually presents a focus on specific, identifiable subjects. That descriptive function reinforces power relations: to see something is then to know something. Identification underwater is important, but it is knowledge that can block out other kinds of perception. Moving beyond taxonomy in the sense of species identification, sway introduces the possibility of attending to taxonomies of looking, in which human-constructed relationships—subject, object— make room for posthuman ones of different relationality.

Conclusion “I have become a man of one idea, – cirripedes morning & night,” wrote Charles Darwin to T.H. Huxley in 1853.74 His focus on one group of species—barnacles—“far from being merely a dry, taxonomic exercise, was a highly theoretical work that addressed several problems at the forefront of contemporary natural history.”75 The problems of relationality raised by the idea of the posthuman Anthropocene place sea squirts in a possibly similar role. In this concluding section, I return to theoretical problems, particularly those for life writing in representing relationality. It may seem a long way from the particularity of Dorset Clavelina or coral reef Polycarpa. My hope is to connect them with discourses of care which

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necessarily speak first to human concerns, but which flow back to small lives through an “education of attention,” a phrase Tim Ingold points out has an implied preposition, since e-ducation means leading out from.76 “Through this fine tuning of perceptual skills, meanings immanent in the environment – that is in the relational contexts of the perceiver’s involvement in the world – are not so much constructed as discovered.”77 Several issues recur in the literature rethinking ecological relations. One is language, or how language may need to take second place to sensory— and sensuous—perception. Sensate, intuitive encounters can produce understanding which moves us towards what Ingold calls “sentient ecology,” specifically “a poetics of dwelling.”78 It is helpful to bring in aesthetics here, because comparable effects have been modelled by Gernot Böhme: The aesthetic qualities of materials cannot be linked immediately to their objective properties, nor to those established through sensuous-practical dealings. Rather, these qualities consist in their character, that is, in the specific mode in which they are atmospherically experienced, or, respectively, contribute to an atmosphere. This character is experienced not through direct physical contact, or even just through sense perception, as the uptake of data by the classical five senses – rather it is experienced through bodily sensing. A material’s aesthetic quality is most characteristic way in which it is sensed.79

Appropriately, here Böhme is discussing gold (a gold ladle); let’s extend it to the ascidian whose name is gold in several languages: Polycarpa aurata, Gold-Seescheide, golden sea squirt. Sensing relationality is an important part of sentience. The jelly-like material of ascidians can be sensed as part of the ocean atmospherics they inhabit variously. And sea squirts have sensory organs: they may well sense us.80 There are other contributions to a sentient vocabulary. Thomas Berry proposed a shift—a swerve?—of terminology to recalibrate the human in relation to other beings: I suggest the name “Ecozoic” as a better designation than “Ecological.” Ecologos refers to an understanding of the interaction of things. Eco-zoic is a more biological term that can be used to indicate the integral functioning of life systems in their mutually enhancing relations. The Ecozoic Era can be brought into being only by the integral life community itself.81

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Adopting Ecozoic would also recalibrate human understanding of relationality itself: the first condition is to understand that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. Every being has its own inner form, its own spontaneity, its own voice, its ability to declare itself and to be present to other components of the universe in a subject-to-subject relationship.82

Recently, Louis van den Hengel has proposed a related word to signal decentring the human. He takes up the generative vitality of zoe, an inhuman, impersonal, and inorganic force which, as I will explain below, is not specific to human lifeworlds, but cuts across humans, animals, technologies, and things. Zoegraphy is my attempt to confront the question of how to think and how to write a life that does not have any human body or self at its center, a life which is in fact fundamentally inhuman, yet which connects human life to the immanent forces of a vital materiality.83

Zoegraphy points a way for posthuman life writing: “Rather than addressing life from an already determined viewpoint such as that of the human ‘subject’ or the nonhuman ‘other’, zoegraphy invites us to look at life as an experimental and open process of transformation, a continuous production of new relationalities.”84 Other additions to posthuman vocabulary are zoopoetics, looking at the expressive powers of animals, and anthrozoology, which equalizes human and animal subjects in relationships.85 All these terms are useful, especially for subjects who are mammals; it is harder, I think, to extend them to wild marine life forms. Yet recalibrating the human can also be done in our everyday words, our metaphors, our prepositions, our unthinking investment in language through which we lord it over the natural world. A newly pressing force in language is the issue of care, a capacious category in which humans are implicitly understood to be the givers, yet with implicit prepositional relations to other beings. In a talk in 1992 on the future of deep ecology, Naess insisted: “What we look for is not a shift of care from humans toward nonhumans, but an extension and a deepening of care.”86 Now, 30 years further into the Anthropocene, we may say that care has deepened very patchily; human carelessness has created worse problems. These problems are material, but also discursive. Recent

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research at Tel Aviv University used the uptake of plastics by filter-feeding sea squirts to measure pollution. “Sea Squirts can help suck up plastic pollution” is the temperate form of how their findings were made public.87 Other reports introduced sea squirts as rubbery, irritating, invading, pesky little sea creatures. Nearly all the reports I read alluded to them as invasive; they were treated like hated immigrants finally contributing something of worth to the world, reinstating human power—and conveniently bypassing all human responsibility for creating plastic pollution in the first place. There is at last some science which shows considerably more care, in that it measures the effects of plastic pollution on sea squirts themselves, and their wider effects on the ocean: as filter feeders, they expel waste as faecal matter which falls through the water column to join detritus on the ocean floor. Along the way these plastic-laden faeces can be eaten by many other species, with further detrimental effects on growth and reproduction.88 Zoegraphy can insist on how small beings actually live their lives, defending them against discourses—and practices—of human arrogance. Here, life writing can join up with a loose literary grouping known in Britain as the new nature writing. “The new nature writing focuses on finding meaning not in the rare and exotic but in our common, unremarkable encounters with the natural world, and in combining both scientific, scholarly observation of nature with carefully crafted, discursive writing.”89 In 2013, Alfred Hornung argued powerfully for the synergies between life writing and nature writing: “nature writing equals life writing.”90 Nature of course is a term freighted with literary history: the new nature writers are conscious of that. As Joe Moran explains, “Their writings tend to be thematically wide-ranging and stylistically digressive, combining personal reflection with natural history, cultural history, psychogeography, travel and topographical writing, folklore and prose poetry, which makes them correspondingly difficult to categorise.”91 They also use very familiar life writing forms, like grief memoir and illness narrative,92 so as to explore what Robert Macfarlane calls “a readiness to pluralize, diffuse, or abolish the watching lyric eye/I.”93 In contrast to terrestrial nature writing, underwater literature has had less visible ecopoetic traditions. That relative freedom from traditions makes it easier for underwater writing to respond in new ways to ecological crisis, atmospheres, sense impressions, posthuman possibilities—and care. In showing how sentience of sea squirts is both glimpsed and obscured by human categories, I hope to bring underwater lives into life writing in the posthuman Anthropocene.

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Notes 1. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 169. 2. Karpiak, “Donna Haraway’s ‘Critters.’” 3. “Small lives” has a symmetry with the “small stories” model which has proved useful to analysis of digital narrative. See Georgakopolou, “Small Stories Research,” 2016. 4. Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist, 12. 5. See many examples in Rotman, Underwater Eden. David Liittschwager makes contingency beautiful in A World in One Cubic Foot, where he photographs the miniscule life forms found in one cubic foot of selected habitats. 6. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 72. 7. Latour, Down to Earth, 81. 8. “We are humus, not Homo, not anthropos; we are compost, not posthuman.” Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking,” Chthulucene section. 9. Huff, “After Auto, After Bio,” 279. 10. See Tsing, Mushroom; Probyn, Ocean; Sheldrake, Entangled. 11. The original, often misattributed, is from Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, 1808, Canto 6, stanza 17. 12. See Cappelle, “Is Out of Always a Preposition?,” 315–328. 13. Serres, Incandescent, 174. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Jansson, Finn Family Moomintroll, 74: “the thundery weather has electrified them – that’s why they shine so.” 17. Clava in its diminutive form in Latin, clavella, means club or hammer, while the Latin ending -ina means similarity. The Greek lepados, genitive of lepas, means bowl-shaped shell. Forma is Latin for shape or form. See https://www.vattenkikaren.gu.se/fakta/arter/chordata/tunicata/clavlepa/clavlene.html. The best image I have seen is Bernard Picton’s photograph at http://www.habitas.org.uk/marinelife/species.asp?item=ZD60. 18. Clavelina lepadiformis on https://www.marlin.ac.uk/species/ 19. Naylor, Marine Animals, 200, describing the gooseberry sea squirt Dendrodoa grossularia in its larval form. 20. Holland, “Tunicates,” 147. 21. Palomina-Alvarez, Moreira Rocha, and Simões, “Checklist of Ascidians,” 2. 22. Pennant, British Zoology, IV, 40. 23. Peckworth Woodward, Mollusca, III 332. 24. Darwin to Edward Cresy [12 November 1860]; see https://darwinproject.ac.uk/; DCP-LETT-2620. 25. Kirby, Power, I, vi. 192.

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26. See https://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/tools/pottery/shapes/askos.htm. 27. Rich, “Diving into the Wreck.” 28. For an overview of taxonomy, systematics DNA technology and barcoding, see Duszynski and Couch, Biology and Identification, 1–15. 29. Naess, “Population Reduction,” 307. 30. See https://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/sites/seagrant.oregonstate.edu/ files/sgpubs/onlinepubs/h-­13-­001-­accessible.pdf, 3. 31. Ibid., 4. 32. Ibid., 29. 33. Davis and Thompson, “Colonizer,” 226–230. 34. See https://oed.com/view/Entry/98931?redirectedFrom=invasive#eid. 35. Colautti and MacIsaac, “A Neutral Terminology,” 136. 36. See Lassuy and Lewis, “Invasive Species”: “The spread of invasive marine tunicates to the Arctic could interfere with access to benthic food sources for already endangered marine mammals like benthic-feeding whales and pinnipeds,” 529. 37. Serres, Incandescence, 92. 38. Ibid., 93. 39. Ibid., 116–117. 40. See https://www.marlin.ac.uk/species/detail/1883 41. Lazar, “This Terrifying Sea-Creature.” 42. See https://www.nishikidori.com/en/japanese-­sauces/31-­hoya-­sea squirt­sea-­pineapple-­sauce-­4984571100573.html. 43. Rohmah, “Ascidian Tunics Carotenoids,” 22–29. 44. See Kumagai et al., “Soft Tunic Syndrome,” and Kumagai, Ito, and Sasaki “Detection.” The same expert(s) ascertained the wild population off Japan has been infected, probably linked to aquaculture there. 45. See https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Sea%20Peach. 46. Respectively, Dendrodoa grossularia and Actinothoe sphyrodeta. Analogy here is purely visual; neither count as food, even for hungry divers. 47. Watters, “Ascidian Toxins,” 162. The symbionts of ascidians also have properties with potential for human drug use. 48. Ibid. 49. Imperatore et al., “Alkaloids from Marine Invertebrates,” 20,392. 50. Rinehart et al., “Ecteinascidins,” 4512. 51. Imperatore et al., “Alkaloids from Marine Invertebrates,” 20,406. 52. Manning et al., “ET743,” abstract. 53. See https://www.nih.gov/about-­nih/what-­we-­do/nih-­almanac/about-­nih. 54. Meeder and Parkinson, “SE Saline Everglades Transgressive Sedimentation,” abstract.

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55. Raijman and Shenkar, “From Tropical to Subtropical.” 56. See Delighta Mano Joyce et  al., “Evaluation of Anti-Inflammatory Activity.” 57. See Gomathy, “Chemical Screening,” abstract. http://depts.washington. edu/ascidian/AN73.html. 58. Heller, Beiträge, 99. 59. The figurative sense is used in fish nomenclature, for example, for a blenny, Clinus exasperates. See Holleman, Von der Heyden, and Zsilavecz: “referring to ‘numerous, unsuccessful attempts by the second author to obtain additional specimens’ (described from only one specimen)”: https:// www.etyfish.org/blenniiformes3/. 60. Bailly, “Anticancer Properties of Lamellarins,” 1105. 61. “Ascidians (Phylum: Chordata, Subphylum: Tunicata, Class: Ascidiacea) have been used as model species in development biology for over a century. These species offer attractive experimental features, including a compact genome (e.g. Halocynthia roretzi’s genome is around 170 Mb with about 16,000 protein-coding genes), invariant embryonic cell lineages, small embryonic cell number, and translucent embryos, which allow the description of developmental processes with a cellular level of resolution. Fifteen years ago, the complete genome sequences of two ascidian species, Ciona robusta (formerly Ciona intestinalis Type A) and Ciona savignyi were assembled, annotated and made publicly accessible through genome browsers. Since then, the genomes of additional tunicate species have been sequenced, partially annotated and publicly released, opening the way to a study of the evolution of ascidian coding and non-coding genetic elements. It is generally considered that ascidians are subject to rapid molecular evolution, in both coding and non-coding sequences.” Wang et  al., “Genome-­wide Survey.” See also Dauga, “Biocuration,” 137. 62. Naess, “Sustainability! The Integral Approach,” 299. 63. Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics, 13. 64. Ibid., 98. 65. See https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Wobble; https:// www.audiomentor.com/tutorials/how-to-create-dubstep-drums-basswobbles 66. See http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/~cross/Wobble%20Boards/ WobbleBoard.htm. 67. See https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Wibbly_wobbly,_timey_wimey. The tenth Doctor Who was played by David Tennant, 2006–2008. 68. The original theme can be heard at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=8NPJ6GMXM3E. 69. Dhanawade, “Good Vibrations.” His final section discusses jelly in relation to digital as a medium. 70. Ibid.

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71. https://www.londonperfect.com/blog/2013/09/hampton-­c ourt/. Post by Zoë, September 18, 2013; includes image (italics in the original). 72. Paradigms and patterns of underwater visuality will be further discussed in my forthcoming book, Underwater Lives.  73. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2JJ8c47NmvSnM8F6 pXNWPTS/trying-­to-­film-­penguins on suitable cameras attached to penguins; not quite bird’s eye perspective, but certainly not a human point of view. 74. 11 April 1853, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-­LETT-­1514. xml; http://darwin-­online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/Richmond_cirripedia.html. 75. Ibid. 76. Ingold, “Religious Perception,” 3 (italics in the original); the phrase “education of attention” is J. J. Gibson’s. 77. Ingold, Perception of the Environment, 22. 78. Ibid., 24–26 (italics in the original). 79. Böhme, Atmospheric, 62 (italics in the original). 80. See Esposito, Pezzotti, Branno, Locascio, Ristoratore, and Spagnuolo, “Ascidian Pigmented Sensory Organs.” 81. Berry, “Ecozoic Era,” in Sheley, Environment, 361. 82. Ibid., 360. 83. Van den Hengel, “Zoegraphy,” 2. 84. Ibid., 8. 85. See the journal Society & Animals (1993–); see also Driscoll and Hoffmann, “Introduction,” 1–13. 86. Naess, “Deep Ecology,” 311 (emphasis added). 87. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46JzMah5hEE. 88. See Dewar-Fowler, “Uptake and Biological Impacts.” She looks at Ciona intestinalis. 89. Moran, “New Nature Writing,” abstract. 90. Hornung, “Ecology and Life Writing,” x. 91. Moran, “New Nature Writing,” 49. 92. See, for example, Helen Macdonald, H Is for Hawk (2014); Amy Liptrot, The Outrun (2016); Horace Clare, The Light in the Dark: A Winter Journal (2018). 93. Stenning, “Interview,” 81.

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Halocynthia roretzi.” Diseases of Aquatic Organisms 106, no. 3 (2013): 267–271. https://doi.org/10.3354/dao02653. Lassuy, Dennis R., and Patrick N. Lewis. “Invasive Species: Human-Induced.” In Arctic Biodiversity Assessment, edited by Hans Meltofte, Alf B.  Josefson, and David Payer, 559–565. Odder, Denmark: CAFF (Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna), Narayana Press, 2013. Latour, Bruno. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018. Lazar, Allie. “This Terrifying Sea-Creature …” Vice Magazine, March 1, 2018. Accessed February 24, 2021. https://www.vice.com/en/article/mb5454. Liittschwager, David. A World in One Cubic Foot: Portraits of Biodiversity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Manning, Thomas, Emily Rhodes, Richard Loftis, Dennis Phillips, Don Demaria, David Newman, and Jack Rudloe. “ET743: Chemical Analysis of the Sea Squirt Ecteinascidia turbinata Ecosystem.” Natural Product Research 20, no. 5 (2006): 461–473. https://doi.org/10.1080/14786410500462462. Meeder, John F., and Randall W. Parkinson, “SE Saline Everglades Transgressive Sedimentation in Response to Historic Acceleration in Sea-Level Rise: A Viable Marker for the Base of the Anthropocene?” Journal of Coastal Research 34, no. 2 (2018): 490–497. https://doi.org/10.2112/JCOASTRES-­D-­17-­00031.1. Miller, Lulu. Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020. Moran, Joe. “A Cultural History of the New Nature Writing.” Literature & History 23, no. 1 (2014): 49–63. https://doi.org/10.7227/LH.23.1.4. Naess, Arne. “Deep Ecology for the Twenty-Second Century.” In The Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Naess, edited by Alan Drengson and Bill Deval, 308–314. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. ———. “Population Reduction: An Ecosophical View.” In The Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Naess, edited by Alan Drengson and Bill Deval, 302–307. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. ———. “Sustainability! The Integral Approach.” In The Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Naess, edited by Alan Drengson and Bill Deval, 293–301. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008. Naylor, Paul. Great British Marine Animals, 2nd edition. Plymouth: Sound Diving Publications, 2005. Palomina-Alvarez, Lilian, Rosana Moreira Rocha, and Nuno Simões. “Checklist of Ascidians (Chordata, Tunicata) from the Southern Gulf of Mexico.” ZooKeys 832 (2019): 1–33. Pennant, Thomas. British Zoology, 4th edition, 4 vols, 1776–77. Probyn, Elspeth. Eating the Ocean. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Raijman Nagar, Lilach, and Noa Shenkar, “From Tropical to Sub-Tropical: Prolonged Reproductive Activity of the Invasive Ascidian Microcosmus exas-

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peratus in the Eastern Mediterranean.” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 25 August 2016. https://doi.org/10.3389/FEVO.2016.00102. Rich, Adrienne. Diving Into the Wreck: Poems 1971–1972. New  York: W.W. Norton, 1973. Rinehart, Kenneth L., Tom G.  Holt, Nancy L.  Fregeau, Justin G.  Stroh, Paul. A.  Keifer, Furing Sun, Li H.  Li, and David G.  Martin. “Ecteinascidins 729, 743, 745, 759A, 759B, and 770: Potent Antitumor Agents from the Caribbean Tunicate Ecteinascidia turbinate.” The Journal of Organic Chemistry 55, no. 15 (1990): 4512–4515. https://doi.org/10.1021/jo00302a007. Rohmah, Zuliyati, Jeong, U-cheol, Ticar, Bernadeth F.,Kim, Jin-Soo, Lee Jae-­ Joon, Kang, Seok Joong, and Choi Byeong Dae. “Effect of Ascidian (Halocynthia roretzi, Drasche 1884) Tunics Carotenoids on Enhancing Growth and Muscle Coloring of Sea-reared Rainbow Trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss, Walbaum 1792).” Agris 4, no. 6 (2018): 22–29. Serres, Michel. The Incandescent. Translated by Randolph Burks. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2018. Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. London: Vintage, 2021. Sheley, Erin, ed. Environment: An Interdisciplinary Anthology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Stenning, Anna. “An Interview with Robert Macfarlane.” Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 17, no. 1 (2013): 77–83. Wang, Kai, Christelle Dantec, Patrick Lemaire, Takeshi A.  Onuma, and Hiroki Nishida. “Genome-wide Survey of miRNAs and their Evolutionary History in the Ascidian, Halocynthia roretzi.” BMC Genomics 18, no. 314 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12864-­017-­3707-­5. Watters, Dianne J. “Ascidian Toxins with Potential for Drug Development.” Marine Drugs 16, no. 5 (2018): 162. https://doi.org/10.3390/md16050162. Woodward, Samuel Pickworth. Manual of the Mollusca; or, a Rudimentary Treatise of Recent and Fossil Shells. London: John Weale, 1851–1856.

PART II

Relational Responsibility

Humanity, Life Writing, and Deep Time: Postcolonial Contributions Renata Lucena Dalmaso

At first glance, deep time and life writing appear to be antithetical. If a person wanted to write down an account of their own life, the text they produce would be able to encompass, at best, the author’s own lifetime. Deep time, which measures events like the formation of galaxies and geological ages, seems to operate on an entirely different scale than a person’s lifetime or even than the age of humankind as we know it. And yet, these different scales are all entangled, as things in the universe usually are, even though this connection is not always apparent to the untrained eye. This chapter  argues that postcolonial life writings are apt to materialize the bonds of their author’s limited life span to deep time in ways that can contribute to a better understanding of the entanglement between humankind and a grander temporality. Postcolonial life writings, particularly those with a thematic focus on humankind’s relation to nature, are keen on conveying those temporal ties, as the perspective of time in these narratives is not centralized in a given subject’s viewpoint of history. Throughout this chapter, I explore the connection between nature

R. L. Dalmaso (*) Universidade Federal do Sul e Sudeste do Pará, Marabá, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Batzke et al. (eds.), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77973-3_6

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writing, life writing, and postcolonial subjectivities in two works, namely, Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) and Ailton Krenak’s Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (2019).1 More specifically, I analyze how the relationship between nature and agency in these works foregrounds a move away from human exceptionalism and, instead, shifts toward a posthuman perspective that is vital for redefining perceptions of time. The texts’ epistemological defiance of the Cartesian concept of humanity decentralizes the perception of time, shifting from a personal experience of time, focused on the cogito individual,2 to deep time, focused on humanity’s larger role within nature. This chapter will first retrace part of the history of the connection between life writing and nature writing, as far back as the nineteenth century, to H.D. Thoreau and Charles Darwin, to understand the effects of the narrating “I” in nature writing from a critical postcolonial perspective. Following that, the analysis of Ghosh’s and Krenak’s narratives will underline the agential features of nature in their works, as well as their denial of the humanistic Cartesian model of the subject and its relation to nature, marking the turn toward a deep time perspective in their works. My own connection to this research will surface throughout the text, further entangling temporalities and subjectivities through life writing.

On Whales: A Personal Interlude First, a small detour into how this line of inquiry came about, or how my research began due to my love for whales. I lived for several years on an island in the South of Brazil where right whales (Eubalaena australis) come to breed and nurse their calves during the winter months. You could see them from the shore and the proximity to such a wild animal in my very own backyard changed me. Having grown up in a mountainous region, far from the sea, the very thought of proximity to aquatic life was alien to me until then. An obsession was born. I began to research and read up on whales in my spare time. I became familiar with whale families, their habitats, their origins, and everything else that made them special. Cetaceans are unique in that they are mammals that fully returned to the aquatic environment, having once thrived on land. Over the course of fifty million years, they have drastically changed their physiology, from the “size of a large domestic dog” (such as the Pakicetus) to the largest creature on Earth.3 As I poured over the literature on the fossil record of modern whales, I was surprised to see how much those scientific works

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delved into the autobiographical to narrate how the authors secured certain specimens, or how they unearthed a clue to solve the puzzles presented by the fossils. As an autobiography studies scholar, my research interests were leading me elsewhere, but reading about whales was the first time I glimpsed the recurrence of the connection between the genres of nature writing and life writing. This initial interest in whales also led me to reflect on deep time, on how fossils are formed, on geological changes, and how they affect life as we know it. A related side note revolves around the political context of the time. As a Brazilian queer scholar, living through a political coup that ousted a leftist woman president in favor of a misogynistic right-wing government, following the daily news was simply too depressing—especially since this turn in government eventually led to an extreme right-wing president who openly defends the persecution of minorities and torture of political opponents (as it was practiced extensively in Brazil during the military dictatorship 1964–1985). The thought of deep time and humanity’s place in it actually gave and gives me solace during the worst days. I take this liberty in an article—spinning a yarn about my love for whales, my loathing of torture supporters, and the comfort found in the idea of deep time—precisely because my academic interests revolve around the constitution of the “I” within and through autobiographical texts. As a genre, life writing has a way of surreptitiously finding its way into more formal texts. Whereas my “I” was inserted here deliberately, to prove a point, other authors who have written about nature have done so either inadvertently or apologetically, as though the “I” were an intrusion on an otherwise “objective” text that needed to be somehow justified.

Archeology of Nature and Life Writing The examples of nature writing from the nineteenth century explored in this section make a point of justifying the intrusion of the “I” in their texts to the reader. While the connection between life writing and nature writing can be traced back as far as Lucretius’s De Rerum Naturae in the first century B.C.,4 I want to turn now, rather briefly, to two founding texts of nature writing from the nineteenth century that are emblematic of this connection: Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). Both works figure in the canon of literature and science, respectively, and, albeit in very different ways, they also deploy autobiographical rhetoric to convey their findings of the natural

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world around them. As such, these works are emblematic of a narrating “I” perceived to stand apart from nature, with the two seen as subject and object, respectively. The preeminence of the humanistic Cartesian subject within these texts is also indicative of the systemic erasure of colonized people’s presence in their accounts of the natural world, as the latter are objectified and placed in opposition to the Enlightenment individual. As Rosi Braidotti points out in The Posthuman (2013), otherness within this humanistic model is defined in relation to “Man,” the cogito ergo sum subject of the Enlightenment, taken as the “measure of all things.”5 Those that do not fall within the set of norms of the Cartesian individual are seen as inferior, non-human, or less than human.6 Posthumanism, in turn, proposes “alternative ways to look at the ‘human’ from a more inclusive and diverse angle,” rejecting the individualism that is central to humanistic texts.7 Thoreau’s and Darwin’s texts are emblematic of the positioning of the narrating “I” within a Cartesian logic of the individual in opposition to nature and non-Western subjectivities. One of the main questions in Thoreau’s Walden revolves around the role of the individual in society, a question spawned by his retreat into the woods.8 The work opens, however, with a rhetorical inquiry into the relation of the self to the text. Walden’s narrator, in the very beginning of the first chapter, posits a defense of the autobiographical “I”: “In most books,” he writes, “the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained … We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking.”9 Walden’s narrator makes a point of reminding the reader that the author of a text is, after all, an “I,” and not a detached voice devoid of subjectivity. In his private journal, Thoreau is particularly emphatic about his predilection for autobiography: “If I am not I, who will be?”10 Thoreau’s text thus carries on a humanistic tradition of autobiography focused on the individual who has a responsibility to society and themselves to look to for answers. Nature, in this Romantic context, works as the catalyst for powerful insights. As Thoreau writes in his journal in 1851, the moral imperative of a poet should be to continually watch the moods of his mind, as the astronomer watches the aspects of the heavens … As travelers go around the world and report natural objects and phenomena, so faithfully let another stay at home and report the phenomena of his own life.11

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In Thoreau’s eyes, the naturalist’s commitment to scientific observation should be mimicked in one’s own life, in one’s poetic drive. The solitary communion with nature, emblematized by Thoreau’s positivistic self-reflecting “I,” helped to canonize rising national ideals of pastoralism. The reiteration of the connection of purity and timelessness to nature present in such ideals, however, discursively erased the “history of colonized peoples through the myth of the empty lands,” as Rob Nixon reminds us.12 The importance of looking at such texts not only through an ecocritical lens but also through a postcolonial critical one is laid bare, thus, by critics such as Nixon who accuse the “silences” between both theories of limiting the scope of discussion about nature writing to “the boundaries of a single nation” rather than fostering a transnational perspective that takes into account a more diverse notion of wilderness and nature.13 The dialogue between ecocriticism and postcolonialism is “urgently necessary,” Graham Huggan insists, if we are to embrace a truly diverse debate about nature.14 If narratives concerned with the context of the Anthropocene and the ethical implications for humanity as geological agents are a “good starting place”15 for such an endeavor, as Melina Savi argues, I would add that postcolonial life narratives, which discuss the categories of nature, humanity, time, and agency as always already entangled, are even more appropriate. Within autobiography studies, the movement toward a theoretical practice that does not naively reproduce Western universalist assumptions of the subject—described by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson as the third wave of autobiography criticism16—seems akin to what Huggan, Savi, and Nixon propose. An articulation that combines the three theoretical perspectives offered by ecocriticism, postcolonialism, and autobiography studies is, thus, well poised to question the boundaries of the self in relation to nature, humanity, time, and agency in a critical way. The urgency of this theoretical dialogue is evident when analyzing scientific texts, such as Darwin’s, that exhibit a Cartesian view of the self in relation to nature, given their continued prestige. Published only four years after Walden, the narrator in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) is apologetic about his own intrusion in the text. Nevertheless, he opens with the first person: “When on board HMS Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent.”17 Despite unabashedly initiating his scientific work on a personal note, a few lines later, still in the same paragraph, the narrator seems to realize his slip and actually apologizes for employing

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such a narrative device: “I hope that I may be excused for entering on these personal details, as I give them to show that I have not been hasty in coming to a decision.”18 Although both Thoreau’s and Darwin’s narrators comment on the appropriateness of the narrating “I,” their divergent attitudes reflect, in part, their (and possibly their readers’) expectations concerning the respective genres of their publications. The confidence seen in Thoreau’s narrating “I” is that of a narrator who understands the possibilities of the personal essay and the potential of experimentation allowed in the genre, of which he takes full advantage. Darwin’s narrator, on the other hand, is bound by the supposed objectivity of scientific discourse. At the same time that he breaks paradigms, denying humanity’s claim to uniqueness in evolutionary processes—a move that, according to Richard Grusin, has paved the way for the non-human turn that would follow19— the narrator seems uncomfortable about pushing the boundaries of the textual genre through the deployment of a narrating “I” in a scientific work. Darwin’s reluctant acknowledgment of the first person becomes central to my argument here, as it inadvertently discloses the colonialist undertones of the autobiographical self in narratives about nature. As the first lines in On the Origin of Species advance, South America functions as the background for the naturalist’s revelations: a setting that reveals hidden truths about the origins of life. The narrator allows himself the transgression of the personal “I” only to convey the reasoning behind his findings. Unlike Thoreau’s text, which explicitly embraces the “I” as a point of view, following in the footsteps of other essayists, Darwin’s autobiographical “I” is almost embarrassed by his stylistic choice, and thus feels obliged to reinforce the narrative’s scientific objectivism. Such a rationale seeks to avoid the spectrum of subjectivity while establishing the authority of the scientific observer from the West exploring the perceived wildness of South America. The naturalist gaze becomes entangled with the colonial one, as the overlapping power structures that govern them frame these spaces as resources to be used for the advancement of European institutions. In this context, South America is not seen as the protagonist of these advances in science, but as the research object. It is the location for fleeting fieldwork; the place to collect specimens, raw data, and other types of useable information. Emulating other colonizing processes, valuable items are taken from the Global South to Europe, and the fact that the entire expedition was funded by the British monarchy is no coincidence, after all.20

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This detour into the evolutionary tree of life writing and its connection to nature writing serves to point out some of the colonialist slippages that permeate such works. Texts that rely on a narrating “I” centered around the humanistic Cartesian subject, such as Thoreau’s and Darwin’s, will invariably establish a series of hierarchical positions against which other categories, such as non-Westerners and people of color, are seen as “devalued and therefore disposable.”21 The autobiographical “I” is presented as remaining detached from the world at large and portrayed as unaffected by it in its Cartesian wholeness and individuality. As such, the perspective of time in such narratives, even in those positioned in an environment of a much grander scale (such as evolution in Darwin’s writings), is seen through the lens of that individuality. To account for a broader scale of time concerning a narrating “I,” one must look elsewhere: postcolonial life narratives that reject a self-centered view of individuality and nature so often found in Enlightenment autobiographies, focusing instead on the connection between different agents across time.

Migrations Across Deep Time Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016) weaves together questions about humanity, nature, and the power of narrative, positing that climate change is not merely a crisis related to the rising temperature of oceans and the atmosphere caused by human actions. Rather, it is “also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination.”22 As a writer, Ghosh looks at the challenges of examining climate change through narrative practices, asking how different literary forms lend themselves to the telling of this story and why so many writers shy away from exploring the specifics of climate change in their texts. The Great Derangement begins with a question: “Who can forget those moments when something that seems inanimate turns out to be vitally, even dangerously alive?”23 Such an awakening to the properties of apparently inanimate subjects is imprinted on Ghosh’s own family’s history, as they became displaced due to a river that, suddenly displaying its aliveness, changed course. He relates how, through storytelling practices passed on from generation to generation, the co-constitutive relationship between the family and the river is composed: [T]he story, as my father told it, was this: one day in the mid-1850s the great river suddenly changed course, drowning the village; only a few of the

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inhabitants managed to escape to higher ground. It was this catastrophe that had unmoored our forebears; in its wake they began to move westward and did not stop until the year 1856, when they settled once again on the banks of a river, the Ganges, in Bihar.24

Ghosh’s ancestors thus recount how nature does not constitute a simple backdrop in people’s lives but rather plays a crucial role in discursively defining (and being defined by) that very life. Karen Barad refers to such entanglements as “agential realism,”25 capturing the notion that things, be it atoms or bodies, are not separate from each other but actively affect each other’s constitution as part of phenomena.26 Discursive practices within these phenomena are then understood as “specific material (re) configuring of the world through which the determination of boundaries, properties, and meanings is differentially enacted.”27 These discursive practices are not seen as exclusive to human-based activities; rather, “material (re)configuring of the world”28 implies that both river and villagers are entangled in such phenomena. Within them, the river’s change of course is as much a component of discursive practices as the villagers’ story about it. In that sense, neither the river nor the inhabitants of its shore are seen as ontologically separated by a given boundary; they are entangled, and mutually construct meaning through the ongoing performance of their entanglement. As the story goes, the Padma River, once seen as a source of security for water, crops, and fishing, had—on its own—decided to move. As a result, Ghosh states, “my ancestors were ecological refugees long before the term was invented.”29 Nature is thus not seen as something to be contemplated, as an object of study, but it is described as an agent in its own right whose ability to act substantially impacts those around it. This relationship cannot be oversimplified, however, or reduced to certain peoples’ supposed proximity to nature—a problematic association commonly made in relation to postcolonial subjects. Rather, the relation to nature foretold in Ghosh’s account is illustrative of Barad’s concept of intra-action, where “discursive practices and material phenomena do not stand in a relationship of externality to each other; the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity.”30 As such, the river’s sudden move(ment) and the villagers’ displacement are not discrete actions. They are invariably entangled, by way of material and discursive implications that reverberate not only through generations but through space and time.

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Pondering the river’s impacts on his family, the narrator in The Great Derangement recalls thinking about nature as something animate as his notes of the time convey: “I do believe it to be true that the land here is demonstrably alive; that it does not exist solely, or even incidentally, as a stage for the enactment of human history; that it is [itself] a protagonist.”31 He goes on to claim that children born into families such as his, who grew up hearing about their ancestors’ displacement due to the river’s whim in the mid-1850s, do not regard nature as passive or as an object. For them, nature has always been a protagonist in its own right, existing on its own, much broader time scale. In fact, he states, such subjects “never lost this awareness in the first place.”32 The narrator conjectures that human beings, in general, used to share that awareness, which was gradually replaced by a belief in the predictable uniformity of events.33 The existence of what he refers to as “non-human interlocutors” was neglected in favor of statistics and probability.34 Ghosh’s narrator then goes on to argue that “climate change challenges and refutes Enlightenment ideas,” questioning the dualistic divide between nature and culture, subjectivity and objectivity, science and the humanities.35 Changes in climate, for example, have forced (some) people in the West to redefine their relationship to nature and begin to see it as an active interlocutor, an agent.36 The narrator cites, for example, Adam Sobel’s chronicles of shock experienced by North Americans affected by the storm, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, who previously “believed that ‘losing one’s life to a hurricane is … something that happens in faraway places.’”37 People unused to the process of bowing to natural events, formerly a bane to those in faraway places, suddenly see themselves in the same situation as Ghosh’s ancestors. We can enumerate the examples of similar awakenings just by looking at the current news.38 As I am writing this, a virus has put the entire world on hold for the better part of the year, wildfires are raging across the Western states of the U.S., forcing entire towns to evacuate, and the 2020 hurricane season has run out of letters in the alphabet. The list goes on. My own country, Brazil, once regarded as a safe haven from extreme natural events,39 has seen unprecedented hurricanes, wildfires, and even earthquakes in this year alone. The “new normal” seems to be the phrase of the moment, on social media and the news, as people become used to the daily routine of wearing masks, to the constant smoke, to the heat. Despite the aura of urgency surrounding the discussion, Ghosh’s text is quick to remind us, though, that there was never a time when we were not affected

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by nature.40 Even before the specific climate changes we are currently facing, we were always already intra-acting with nature, as Barad claims, and as Ghosh’s father’s story illustrates. Nevertheless, the apparent suddenness of nature’s presence may feel uncanny for some. Ghosh uses the uncanny to describe the sensation felt when one witnesses things that at first appear inanimate suddenly come to life, such as a river that decides to change its course. The definition of the uncanny, or unheimlich, literally “unhomely” in German is, however, more complex. In his 1919 essay on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud attempts to “solve the problem of the uncanny”41 through a long, at times contradictory, list of instances that can generate that “class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”42 According to the psychoanalyst, among other things, the uncanny can be felt through the experience of repetition, déjà vu, death, or the presence of doubles, but the most general definition of the uncanny is that of something strangely familiar, or of that which at first seems familiar and then is revealed to be unfamiliar, and/or vice versa. Despite his drawn-out attempt at extinguishing the possibilities of the uncanny, Freud never quite completes his survey of the term. He concedes “that we must be prepared to admit that there are other elements besides those which we have so far laid down as determining the production of uncanny feelings.”43 As Freud experiences throughout his essay, the uncanny has a way of circling back on itself, of defying definitions, of refusing closure, embodying its own estrangement through its refusal to settle on how exactly the familiar and the strange are involved. Ghosh’s narrator, on the other hand, does not seem as preoccupied with the term’s elusiveness, repeatedly using the uncanny to characterize humanity’s response to nature through an agential perspective. The narrator argues that “one of the uncanniest effects of climate change, [is] this renewed awareness of the elements of agency and consciousness that humans share with many other beings, and even perhaps the planet itself.”44 Whereas Freud seems particularly anxious about the idea of human-like robots that can be mistaken for living people, a little more than a century later, Ghosh’s text locates the uncanny in humankind’s newfound perception that it does not have a monopoly on agency, a perception brought on by climate change. The realization that there are other entities at work transforms once familiar surroundings, challenges truths, shatters the ground, sometimes quite literally. This newfound uncanniness, Ghosh argues,

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proves … that non-human forces have the ability to intervene directly in human thought. And to be alerted to such interventions is also to become uncannily aware that conversations among ourselves have always had other participants.45

Comfortable Cartesian truths are, thus, challenged as we become increasingly aware of these other interlocutors in our midst. Karen Barad sees the uncanny in nature’s own ability to challenge conventions of space and time.46 She uses the term to characterize quantum phenomena and their discontinuous movement; the way an electron leaps from one energy level to the next without going through an in-between space, while simultaneously there appears to be “instantaneous communication” between particles across space and even across time.47 Using Albert Einstein’s famous characterization of quantum theory as “spooky action at a distance,” she wonders: What kind of spooky action-at-a-distance causality is this?! The difficulty here is the mistaken assumption of a classical ontology based on a belief in a world populated by independently existing things with determinate boundaries and properties that move around in a container called “space” in step with a linear sequence of moments called “time.”48

Quantum mechanics challenges our understanding of things as individual, separate entities that interact in a given situation, in a given time, in a given space. The uncanny lies, for the theorist, in the bafflement felt by the observer when studying quantum particles and their spooky behavior. Quantum particles behave in a way that defies Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, challenging assumptions about the linearity of the space-time continuum, moving through different fields without going through their in-between spaces, communicating information between particles even backward in time.49 The discontinuity observed in the particles’ behavior defies ontological assumptions about the nature of matter itself. Uncannily, quantum physics challenges concepts such as “before” and “after,” “self” and “other,” “here” and “there,” forcing a perspective of simultaneity on what Barad refers to as “spacetimemattering,” performed through these entanglements.50 This simultaneity relates to deep time, entangling micro and macro scales of time in its performance of spacetimemattering. Barad uses the metaphor of tree rings to illustrate the idea of time as becoming, as past and future are enfolded through

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mattering.51 Larger scales of time such as changing seasons and years are entangled to micro scales, to the cellular level in a tree’s trunk, through a process of material becoming which not only marks time but makes time as well. As much as the ebbs and flows of a river and the connection with its settlers work in a similar way, Barad’s understanding of the uncanny is also connected to that of Ghosh. The discovery of agency brought on by climate change, which generates the uncanny feeling for Ghosh, is also the realization that previously assumed universal truths cannot be trusted anymore. By resisting Cartesian logic, the uncanny surfaces in the communication between river and villagers, for example. As the text’s title suggests, the temporality of past/present/future is quite literally deranged, as one realizes that the events of the 1850s are repeatedly retold and become part of the daily life of the descendants of those first displaced by the river. Generation after generation inherits the narrative of the river and reenacts its history through iteration, generating new depths of meaning at each recurrence. The river produces its own narrative, through ebbs and flows, intra-acting with several other agents as well. River and villagers communicate across time, informing each other’s actions, affecting each other’s subjectivities. In quantum mechanics, we say that particles are entangled due to their ability to alter each other’s properties, even at a distance, when separated from each other. In this sense, we can perceive entanglement in the relationship between river and villagers as well, for they continue to affect each other even at a spatial and temporal distance. Storytelling, then, connects them across space, time, and matter. The familiar is not necessarily the former shores of the river but the story itself. The different experiences of uncanniness in relation to nature constitute a core part of this familiarity. As Ghosh’s narrator points out, such feelings of familiarity or strangeness toward nature’s agency vary greatly according to context: In the Sundarbans, for example, the people who live in and around the mangrove forest have never doubted that tigers and many other animals possess intelligence and agency. For the first peoples of the Yukon, even glaciers are endowed with moods and feelings, likes and dislikes. Neither is it the case that we were all equally captive to Cartesian dualism before the awareness of climate change dawned on us: my ancestors were certainly not in its thrall.52

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The Padma River that displaced Ghosh’s ancestors has always been regarded by them as an agential entity. Through time, the river has become entangled with those that inhabit its changing shores, invariably linking their narratives. Moreover, the narrative of the river is one of constant changes through deep time. One can go back, for example, to the collision of the Indian and the Eurasian tectonic plates, approximately 50 million years ago,53 which formed the Himalayas and shaped the morphology of the continent. That geological episode set forth a chain of events—including but not restricted to changes in climate, sediments, vegetation, and waterways—that all affect the area to this day. Before ever being referred to as Padma, which in Sanskrit means “lotus flower,” the dynamic of the river was already being told through the friction between land and water. Although the present course of the Padma is relatively new—around 200 years old54—its dynamic characteristic means the layout of its banks has significantly changed since then. The Padma is considered, thus, a migrant river, as the “dynamic physical processes … including the movement of water, sediment, and wood, cause the river channel in some areas to move, or ‘migrate,’ over time.”55 Bangladesh-based photographer Sarker Protick developed a project called “Of River and Lost Lands,” which documents the eroding nature of the Padma River and its impact on the populations, like Ghosh’s family, that live by its banks.56 His photographs attempt to capture the melancholic fluidity of life by the river’s edge, as erosion breaks the banks, eating away the land, and displacing people time and time again. When asked why people stay along the river in such conditions, Protick states that [t]his thing has been rooted in our culture, in our songs, our writings, for a long time. And every time it’s referenced, it talks about how people fight with it. It’s strange. They have lost their houses, but they still try to live by the river because it’s how they’ve been living for a long time, six or seven generations, because they are the people of the river.57

The connection to the river is upheld throughout generations, in a mutually constitutive process. River and people adapt to each other, affect each other, displace each other. An example of the material bonds implied in this constitutive process can be seen in the way the floods affect both villagers and river: seasonal floods dislodge villagers, who continually move and populate new swaths of land by the river; humans, in turn, alter the flow of the river, by farming and settling in erodible embankments and,

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more recently, by building dams. Actions carried out by river and people invariably impact each other, as Ghosh’s family story exemplifies. The narratives of the river and the settlers become entangled, thus, in the materiality of their migration as well as in the symbolic recurrence of this constant relocation through time.

Precambrian Repercussions of Early Life In Ailton Krenak’s Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, such an entanglement of narratives, between people and river, namely, between the Krenak people and the Watu River, surfaces throughout the work as well. Ailton Krenak, an indigenous leader of the Krenak people in Brazil, had a principal role in assuring that the Brazilian Constitution of 1988 (promulgated after the dictatorship that ruled the country from 1964 to 1985) contained a chapter on the rights of indigenous peoples to the land. In Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, he offers three essays that address the urgency of the Anthropocene and the power of narrative as resistance. Krenak was born in the region of the Watu River, or Rio Doce, which in Portuguese means “Sweet River,” situated in the Southeast of Brazil. The river hit headlines in 2015, when a dam containing refuse from an iron ore mine in the town of Mariana (Minas Gerais), controlled by Samarco, a Vale and BHP joint venture, broke. The ensuing mudslide killed nineteen people, flooded entire villages with toxic sludge, poisoned water sources and soil for hundreds of miles, and reached the sea contaminating a large area of the coast. At the time, many journalists and environmentalists considered this event to be the biggest environmental tragedy in Brazilian history.58 Millions were affected, including the Krenak people. For them, whose lands were by the river, the consequences of the environmental crime were disastrous as the river was declared dead soon after the tragic event.59 The Krenak depended on the river for freshwater, for fishing, for their crops, and for so much more. Krenak’s essays argue that financial institutions, such as the mining companies behind the disaster, see the river as a commodity, as part of a capitalist system that understands nature as a series of natural resources to be explored, auctioned, or leased. Contrasting this, the Krenak people refer to the river as “Watu, our grandfather, not a resource, as the economists say. It is not something that someone can possess; it is a part of our construction as a collective people that inhabit a specific place…”60 The emotional connection to the river runs as a family history, going back generations, extending the

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relationship beyond the immediate present and signaling toward a deep time perspective of nature. When the river dies, the Krenak mourn: The Watu, this river that supported our life by the margins of the Sweet River, between the states of Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo, extending for six hundred kilometers, is all covered by a toxic material that came down from a tailings dam, which left us orphans and accompanying the river in a comatose state.61

If Ghosh’s overt connection to the river dates back to his ancestors, Krenak’s narrative posits the bond with the waterway as that of a direct descendant. In fact, the idea that people and river are co-constituents, performing a relationship through intra-action is foregrounded from the very beginning of Krenak’s account. Life narratives such as Krenak’s and Ghosh’s that intersect life writing and nature writing from a postcolonial perspective can help us understand humanity’s relation to time in different terms, primarily, because they question the Enlightenment idea of humanity. Krenak’s account, however, does not display the uncanniness described in Ghosh’s, mostly because the fallacy that humanity is separate from nature is addressed explicitly in his essay: The name krenak is constituted by two terms: one is the first particle, kre, which signifies head, the other, nak, means earth. Krenak is the inheritance we received from our ancestors, of our origin memories, which identify us as “head of earth,” as a humanity that cannot conceive itself without this connection, without this profound communion to the earth.62

Humanity is presented as entangled with nature, discursively and materially performed. Neither are seen as distinct entities, and the memory of this knowledge is inherited through narrative and etymology. The thought of a distinct boundary between humanity and nature is even mocked throughout the essays.63 Sustainable development (sustainable for whom?), natural resources (resources for whom?), the creation of parks (a stepping stone toward the creation of parking lots) are all described as banal ideas, catering to an audience that seeks to consume nature.64 Krenak’s text denounces what he deems as people’s effort in creating a “metaphor of nature” that comfortably adjusts to their consumerist goals, rather than an acknowledgment of how humans are a part of nature and vice versa: “the idea that we, humans, are detached from the earth, living

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a civilizing abstraction, is absurd.”65 Corporations, such as the ones directly responsible for the death of the Watu River, however, like to take advantage of a consumerist vision of sustainability and to showcase their alleged efforts in conservation, as a precursory look at their corporate websites will showcase.66 The way out of this hypocrisy, the narrator claims, is to reflect on why we need such metaphors that discursively reinforce the artificial chasm between humanity and other entities in the first place. Such humanistic exceptionalism has no place in his understanding of the phenomena that entangle us with nature: We were, for so long, led on by the story that we are the humanity. Meanwhile … we were alienating ourselves from this organism to which we belong, the Earth, and went on to think that it is one thing and we, another: the Earth and humanity. I do not see where there is something that is not nature. Everything is nature. The cosmos is nature. Everything I can think of is nature.67

Krenak thus questions the idea of humanity as separate from nature, highlighting the artificiality of that opposition. The entanglement that connects humanity and nature is laid bare even as the categories are juxtaposed. The construction of a metonymic humanity, that is, one in which a specific type of humanity stands in for all, is also at the heart of Krenak’s critique. The process that separates humanity from other agents is akin to the system that excludes other human subjects from the category of humanity. The narrator asks: What type of humanity is it that we talk about? Who are the subjects that are encompassed within this conception? By doing so, Krenak challenges an exclusionary view of humanity: During the last 2 or 3 thousand years, how did we construct the idea of humanity? Is this not at the base of a lot of wrong choices we have made, justifying the use of violence? The idea that white European people could go out colonizing the rest of the world was based on the premise of an enlightened humanity that needed to go towards the darkened humanity, bringing it to this incredible light. This call for the heart of civilization was always justified by the notion that there is a way of being on this Earth, a certain truth, or a conception of truth, which has guided a lot of the choices made in different periods of history.68

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As a subject historically associated with this “darkened humanity,” Krenak seems to be particularly aware of how fallacious these premises can be. The hubristic truth proposed by these premises separates humanity from everything else on this Earth and, as such, justifies the appropriation of the latter in service of the former. The same premises segregate the privileged sections of humanity from the disposable ones, enabling the use of violence in the dominating process that differentiates “enlightened humanity” from the “darkened” one. The construction of this idea of humanity is, for Krenak, flawed at its core. The result, according to the narrator, is the commodification of both nature and humanity, in which one emptily consumes the other under the guise of progress.69 The arrival of the era identified as the Anthropocene, in this scenario, is another sign of the flaws of such a system, and “it should sound as an alarm.”70 The cause for concern is indeed urgent, as humanity is confronted with its role as a geological agent.71 However, Krenak points out, the feeling of impending doom in discussions about the Anthropocene and climate change is also associated with the narrowly defined concept of an enlightened humanity that still sees itself as separate from other humans and non-­ humans and entirely disconnected from deep time. For that humanity, this is the first time that its existence is actually in jeopardy, whereas for others, such as Krenak’s people, the end of the world has come and gone a few times already. The title of his work, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, is at heart a provocation; after all, who better to give advice about the end of the world than someone who has seen so many apocalypses before in the form of colonization, wars, epidemics, poverty, hunger, violence, and, most recently, mining dams that burst and kill your water source? At the same time, this provocation inherent in the title plays with the fear of a finality of time, as narrowly conceived through an individual’s perspective, and also with ideas of conquering such challenges through reason. Rather than resorting to Enlightenment strategies to avoid this perceived end of times, Krenak turns to narratives of resistance from other peoples, such as his own. In 2018, after the election of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who campaigned on an anti-indigenous rights, anti-­ environmental protection platform, promising not to give “one centimeter” more of land toward protecting indigenous groups during his term,72 Krenak recalls how he was approached by people who were rightfully concerned with the ominous situation. How are indigenous groups going to deal with all of this? He responded by saying that indigenous groups have been resisting for at least 500 years, and that “[his] worry is with the white

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folks now, how are they going to escape this one?”73 He suggests that these “folks” look to the peoples that have had to deal with the end of the world before, how did they manage to survive colonization and still be “kicking and screaming”?74 Taking his own advice, he recounts how he found inspiration for resistance in looking at the strategies of his ancestors for survival, specifically at how they have made use of poetry, creativity, and narrative as forms of resistance.75 In a post-humanistic turn, through this imaginative use of language, Krenak concludes that his people “resisted by expanding our subjectivity, by not accepting this idea that we are all the same.”76 Krenak’s proposal for an expansion of subjectivity is, thus, to resist the humanist idea of the human, which takes the white male as the universal representative. By destabilizing the concept of humanity, Krenak’s text suggests that we can also move beyond limited notions of what it means to be human.77 If we abandon the idea of “Man” as the measure of all things, as Krenak suggests, we are freer to consider our place as agents within a deep time chronology much more effectively. A deep time perspective entails the detachment of the idea of time from that of humanity. Krenak illustrates that through the remembrance of an era when the planet was organized into a supercontinent, called Pangaea, imagining that a picture taken from above at the time would be completely unfamiliar to us.78 We have gotten accustomed to the picture of today to the point that we regard it as immutable, he argues: “If there have been other Earth configurations before, even without us here, why is it that we are so attached to this portrait with us here?”79 Paradoxically, the Cartesian subject might be well aware of other eras prior to ours, but he still regards our current configuration as firmly established as his centralized position in it. The insistence on seeing humanity as the center around which other categories, including time, are constituted, exposes the hubris responsible for our current climate crisis. Departing from the idea of humanity as the central parameter in relation to how time is perceived further highlights the entanglements between humans and nature, as the narrative of the Watu River evidences. Many populations are still struggling with the poisoned river, and the aftermath of the Mariana disaster is very much in the present, but deep time is instrumental in understanding the causes and the lasting effects of the event. Within the context of this discussion, one needs to go back to the Paleoproterozoic Era, between 2.6 and 2 billion years ago, when the Minas Supergroup layer of metamorphic rocks was being formed.80 During the Archean and the Proterozoic, as the atmosphere was being suffused

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with oxygen, produced by the first cyanobacteria, oxidizing the iron on ocean floor sediments, banded iron formations (or BIFs, as these units of rocks are called) registered the beginning of life on Earth. Ironically, the fossil record of the earliest stages of organic life is also responsible for most of the global iron ore reserves, linking life in the Precambrian oceans to the mining industry that has severely impacted the region of the Watu River. The narrative of the river is thus tied to that of the Krenak people, which is tied to the narrative of the layer of rocks being mined, which is tied to the story of the cyanobacteria in ancient oceans, and so on, in a series of entanglements through time. To understand these linkages to the past is also to grasp the responsibility of a future beyond our own lifetimes. To think of deep time, one must move away from an exclusive focus on the experience of the individual’s lifetime. Deep time connects the life span of the narrator in Krenak’s text to the life span of the river, as intersecting narratives, which materially and discursively constitute each other in past, present, and future times.

Concluding Remarks Life writing seems, at first, to be a genre concerned specifically with a limited time span, that of the narrator’s lifetime, or even just a part of it. Thoreau’s Walden, for example, focuses on a timeline of two years, two months, and two days. This limited timeline is particularly noticeable when one looks at more traditional forms of autobiography, emblematic of the Enlightenment. If one is limited by the objectivity and rationality of the cogito subject, it follows that time is only perceived through personal experience. The adherence to this perspective severely limits imagining possibilities of temporalities outside the empirically lived. Deep time, thus, appears to be antithetical to the genre, for how could one write about one’s life in relation to a time span that surpasses one’s own lived experience by eons? Material ecocritic Jane Bennett affirms that “perhaps the claim to a vitality intrinsic to matter itself becomes more plausible if one takes a long view of time,” and “[i]f one adopts the perspective of evolutionary rather than biographical time.”81 How can life narratives take on an evolutionary perspective on time that goes beyond the (auto-)biographical, the very issue of the genre? The answer lies most likely within the potential of life narratives situated outside the idea of humanity attached to Enlightenment ideals, such as Ghosh’s and Krenak’s texts, which engage with the entanglement of nature and humanity and

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chime in with Barad’s concept of agential realism. Such narratives offer a more provocative posthuman perspective on the scope of humanity’s relation to the Earth. Humanistic notions of subjectivity that have for centuries excluded these points of view as well as individual perceptions of time are, then, disrupted, in favor of a rethinking not only of these categories but also of the genre itself. In the process of relinquishing claims to the objectivity of personal experience as a cornerstone of autobiography, the texts analyzed throughout this article point to new forms of life writing. As Krenak discusses the Anthropocene, he wonders if Maybe we are too conditioned to this idea of the human being and to one kind of existence. If we destabilize this pattern, maybe our mind will suffer some kind of rupture, as if we were to fall into an abyss. Who says we cannot fall? Who says we haven’t fallen already?82

To let go of a fixed idea of humanity is part of a chain reaction of epistemological and ontological ruptures, as Enlightenment notions of subjectivity, agency, nature, and time are repeatedly called into question. The narrative of the universe is itself riddled with ruptures, from the very beginning, as elements expand and modify the world around them continually throughout time and space. The material and discursive entanglements that connect these deep time events are performed through life narratives such as Ghosh’s and Krenak’s, as illustrated throughout this text. The linearity of the Enlightenment subject and its perception of time is disrupted, poised against a series of discontinuities that make up the post-humanistic subject. As such, life narratives that engage with such ruptures can offer unique insights into the debate of the Anthropocene and the lasting impact of humanity on Earth.

Notes 1. Krenak’s text is only available in Portuguese, at least for the time being. Therefore, all the translations in this article are mine, including the title. 2. The philosopher René Descartes defines the individual as a knowing subject, governed by rationality. His famous conclusion “cogito ergo sum,” I think, therefore I am, encapsulates the idea of the dualism of mind and body. The Enlightenment subject is thus connected to a universal rationality that establishes a series of hierarchies in which Otherness, in terms of sexuality, race, gender, disability, is defined as negative or as inherently inferior, see Braidotti, The Posthuman, 15.

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3. Pyenson, Spying on Whales, Loc 355. 4. Grusin, “Introduction,” viii. 5. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 15. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 28. 8. Cramer, “Introduction,” xvii. 9. Thoreau, Walden, 1. 10. Thoreau, quoted in Cramer, “Introduction,” xviii. 11. Ibid., xviii. 12. Nixon, “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism,” 235. 13. Ibid., 234. 14. Huggan, “‘Greening’ Postcolonialism,” 720. 15. Savi, “The Anthropocene,” 955. 16. Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 145. 17. Darwin, Origin of Species, 1. 18. Ibid., 1 (emphasis added). 19. Grusin, “Introduction,” viii. 20. The HMS Beagle was a part of the Royal Navy, as the acronym HMS (His/ Her Majesty’s Ship) conveys. It was originally launched as a standard 10-gun brig, in 1820, a small and versatile type of vessel used to provide support for larger ships in both shallow and deep water, see Thomson, HMS Beagle, 40. After the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), most ships of this class were converted in some form or another, either to work in survey missions or as part of the Coast Guard, 55. Even though the HMS Beagle was not built until after the war, it was still initially conceived as 10-gun brig and was not put into service until 1825, when it was commissioned to become a survey vessel, 58. 21. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 28. 22. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 17. 23. Ibid., 8. 24. Ibid., 9. 25. Whilst a number of theorists have different approaches to what Grusin terms “the nonhuman turn” (Grusin’s list of theoretical developments in the field include Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory; affect theory; Donna Haraway’s animal studies; Gilles Deleuze, Manuel De Landa, Latour’s assemblage theory; among others), I have decided to borrow mostly from Karen Barad’s concept of “agential realism” for the purposes of this article. Barad’s theory particularly resonates with my own interests in quantum physics, performativity, and the dialogue between disciplines. 26. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 141. 27. Ibid., 148. 28. Ibid., 183.

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29. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 9. 30. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 184. 31. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 12. 32. Ibid., 89. 33. Ibid., 39. 34. Ibid., 46. 35. Ibid., 47. 36. Ibid., 46. 37. Ibid., 40. 38. For more on the recent natural events associated with climate change see Hersher, Rott, and Sommer, “Everything Is Unprecedented.” 39. Even though Brazil is geographically immense, it is comfortably distant from active volcanoes and far from the instability of plate boundaries. I remember learning in school about how this geographic stability was another testament to the nation’s promise as the “Country of the future,” a phrase coined by Stefan Zweig that became a national motto of sorts. A promise that remains unfulfilled and ever more threatened, as the consequences of climate change seem amplified by a government intent on stripping away any of the already fragile environmental protections of the country. 40. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 86. 41. Freud, “The Uncanny,” 637. 42. Ibid., 620. 43. Ibid., 638. 44. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 89. 45. Ibid., 47. 46. Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 137. 47. Ibid., 144. 48. Ibid. 49. For more on this topic, see the debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein, Bohr’s uncertainty principle and the nuances of the double-slit experiment, explained in detail in Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007). 50. Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity,” 147. 51. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 181. 52. Ghosh, The Great Derangement, 89. As a descendant of immigrants whose primary occupation was agriculture, I have witnessed signs that my ancestors were not in thrall of this Cartesian dualism either. Climate, mainly, was regarded as agential and I would listen to my grandmother recounting the hardships of prior years due to floods or droughts, as she would look anxiously to the skies and attempt to decipher the whims of the coming rain in the shapes of the clouds or in the direction of the wind. Before climate

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change was an issue discussed in academia and in the news throughout the globe, my grandparents were already well aware of the effects of La Niña and El Niño on their crops, for example. Similar to Ghosh’s ancestors, mine hardly had the luxury of seeing nature as anything other than agential when it came to their livelihoods. 53. Rowley, “Age of Initiation,” 1. 54. Rahman and Islam, “Comparison,” 1. 55. Ety and Rashid, “Changing Pattern,” 92. 56. Harlan, “Vanishing Act.” 57. Ibid. 58. For an overview of the event and its consequences, see France24’s web documentary The Mariana Mining Disaster (by Gormezano, Protti, and Cowie). Just four years later, in 2019, a much larger dam, also controlled by Vale, burst, in Brumadinho, another town just a few miles away from Mariana. At least 248 people were killed (Sá). 59. Fiorott and Zanetti, “Tragédia Do Povo Krenak,” 128. 60. Krenak, Ideias, 40 (emphasis added). 61. Ibid., 21–22. 62. Ibid., 23 (italics in the original). 63. Ibid., 32. 64. Ibid., 12. 65. Ibid. 66. For example, see http://www.vale.com/brasil/EN/sustainability/Pages/ default.aspx or https://www.riotinto.com/sustainability. 67. Krenak, Ideias, 9–10 (emphasis added). 68. Ibid., 10–11. 69. Ibid., 20. 70. Ibid., 23. 71. Ibid., 34. 72. For more on Bolsonaro’s promises and their repercussions on indigenous populations, see Londoño and Casado, “Bolsonaro.” 73. Krenak, Ideias, 15. 74. Ibid., 14. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., 15. 77. Ibid., 29. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid. 80. Alkmin, História Geológica, 6. 81. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 10–11 (emphasis added). 82. Krenak, 29.

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Works Cited Alkmin, Fernando F. História Geológica de Minas Gerais. Belo Horizonte, MG: Companhia de Desenvolvimento de Minas Gerais (CODEMGE), 2018. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. ———. “Nature’s Queer Performativity.” Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (2011): 121–158. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Cramer, Jeffrey S. Introduction to Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, by Henry David Thoreau, xv-xxv. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. 1859. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Ety, Nusrat Jahan, and Shahedur Rashid. “Changing Pattern of the Downstream of Ganges River Course: A Comparison with Rennell’s Map of 1760s.” International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications 7, no. 4 (2017): 90–105. Fiorott, Thiago Henrique, and Izabel Cristina Bruno Bacellar Zanetti. “Tragédia Do Povo Krenak Pela Morte Do Rio Doce/Uatu, No Desastre Da Samarco/ Vale/BHP, Brasil.” Fronteiras: Journal of Social, Technological and Environmental Science 6, no. 2 (2017): 127–146. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” New Literary History 7, no. 3 (1976): 619–645. Gormezano, David, Tommaso Protti, and Sam Cowie. “The Mariana Mining Disaster.” France24. Accessed September 29, 2020. https://webdoc.france24. com/brazil-­dam-­mining-­disaster-­mariana/. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2016. Grusin, Richard. “Introduction.” In The Nonhuman Turn, edited by Richard Grusin, vii-xxix. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Harlan, Becky. “Vanishing Act: The Disappearing Banks of the Padma River.” National Geographic, April 17, 2014. Accessed March 31, 2021. https://www. nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2014/04/17/ musings-­sarker-­proticks-­of-­river-­and-­lost-­lands/. Hersher, Rebecca, Nathan Rott, and Lauren Sommer. “Everything Is Unprecedented. Welcome to Your Hotter Earth.” NPR, August 28, 2020, sec. Science. Accessed March 31, 2021. https://www.npr.org/2020/08/28/905622947/ everything-­is-­unprecedented-­welcome-­to-­your-­hotter-­earth. Huggan, Graham. “‘Greening’ Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives.” Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 3 (2004): 701–733. Krenak, Ailton. Ideias Para Adiar o Fim Do Mundo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2019.

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Londoño, Ernesto, and Letícia Casado. “As Bolsonaro Keeps Amazon Vows, Brazil’s Indigenous Fear ‘Ethnocide.’” The New  York Times, April 19, 2020, sec. Americas. Accessed March 31, 2021. https://www. nytimes.com/2020/04/19/world/americas/bolsonaro-­b razil-­a mazon-­ indigenous.html. Nixon, Rob. “Environmentalism and Postcolonialism.” In Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, edited by Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Bunzl Matti, Antoinette Burton, and Jed Esty, 233–251. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Pyenson, Nick. Spying on Whales: The Past, Present and Future of the World’s Largest Animals. London: William Collins, 2018. Rahman, Muhammad Muzibur, and Nazrul Islam. “Comparison of Right and Left Bank Erosion Pattern of the Padma River Part III.” Journal of Geology & Geophysics 6, no. 6 (2017): 1–6. Rowley, David B. “Age of Initiation of Collision between India and Asia: A Review of Stratigraphic Data.” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 145, no. 1–4 (1996): 1–12. Sá, Gabriel de. “Brazil’s Deadly Dam Disaster May Have Been Preventable.” National Geographic, January 29, 2019, sec. Environment. Accessed March 31, 2021. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/01/ brazil-­brumadinho-­mine-­tailings-­dam-­disaster-­could-­have-­been-­avoided-­say-­ environmentalists/. Savi, Melina. “The Anthropocene (and) (in) the Humanities: Possibilities for Literary Studies.” Revista Estudos Feministas 25, no. 2 (2017): 945–959. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Thomson, Keith S. HMS Beagle: The Story of Darwin’s Ship. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition. Edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.

Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk and Critical Posthumanism Monir Gholamzadeh Bazarbash

Introduction As famously professed by Dipesh Chakrabarty in “The Climate of History: Four Theses” (2009), it was history that first came to acknowledge humankind as a major geophysical force in engendering the Anthropocene. Initiated by the industrial revolution in the 1800s,1 the unprecedented human-inflicted geological condition of anthropogenic climate change is an undeniable reality of our present time. Not surprisingly then, as Pieter Vermeulen has pointed out, the Anthropocene also became a major theme in literature: When Jedediah Purdy’s After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene won the 2015 Pulitzer prize in nonfiction, his award testified to the fact that the concept had found its way into the broader cultural context.2 And almost simultaneously, the Anthropocene has been adopted as a central issue of concern by the humanities. In their introduction to their special focus section on “Writing in the Anthropocene” in The Minnesota Review in 2014, Tobias Boes and Kate Marshal (2014)

M. Gholamzadeh Bazarbash (*) Allame Tabaratabie University, Tehran and Purdue University, Urmia, Iran e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Batzke et al. (eds.), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77973-3_7

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grappled with the question of how “the human” can be conceptualized and written in the current age, since, in their view, “theories of the Anthropocene are premised on the historicist notion of an absolute break with the past: a hypothetical point in time when the human condition irrevocably changed.”3 In light of these circumstances, they argue that the Anthropocene is fundamentally a posthumanist era.4 This chapter concentrates on Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is for Hawk (2014) as an instance of contemporary life writing that seeks to negotiate this “irrevocable change” of the human condition. Following Rosi Braidotti’s critical framing of posthumanism, I delineate the ways in which Macdonald’s negotiation of living side-by-side non-human beings brings the concerns of posthumanism to the fore. Moreover, I argue that H Is for Hawk can productively be read as a manifestation of critical posthumanism in its portrayal of the human/non-human relationship between the human protagonist Macdonald and Mabel, the goshawk she is training: Indeed, the ways in which H Is for Hawk offers nuanced reflections on the interactions between humans and non-humans and questions the masculinist and colonialist premises underlying traditional falconry are saturated with (critical) posthumanist ethics.

The Posthuman Subject and a Neo-materialist Philosophy of Becoming In her 2017 Tanner Lecture at Yale University, “Posthuman, All Too Human: The Memoirs and Aspirations of a Posthumanist,” Rosi Braidotti posited that posthumanism is grounded in a neo-materialist philosophy of becoming. This relational posthuman ethic rooted in Spinoza assumes that all of us are made of common matter. Distinguishing between bios and the non-human zoe, it is geared toward creating new alliances between human and non-human forces and agents by embracing zoe-/geo-/ techno-bound perspectives, in which geo is ecologically bounded, and techno is technologically mediated.5 Braidotti further advocates that posthumanism needs to affirm an understanding of the posthuman subject as a materially embedded, multi-layered, and nomadic entity that engages with (other) human and non-human agents.6 The posthuman present is the record of what we are ceasing to be (the actual) and the seed of what we are in the process of becoming (the virtual)—therefore, the present in posthumanism is multi-layered and complex. Accordingly, the nomadic

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subject is a subject-in-process, in perpetual becoming. It “cannot stop at the critique of the actual (of what we are ceasing to be), but needs to move to the creative actualization of the virtual (of what we are in the process of becoming). The interplay between the present as actual and the present as virtual spells the rhythm of subject formation.”7 H Is for Hawk presents its autobiographical protagonist Helen Macdonald as such a nomadic subject-in-becoming by drawing attention to her increasing awareness of her own embeddedness in the material world. The autobiographical narrative is framed by Macdonald’s loss of her father, a renowned photographer—a traumatic experience that is further exacerbated because Macdonald concurrently loses her short-term teaching position at Cambridge University and ends a short-lived relationship.8 Struggling to cope with these circumstances, Macdonald chooses to pursue her childhood obsession with birds of prey, a deep-seated love that made her “sure they were the best things that had ever existed.”9 Focused largely on Macdonald’s relationship with Mabel, the goshawk she acquires to train, H Is for Hawk utilizes the theoretical framework of posthumanism to support an ecofeminist endeavor: throughout the text, her treatment of the hawk becomes no longer governed by her twelve-year-old-self’s admiration of falconry as a male-dominated practice in which the male falconers assume that “these animals [are] at their service, available for their leisure or sport.”10 Rather, in stark opposition to such “traditional” and distinctly anthropocentric stances, the narrative offers a profound contestation of the phallogocentric neglect of non-human beings. Macdonald reflects critically, for example, on the link between the medieval glamour of falconry and modern air warfare, and on how propagandists used this link to argue for their visions of war as the natural order of things.11 Through training the hawk, and her affinity with the material surroundings in the dark forest and its non-human inhabitants, Macdonald thus reaches a disengagement from the anthropos and embraces what Braidotti calls a “vitalist immanence of non-anthropomorphic life-systems.”12 She calls attention to the dark forest as a place where there are no pre-set borders between the human and non-human world, “the dark forest to which all lost things must go.”13 Aligning herself with these “lost things,” Macdonald presents the forest as a space in which multiple boundaries are blurred: temporal, spatial, material, physical, and emotional. She depicts her own life in the forest as intermeshed with nature, as being one with the hawk, foregrounding their shared history with the fields. She asserts that

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there are ghosts in these woods “but they are not long-dead falconers, they are ghosts of things that happened.”14 Macdonald thus consolidates what Braidotti calls the need to “overcome the vision of a de-naturalized social order somehow disconnected from its environmental and organic foundations,” in favor of “more complex schemes of understanding the multi-layered interdependence between ‘naturecultures’ today.”15 Finding more and more similarities between herself and the hawk, Macdonald’s focus transforms from subjective thinking into species thinking: “She [hawk] is learning a particular way of navigating the world, and her map is coincident with mine … She is making the hill her own. Mine. Ours.”16 Emphasizing the ways in which the hawk’s and Macdonald’s processes of subject formation translate into new cartographies of the world shared across species boundaries, H Is for Hawk illustrates a form of nomadic subjectivity that resonates strongly with Braidotti’s call for a neo-­materialist philosophy of becoming in conceptualizations of posthumanism. It is the engagement with the non-human world of matter by an emotionally broken and grief-stricken autobiographical subject that opens the way to a decentered understanding of human subjectivity and to a critique of what Braidotti calls “the injustices and threats of the present times.”17 Helen Macdonald’s way of sharing her life with her hawk while training her resonates with Braidotti’s claim that “it is at the moment of its dissolution that ‘Man’ becomes thinkable as such and emerges as a present concern. Up until that moment it had not surfaced to the critical eye, because it functioned as an implicit notion.”18 In this way, Macdonald’s interactions with her hawk also implicitly question definitions of “the human,” and the way in which normative perceptions of the human are explicitly grounded in discriminations, as Cary Wolfe points out, for example against non-human animals.19 As Derdeyn convincingly argues, Macdonald’s choice to hunt alongside the hawk presents a “reversal of agency”20 that marks her as materially embodied and embedded in a way that is markedly distinct from the sense of transcendence and superiority in treatment of a traditional falconer. This re-allocation of agency also echoes Jane Bennett’s notion of “distributive agency,”21 which she develops in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2009). According to Bennett, “bodies enhance their power in or as a heterogeneous assemblage,” whereby agency can no longer be understood as “a capacity [exclusively] localized in a human body or in a collective produced (only) by human efforts.”22 Macdonald’s engagement with posthumanism is therefore not so much thematic but rather

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operational: by engaging her life in the active life of the hawk she reaches beyond her own human subjectivity. In this way, via her reconsideration of the close association of the human with the non-human, she fosters a reconsideration of agency in relation to the world. Similarly, H Is for Hawk depicts Macdonald’s body simply as one site of distributive agency. Just like nature and non-human animals, her body is part of the materialist continuum, or zoe: “an intertwined web of humans and non-­human living matter.”23 Macdonald’s sense of her hawk’s satisfaction is so significant for her that she frequently takes note of its happiness, which in turn strengthens her own identification and emotional connection with the animal. She notices, for instance, how Mabel “looks [her] directly in the face,” and that the bird is “already on her way back to [her], coming in at treetop height over the wood like a Mustang in a war movie … and she’s back on the fist, grinning like an idiot.”24 In this way, Macdonald makes it possible for us to see the kind of emotional bond she develops with the goshawk. Derdeyn observes that Macdonald even verges on thinking “she is a bird,”25 and Macdonald herself emphasizes that [h]unting with the hawk took me to the edge of being a human [and] then … past that place to somewhere I wasn’t human at all.”26 Living with her hawk like a “nomadic subject,”27 she adapts to the behavior of her hawk rather than attempting to curb the ingrained traits of a hawk. However, while she identifies with the bird to some extent and also identifies the bird with herself, stressing that the animal “seems more human”28 on some days, she clearly maintains that the goshawk’s “inhumanity” should be treasured as separate from humanity; “because what they do has nothing to do with us at all.”29 This portrayal of the goshawk as a sentient and even emotional—yet distinctly non-human—being not only calls for a reconsideration of binary, anthropocentric assumptions about humans and animals but also attributes to the hawk what Huff and Haefner have termed “spiritual subjectivity and emotional agency.”30 Despite the connection between Macdonald and her goshawk, that is, despite Macdonald’s efforts to “bridge the gap” and to “be aligned with the hawk’s eye,”31 the memoir emphasizes that the “inhumanity” of the goshawk, Mabel’s separate agency, remains intact: even when the hawk “has decided” that her trainer is “harmless,”32 Macdonald is still not immune to the goshawk’s aggression. One day, though she has done nothing to provoke the hawk, “Mabel leapt from her perch to my fist, lashed out with one foot and buried four talons in my bare right arm I

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froze. Blood was dripping on the kitchen floor. I could do nothing. Her grip was too powerful. I had to wait until she decided to let go.”33 On a different occasion, Macdonald notes: “Coshed by goshawk! First only blackness, then a field of stars. Then a weird proprioceptive sense that I was wearing a crown of thorns; a complicated halo of pain around my head … I finally wondered … why is my goshawk bating at my face?”34 This desperate situation illuminates not only Macdonald’s vulnerability vis-à-vis the non-human but also the perseverance of her (com)passionate treatment despite being vulnerable to the hawk’s attacks. Macdonald’s reaction exemplifies a core point Braidotti makes about posthuman subjects. While posthumanism offers a philosophical critique that undermines the “Western Humanist ideal of ‘Man of reason’ as the allegedly universal measure of all things, … post-anthropocentricism rests on the rejection of species hierarchy and human exceptionalism.”35 For Braidotti, “posthuman subjects  – as the effect of the convergence of posthumanism and post-­anthropocentrism  – are a ‘we-are-in-this together-but-we-are-not-­­ one-and-the-same’ – kind of subjects. That is to say they are not unitary, but rather complex and multi-layered.”36 Macdonald’s writing conveys this sense of close connection and radical difference at the same time, and via this “double vision,” she is able to overcome this bitter incident and does not view the hawk’s attack as a terminal crisis. Macdonald’s relation to the non-human also incites her to rethink human history; to reconceive it as a history of violence and exploitation. Braidotti refers to “the inhuman and inhumane aspects in our historical condition, namely the recurrence of mass migration, wars, racism, terror, conflicts and economic inequalities.”37 Against this background, she proposes the framework of an ethics of affirmation to “engage actively with instances of injustice and dispossession, pain and hurt, in a transformative manner.”38 Macdonald engages with these instances of injustice and oppression when a chance meeting with some furtive acquaintances confirms that the patriarchal falconry culture is not a thing of the past and that discriminatory structures persist in society even today. Coming back tired on a rainy day, Macdonald is at first glad to run into an old couple, whom she has seen multiple times. However, she is deeply saddened by their question, “Isn’t it a relief that there’re things still like that [falconry], a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these immigrants coming in?”39 Such resistance to vulnerable migrant others disappoints and embarrasses Macdonald. She cannot help but see a relation between this comment and the imagined lineage of chalk-cult mysticism, which ties falconry and the

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love for the landscape to ideas of “purity and blood-belonging;” ideas that wipe away the dark and “complicated histories that landscapes have,” in order to replace them with presumably “easier, safer” histories.40 During her conversation with the couple, she ponders the implications of their notion of safe landscapes and safe histories: They are only safe for us. The fields where I fly Mabel back in Cambridge are farmed organically, and they are teeming with life. These are not. The big animals are here, it is true: the deer, the foxes, the rabbits; the fields look the same, and the trees, too, but look more carefully and this land is empty. There are few plants other than crops, and few bees, or butterflies, for the soil is dressed and sprayed with chemicals that kill.41

Macdonald’s motivations for hawking are entirely different, full of respect for the non-human (world). In the midst of her trauma, she looks at ways to “build across the gap” and to “make a new inhabitable world.”42 Through her own relation to her hawk, which acknowledges multiplicity and complex interconnections, she counters the history of human (ab)use of hawks for human leisure and the pursuit of violence. At the same time, the relation to Mabel also inspires Macdonald to rethink violence and abuse among humans, as the conversation with the older couple and Macdonald’s emotional reaction to their derogatory comments about migrants illustrates. This is also reflected in her emotional response to the conversation with the couple after the encounter: We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. … I wish that we would not fight for landscapes that remind us of who we think we are. I wish we would fight, instead, for landscapes buzzing and glowing with life in all its variousness. And I am guilty too. I’d wanted to escape history by running to the hawk. Forget the darkness, forget Göring’s hawks, forget death, forget all the things that had been before. But my flight was wrong. Worse than wrong. It was dangerous.43

Instead of advocating warfare and the defense of the landscape against an imagined evil “other”—an idea not only represented by the elderly couple but also by the reference to Hermann Göring, the infamous Nazi leader and war criminal—Macdonald endorses an environmental approach that focuses on sustaining “life” rather than bringing about “death.” However, rather than exempting herself, she also (self-)critically reflects

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upon her own complicity in and responsibility for such injustices. H Is for Hawk thus presents Macdonald’s encounter with the non-human other as one productive way of responding to Braidotti’s call to “engage actively with instances of injustice and dispossession, pain and hurt, in a transformative manner.”44 As Macdonald relates how her time with Mable fosters a deep engagement with nature, her perception shifts: she no longer views nature solely as backdrop to human action and she questions the presumed separateness of humans and nature. And yet, these processes of decentering the human do not lead her to completely erase the boundaries. On the contrary, Macdonald professes, “I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.”45 Like Alaimo, Macdonald rejects views of nature as “inert, empty space or as a resource for human use.”46 Instead, she draws attention to nature as “a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions.”47 Macdonald’s memoir thus is a strong example of posthumanism with a focus on what Cynthia Huff has called “the relational, the material, and the umwelt,” and of decentering the human in favor of “considering matter, the non-human, and the surround in which beings interact.”48 Macdonald does not transcend the environment, but is—to borrow Huff’s words—“firmly located in the material.”49 In a significant difference between H Is for Hawk and other animalographies, Macdonald does not offer a “ventriloquized representationality”50 in which the human simply speaks for the animal. Neither is her training of the hawk focused on human mastery. Macdonald is not training Mabel to make her overcome her animal instincts; even though the hawking books warn that it is the fastest way to lose your hawk, she allows Mabel to self-hunt. Rather than insisting on taming the hawk, Macdonald lets the “distance” between her and Mabel increase, giving voice to her realization that “…her world and my world are not the same, and some part of me is amazed that I ever thought they were.”51 Even when the hawk ultimately ignores all her signs, sitting on a tree twenty-five feet above her and not paying attention to her waving and whistling, she is not disappointed because she can see the signs of a happy hawk full of contentment.52 In portraying Macdonald’s acceptance of Mabel’s own free will, H Is for Hawk not only refrains from obscuring the undeniable differences between humans and hawks but also from appropriating the hawk’s voice to harbor the illusion of cross-species ‘understanding’ beyond the limits of human language and perception. While the text acknowledges these limits, it also illustrates numerous

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instances in which a decentering of Macdonald’s human perspective takes place. The posthuman encounter with the non-human other, her hawk, leads Macdonald to embrace an increasing awareness for the senses of touching, smelling, seeing, and hearing. These are all ways of perception that, as Huff explains, “are just as or more important for non-human animal and mechanical relationality.”53

Contestation of Traditional Falconry as a Critical Posthumanist and Ecofeminist Endeavor If posthumanism thus issues a call for a “decentering” of “anthropomorphic thinking”54 in the field of the humanities, H Is for Hawk certainly meets the challenge. Following Cynthia Huff and Joel Haefner’s important distinction between popular posthumanism and critical posthumanism, I would however also argue that H Is for Hawk should be categorized as a critical posthumanist rather than popular posthumanist work, as Macdonald’s life writing records a reciprocal human/non-human life narrative: Whereas Huff and Haefner see popular posthumanism as dominated by a humanist subjectivity that “aims to describe and colonize, through human language and perception, the subjectivities of other species,”55 they argue that a critical posthumanist view “analyzes the relationship between the subjectivities, and studies how those subjectivities transform in the process of engaging each other.”56 Macdonald engages this juxtaposition when she introduces T. H. White, the falconry biographer, whose own biographical work on training hawks creates the masculinist foil that contrasts her own stance. In referencing White, Macdonald first and foremost undermines and questions his stance that training a hawk is supposedly a prime sport for men, and men alone. Macdonald further clearly distances herself from White’s view of training hawks as an outlet for the “savagery of the human heart.”57 While Macdonald does not deny the violence inherent in training a hawk, her own handling of the hawk resists patriarchal and anthropocentric notions of hierarchy and domination that are both central to White’s method. In doing so, she advocates a more responsible approach to encounters between different species—an approach deeply grounded in accepting relationality and equality, rather than assuming difference and superiority. In this context, one problematic issue raised by Macdonald is the treatment of the hawk’s prey during her training. She describes, among other

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things, “breaking the necks of rabbits … while the hawk dips her head to drink blood from her quarry’s chest cavity,” and having to watch “the goshawk snip, tear and wrench flesh from the rabbit’s foreleg.”58 Reflecting the relational side of interaction between species, Macdonald feels like a tableau on a roadside shrine because her life consists of being crouched with rabbit and hawk. Here, Macdonald realizes that she is no longer the center, “as if all this was just the inescapable way of the world.”59 While she also sees herself as “an executioner after a thousand deaths,”60 she does not perceive the rabbits as unimportant beings. In fact, she feels accountable for those deaths. Thus, despite Macdonald’s and White’s shared practice of hunting rabbits for the hawk, the narration highlights the discrepancy in their treatments of prey. As Macdonald reiterates, White describes himself as rushing to the scene with a hunting knife in order to pin the rabbit to the ground: “Think of lust … Real blood-lust is like that.”61 In comparison, Macdonald decenters herself as “executioner” and paints herself as part of a larger “tableau.”62 Her assessment of her own role also taps into Alaimo’s concept of “trans-corporeality,” which posits the idea “that all creatures, as embodied beings, are intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them.”63 With Macdonald’s embeddedness in nature alongside the non-human hawk, the “figure/ground relation between the human and the environment dissolves as the outline of the human is traversed by substantial material interchanges.”64 Macdonald does not imagine herself as transcendent, disembodied, and removed from the world, but rather as entangled with biological, technological, economic, political, and other systems, processes, and events, on vastly different scales. In her training of the hawk, she enlivens trans-corporeality by making material interconnections between human and the non-human “nature.” In numerous instances, Macdonald decries the inhuman exploitation of animals and non-human others. By foregrounding her own bodily and mental situatedness in nature and her companionship with non-human others, she chooses a trans-corporeality that is capable of posing political and ethical questions about the human, the environment, and non-human others. Particularly in light of the challenges of the Anthropocene, the memoir thus draws attention to humanity’s ethical responsibility to care for its non-human environment, to depart from notions of antagonism and otherness, as well as to embrace the relational bonds between different species. In doing so, Macdonald also implicitly

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calls for these aspects to be considered in political decisions battling climate change and fighting for environmental justice. Macdonald also illustrates the remnants of feudal culture, leisure, and privilege still extant in modern hawking when she describes that she “was terrified. Not of the hawks: of the falconers.”65 Aligning herself with the hawk, both emotionally and physically, Macdonald experiences a unique connection to the animals through what Braidotti might describe as “enhanced and altered modes of perception.”66 By highlighting these “new” modes of perception, Macdonald’s memoir responds to posthumanism’s call for “a more egalitarian relationship to nonhuman others.”67 Overall, Macdonald’s distinctively empathic treatment of the hawk is not to be understood merely as an act of cross-species solidarity. Quite to the contrary, it illustrates what Braidotti has identified as one of the conceptual contributions of feminist critical thought to critical posthumanism: Presenting herself as situated, relational, and affective, Macdonald implicitly contemplates the ethical and ontological differences between different species, but also formulates epistemological alternatives to such notions of difference by foregrounding her own material and emotional embeddedness. Macdonald’s narrative thus exhibits an “awareness of the relational structure of the embedded and embodied, extended self,”68 which, according to Braidotti, is crucial for critically interrogating both anthropocentrism as well as species supremacy.69 In this way, H Is for Hawk’s critical posthumanist endeavor frequently also responds to an ecofeminist call for what Gaard describes as “social justice and environmental health,” taking into account the connections in the “oppression of gender, ecology, race, species, and nation.”70 By drawing attention to such intersecting mechanisms of oppression that work across the boundaries of different species, Macdonald’s memoir disrupts conceptualizations of reality that conceive of human corporeality and non-­ human others as entirely separate, unconnected entities. Instead, the text highlights the overlaps between Macdonald’s gendered experiences in the male-dominated field of falconry and the mistreatment of the birds in the very same field. While the memoir acknowledges that these experiences are not identical—Macdonald is human and a falconer herself after all—it emphasizes that both experiences are grounded in notions of alleged hierarchy and disaffiliation epitomized by the male falconers. In her challenge of not only anthropocentric but also decidedly patriarchal norms of falconry, the critical posthumanism of Macdonald’s memoir is thus also firmly grounded in an ecofeminist ethics. By removing the

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binaries and delimiting boundaries of human and non-human others, her writing exemplifies Serpil Oppermann’s observation that ecofeminism has influentially aimed to subvert the matrix of masculine ideological formations.71 In recent years, scholars like Oppermann, Braidotti, and Alaimo have thought posthumanism and ecofeminism together and fostered the context for an ethics that is not only social but also material, using concepts such as trans-corporeality to make tangible “the inseparability of human corporeality from nonhuman environments.”72 Paying attention to such human/non-human linkages and the relational quality of the “embedded, embodied, and extended self”73 provides ways to interrogate anthropocentrism, but it also allows an attentive ecofeminist reading of Macdonald’s relation to her hawk as care-work. Macdonald’s caring for her hawk is unlike “the sport of the falconers who treat the hawk’s brutal abilities with sacramental reverence.”74 Macdonald challenges the “‘masculinized’ ethics and politics” that have given rise to “the twin problems of ecological destructions and gender inequality,”75 putting forward an alternative approach of caring that renders the hitherto invisible hawk more visible and interactions between trainer and hawk multi-directional. She condemns traditional male falconers, who capture hawks with “brute cruelty,”76 as the culmination of gender bias, while her own actions are shaped by ecofeminist alternative visions about the treatment of the non-­ human world. Macdonald prefers to eat the food caught by hawk over “things that have had a blind and crowded life in a barn or battery cage.”77 The process of hunting a rabbit is described as short and injury-free, “nothing is wasted: everything the hawk catches is eaten by the hawk or me.”78 Although she is aware that the sight of Mabel’s tight hold on the killed rabbit affects her emotionally, she deems it necessary to harden the heart, stating “I learned that hardening the heart was not the same as not caring … I was being accountable to myself, to the world and all the things in it.”79 On the contrary, when she feels sorry for the killed animal, this refocuses her attention to “the sorrow of all deaths” and a “sharp wordless comprehension of my own mortality. Yes, I will die.”80 In this way, care-­ work, killing, and accountability are closely interwoven in Macdonald’s memoir. Decentering the human in favor of the non-human does not lead to an obsolescence of Macdonald herself as a human being. However, she refuses to situate herself as anthropocentric, to understand herself as part of a species with all the rights and privileges, and instead, reconfigures herself “amid the looming darkness of a dangerous world.”81

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Concluding Remarks Ultimately, H Is for Hawk illustrates that long-established patriarchal and anthropocentric hierarchies are at least in part responsible for the detrimental effects of human behavior on Earth’s ecosystems. Macdonald’s depiction of her life as a “hermit with a hawk”82 seeks to propose an alternative discourse for the age of the Anthropocene by outlining the problematic nature of the centuries-old understanding of a belligerent confrontation between human and animal that was fostered by patriarchal fantasies of male domination and superiority. The memoir’s emphasis on the complex entanglement of human and non-human beings in an anti-­ dualist, anti-phallogocentric way then posits an ecofeminist refutation of White’s master-like treatment of the hawk. While White’s training of the hawk is grounded in logics of domination, Macdonald approaches the animal respectfully, thus following the “posthumanist ethic of the respectful encounter with ‘difference’/the other” as proposed by Serpil Oppermann.83 In every respect, Macdonald prioritizes the goshawk by putting “kindness and love”84 above anything else. Macdonald seeks to bond and build a relationship of trust with her hawk—even in moments when she has completely lost her own trust in this world. In doing so, Macdonald chooses her own path, despite the severe criticism she faces when she adopts the traditionally male-dominated occupation of falconry. While the other (male) falconers define the goshawks as “ruffians murderous, difficult to tame, sulky, fractious and foreign,”85 and warn her that they will “drive you mad. Leave goshawks to the goshawk boys. Get something more sensible,”86 Macdonald resists these assumptions. Instead, she approaches the hawk on eye level, and thus finds her own, decidedly sensible, approach to falconry. The other falconers’ criticism also clearly speaks to their gendered and highly normative assumptions about falconry—in other words, to their image of how a “normal,” that is, “norm-adhering” falconer should look and act. Critical posthumanism challenges such “normative” notions by scrutinizing markers of normality, such as class, race, gender, sexuality, age, and able-bodiedness, that qualify “humanity,” and by rejecting the assumption that “the human” is a universal or neutral category. Instead, critical posthumanism focuses on the experiences of the marginal and dispossessed. By highlighting the overlaps between her own gendered suffering and marginalization in falconry, and the experiences of White’s hawk who “had suffered terribly as [White] had tried to train it,”87 Macdonald

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reveals parallels between gender-based and species-based oppressions and violence. While White conceives falconry as “a pitched battle between man and bird,”88 Macdonald’s compassion for non-human beings not only challenges notions of normalcy with regard to gender in the field of falconry but also undermines the clear-cut species boundaries to which White subscribes. In its re-evaluations of falconry relationships, H Is for Hawk thus translates Sherilyn MacGregor’s ecofeminist call to “[unearth] the foundations of gender [and species] bias in Western philosophical traditions”89 into practice. Notably, this holds true even when the bird attacks Macdonald, an event she describes in great detail: “I felt the talon incision: a half-inch long, deep slash right between my eyes … I pressed the place hard with my fingers until it stopped bleeding.”90 Even in these moments of pain, she “kept on hawking,”91 not allowing her own vulnerabilities to taint her encounter with the non-human world. Her refusal to revert to White’s logic of antagonism and subscribe to the falconers’ gender prejudices hence speaks to the memoir’s rejection of both anthropocentric and patriarchal ideas of “normalcy,” and foregrounds posthuman and ecofeminist notions of relationality, responsibility, and equality instead. Focusing on the relevance of these perspectives for Macdonald’s own life (narrative), the text moreover puts emphasis on “a becoming together,”92 by highlighting the interrelations and interconnections among human and non-human beings that, while affecting each other, still remain individuals. Macdonald’s insistence on maintaining a setting in which her hawk can flourish also remains in stark contrast to White’s description of the human-hawk relationship as a “metaphysical battle.”93 Via her explicit withdrawal from masculinized violent practices embodied by White and other falconers, Macdonald’s life writing ultimately offers a posthuman re-evaluation that critically explores an alternative subjectivity capable of being embedded and embodied alongside non-human beings. Macdonald distances herself from the traditional anthropocentric view of the hawk’s predatory nature, which considers them “warplanes made flesh,”94 and instead embraces the zoe of her hawk. By doing so, the memoir’s emphasis on the possibility of alternative subjectivities makes this text one that can foster empathy in its readers through the creation of an alternative environmental imagination more generally, in the sense that Erin James proposes.95 James undertakes econarratological readings of narratives to consider the ways they communicate their environmental imaginations and experiences, and represent

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identity politics.96 She elucidates that, through empathy, readers can project themselves into lives different from their own, and can be immersed in the perspectives, thoughts, emotions, experiences, and worlds of others.97 In her writing, Macdonald makes a clear distinction between her type of empathy from that of traditional (male) falconers, who surreptitiously treat their hawks with cruelty, neglecting their needs and their agency alike. This demarcates the way Macdonald decries humanism and its commitment to reproducing the concept of the human by evading the kind of normative anthropocentric subjectivity, which, as Wolfe has noted, is premised on its discrimination against non-human animals.98 Overall, H Is for Hawk challenges the limiting and limited anthropocentric ways that validate notions of human superiority by presenting “cross-hybridization”99 and a focus on relationality as alternatives to social and environmental injustices in the posthuman Anthropocene.

Notes 1. Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, 1. 2. Vermeulen, “Future Readers,” 867. 3. Boes and Marshall, “Writing the Anthropocene,” 62. 4. Boes and Marshall set this posthumanism in contrast to the antihumanist traditions of scholars such as Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, and Lacan, “Writing the Anthropocene,” 62. 5. Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human,” 3. 6. Ibid., 7. 7. Ibid., 10. 8. Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 17; see also Derdeyn, “Trauma and the Anthropocene,” 773. 9. Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 21. 10. Derdeyn, “Trauma and the Anthropocene,” 774. 11. Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 151. 12. Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human,” 43. 13. Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 175. 14. Ibid., 181. 15. Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human,” 43. 16. Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 192. 17. Ibid., 17. 18. Ibid. 19. Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism, xvii. Note that Macdonald engages this juxtaposition not only in connection with non-human animals, but also when

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she introduces T. H. White, the falconry biographer, whose own biographical work on training hawks creates a humanist/anthropocentric foil of her own stance. I will elaborate on this in the next section. 20. Derdeyn, “Trauma and the Anthropocene,” 769. 21. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 21. 22. Ibid., 23 (italics in the original). 23. Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human,” 23. 24. Ibid., 185–186. 25. Derdeyn, “Trauma and the Anthropocene,” 777. 26. Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 155. 27. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 10. 28. Ibid., 185. 29. Ibid., 219. 30. Huff and Haefner, “Animalographies,” 159. 31. Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 155. 32. Ibid., 73. 33. Ibid., 167. 34. Ibid., 169. 35. Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human,” 19. 36. Ibid., 23. 37. Ibid., 40. 38. Ibid., 41. 39. Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 210. 40. Ibid., 196. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 13. 43. Ibid., 211. 44. Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human,” 40. 45. Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 216. 46. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2. 47. Ibid. 48. Huff “After Auto, After Bio,” 279. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 280. 51. Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 186. 52. Ibid., 195. 53. Huff, “After Auto, After Bio,” 279. 54. Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human,” 39. 55. Huff and Haefner, “Animalographies,” 155. 56. Ibid. 57. Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 153. 58. Ibid., 178.

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59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid., 162. 62. Ibid., 178. 63. Alaimo, “Trans-corporeality,” 435. 64. Ibid., 1. 65. Ibid., 16. 66. Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human,” 43. 67. Braidotti, “Posthuman Critical Theory,” 10. 68. Ibid., 13. 69. Ibid. 70. Gaard, “Ecofeminism Revisited,” 28. 71. Oppermann, “Feminist Ecocriticism,” 67. 72. Ibid., 76. 73. Braidotti, “Posthuman Critical Theory,” 13. 74. Derdeyn, “Trauma and the Anthropocene,” 772. 75. MacGregor, “From Care to Citizenship,” 59. 76. Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 137. 77. Ibid., 156. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid., 156–157. 80. Ibid., 156 (italics in the original). 81. Livingston and Halberstam, Posthuman Bodies, 10. 82. Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 54. 83. Oppermann, “Feminist Ecocriticism,” 69. 84. Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 45. 85. Ibid., 18. 86. Ibid., 45. 87. Ibid., 44. 88. Ibid. 89. MacGregor, “From Care to Citizenship,” 59. 90. Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 169. 91. Ibid., 169. 92. Ibid., 280. 93. Ibid., 26. 94. Macdonald, H Is for Hawk, 65. 95. Erin James, The Storyworld Accord, 340. 96. Ibid., 347. 97. Ibid., 342. 98. Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism, xvii. 99. Braidotti, “Posthuman, All Too Human,” 43.

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Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010. ———. “Trans-corporeality.” In Posthuman Glossary, edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, 435–438. London: Bloomsbury, 2018. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Boes, Tobias, and Kate Marshall. “Writing the Anthropocene: An Introduction.” The Minnesota Review 83 (2014): 60–72. Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. ———, Rosi. “Posthuman, All Too Human: The Memoirs and Aspirations of a Posthumanist.” Tanner Lectures, Yale University (2017). Braidotti, Rosi. “Posthuman Critical Theory.” Journal of Posthuman Studies 1, no. 1 (2017): 9–25. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222. Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015. Derdeyn, LeeAnn. “Trauma and the Anthropocene: Fear and Loathing in Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 25, no. 4 (2018): 767–785. Gaard, Greta. “Ecofeminism Revisited: Rejecting Essentialism and Re-placing Species in a Material Feminist Environmentalism.” Feminist Formations 23, no. 2 (2011): 26–53. Huff, Cynthia. “After Auto, After Bio: Posthumanism and Life Writing.” a/b Auto/Biography and Life Writing 32 no. 2 (2017): 279–282. ———, and Haefner Joel. “His Master’s Voice: Animalographies, Life Writing, and the Posthuman.” In “(Post)Human Lives,” edited by Gillian Whitlock and G. Thomas Couser. Special issue, Biography 35, no. 1 (2012): 153–169. James, Erin. The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Livingston, Ira, and J.  Jack Halberstam, eds. Posthuman Bodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Macdonald, Helen. H Is for Hawk. New York: Grove Press, 2014. MacGregor, Sherilyn. “From Care to Citizenship: Calling Ecofeminism Back to Politics.” Ethics & the Environment 9, no. 1 (2004): 56–84. Oppermann, Serpil. “Feminist Ecocriticism: A Posthumanist Direction in Ecocritical Trajectory.” In International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism, edited by Greeta Gaard, Simon C.  Estok, and Serpil Oppermann, 19-36. London: Routledge, 2013.

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Purdy, Jedediah. After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. Vermeulen, Pieter. “Future Readers: Narrating the Human in the Anthropocene.” Textual Practice 31, no. 5 (2017): 867–885. Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Vol. 8. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Writing Life on Mars: Posthuman Imaginaries of Extraterrestrial Colonization and the NASA Mars Rover Missions Jens Temmen

Introduction: Life Writing on Mars It does not exactly take rocket science to recognize that humanity is fascinated by the idea of leaving Earth, of walking and living on other planets. Narratives of a future of human life in outer space have been and continue to be a powerful imaginary for humanity. Many of these narratives predate the technology that allowed humanity to actually leave the Earth. Yet, ever since technology has placed such a future seemingly within grasp, space travel has become synonymous with the transformative progress of all of humanity and, especially in the context of the United States, even with modernity as such. This notion is immortalized with the idiomatic reference to rocket science used above, which equates said science with the peak of humanity’s achievements.

J. Temmen (*) American Studies Department, Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Batzke et al. (eds.), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77973-3_8

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In “Astrofuturism,” Alexandra Ganser argues that in recent decades, particularly in response to the increasingly prevalent climate crisis on Earth, human colonization of other planets has been reframed as not only progressive and desirable but also as inevitable and necessary to ensure the survival of humanity.1 Such astrofuturist narratives, Ganser argues, meet destructive scenarios of global warming with the “idea of exodus to or resettlement on other planets,” relying on a notion of outer space as humanity’s “back-up space.”2 Beyond being a guide to mere survival, however, astrofuturism also offers a hopeful if not utopian vision of space colonization as a transformative posthuman experience of escape from the terrestrial limits placed on humanity, of breaking with humanity’s terrestrial history, and even of harboring the potential for humanity’s immortality.3 The planet Mars and its colonization are at the center of many of these astrofuturist narratives, circulating in scientific discourse and literary speculations, but also proliferating as part of neoliberal business models of so-called New Space Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. These representatives of the private sector in particular have forcefully reiterated the promise to help humankind transcend its terrestrial limitations to safeguard them against the effects of climate change.4 Critics who look at such narratives through the lenses of critical race studies, postcolonialism, and feminism (among others) note, however, how these newly emerging astrofuturist narratives fail to address either how planetary colonization beyond Earth would bring about a dismantling of terrestrial societal structures and power asymmetries or how they even outright reproduce these very same structures by relying, for example, on recycled motifs of the American frontier that center white, male, and heteronormative experiences.5 This disparity described by Ganser and others between the way in which these narratives seem to center posthuman themes of transformation while repeating terrestrial human structures of oppression reminds us that not every narrative that has a posthuman subject does necessarily do the work central to posthuman inquiry: critically interrogating humanity’s anthropocentrism and thereby striving to overcome the inequalities and inhumanities that this anthropocentrism produces.6 It is also, I would argue, a call to scholars in posthuman studies to continue to critically engage the avenues through which these narratives of Mars colonization are produced and reproduced in an interplay of science, literature, and culture, in order to better understand how exactly Mars colonization as a theme has become a powerful force within existential debates on responsible actions to combat climate change.7

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Using Ganser’s conception of astrofuturism as a framework, my contribution to this volume will analyze different narratives of human life on Mars. At first glance, each of these seem to connect in their own way to the imaginary of a posthuman future for humanity on Mars: the first part offers a close reading of the NASA Mars rover missions, which have—literally—become one of the central scientific vehicles through which knowledge of the red planet is crafted.8 In a second step, my analysis will focus on how the life narratives of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk in The Space Barons employ what could be described as a strategic “double red washing” of their plans to privatize the space industry.9 The final part of my analysis offers an example of ways to think about human life on Mars through an ecocentric lens, as attempted by the artist and activist group “Nonhuman Nonsense” and their project “Planetary Personhood.” I argue that all three narratives are connected through a discourse that promotes the liberating and moral quality of technology, which originates in the Mars rover missions and which is at the heart of the notion of fundamentally transformative experience of Mars colonization.10 My analysis also exemplifies that even though the format of life writing seems to lend itself quite naturally to negotiating such narratives, the question remains whether a form that centers human life and perspectives can adequately explore posthuman futures. Most importantly, my analysis stresses that while a critique of speculations about Mars colonization might not seem urgent, the stakes connected to these imaginaries are quite high: narratives of human life on Mars not only are central to shaping the reality of humanity’s future on another planet but, as currency in debates on climate change, impact the livelihoods of humans across the globe today.

The Life and Death of a Mars Rover On June 12, 2018, NASA lost contact with its Mars rover “Opportunity” as a result of a severe planet-wide storm that cut off the rover’s solar energy too long for it to recover. On February 13, 2019, after more than a thousand unsuccessful attempts to contact Opportunity, NASA declared the mission officially completed. At that point, the rover had shut down in an area fittingly called Perseverance Valley. It had outlasted its designed mission time of ninety Sol days by almost 5450 Sol days, resulting in an active stay on Mars of about fifteen years (2003–2018). With this, Opportunity’s became one of the longest and most successful NASA missions on the Red Planet.11 The rover’s final transmission from Mars was relayed to the

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public by a science journalist with access to NASA’s data, who tweeted on February 12 that same year that “[t]he last message they [NASA] received was basically, ‘My battery is low and it’s getting dark.’”12 This final transmission created quite a buzz across social media and other international media outlets. Celebrities and other public figures around the globe, but predominantly in the U.S., paid tribute to the rover via social media, while several artists published little sketches that picked up on the romantic and melancholic tone of Opportunity’s alleged final message. Prestigious online news platforms like NPR.org followed suit by publishing articles on Opportunity that, given their tone and style, can only be described as obituaries.13 In sum, all these emotional responses frame the shutdown of a 400-pound golf cart-sized robot on Mars as a “grievable death.” According to Judith Butler, the notion of a grievable death does not only mark the end of a life but actually serves to identify what we consider a “culturally recognizable human,” thus highlighting the value of the life that preceded it.14 The public mourning of Opportunity rover thus presupposes that it led a life that matters, and, more importantly, that it counts as being alive in the first place.15 This humanization of the rovers seems to repeat itself in their anthropomorphic representations in both popular culture and NASA’s own marketing strategy of the different rover missions. A common trope in children’s literature, for example, is the celebration of the machines’ life on Mars, while also characterizing the rovers either as curious, innocent, and childlike or as well-behaved pets—clearly capitalizing on the popularity of the name “Rover” for pet dogs in many anglophone contexts. In a similar familiarizing strategy, NASA attempted to make Opportunity’s mission more palatable for a wider audience by setting up the rover’s own Twitter account (on which it also posted the first selfie of a Mars rover) as well as publishing Opportunity’s own Spotify playlist.16 Only a few days after Opportunity’s shutdown, and given the unexpected public response to the news, the journalist who proliferated the rover’s last words, however, had to redact his original report: Opportunity’s final transmission from Mars to NASA was merely a raw data package, indicating that an approaching storm was blocking the rover’s access to critical solar energy and that its power was accordingly running low. As the errata clarified, Opportunity’s alleged final words—“My battery is low and it’s getting dark”—had been a “poetic translation” of the rover’s data transmission.17 While this final revelation of the poetic license of this very enthusiastic scientific journalist might seem surprising, it is in fact not

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unprecedented if we consider how, according to Lisa Messeri, planetary exploration as a scientific field is driven by the widespread practice among planetary scientists to rely on narration, mapping, visualizations, and simulated habitation to imagine themselves and humanity on other worlds.18 As Messeri argues, with the help of this “planetary imagination” scientists attempt to translate “the strange and unknown into the sensorially relatable. Planetary scientists push their practice to make visible the invisible. They want to be able to see the curvature of a dried-up streambed on Mars or the glow of an exoplanet.”19 In the case of Mars exploration, this planetary imagination draws on and translates raw scientific data into “speculative musings concerning a future habitation on Mars.”20 Messeri goes on to describe how these speculative narratives are a powerful force within planetary science: they serve to inspire and structure the research of today’s Mars scientists and exoplanet astronomers alike, and are also used to market an extraterrestrial future of humanity to a larger public.21 In other words, the way that scientists approach Mars as a scientific object today is based not only on scientific data of Mars itself but also on how scientists spin this data into narratives about humanity’s possible future on Mars. In the case of the Mars rover missions and particularly the story of the life and death of Opportunity, there is an apparent urge to frame the rovers as human, to translate the knowledge they produce into an expression of their humanity, and thus to consider their very existence a life writing practice. Read through a posthuman studies lens, this urge is a reflection of how, as Rosi Braidotti argues, our “technologically mediated societies” increasingly produce “discourses and representations of the non-human, the inhuman, the anti-human, the inhumane and the posthuman,” to re-­ negotiate, among other things, the very definition of (human) life.22 This obviously holds true for the Mars rovers on several levels: they are technological proxies through which scientific knowledge of Mars is produced— knowledge which is supposed to help humanity inch closer toward determining the possibility of life beyond Earth, where it can be found, and how it compares to life as we know it.23 The mission objectives’ renegotiation of our definition of life is clearly reflected in how the process of knowing the red planet through the rovers is structured by and mediated through different life writing texts and practices described above. The notion of Opportunity’s life and death does not, however, merely offer a colorful illustration of the rovers’ life-finding missions. Instead, the ways in which life writing texts and practices permeate the representations of

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Fig. 1  “The Evolution of a Martian.” Image source: NASA. No Rights Reserved

the NASA rover missions highlight how the rovers themselves are considered to be reproducing human life on Mars.24 The pervasiveness of this discourse is demonstrated by NASA’s own promotional material, which, leaning on the famous “March of Progress,” depicts the rovers as a crucial evolutionary link in creating the Martian branch of humanity (see Fig. 1).25 In NASA’s understanding of the rover missions, humanity seems to have set foot on Mars already.

Walk Like a Mars Rover The aesthetics of the NASA advertisement above (Fig. 1) clearly draw on a popular motif of space colonization found in both science and science fiction: the silver (or here: red-tinged) lining of a fresh start for humanity in a, until now, “human-free” environment in space.26 The way that the image connects a clean slate motif with the notion that it is particularly the infusion of technology into human evolution and the blurring of human life and robotics, which contributes to this hopeful future, draws on what Rosi Braidotti has described as the widespread assumption of an “in-built

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moral intentionality” of technology.27 This, she argues, somehow increases the morality (or at least alleviates the immorality) of actions for which this technology is employed. In the case of the Mars rovers, this utopian vision of a future of technology-infused human life is not only reflected in the anthropomorphic representation of the rovers but also in what Janet Vertesi describes as the “technomorphism” of the humans operating the rovers back on Earth. Vertesi depicts the habit among NASA scientists of describing different parts and actions of each rover in human terms: the rovers’ cameras are its eyes, the hazard cameras aimed at its wheels show what is under its “feet,” while its instrument to deploy probing devices is its “arm.” Vertesi argues that this habit is, however, not merely a sign of affection but serves to facilitate and simplify communication among the large group of scientists and engineers of vastly different disciplinary backgrounds steering the rover on Mars, and to funnel their different agendas into a clear and efficient mission plan.28 The rover’s operation and usability—its life on Mars—then depend on productively negotiating this multitude of trainings, backgrounds, and lives back on Earth and aligning them with the rover and its purpose on the red planet.29 This negotiation includes the shared habit of physically mimicking the rovers, as Vertesi demonstrates: [I]n many visual, gestural, and narrative moments entailing the rovers, the projection does not run from human to robot, with these robots acquiring human characteristics. Instead, individuals on the mission must learn, imitate, and demonstrate what it is like to be a rover on Mars. Thus the team is subject to technomorphism as members take on the robot’s body and experiences in their accounts of their work.30

She describes how the observed technomorphism contributes to a heightened sense of physical intimacy between rover and human by “writ[ing] the rover onto the human body.”31 This blurring between human life and the life of the machines is only intensified due to the staff operating on a 24.7 h Mars day to be in sync with the rovers. As a result, the scientists involved have a tendency to experience a threat to the operationality of the rovers as a mortal threat to their own lives.32 The way in which the rovers and their operation are presented as a reciprocal anthropomorphization/technomorphization of technology and human life clearly suggests that Martian colonization is accompanied by a queering of the proliferation of human life beyond the

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heteronormative standards of reproduction, reaffirming the utopian vision of a multi-planetary humanity that the rovers embody. This representation capitalizes on what Kara Keeling has described as the political potential of technology to queer and as such disturb the infinite reproduction of a standard heteronormative capitalist society.33 In other words, this queering of human life through the rovers forebodes a utopian future for humanity, in which Mars colonization serves as a point of departure for a liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-imperial, and generally progressive future for both planets—again, a fresh start for humanity. In terrestrial contexts, posthumanism has oftentimes referred to military drones and the necro-­ politics connected to these technologies as a way of discussing how increased technological mediation does not necessarily signal a progressive step forward, but instead opens up new dimensions of ethical dilemmas and potentially inhumane practices.34 By comparison, an analysis of the death of a Mars rover and its discursive underpinnings through a posthuman lens, which I am proposing here, seems less urgent and less consequential than the employment of drone technology on Earth, given the (allegedly) human-free environment in which the rovers operate. Yet, as Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora remind us, robotic technologies that perform labor in place of humans “still have a human cost despite a resolute desire to see technology as magical rather than the product of human work.”35 In the context of planetary science, this magical thinking divorces space exploration from the history of terrestrial colonialism, in spite of the fact that planetary science tends to operate with clearly colonial and capitalist discourses of exploration, human progress, settlement, extraction, and territorialization in their framing of space exploration.36 Space exploration, the assumption goes, does not, strictly speaking, entail the acquisition of land or settling in already peopled spaces. Instead, it is seen as driving the progress of all humanity and is therefore regarded as inherently good.37 Quite obviously, operating with this very narrow understanding of colonialism does not reflect the realities of the continuous militarization and territorialization of outer space. More importantly, however, this vision of space colonization highlights how centering narratives of adorable anthropomorphic robots, which inhabit a potentially utopian terra nullius in space and are considered the epitome of technological and human progress, clearly affirms the magical thinking behind the colonization of Mars, untethered from its terrestrial burdens. Much like its terrestrial predecessors, the discourse of a terra nullius on Mars shrouds the human cost of colonization into obscurity.38 While Martian colonization

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does not (at least to our knowledge) involve the violent removal and replacement of an Indigenous population, framing the rovers as operating in a human-free environment ignores the fact that the narratives and discourses that space colonization produces do circle back to the terrestrial contexts in which the rover missions are operated, and contribute to a perpetuation of Earth’s “human patriarchal and imperial social world.”39 In Space in the Tropics, Peter Redfield explores, for example, how the discourses that established French Guiana as a penal colony connect to choosing the very same space as a rocket launch site for the European Space Agency. A similar connection holds true for a US-American context: In “Space Age Tropics,” Mimi Sheller describes how extractivist practices have shaped the relationship between North America and the American tropics and continue to do so, particularly in the current Space Age. I have argued elsewhere that in the context of space mission simulations, the logic of choosing the Arizona desert, the Arctic, or the Hawaiian Islands as Mars simulation sites relies heavily on settler-colonial discourses of territoriality, the frontier mythology, and on imperial exoticization first coined in U.S. expansion in the nineteenth century and leveled at Indigenous peoples.40 In the same context, Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) have been protesting against the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on their sacred mountain of Mauna Kea (Island of Hawaiʻi) since 2014—a struggle which has been framed by the backers of the construction as pitting science aiming for the good of all humankind against the “primitive” needs and beliefs of a few indigenous people.41 All of these sites exemplify how the utopian narrative of space exploration, rather than propelling humanity beyond these colonial struggles, seems to intensify them or even to thrive on them.42 I argue that, in a very similar way, the representation of the rover missions contributes to a narrative of Martian colonization that, as Atanasoski and Vora assert, may seem to break with the “colonial relations that were the foundation for the rise of the capitalist economy,” while still being very much embedded in and perpetuating such structures.43 The context in which this becomes visible is through the ongoing privatization of space travel. Here, the utopian narrative of space exploration, which the rovers underwrite, has become a central tenet for a number of influential tech-billionaires—Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos among them—who all hail Martian colonization not only as necessary and liberatory but also as an allegedly viable solution for battling anthropogenic climate change on Earth.

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Rocket Men and Martian Rocks As outlined in the opening paragraphs of this contribution, the promise of imminent Martian colonization has been framed as a remedy for a crisis of planetary proportions: climate change. Particularly in the private sector, so-called New Space Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have promised to help humankind reach Mars in no time. Once there, humanity, having become an “interstellar species,” could then somehow weather the climate crisis on Earth in a backup ecosystem.44 These plans can only be achieved, however, by breaking up the monopoly of nation-states on outer space and turning space travel into a privatized business model.45 In The Space Barons, a life writing text that sketches how the lives and careers of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla founder Elon Musk have allegedly always been tied up with space travel, Christian Davenport depicts in broad strokes how these tech billionaires envision this privatization as transcending both national and class boundaries: by lowering the costs of space travel through increasing reusability of the rockets, space would become available to the “masses, and push human space travel past where governments had gone.”46 The plans of these alleged philanthropists, like with the old captains of industry in the nineteenth century, would help to usher in a “new golden age of space exploration.”47 This promise of a new golden age incorporates the usual transnational and post-racial themes generally prevalent in space exploration discourses and connects them with the same utopian post-capitalist vision of a multi-planetary humanity and an unshakable faith in technological progress, which also surround and are perpetuated by the Mars rover missions.48 Yet the title of the book, The Space Barons, already somewhat willingly gives away that Musk’s and Bezos’ plans, cladded in altruism and social justice, seem rather to be based in a sense of oligarchical entitlement that helps these entrepreneurs avoid accountability for their less-than-­ philanthropic business models here on Earth.49 Atanasoski and Vora have coined the concept “technoliberalism” to describe this discursive relationship. They define it as the political alibi of present-day racial capitalism that posits humanity as an aspirational figuration in a relation to technological transformation, obscuring the uneven racial and gendered relations of labor, power, and social relations that underlie the contemporary conditions of capitalist ­production … maintaining the fiction of what or who is human depends upon obscuring the violent social relations that scaffold the figure of the human.50

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In a similar sense, evoking a technology-driven and liberating transnational and utopian future for humanity serves to mystify and justify both Bezos’ and Musk’s projects, and at the same time obscures the neocapitalist, nationalistic, and colonial undertones of their businesses. In what reads like a harsh rejection of the queering of human life, which space travel allegedly represents, the opening paragraphs of Davenport’s book, describing the first launches and landings of Bezos’ and Musk’s reusable rockets, clads these undertones in a vocabulary of toxic masculinity and phallic symbolism: As the ground came into view, fire from the engine kicked up a plume of dust. The employees at Blue Origin rose to their feet in unison. The rocket was under control, descending gently.… There was one last flash of the engines, a bright orange glow shining through the dust and smoke.… The rocket booster stood in the center of the pad like a giant trophy.… It was “one of the greatest moments of my life,” Jeff Bezos would later say. “I was misty-eyed.” Twenty-eight days later, another rocket was falling from the sky. This time, it was a much bigger booster that had been flying at a much greater velocity.… About ten minutes after blasting off into the dark, evening skies over Cape Canaveral, Florida, the fire from the rocket engine suddenly appeared like a streetlight in the distance, a shimmering, ethereal beacon lowering through the clouds.51

The book is heavily invested in the image of the rocket as a beacon of hope, lighting the way for humanity into its interstellar future, which underlines the salvational character of the project and the enormity of the task itself. Yet at the same time, the blunt phallic symbolism of the rockets, standing proudly on their landing pad, serves to remind us that the billionaires’ enormous success in achieving this task needs to be attributed to their brazen masculinity and individualism.52 The way that this depiction centers linear heteronormativity as the driving force behind space exploration clearly stands in sharp contrast to the discourse of the queering of human life embodied by the robots and prevalent in Martian colonization per se, yet also taps into the liberatory and even “magical” qualities of robotics-led Martian colonization.53 In The Space Barons, this trope of masculinity and individualism is accompanied and bolstered by a variety of references to well-known discourses of manifest destiny, the frontier myth, translatio imperii, as well as the notion of ‘discovery’ and ‘exploration’ as quintessentially U.S.-American prerogatives. With this, the privatized space program that Bezos and Musk imagine clearly appeals to deeply

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nationalistic sentiments rather than harboring a transnational perspective or purpose.54 The way that The Space Barons hijacks the narrative of Mars colonization to sell both the life stories and business models of these space entrepreneurs underlines the stakes connected to imaginaries of Mars colonization and sketches the need to critically approach them through the lens of posthuman studies: these technoliberal projects of space privatization capitalize on the notion of a liberating posthuman future for humanity via Mars colonization while obscuring that it is obviously not a viable option for all of humanity. In the process, valuable resources which could support communities, predominately in the Global South, that are suffering from climate change right now, are being withdrawn. In a recent interview, Rob Nixon argued that the Anthropocene “raises the stakes of the planetary impacts of human actions, including but not restricted to climate change.”55 As a consequence, he maintains that “an ethical, political and imaginative commitment … to safeguarding people and other life forms that are remote from us in time and space” should be the central tenet to any effort to mitigate climate change.56 The space entrepreneurs’ conceptualization of Martian colonization can be described as a twisted version of that tenet: in their elitist vision, it seems to be easier to imagine human life in the remoteness of the red planet than to imagine being committed toward battling climate change anywhere on Earth today.57 The idea that the connection between an imagined Martian humanity and the Global North takes precedence over global solidarity in the face of climate change, necessarily also impacts discourses of planetarity as put forth by Gayatri Spivak or Ursula Heise, which are at the heart of the concerns of posthuman studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism.58 The rising prevalence of space exploration in the context of the planetary climate crisis urges us to consider how the idea of saving only a certain part of humanity via Mars colonization relates to the conception of a fragile, yet fundamentally connected terrestrial ecosystem championed by planetarity.59 How do we create and maintain solidarities between terrestrial human and non-­ human life (let alone beyond Earth) during the climate crisis in the face of technoliberal fantasies of abandoning Earth? How can life writing contribute to imagining such solidarities? An example of such transformative life writing narratives is the artistic and activist intervention by the Swedish art collective “Nonhuman Nonsense” who initiated a project advocating for awarding Mars “Planetary Personhood” as a way of safeguarding the red planet against

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irresponsible human intervention. The project directly connects to the discourses surrounding privatized Mars colonization and counters them by calling for the abandonment of an anthropocentric perspective: As NASA, SpaceX [Elon Musk’s space enterprise], and others, now attempt to bring earthlings to Mars, Planetary Personhood is an opportunity to free ourselves from the conceptual baggage of earthly traditions and systems. Seeking to move away from the dualistic divide between living beings and inanimate matter, the project invites us to a new way of relating to a planetary whole, and to the myriad of nonhuman forces and actants that surround us.60

The project draws attention to how plans to terraform the alleged terra nullius of Mars—however far-fetched these plans might seem right now— are directly linked to the ways in which humanity currently terraforms Earth itself to the point of “mass extinction and climate disruption.”61 The project also highlights that Mars colonization is not divorced from terrestrial histories of colonialism simply by way of taking place beyond Earth. As the collective states: Mars is the dream world where the narrative of human domination is running wild and free. We speak of Mars colonization as if we suddenly forgot the atrocities and genocides that the drive of colonization caused the last time we pursued it.… Planetary Personhood invites us to re-think our dreams of Mars. How can we go to space, but without the colonialism?62

To express this shift in approaching Mars colonization, the project awards “Planetary Personhood” to Mars, thus recognizing it as a legal entity with agency. The project compares this to similar concepts of environmental personhood practiced in Indigenous contexts such as Aotearoa/New Zealand, in which legal personhood is awarded to rivers, mountains, or entire ecosystems.63 Unlike the vision of the space entrepreneurs, “Planetary Personhood” privileges an ecocentric approach that seeks to create solidarity by transcending the boundary between life and non-living entities, and thereby advocates a responsible approach to Martian colonization: Biocentrism is the ethical view that divides the world into living beings and inanimate matter—seeing life in any form as valuable and worthy of attention and protection, seeking to protect species from extinction, valuing biodiversity and wildlife. On Earth, this view enables us to compassionately

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connect with other species, and is humbler than the related Anthropocentrism, which sees humans as superior and unique. But on Mars, the absence of “life” reveals that biocentrism still maintains an underlying relationship to matter as mere resource. A thought that enables an extractivist mindset focused on short term goals of power and profit. Focusing on “life” means that humans can do whatever they want on Mars, which overlooks our deeply entangled state of interbeing that encompasses everything, including nonlife. Focusing on biodiversity also misses the fact that there is a lot of diversity on Mars: geodiversity! It is a planet full of activity, but perhaps on different timescales: sandstorms, volcanoes, freeze-thaw cycles, marsquakes, and stones falling over—it is a place where “no-one” is doing anything, but a lot of things are happening.64

This conceptual shift—from biocentrism, or even Anthropocentrism, toward ecocentrism—is conveyed by relying on a number of life writing practices, such as issuing Martian passports to meteorites found on Earth that originated from the red planet. These practices seem very similar to the anthropomorphization that can be observed in the representation of the rovers discussed above. Yet, unlike in the case of the rovers, the “strategic anthropomorphism” of “Planetary Personhood” serves not to humanize life on Mars, but rather to imagine and create sympathy for non-human Otherness.65 According to “Nonhuman Nonsense,” this change of mindset is not only a precondition for a responsible and sustainable approach to Mars colonization but will also result in a necessary shift in our relationship to life on Earth. As such, “Planetary Personhood” seeks to create a posthuman life narrative that initiates a mutually transformative practice of terraforming—both on Earth and on Mars—which, in turn, allows to imagine new scenarios of human life beyond Earth outside “the reproduction of capitalist political economy and discourse.”66 Reading “Planetary Personhood” in comparison with Space Barons demonstrates then, how posthuman life writing can go beyond simply reproducing of human life and realities on other planets, to rather imagining transformative narratives that question our anthropocentric assumptions. In relation to the larger context of the currency of Mars colonization in climate change debates, “Planetary Personhood” avoids the magical thinking that the representation of the Mars rover mission advocates for by clarifying that Mars colonization is not a solution for anything in and of itself. Instead, the project reframes terraforming not as re-creating the anthropocentric realities of Earth somewhere else, but as an avenue

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through which to critically and responsibly address our climate crisis on Earth right now.

Notes 1. Ganser, “Astrofuturism,” 36. 2. Ibid., 35, 37. 3. See Ganser, “Astrofuturism,” 36, 40. See Kilgore, “Astrofuturism,” 1, quoted in Ganser, “Astrofuturism,” 35. 4. Davenport, The Space Barons, 4, 123, 143–144. 5. See Ganser, “Astrofuturism,” 37, 40. See Redmond, “The Whiteness of Cinematic,” 348. 6. See Braidotti, The Posthuman, 9. 7. See Messeri, Placing Outer Space, 2. 8. See Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover, 20. 9. Similar to the idea of “greenwashing” products as environmental-friendly, the concept of “double red washing” refers to how the privatization of the space industry is promoted by Musk and others as the only way to achieve the colonization of the red planet, and to how both the privatized space industry and Mars colonization are depicted as progressive measures aiming for greater social justice (see Marx, “Elon Musk is Planning”). 10. See Braidotti, The Posthuman, 43–44. 11. Opportunity’s sister rover “Spirit” had shut down in 2009 already. 12. See “‘My battery is low.’” 13. See Simon, “Opinion.” 14. See Butler, “Precariousness and Grievability.” 15. Butler analyzes how in times of war and crisis, the notion of a grievable death is a political issue of enormous significance. Focusing on 9/11 and the subsequent war in Iraq, Butler describes how public mourning can be used as a way of supporting the war effort and of constructing nationalist (non-)belonging, but also as a mode of dehumanization of the lives that are specifically constructed as ungrievable. Even though Butler’s work is deeply immersed in the specific context of warfare, her assumptions are valid for the way in which the rovers and their demise figure as a ledger for nationalistic sentiments of belonging and pride. 16. The playlist consists of the music that NASA staffers had sent to Opportunity along with its wake-up command after the storm had crippled him and includes songs such as David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?,” “Staying Alive” by the BeeGees, as well as Wham!‘s “Wake Me up Before You Go-Go.” 17. Simon, “Opinion.” 18. See Messeri, Placing Outer Space, 19. 19. Messeri, Placing Outer Space, 19.

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20. Ibid., 2. 21. See Messeri, Placing Outer Space, 5, 19, 34. 22. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 2. 23. Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover, 20. 24. See Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 2. 25. The way that the rovers seem to break barriers between technology, human, and animal, make them comparable to other posthuman icons, such as the cloned sheep Dolly, which, according to Braidotti, is an entity “no longer an animal but not yet fully a machine,” 74. The rovers, no longer a machine but not yet fully human, seem to be on that same spectrum. 26. Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 6. See Markley, Dying Planet, 270. 27. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 43–44. 28. See Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover, 7, 170–171. 29. Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover, 25. 30. Ibid., 171. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 176. 33. Keeling, “Queer OS,” 157. 34. See Braidotti, The Posthuman, 9, 124, 125–126. See Mbembe, Necropolitics. 35. Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 1, 6. Atanasoski and Vora’s work focuses predominately on self-reproducing robots which are projected to be a vital part of the first steps to Martian colonization, but which have not yet been constructed or deployed (see ibid.,  2). The way that NASA frames the current Mars rovers as links in human evolution, allows, I would argue, for a broadening of Atanasoski and Vora’s argument to apply here as well. 36. See Messeri, Placing Outer Space, 18, 68. 37. See Messeri, Placing Outer Space, 18. See Vertesi, Seeing Like a Rover, 31–32. A prominent and striking example is the influential essay by aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, titled “The Significance of the Martian Frontier,” which advocates for Martian colonization through frontier discourses in general and by directly drawing on Frederick Jackson Turner’s infamous frontier thesis in particular, 13. 38. The concept of terra nullius is a core tenet of settler colonialism that relies on framing the Indigenous populations of newly “discovered” lands as less-than-human and therefore without claim to their own land (see Robertson, Conquest by Law). 39. Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 2. 40. See Temmen, “From HI-SEAS to Outer Space.” 41. See Saraf, “‘We’d Rather Eat Rocks.’”

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42. See Messeri, Placing Outer Space, 68. 43. Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 6. 44. Davenport, The Space Barons, 4, 123, 143–144. 45. Even though space agencies around the globe rely (and have relied for a long time) on private industry contractors, space travel is not a privatized business, but regulated on a national and international level. Private businesses can partner with national agencies, but they cannot conduct space travel on their own. While Musk and others have become important players as contractors, their vision includes completely privatizing space travel, which would, in their perspective, break a detrimental nation-state monopoly on space travel. 46. Davenport, The Space Barons, 4. 47. Ibid., 4–5. 48. See Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, 175–176. 49. Messeri, Placing Outer Space, 18. 50. Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 11. 51. Davenport, The Space Barons, 1–2. 52. See Davenport, The Space Barons, 2. 53. Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 1. 54. See Davenport, The Space Barons, 49–60, 117. 55. “When Slow Violence Sprints.” 56. Ibid. 57. Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth, 176. 58. See Braidotti, The Posthuman, 5–6. See Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 221–222. 59. See Heise, Sense of Planet, 25. See Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 16. 60. Nonhuman Nonsense, “Planetary Personhood.” 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. See New Zealand Parliamentary Counsel Office, “Te Urewera Act 2014.” 64. Nonhuman Nonsense, “Planetary Personhood.” 65. Ibid. 66. See Atanasoski and Vora, “Why the Sex Robot,” 14.

Works Cited Atanasoski, Neda, and Kalindi Vora. “Why the Sex Robot Becomes the Killer Robot – Reproduction, Care, and the Limits of Refusal.” Spheres: Journal for Digital Cultures 6 (2020): 1–16. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: polity, 2013.

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Butler, Judith. “Precariousness and Grievability  – When Is Life Grievable?” Accessed November 25, 2020. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2339-­ judith-­butler-­precariousness-­and-­grievability-­when-­is-­life-­grievable. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222. Davenport, Christian. The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos. New York: Public Affairs, 2018. Ganser, Alexandra. “Astrofuturism.” In Critical Terms in Future Studies, edited by Heike Paul, 35–43. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Heise, Ursula K. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Keeling, Kara. “Queer OS.” Cinema Journal 53, no. 2 (2014): 152–157. Markley, Robert. Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Marx, Paris. “Elon Musk is Planning for Climate Apocalypse.” Jacobin Magazine. Accessed December 1, 2020. https://jacobinmag.com/2020/01/ elon-­musk-­climate-­apocalypse-­tesla-­spacex. Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. Messeri, Lisa. Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. “‘My battery low and it’s getting dark’: Mars Rover Opportunity’s Last Message to Scientists.” abc7chicago.com. Accessed September 21, 2020. https://abc7chicago.com/science/my-­battery-­is-­low-­and-­its-­getting-­dark-­opportunitys-­last-­ message-­to-­scientists/5137455/. New Zealand Parliamentary Counsel Office. “Te Urewera Act 2014.” Accessed January 26, 2021. https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2014/0051/ latest/DLM6183601.html. Nonhuman Nonsense. “Planetary Personhood.” Accessed November 27, 2020. https://planetarypersonhood.com. Redfield, Peter. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Redmond, Sean. “The Whiteness of Cinematic Outer Space.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Society, Culture and Outer Space, edited by Peter Dickens and James S. Ormrod, 337–354. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Robertson, Lindsay G. Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Saraf, Aanchal. “‘We’d Rather Eat Rocks’: Contesting the Thirty-Meter Telescope in a Struggle Over Science and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi.” In “American Territorialities,” edited by Jens Temmen and Nicole Waller. Special Forum, Journal for Transnational American Studies 11, vol. 1 (2020): 151–175. Sheller, Mimi. “Space Age Tropics.” In Surveying the American Tropics: A Literary Geography From New  York to Rio, edited by Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Peter

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Hulme, Owen Robinson, and Lesley Wylie, 131–158. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017. Simon, Scott. “Opinion: Good Night, Oppy, A Farewell to NASA’s Mars Rover.” Accessed September 21, 2020. https://www.npr. org/2019/02/16/695293679/opinion-­g ood-­n ight-­o ppy-­a -­f arewell­to-­nasas-­mars-­rover. Temmen, Jens. “From HI-SEAS to Outer Space: Discourses of Water and Territory in U.S. Pacific Imperialism and Representations of U.S. Mars Colonization.” In Maritime Mobilities in Anglophone Literature and Culture, edited by Alexandra Ganser and Charne Lavery. Palgrave Macmillan. Forthcoming 2022. Vertesi, Janet. Seeing Like A Rover: How Robots, Teams, and Images Craft Knowledge of Mars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2019. “When Slow Violence Sprints: Interview with Rob Nixon.” Harvard University Press Blog. Accessed November 24, 2020. https://harvardpress.typepad.com/ hup_publicity/2013/11/when-­slow-­violence-­sprints-­rob-­nixon.html. Zubrin, Robert. “The Significance of the Martian Frontier.” In Strategies for Mars: A Guide to Human Exploration, edited by Carol R. Stoker and Carter Emmart, 13–26. San Diego: American Astronautical Society, 1996.

(Life) Narrative in the Posthuman Anthropocene: Erin James in Conversation with Birgit Spengler Erin James and Birgit Spengler

Birgit Spengler: This volume explores life writing—broadly conceived— in the context of the posthuman Anthropocene, the time period in which the anthropogenic damage inflicted on planet Earth can be traced to its geological layers, but also the time in which the consequences of such damage have triggered numerous calls for re-orienting the value systems and practices that have facilitated, and in fact often justified, the devaluation and exploitation of non-human life forms and the non-animate world as well as countless human lives. One of the questions arising from the title of this volume relates to the potential or potentials of life writing in this context. Where do you see this potential? And, since life writing has a long

E. James (*) University of Idaho, Moscow, ID, USA e-mail: [email protected] B. Spengler University of Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Batzke et al. (eds.), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77973-3_9

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tradition—or rather, some forms of life writing in Western literary history have a long tradition—in placing the individual human being center stage, in which specific ways might life writing be able to contribute to current debates and forms of activism that characterize the volume’s eponymous “posthuman Anthropocene”? How can life writing help to answer the question “how to write”1 the Anthropocene? I want to evoke the title of a book that I found inspiring in this context: How can life writing contribute to teaching the “arts of living on a damaged planet”?2 Erin James: Yes, that is a great book, and this is a key, if not the key question for me, this question of the human. I want to preface my comments here in the interview by saying that I know that this volume is about life writing yet I’m really a scholar of narrative, so the comments that I’m going to make are largely confined to narrative and thinking through life writing narratives as opposed to other forms of life writing as you’ll probably see in some of the things that we talk about today. For instance, a particular project of mine is to encourage scholars within the environmental humanities to be more precise and specific in their understanding of this word—“narrative”—and so maybe I’ll start by giving a few definitions of narrative as a preface for moving into the broader question of the potentials of life writing in this particular moment. I really like James Phelan’s definition of narrative as “somebody telling someone else on some occasion for some purpose(s) that something happened,”3 mainly because it’s easy to remember and cute and fun to say, but I’ve also been particularly attracted to David Herman’s articulation of narrative as having four basic elements: There is event sequencing. There is a situatedness to it and an occasion for telling, that is, there is a speaker or telling agent and a receiving agent. There is a world—a surrounding context, an environment— and then finally a narrative helps us understand what Herman calls the “what it’s like”-ness of experiences, that is, what is it like to experience something.4 I also am attracted to Herman’s work because he understands narrative from a cognitive perspective. He thinks about the cognitive processing that needs to happen in our heads to be able to understand narrative. Lots of different scholars have approached this issue in different ways. Some people think about narrative as emotional tools in which we “try on” the emotions of others. This is something you hear people like Lisa Zunshine or Suzanne Keen talk about. But I’m really interested in this idea of narrative as a cognitive affordance by which we try on other worlds, and we immerse ourselves in or transport ourselves to—to use figurative

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language—storyworlds, or other fictional or non-fictional worlds, and run simulations of those worlds or imagine what it’s like to live in those worlds. The more that I think about narrative and the more that I think about narrative in the Anthropocene, I’m really drawn to the concept of narrative as a particular cognitive affordance by which humans write worlds. And I see this as being perhaps the key relationship between narrative and our particular moment: if the Anthropocene is the product of humans “writing” a world, quite literally reshaping a world in our own image, then narrative is one cognitive mechanism by which we rehearse this action—a cognitive mechanism in which we write worlds, we transport ourselves to these worlds and we inhabit them. I often find myself the “cheese that stands alone” at an environmental humanities conference because people are interested in the posthuman, or the more-than-human, or the non-­ human, and I’m making a case for the study of humans. My point is that, if humans are the problem, if humans are the things that are driving these radical and fundamental changes that we see in the world, then perhaps we should study ourselves, and get to grips with the processes by which we do this work and we do this writing. So, just like scholars who study narratives and emotion talk about narrative as a kind of safe context in which we can try on the emotions of others, I tend to think of narratives as “safe” contexts in which we can try on worlds, in which we can imagine and inhabit worlds. Although I don’t think they are that safe because the more easily that we inhabit and imagine a specific world, the easier it is for us to make that world a reality and live in that world in real life. So, the question of the potentials of life writing, or the importance of life writing in this moment, I think, could play a fundamental role in understanding this process by which we write, and imagine, and immerse ourselves in, and create new worlds. This is fundamentally important to this epoch that we’re in, or this moment that we’re in, where we are grappling with the “real” life rewriting of the world by humans. Birgit Spengler: So, if studying life writing allows us insights into the ways in which we “try on” world views and rehearse actions that have brought the contemporary world into being, can you think of forms of life writing that would teach us otherwise? That is, can you think of forms of life writing that teach us different actions, or that rehearse actions that might help us mitigate the damage that we have inflicted? Erin James: For sure. This is a big debate within environmental communities: what scholars like Ursula Heise and various people talk about is, what are dangerous types of narrative and what are productive types of

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narrative? We will probably get into it when we start talking about some of the questions about realism and Amitav Ghosh’s arguments about realism. I’m attracted to this debate about realism, too, but I want to think more broadly about it. One of the things I’ve been interested in lately is science communication and interdisciplinary work. I’ve been working with an interdisciplinary team at the University of Idaho on yoking together narrative, emotions, and climatology, and thinking about how these things can come together. And I’ve been attracted to conversations with scientists who talk about their emotions, their climate grief. They talk about how stressful it is to study climate change and to feel like a Cassandra—like someone who is able to see what the future is going to look like and is sounding an alarm and no one is listening to them. We’ve been talking with some of our colleagues about what it would look like if we included more life writing from the scientists’ perspective. What would science look like that tried to immerse its readers into the emotions and the grief and the experiences of the scientists who are studying this kind of material? An interesting example of this is a scientist named Peter Kalmus, whose work I encountered at an Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference in Davis, CA, a few years ago. He works for NASA, and he is probably best known as a climatologist who started a no-­ fly campaign for scientists, where he’s trying to get scientists to commit to not flying.5 But he has also advocated for exactly this type of science communication that is infused with the emotional experiences of the scientist, that moves away from the standard of objectivity or stereotypically dry, clinical writing and tries to represent more the memories and experiences of what it’s like for scientists to study the climate.6 I think that is one easy example of a particularly productive type of life writing in the moment. I want to say, too, that my focus on the human should not come at the cost of projects that are challenging the barrier between the human and non-human or advocating for a more radical conceptualization of the more-than-human. I see this as a companion project. I don’t want to replicate ideas of human supremacy or attitudes of human supremacy by advocating for the human in this way. And I think that sometimes some of my environmental humanities colleagues misunderstand me as being so human-focused that I would do away with some of these other projects. But I do want to make a case for the study of us. Birgit Spengler: I mean, after all, maybe that’s what we’re experts in—that is, what narrative and certain narrative traditions have expertise in: “studying” us as humans. I don’t think it comes across as though you

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wanted to center the human in the sense of pushing other questions or perspectives aside. That’s not how I understand your work. But I do think that your example of scientific life writing is already partly an answer to another question I had. This question concerns the forms and formats, as well as representational and narrative strategies in contemporary life writing—or perhaps even future forms of life writing—that would be particularly interesting or promising in engaging the posthuman Anthropocene. And there is a second part to the question, namely, in which ways have contemporary forms of life writing already departed from more traditional forms of autobiography by not only reflecting the conditions of the Anthropocene but by challenging anthropocentric ways of perceiving and engaging with the non-human world? Given that you mainly focus on narrative, and not necessarily on narrative forms of life writing, please feel free to think of examples that go beyond life writing in a narrow sense of the term. Erin James: Yes, in this interdisciplinary work that I’ve been doing, I can think of life writing as playing two different roles. The first is this science communication project that I’ve been talking about. This actually started when the Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at our institution hired a specialist, Randy Olson, to come in and train the science faculty in the College on how to use narratives in their work. And I thought, “oh this is fascinating.” So, myself and a colleague snuck into the presentation to listen to what was happening, and I was really intrigued. Olson runs these trainings all over the world for university faculty and other organizations like the National Park Service in the United States; he’s also published books about this, most notably Houston: We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs a Story (2015). In the presentation that I attended, he gave people a very specific understanding of narrative as directly linked to event sequencing and not incorporating any of the other things that we associate with narrative, like characters or world or sensory information, or what it’s like. I was really struck by this rather limited way of understanding narrative. When you follow through with this, well— you begin with a really limited stance on what narrative is and it produces a rather limited way of using narrative in your work in that you are just focusing on the sequence in which you are relaying information. My colleagues and I have been trying to talk with some of our science colleagues about having a much broader understanding of narrative, and therefore being able to include things like characters and emotions, and sensory

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information in the way that they’re communicating their work. That is one project. Another project would be to think of life writing as data in a project that studies our world. One project that I’m currently working on is called “Communicating Fire” and it is funded through the National Science Foundation. It involves a core team of me, as a narrative theorist and scholar, a fire ecologist, a science communication and education specialist, and a specialist on affect, emotions, and literature. We have been collecting stories, life writing, from people in Idaho and the surrounding region that have experienced wildfire firsthand, either as smoke jumpers, people who are fighting the fires, or people who’ve been evicted or lost property, or had their lives significantly disrupted because of fires. We’re talking with them about their narratives and about their stories and getting them to articulate this—basically as life writing. We’re doing two things with this: one is we’re studying these narratives to try to figure out levels of scientific literacy that are circulating in the area, and how people think about fire science and what work there is to do there. But we’re also studying these narratives for the ways that people communicate their experiences via these life narratives. It’s so interesting because they’re so drastically different than a lot of the popular narratives that circulate about wildfire, which are very sensational, very terrifying, very scary. We’re analyzing the narratives we collected to try to figure out how people talk about fire who have experienced it in ways that are nuanced and impactful, and then, how these narratives reflect either solid current fire ecology science or ideas that could benefit from some more information. We’re then running workshops where we’re training informal science educators, such as Park Rangers, on cutting-edge fire ecology and fire science and narrative theory. And we’re helping them understand the stories that people tell about what it’s like to experience fire, but also how to tell their own stories about fire that effectively communicate and represent cutting edge fire science, and then furthermore how to facilitate even more people telling their stories about fire when they’re interacting with the public. That’s a very different understanding of life writing in this moment, and how we might think about the use of life writing in this moment. The project uses life writing as evidence to study an environmental problem. I’m very interested in that type of work: work that doesn’t just think about life writing as packaging for how we can communicate information, but a kind of source of knowledge in and of itself by which we can study how our world is changing and how people are experiencing that change.

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Birgit Spengler: This sounds like a fascinating project. I also think that it’s particularly interesting because it has these strong local and regional ties. Are your collaborators all placed in Idaho and the vicinity? Erin James: Yes, for this project they’re all in Idaho. We have other projects that are looking to build a broader network around the Pacific Northwest, so we’ve recently developed relationships with people in Washington state and Oregon state. You know, I love Idaho and I love living in Idaho, and my collaborators and I recognize that there’s a real need right now, particularly in understanding American culture and environmental problems, of engaging with rural communities and traditionally underrepresented communities. So, I think this is something that we’re really well placed to be thinking about in Idaho given the ruralness of our state. Birgit Spengler: I found it interesting when I was traveling in the West—in Idaho and Montana—to see all the fire towers. One time, our hiking trail passed by one of these towers and we talked to a volunteer about doing duty on a fire tower and watching out for wildfires during the summer. He was pointing out areas he was paying particular attention to that day. Your project even makes me think about my own little fire life narrative from that trip because we were camping and there was a wildfire nearby. Erin James: Oh really? What’s so amazing about this project is that so many of us have fire stories. Even if people don’t think they do, they often have some sort of story about a fire. But where did you experience this? Birgit Spengler: This happened in Glacier National Park. We were hiking that day, and we actually went to the far, western side of Glacier to hike. We couldn’t get back to the campground because a fire had broken out at the side of the road that runs through the National Park and our campground was located on the north-eastern edge. Actually, the fire was just across the hill from the campground, or rather on the other side of the mountain. So, once we finally had made it back, we didn’t really know what we would wake up to. I have to say it was a leap of faith to crawl into the sleeping bag that night and trust that they would evacuate us in time if necessary. It was a strange experience. Erin James: I think it’s particularly strange if fire is not part of your cultural knowledge. I grew up in Nova Scotia and lived in England for a long time before I moved to the American West. I’m much more used to water-based weather phenomena  and water-based disasters. The whole

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idea of a fire season and when the smoke rolls in—I find it especially alarming just because it’s not something that I grew up with. Birgit Spengler: Yes, definitely. To smell the fire, to see it, and the weird thing is, it looked rather beautiful and yet we knew it was so devastating. But then fires are also part of the natural cycle in the West, at least to some extent. Erin James: Yes, one of the most interesting things that have taken us by surprise, I think, is that the beauty of the fire is a really dominant refrain through a lot of these interviews. This is something that the traditional— in the sense of Smokey the Bear’s warning “only you can prevent forest fires”—understanding of forest fires doesn’t involve. It doesn’t involve beauty. This representation of forest fires depicts them as terrifying. But it’s fascinating, the way that people talk about being awestruck by the fires and also the way that people often will revert to very figurative language to talk about the fire almost as if they lack the language to talk about it directly. There’s a kind of displacement that happens in their articulations of the fires, which is so interesting to us, and it tasks you with imagining a much different experience of this phenomenon than the more standard, terrifying experience of fire. It’s been such an exciting project to work on. The people in the fire towers are part of the demographic that we’ll be working with when we do these workshops for informal science educators, so maybe that guy that you were talking to will be one of them. Birgit Spengler: I’m looking forward to reading more about this project! It is really fascinating and also brings me to my next question about the possibilities and affordances of multimedia, perhaps also non-­narrative, forms of life writing within the context of the posthuman Anthropocene. In fact, your example of the wildfire project immediately suggests that non-narrative or multimedia forms of narration might also be important? Erin James: This is such an interesting question. My first response is to think about affordances of different types of narrative, that is, what you can do in a purely written narrative that you might not be able to do in a visual or cinematic narrative and vice versa. I’m thinking especially of Alexa Weik von Mossner, who is a scholar that I respect immensely, who has this chapter in her book Affective Ecologies in which she talks about trans-species empathy and the ability of narrative to foster empathic connections between humans and non-human characters.7 Her primary example is cinematic—a documentary film, The Cove. I’m really persuaded by her analysis, but I find it’s not easy to transpose the arguments that she makes about cinematic narratives to non-cinematic texts because the

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example that she uses relies on viewers literally hearing the sounds of animals who are being abused, or slaughtered in this case, and seeing animal bodies writhing and in pain. Of course, when you transpose that into a written narrative, you’re going to have some sort of narratorial interference in that there’s going to be a narrator who’s telling us about this experience. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a lot of the narrative scholarship on the non-human, and in particular on empathy and non-human characters, has tended to focus on visual narrative; Alexa’s work, David Herman’s initial work on animals focuses on graphic novels, Suzanne Keen has a really great essay on animal characters in graphic novels and empathy. So even within narrative, I think the different media can do really different things. That’s something that we really need to think about and develop, and this is where transmedial narratology can become really helpful. I’m also really interested in how, within written narrative, there are these moments in which a narrative can make space for a non-human perspective in a sensitive way without anthropomorphizing. I’m particularly influenced here by postcolonial theory, and I think about Gayatri Spivak and the arguments that she makes about the female subaltern; that there’s a lost archive of the female subalterns’ narrative. It just doesn’t exist, and we can’t recover it. She advocates for a project of reading the gaps or the silences in a text in which there’s a place-marker for that irrecoverable story. And I want to advocate for a similar project within the environmental humanities or narrative theory/narrative scholarship, and life writing scholarship, which is to think about the way that narratives—and written narrative in particular—can foster this acknowledgment of the missing narrative or the thing that is unnarrated. So, I think about Gerald Prince’s categories of the “unnarratable” and the “disnarrated.”8 These categories haven’t been explicitly connected to non-human lifeforms, but I think that there’s a lot of work that we can do to think about how the breakdown of narrativity can be a productive mechanism for representing non-­ human perspectives, or more-than-human experiences. The blurry boundary between the human and non-human might be located at the blurry boundary between narrative and non-narrative, where this narrativity breaks down. I would love to think about that in a more robust way and see more scholarship take on this project. Birgit Spengler: Yes, that sounds like a promising avenue for future scholarship. Can you give an example for a breakdown like that?

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Erin James: I can refer you to an essay that I just read. I just wrote an afterword for a new collection of essays that is coming out in SubStance. Cord-Christian Casper has a really great essay on the disnarrated and British nature writing. He charts in these texts moments in which narrativity breaks down as a self-conscious mechanism of referencing the limits of human imagination and human ontology, or an attempt to hold space for what is missing.9 Birgit Spengler: Your interest in reading gaps and silences also makes me think of Wolfgang Iser’s work on gaps that readers have to fill.10 Once again, this foregrounds the process of reception as something that narratives can exploit in order to encourage new perspectives, new outlooks on life. Erin James: This is a key interest of mine: gaps. Going back to Iser and all through cognitive narratology, there has been this interest in gaps—in what the narrator does not narrate and thus what information the text is relying on readers to import, that is, presuppositions and assumptions that the reader must bring to bear on the text to literally make sense of it. Scholars in the environmental humanities do not do a very good job thus far of talking about gaps or what is absent from a text. There is this hypersensitivity to content and what is explicitly represented in the text, but not so much what is not in the text. I think there is such room to study the assumptions and presuppositions the text relies upon as getting to grips with the mechanisms by which anthropocentric and anthropogenic attitudes of human supremacy circulate in our culture. This is something I’m really interested in: reading gaps as a way to not only acknowledge an archive of non-human representations and ontologies that is missing, that perhaps even cannot be narrated or that resists narrativity, but then also how ideas about the dominance and importance and supremacy of humans circulate in the texts that we tell each other, how many of these texts rely upon ideas of human supremacy in ways that are not articulated explicitly in the content of the narrative. I’m interested in these gaps. Birgit Spengler: You emphasized early on that you’re a narratologist, but we can see in the fire project that life writings play a large role in some of your current work. Before we move further away from the context of life writing, I would like to ask you: How do you account for its popularity right now? Do you see any connections between this form of writing and the contemporary moment? Erin James: It makes sense to me that in a moment in which there’s deep anxiety about “our” world and “our” future in it and “our” place in

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it, that we would be telling stories that center around human lives and experiences. This is a moment in which we’re asking: what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be human in the world? What does it mean to be human in this world? How do we best live as humans in this world? It makes intuitive sense to me that life writing would be something that we turn to perhaps for the comfort of seeing ourselves as more autonomous than we actually are, but also a form that can challenge assumptions of human separateness from our context. Birgit Spengler: Absolutely. If we shift the focus from life writing in the posthuman Anthropocene, which is the title of the volume, to something like posthuman life writing: what forms of expression would you include in this category and would it make sense to you in the first place? Where would you draw the boundaries of such life writing? Erin James: I think I would begin to approach this question by conceptualizing the “post” in posthuman as similar to the “post” in postcolonial and “post” in postmodern—so not in the sense of “after” human but “next” or “beyond.” As a humanist who thinks about human modes of cognition and communication, I have trouble letting go of the human. But I guess I would think about posthuman life writing as life writing that is able to accommodate other forms of life and agency and trouble the boundary between the human and the non-human. Some of this might be by this breakdown of narrative that we’ve been talking about, or via an exploration of the limits of narrativity. It might feel like a weird story. It might even be a little boring because breakdowns in narrativity often occur in description, when plot is not happening, or when events are not happening. I’m also really interested in forms of non-human material that express a certain type of narrativity. I’m thinking about tree rings or ice cores or geologic strata that has literally embedded within it a representation of a sequence of events, and how that might inform life writing. I love the “Good Oak” chapter of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac.11 It’s a nonfiction narrative and Leopold-as-narrator is talking about being cold and wanting to get warmer. He cuts down an oak tree so that he can burn it to get warm, but the chronology of this chapter follows the rings of the oak tree. So, he moves backward in time as he’s sawing through the tree and after he gets to the heartwood, he then comes out back to the present moment. I think that’s a rich proto-example of posthuman life writing that features a human writing about his life but taking cues from the temporality of a non-human organism.

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Birgit Spengler: Do you sometimes catch yourself searching for these texts that you imagine, that you think should exist, but don’t necessarily exist yet? I sometimes think I’m actually waiting for that perfect text to be published. Erin James: Yeah, me too. Birgit Spengler: Actually, there’s a book by Michael Christie called Greenwood.12 I don’t know if you’ve read it. Erin James (laughs): So, my mother just came home with it the other day, and she nabbed it and is reading it first! My mom is a voracious reader and I had never heard of it, but apparently it was on the Canadian Book Award winning shelf at the local bookstore, and she tends to just pick up whatever is on that shelf. So, yes, I’m really excited to read it. The other one that it reminds me of is of course is The Overstory, the Richard Powers novel,13 and then Barkskins by Annie Proulx.14 Proulx’s novel is a really interesting companion piece to The Overstory as the two texts give us very different representations of trees and tree writing. Birgit Spengler: Yes, and so does Greenwood, which is also using tree rings as a structuring principle, just like the “Good Oak” chapter from A Sand County Almanac. Erin James: Yes, exactly. Just as an aside, too. I was at a party before the pandemic started and was talking with a friend who is a fisheries scholar in Idaho. He said that the bones in the ears of salmon are like tree rings and that they encode within them a representation of a specific sequence of events in the salmon’s life. So, you can map where the fish has been by reading the bones in the ear. I thought “wow!” I’m sure there’s a lot more material out there that would have this kind of base degree of narrativity that would be so interesting to study. Part of the fun of a question like this, about what would posthuman life writing be, is to think in a speculative way about the cool texts that you don’t know of yet but that you might imagine would get at some of these ideas. So, yes, salmon ear bones… Birgit Spengler: I never heard about that, but that’s absolutely amazing. Wow, we’re right in this issue of storied matter. You’ve already talked about this quite a bit, but one of the questions is, of course, what role this notion of storied matter or the narrative agency of matter could play in the future of literary studies, in the future of life writing, or in the future of narratology. These are huge questions, but perhaps you can speculate on them and on the role of human agency in the context of storied matter. Would you say a bit more about that?

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Erin James: I would, yes, and I’m so delighted that you asked this question because this is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. As I go to conferences and hear people talk about storied matter and material agency and the agency of non-humans, I frequently register a slippage that happens between agency and narrative agency, and forms of representation or expressive capacity and narrative. I’m fascinated by this slip, and I want to press on it. I do not want to, of course, deny non-­ human or more-than-human forms of agency. I have no interest in doing that. I think that we need to take very seriously non-human forms of agency, material agency, and think very seriously about it as a part of a robust response to what is happening in the world and how humans best live in this world. But I think that we actually do non-human ontologies a disservice when we make the jump from agency to narrative agency or expressive capacity to the ability to perform a narrative or tell a narrative. We can return here to a popular definition of narrative: somebody telling someone else for some purpose(s) on some occasion that something happened. We can also turn to scholarship in “evolutionary narratology” that talks about narrative as being a particularly human mode of cognition and representation. I understand that some material has a base degree of narrativity, like tree rings, ice cores, salmon ear bones, or geological strata. But this is a pretty low degree of narrativity. Yes, it’s a representation of a sequence of events, but it lacks a clear narrator. It doesn’t evoke for us a rich world. It gives us very little sense of what it’s like to experience those events. There is no focalization. There’s no representation of speech and consciousness. There’s no temporality other than linear chronology. There’s a degree of narrativity there, but it’s pretty low. To think in terms of the narrative agency of non-human matter, I find it helpful to think in terms of narrativity, and to think about material agency as this base degree of narrativity that people like Aldo Leopold can use as one tool by which to gesture towards non-human experiences. But I really want to push against the idea of the narrative agency of non-human matter because I just think that that collapses a whole bunch of different agencies into one very human type of agency. It makes me uncomfortable to do that. Another way that we might think about this is that we also might study—from a cognitive perspective—the effect that different types of material have upon our engagement with narrative, or how the agencies of different types of material influence how humans interpret narrative. I think here of studies that suggest that readers who primarily interact with

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digital interfaces have much shorter attention spans and tend to develop habits of reading that they then take out of the digital environment. Their eye-tracking moves differently. We might even study this phenomenon as being linked to a particular type of material agency in the sense that digital texts are made from actual materials like cobalt and underwater sea cables and things like this that would influence or affect the way that we interact with narrative in a way that print material would not. That’s a conversation I’m really interested in developing. I think this is a different angle on storied matter that understands more precisely what narrative is, the work that narrative does, and how it affects us cognitively. But it does so without collapsing all these different types of agency into one type of agency that’s very familiar to humans. I’ve never expressed it this strongly before, but it’s almost as if there’s a kind of ironic move to account for non-­ human agency via a form of agency that is distinctly human. It just doesn’t make too much sense to me to do that. Birgit Spengler: I totally see the point, yet, I guess it always depends on the eye of the beholder because our inability to decipher more than fragments of narrativity may just be that—our inability. And then, of course, much depends on our definition of narrative as well. If we think of narrative as a human form of expression, the limits are also there from the beginning. But I can see the point that you’re making. Erin James: I’m open to the very radical argument that we need to completely redefine narrative based upon different types of non-human agency. But I’m not sure that we’re there yet. I think about dogs in this context. I walk my dog Rudy every day and he likes to sniff everything. When my husband and I adopted Rudy, I read books on dog minds and “understanding your dog.” Several of the books mentioned that dogs can smell sequences of events—that when Rudy sniffs, he can smell the order in which other dogs have peed in this spot, et cetera. And I guess that’s a form of narrative that he is interpreting, a sequence of events. Again, it comes back to your definition of narrative. Gérard Genette’s definition of narrative is “the representation of a real or fictious event or series of events.”15 If we hold that as our definition of narrative, then, yes, tree rings have narrative agency. But I would argue that narrative scholarship has really pushed the definition of narrative far beyond that basic definition that Genette gives us, and that current narratological scholarship is much more ambitious in the way that it thinks about narrative not only as a representation but as a cognitive affordance and a cognitive mode. It’s in that understanding of narrative that I find it hard to reconcile narrative

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agency with what my dog is doing or what a tree is doing—even though I don’t want to diminish what the dog is doing or what the tree is doing. We create confusion by collapsing those three types of agencies together. Birgit Spengler: For us, the act of deciphering such potential non-­ human narratives also necessarily remains a projection: we are not able to read these types of language without projecting and without engaging in anthropomorphism. I think this also leads to a question about potential reasons why life writing—and, by extension, narratology—should insist on the category of the human despite the fact that the human has been such a problematic category, specifically in terms of its exclusionary focus on the sovereign individual and its relation to anthropocentric perspectives in Western traditions of thinking. Erin James: I think the simple answer is that the Anthropocene is the human epoch, and so we have to grapple with the human. But I’ll give you a broader answer that I think is more interesting for literary critics. My background is in postcolonial literature and theory, and I’ve already mentioned Spivak and gaps. Here, I find it really helpful to return to Edward Said’s work, particularly Culture and Imperialism, in which he studies the mechanisms by which imperialist attitudes and assumptions circulate.16 He advocates for a twofold postcolonial project. On the one hand, postcolonial scholars need to study representations of indigenous and postcolonial culture as written by indigenous and postcolonial writers as challenging Western ontologies and Western Enlightenment understandings of realism. On the other hand, and at the same time, Said suggests that postcolonial scholars need a companion project that returns to those canonical Western texts and rereads them to study them as distributors of these attitudes—attitudes which drove the imperial project. And I think environmental humanities scholars thus far have done a really great job of the first project, which is to think about representations—be they narrative or non-narrative—or ways of thinking and imagining that challenge assumptions about human supremacy and anthropocentrism. I’m interested in this project, but as a companion project. I also want to advocate for a version of contrapuntal reading within the environmental humanities. For Said, to read contrapuntally is to read both the narrated explicit point of a text but also the assumed or unnarrated counterpoint. His famous example, of course, is Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, where he talks about how the plot of the novel never moves from England. There are no non-white characters in this text; it’s a marriage plot set in England and mainly focusing on the English aristocracy. But, of course, the whole plot is made

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possible by Sir Thomas Bertram’s plantation in Antigua, and the whole thing is financed by a system of enslavement, exploitation, and brutality that largely goes unnarrated save for the occasional and infrequent mention of the plantation—not even the plantation but Antigua, the island. I think that is a really interesting model for scholars of life writing or the environmental humanities or narrative more generally to follow—to say, this text might not explicitly be representing anthropocentric attitudes but does so in what it doesn’t narrate, or in the assumptions or the web of affiliations that it relies upon for readers to make sense of it. Via these gaps, it is circulating a certain idea of human supremacy and humans as autonomous and separate from the environment around us. I want to push on this. I want to develop this project of rereading canonical texts as mechanisms by which these ideas circulate. I don’t want to blame those texts. Said doesn’t blame Austen for not writing an exposé of slavery. I don’t want to come down on someone like Austen for being too anthropocentric, but I do want to re-examine the text and the form of the text to better understand how ideas circulate in our culture. Birgit Spengler: This actually is a great transition to the idea of traditional or old narratives that you talk about in a recent article in DIEGESIS,17 in which you actually do take a stand, not against new narratives, but for reading old narratives and for uncovering the ways in which conventional patterns and storylines have ushered us into the present moment, into the Anthropocene. You make a compelling argument for what we can learn from studying these narratives. If I see it correctly, what you just said also directly relates to this argument? Erin James: Yes! This is maybe a good moment to clarify that when I talk about “old texts” or “rereading,” I am not doing so out of an interest in a kind of inherent conservatism or chronological thinking. In that essay I discuss the Avengers movies, so rather contemporary narratives, but I see them as recycling very old ideas. I see myself as doing or advocating for something really similar to what Said is saying: that is, if we want to understand how imperialism works, we need to study—literally—how it works— and not as a means of doubling down on imperialism, but rather as a means of coming up with alternatives to imperialism. Via contrapuntal reading, we train ourselves out of an imperialist mindset. Likewise, if we want to understand how anthropocentrism works, we need to literally study the mechanisms by which it functions as a means of becoming self-­ conscious of it and sensitive to it, so that we are not simply uncritically digesting it. This also connects back to the idea of narrative as a cognitive

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affordance for worldbuilding. I think I am making a familiar environmental humanities argument here, which is, the more time you spend imagining a certain world, the easier it is to literally live in that world. And I think if we can become self-conscious and critical of the type of worldbuilding that we are doing, we stand a better chance of acknowledging the movement between our imaginative world and real world. In this context, I also think of Suzanne Keen’s arguments about narrative empathy18 often as being dangerous: If you are empathizing with a character who is not well behaved or if you are flexing your emotional muscles in a way that maybe would produce some questionable ideas or behaviors in real life, then that is not necessarily a healthy or productive thing to be doing. And likewise, just as Keen has complicated our understanding of narrative empathy and the products and benefits of it, I want to complicate our understanding of narrative worldbuilding and the products of it and the “benefits” of it, especially the potentially adverse effects of it. Birgit Spengler: Your emphasis on the insights we can gain from “old narratives” in terms of how anthropocentrism works is rather compelling. In the article I just mentioned, you also discuss a number of narrative strategies and patterns that are particularly significant in the process of naturalizing anthropocentric ways of engaging with “world.” I was wondering if you can talk a bit about those strategies—perhaps provide us with some additional examples that you have identified—and explain the type of cultural work that such “old narratives” perform. Erin James: Maybe I will go back to Mansfield Park because I think this is a good starting point for a conversation about realism, as I think we are pushing into this territory. I know the scholarship that studies the novel as a literary mode is robust and there has been much written since Ian Watt published The Rise of the Novel in 1957,19 but I find it helpful to return to what Watt says about literary realism, which of course is connected to this titular “rise of the novel” and the novelistic mode in general. Way back then, Watt argued that we can distinguish the realist novel that appeared in Britain from the texts that came before it via two formal characteristics: on the one hand, characterization, as the realist novel represents people that appear to be real, but are not based on anyone in particular, and then, on the other hand, a particular type of spatialization or setting, meaning that the characters function in a very stable place, or rather against a stable backdrop in which their drama takes the foreground and this then takes precedence over whatever is happening in the background. I think these are two noteworthy formal characteristics when

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considering the perspective of “old narratives”: the foregrounding of individual human drama and the backgrounding of a stable environment, which readers can ignore, unless they are explicitly told to pay attention to it for some reason, so much so that the background often is not narrated. We can easily identify this in Mansfield Park. A common interpretation of the novel is that place is symbolic or representative of character, that is, the Crawfords, who are wild, come from London, which is wild as well; the Bertrams are in Mansfield Park, which is much more civilized; Mr. Rushworth lives at the Sotherton Estate, where the old money is—so the environments of the text and the buildings and “natural” world become a stand in for the characters. Environment becomes a form of characterization. And this form of characterization relies upon the assumption that environment is significant only in terms of character and that anything else that happens in the environment does not matter. It only matters in terms of how it allows us to think about Fanny and various other people in the novel. All in all, this then presents an easy example for how we might reread a text with a kind of contrapuntal methodology in mind, to study how it circulates certain ideas. You could, for example, also consider the fact that there are hardly any non-human characters in Mansfield Park; Edmund gives Fanny a horse at some point, but the horse is really just there as an illustration of Edmund’s affection for his cousin, and the narrator compliments the horse for becoming adjusted so quickly to Fanny’s wants and desires. Rushworth fells a bunch of oaks on his estate because they obstruct the view and this again is symbolic of his need to modernize. So, when non-human characters appear, and they do so infrequently, they are always in the service of humans that are foregrounded in the text. We can do a similar reading of something like Ian McEwan’s novel Solar,20 which also is playing with these ideas in a much more satirical and self-­ conscious way. It foregrounds human drama at the expense of everything else but does so in a much more caustic and tongue-in-cheek way to call attention to the damage that such attitudes can cause when they are unchecked or run amok. Birgit Spengler: Your observations are particularly interesting when it comes to current debates about the merits and “crimes” of realist fiction— its ostensible inability or inappropriateness to portray and interfere with climate change and anthropocentrism. In contrast to Amitav Ghosh,21 who argues that the conventions of literary realism render it unsuitable to address and depict the challenges of the Anthropocene, your observations suggest that literary realism can be quite useful when thinking about the

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challenges of the Anthropocene, even if not necessarily in a straightforward or obvious way. Erin James: The problem I have with Ghosh’s argument—even though I agree with quite a bit of what he says—is that I find it hard to understand how he collapses “serious fiction” and “realism”—that just seems like a like an odd thing to do. I do take issue with his ultimate move to say we should shift away from realism because then we cannot push past our anthropocentric assumptions. I think that is exactly the reason why we should study, analyze, and unpack the forms and structures of realist novels. But I am persuaded by his argument that realism is a form that is based on a certain amount of predictability. We see that in all this scholarship on the rise of the novel; we see the stable backdrop and setting that exists largely in the gaps of the text. For example, we rarely read about the weather in a realist novel until the weather becomes exceptional enough for the narrator to articulate it because it plays a role in whatever is happening with the drama of the characters. And so once again, I am coming back to this idea of gaps and the unnarrated as being important to our understanding of how realism works. Narrative gaps are a site of inquiry in and of themselves. Birgit Spengler: I have always been rather skeptical about arguments that dismiss a specific form of writing in its entirety, or a genre as a whole. In terms of the merits and “crimes” of realist fiction, I am wondering if there isn’t yet another argument that we can make in its favor: if it comes down to challenging worldviews—including our understanding of the place of human beings in the world, our entanglements with non-human animals, with plants and other creatures—I think that realist forms of writing can be a particularly effective and persuasive means to present alternative worldviews, to popularize them, and to make us accept them. And they can be effective and persuasive precisely because they present such alternative worldviews in a familiar mode. In other words, when we think about how we can change our perception of the world, is it not possible that realist fiction can actually play an important role in that process? I am thinking of a novel like The Overstory by Richard Powers, for example, which invests new ways of understanding the “world” with authority and the force of conviction by creating the effect of verisimilitude. Erin James: When I hear you express it like that, what really comes to mind—and I am returning to Suzanne Keen’s work on narrative empathy here—is that Keen says that narrative empathy often involves an “in-group bias” in that we as readers tend to empathize with those characters that we

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can identify with more easily than with characters who are part of an “out-­ group,” or at least not part of our “in-group.” I want to make a similar argument about “in-world bias” in that readers find it a lot easier to mentally model and imaginatively inhabit a world that resembles a familiar world than to imagine something that is radically different. If we are thinking about an “in-world bias” in relation to narrative worldbuilding, then realism becomes really important because it, perhaps more than all other modes, works with these biases of how Western readers tend to imagine the world. I could go into much more cognitive science at this point, for example, Marie-Laure Ryan’s principle of minimal departure,22 or more generally about how readers form storyworlds, but I do think you are exactly right in pointing out that realism does have the potential to introduce, or almost sneak in, radical ideas because they are being packaged in this very familiar format. The Overstory is a really great example of how this can work, as it is a realist novel that tasks readers with imagining tree ontology—with how the experience of a tree is different from that of a human. I want to make two more points about realism in this regard. Going back to Ghosh, one is that his equating of “realism” and “serious fiction” and “the novel” collapses quite a few different categories into one, and disentangling this conflation is something that narrative theorists can be really helpful with, as we do talk about specific narrative structures that are endemic to these different categories. Moreover, people like Adam Trexler23 and Stephanie LeMenager24 have made great arguments about realism and the novel in general, and they have a much more capacious understanding of these two categories so that they can include speculative fiction and science fiction. Along these lines Ghosh’s conceptualization of not only “realism” and “serious fiction,” but also the novel, seems unnecessarily narrow. Also, I want to make another point. Kim Stanley Robinson argues that climate change fiction is the realism of our time.25 This raises the question of what happens to realism in a moment in which we are questioning what is real and what is normal? What happens to a mode that is based on a certain amount of predictability in a moment that is increasingly unpredictable? Because of these questions I am persuaded by arguments of people like Jon Hegglund who say that the weirder a text is the more realistic it is, at least in this particular moment.26 In this way, Jeff VanderMeer’s weird fiction is a particularly effective form of realism, even more so than McEwan’s Solar, because it represents the unpredictability and strangeness of our reality at the moment. All in all, I think there can

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be a lot of conversations about realism, life writing, the human, narrative forms and structure, and how all these things come together, and how we can be more precise and sophisticated in the way that we talk about them. Birgit Spengler: What should be accepted as mimetic, in other words, is quite different from what we have been trained to believe, both by means of representational conventions and by way of culturally accepted knowledge. The strangeness of certain types of fiction renders them more realistic than what has been traditionally identified or categorized as realism. Erin James: Again, this is where postcolonial theory and postcolonial literature is really helpful. There is a long tradition within postcolonial literature of using non-Western realism to question totalitarian notions of Western realism as “reality.” You can think about magic realism: it leans into the conventions of the realist mode as a very precise way of questioning the dominance of Western notions of what is “reality” and what is “real.” I think that we could turn to some of those scholarly conversations and take cues from them when we want to talk about realism, the human, the non-human, or the environmental in this particular moment. Birgit Spengler: You have already talked a lot about postcolonial theory, but I think the editors of this volume are particularly interested in whether you see a necessity to hold on to theories such as postcolonial theory or Marxist theory, which focus on the problems arising from the exploitation of humans, instead of “moving on” to thinking of “the human” as an agent among many agents (such as animals, plants, geological phenomena, etc.)? In other words: How do we calibrate, how can we bring together these different types of interests and necessities of the moment? Erin James: I really like this question of whether it is necessary to hold on to theories like Marxism or postcolonial theory that focus on the problems between humans. As is probably not surprising to you given our conversation that we have had so far, my answer is an emphatic “Yes, we do need to hold on to these theories.” We run a real risk in destabilizing the human/non-human binary—we run a risk when collapsing the human into one homogenous category. That is a dangerous thing to do. I think Rob Nixon is really great on this, particularly his writing about the Great Acceleration versus the Great Divergence, and his proposition of a different narrative of the Anthropocene that is not one of a common human experience but of the unequal distribution of resources.27 People like Dipesh Chakrabarty propose a geological argument—that this is the epoch

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of the human and that we as humans are a collective geologic agent that is functioning at the level of the species.28 Nixon gives us an alternative narrative or companion narrative that suggests that at the same moment that human activity is registering in geologic strata, the injustices amongst human communities are growing ever wider. We need to be able to think on two scales at once: on the one hand, thinking about humans as a collective with group agency, but on the other hand recognizing humans as a very nuanced and bifurcated or separated group. I run into this risk, too, as I make these evolutionary arguments about narrative as a mode of human cognition. And I really do want to hold on to this species-level thinking of narrative as a cross-species and cross-cultural mode of mentation and cognition. But as a postcolonial scholar, I would never want to argue that narratives across cultures are the same, or that narrative structures in cultures are always identified with a particular ideology, no matter the context of their use or production. I want to hold room for lots and lots of different nuances. So I find myself very interested in narratives and narrative structures that can encourage readers to think on two scales at once: at the level of the human collective, but then also at the level of the individual. Part of this is my own experience of climate change: I do not want to lose sight of the fact that not one human can escape climate change, but that we feel its effects radically differently. If you look at wildfires in California or Australia or think about the energy crisis in Texas, the pandemic even: different human populations in different demographics feel these events and catastrophes in really different ways. In the book that I have just finished writing, next to contrapuntal readings and Said’s work and discussions of realism, one chapter in particular looks at the issue of agency and thinks about how different conceptualizations of human agency in the Anthropocene put pressure on the narratological model and encourage us to think differently about how agency functions in narratives. I am really attracted to those structures within a narrative that can facilitate this double scale thinking, which tasks readers with imagining the experience of a collective that supersedes any individual experience, but then also the experience of the individual—structures that demand that readers think about both levels and their corresponding types of agencies at the same time. I think this is a really important question. I think we can also facilitate this project of holding on to the human, while at the same time being self-conscious of the human via this embrace of postcolonial theory or Marxist theory that I have been talking about throughout this interview: of looking to some of these theories as

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providing us with models for how to negotiate these big discussions about humanity, humans, agency, and how we function. Birgit Spengler: Ideally, of course, there would be mutual learning. There is a lot that current scholarship in the environmental humanities can learn from postcolonial studies, from feminism, from gender criticism, from Marxism, et cetera—and there are many examples for the ways in which scholarship in the environmental humanities has already been inspired by them. And, clearly, there is also a lot that these “old” theories, “old” narratives, can learn from the environmental humanities. Erin James: For sure. In the interdisciplinary work that I do, we see this a lot. We are not interested in unidirectional traffic; we are not interested in one group that comes in and imparts knowledge to another group and that is then the only thing that happens. Instead we want multidirectional traffic all the time, where no one perspective is taking precedence. As I get older, I find myself looking more and more for multidirectional traffic. And so of course I think scholars of the environmental humanities would do well to look to some of the projects of Marxism and postcolonialism, and feminism and queer studies, et cetera, but that should not lead to unidirectional traffic; these “older” theories have room to grow and evolve as well—and that includes narrative theory. Birgit Spengler: This idea of “multidirectional traffic,” and specifically “multidirectional traffic” between the environmental humanities and narratology, is actually something I wanted to ask you about. Since you have been working in both fields and, really, at their intersection, for such a long time, you are ideally equipped to answer this: The environmental humanities, broadly speaking, have dedicated a lot of energy to the process of challenging received systems of thought and traditional forms of classification and categorization. However, narratology has so far remained relatively “unharmed,” largely left intact by such moves, even though many narratological categories and concepts are inherently anthropocentric—and perhaps unsurprisingly so in the light of what you have argued about narrative as a primarily human sense-making strategy. Marco Caracciolo, for example, has commented upon a “latent anthropocentrism of narrative practices,”29 and, in a similar vein, you and your co-editor Eric Morel have argued that “today’s environmental challenges necessitate revisions to models of narrative”30 in your introduction to Environment and Narrative (2020). I was wondering how, from your point of view, the insights and thematic concerns of current debates in the environmental humanities—for example, ideas of “entanglement,”31 “response-ability,”32

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but also “distributive agency,”33 “transcorporeality,”34 or “storied matter,”35 which we have talked about before—might be able to enrich narratology? And would—or should—this type of enrichment also move narratology away from its anthropocentric bias? Erin James: This is a big question, and it is one that has consumed me for the last past five years or so. I have just written an entire book on this question! Birgit Spengler: Congratulations! Erin James: Thank you! And yes, of course, I absolutely and fundamentally agree with Marco Caracciolo that there is a latent Anthropocentrism in narrative practices and I stand by the comment that Eric Morel and I make in our introduction that what is happening in the world right now necessitates updates to the narratological model. Econarratology, for me, began as a project of frustration and disconnect: I was studying postcolonial literature and I could not figure out a way to apply ecocriticism, as it was then articulated by scholars, to the texts that I was reading, because the ecocriticism of the time was interested very much in nature writing and how people were communing with nature in positive and productive ways. But in the texts that I was reading, people were not communing with nature. People were trying to get away from nature, as a site of slavery and exploitation. Disconnect is something that continues to drive a lot of my thinking. This new book that I have just finished is inspired by the moments in which I see a kind of popular narratological model as being weak or ill-­ suited to either analyzing what is happening in the world today or analyzing texts that are trying to represent what is happening in the world today. The book is divided into the chapters “Worlds,” “Material,” “Time,” “Space,” and “Narration,” and in all five chapters I am trying to identify these pressure points in a narratological model and offer up new concepts or new terms, new ideas. I will give you one quick example. Going back to Rob Nixon and how we just talked about the Great Acceleration versus the Great Divergence, his notion of slow violence36 has become really fundamental to conversations in the environmental humanities, and in a lot of life writing, too, that is thinking about toxicity and pollution. Nixon is very clear that slow violence is particularly hard to represent in narrative because it is not legible as an event in the moment it occurs; it is only legible as an event via the effects that it has on bodies and objects, via its transformative effects. We can’t detect the slow drip-drip-drip of toxicity in the moment that it’s

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happening; we can only recognize it after the fact via the cancer that appears in someone’s body, et cetera. This understanding of time poses a radical challenge to the narratological model: Narrativity has long been linked with event sequencing, but our notion of an event is almost wholly reliant on an event being immediately recognizable as an event. Thus, an event that has narrative resonance or importance is something that narrators, characters, and readers can recognize as an event immediately in the moment that it happens. So how do you account for slow violence and the events that are not legible to characters, narrators, or readers? We need a totally different understanding of events and a totally different understanding of temporality, a new category and new vocabulary. In the “Time” chapter, this is one of the things I talk about. I propose a new type of event, a new category of narrative temporality that would allow us to read these as events. The second part of my project is to argue that these things already exist in texts. But so far scholars have lacked appropriate analytical language to talk about them as such, and so they’ve gone unread in this way. I’m trying to both articulate the new category, or develop the narratological model, and then show how it looks in practice. This is part of the bigger project of the book. I think that narratology—although it is incredibly useful for understanding how we perceive and live in the world—needs to evolve as the world around us continues to change and our relationship to it continues to change. Birgit Spengler: Just out of curiosity, one of your chapters is on narration, you said. Are you also concerned with focalization? Erin James: Focalization is one structure that I don’t deal with head on, but I would love for someone else to take up this project. The narration chapter is where I’m grappling with these forms of collective versus individual agency that we were just speaking of. I’m dealing with we-­ narration and second-person-narration as being especially interesting structures, and I also talk about the tradition of omniscient narration as being one of these structures that can be particularly good at distributing and replicating kind of anthropocentric ideas about humans and our alleged separateness from the world around us. So, the narration chapter is really the agency chapter. Birgit Spengler: I’m really looking forward to reading your new book. The reason I was asking about focalization are its ties to the ostensible visual bias, a privileging of the sense of vision in Western thinking: Even though of course perception in narrative isn’t limited to the visual, obviously there is a strong tendency towards the sense of sight, which, in turn,

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has long been described as the “distancing sense” and has been considered to be closely linked to anthropocentric ways of engaging with “world” and notions of human exceptionalism. Although I think that this argument is too broad, I find it intriguing nevertheless to think about the potential effects of this foregrounding of vision on narrative world-making. But perhaps that will be material for the next book. On the other hand, and as the flip-side of my previous question, what insights can narratology contribute to the environmental humanities? You have actually already given some examples of how narratology can contribute to the environmental humanities, but perhaps you want to just point out a few particularly interesting pathways for such cross-fertilization? Erin James: I think, again we’re talking about multidirectional traffic. I’m really keen to show how these two projects of environmental humanities and narrative theory can be mutually informative. I’ve already articulated one project, which is the idea of (re-)reading old narratives for their gaps. This is a clear pairing of cognitive narratology and the environmental humanities in a way that I think is particularly promising. This is also connected to a second contribution that narratology can make to the environmental communities, which is a broader study of form. I teach a class on climate change fiction and part of the new book project is to track climate change fiction and how people are talking about it. There seems to be a clear consensus building amongst environmental humanities scholars that for a text to be considered as cli-fi, or climate change fiction, it has to explicitly represent climate change in its content. I want to push against that notion. I want to think about form. There are lots and lots of texts that might not be explicit about climate change but still task us with imaginatively inhabiting a world that is being altered by climate change, or task us with imaginably inhabiting a certain set of attitudes and a web of affiliations that is helping to produce climate change. These texts do not do this in their content but in their form. So, I want to make a case for a sensitivity to form within environmental humanities scholarship. I think that this is something that’s been missing, quite frankly, and I think that narrative theory can really help because it provides you with an entire lexicon for talking about narrative form and thinking about form. Finally, the third project that I would argue for is also one that we’ve talked about today, which is this more precise understanding of narrative as a category—as a rhetorical mode and as a mode of cognition—and not just a catch-all term for any type of representation. This, I worry sometimes, is how it gets used in some environmental humanities scholarship in

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that narrative becomes synonymous with signification. I want to try to tease those things apart so that we can be sensitive to what narrative is, and then what other forms of signification are, and can be, and can do that might be different from narrative. Birgit Spengler: I think many of the projects you have been talking about today attest to this notion of multidirectional traffic, the idea of a mutually enriching process. My final question is again, a rather broad question. It relates to the development of econarratology, and I want to invite you to share your perspective on this evolving field. Your book from 2015, The Storyworld Accord,37 is considered one of the first, if not the first book-length contribution(s) to the field of econarratology. More recently, you have also co-edited a volume, Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology,38 with contributions that combine a wide range of narratological approaches with posthumanist, ecocritical, and new material concerns. Apparently, “econarratology” has come a far way in a very short period of time. From your point of view, what have been the most important developments in the field of econarratology since the publication of The Storyworld Accord? Are there any specific insights or desiderata for a future econarratology that you would want to highlight? Erin James: I feel kind of awkward answering this one because I’m not sure if it’s my place to say this, as there are multiple perspectives welcome here. I would open this up to what other people might do with this term. I have pushed a couple of projects in this interview that I would like to very briefly repeat here: firstly, a more precise understanding of narrative within environmental humanities; secondly, an expansion or updating of the narratological model to better accommodate or address our changing world; and thirdly, a broader consideration of the worldbuilding power of narrative that recognizes narratives as key cognitive affordances by which humans practice and perfect their worldbuilding skills. Those are three projects that I would like someone else to take up now. I would like people to run with those ideas, and maybe I will continue to run with those ideas, but I really have no idea where this should go. To be honest—and I mentioned this just a few minutes ago—this idea of econarratology was really born out of frustration and disconnect. It was also born out of necessity: When I was working on my PhD, I was trying to find a way of talking about postcolonial literature and ecocriticism together … and econarratology is what I came up with. When I first began to talk about this, it was a way of reading non-mimetic postcolonial texts, or “non-realist” postcolonial texts. In six years, it has grown far beyond

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that. People are using it to analyze various different kinds of texts and having different kinds of conversations. I am very grateful that people have pushed it far beyond what I could have imagined at the time, and what I can still imagine now. Now, I’m eager for other people to join in the conversation or continue to contribute to the conversation. But, as I said, what I’m doing now is still driven by this, this nagging sense of disconnect. I’m still using the nexus of environment and narrative to try to pinpoint areas that we can be better at, and to think about how we represent the environment, how we engage with representations of the environment, and how representations of the environment affect our engagement with the actual material world. It’s these pressure points that I continue to be drawn to, where I continually find narrative theory and ecocriticism, but also other forms of literary theory, including postcolonialism, as really interesting models, but also as models that should be growing, and changing, and developing as the world the around us continues to change. Birgit Spengler: I think it is always nice if scholars working in the field also point to directions that should be pursued. So, hopefully, someone will read this interview and perhaps feel inspired to continue the conversation. Erin James: … or offer something completely new that is beyond the limits of my understanding and imagination, which I would love to read myself.

Notes 1. Pratt, “Coda: Concept and Chronotope,” 170. 2. See Tsing, Bubandt, Gan, and Swanson, eds., The Arts of Living. 3. Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric, 218. 4. Herman, Basic Elements of Narrative, 9. 5. See https://noflyclimatesci.org/. 6. Kalmus, “To My Fellow.” 7. Weik von Mossner, Affective Ecologies, Chap. 4. 8. Prince, “The Disnarrated,” 2. 9. Casper, “What Is It Not.” 10. Iser, Der Akt des Lesens. 11. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac. 12. Christie, Greenwood. 13. Powers, The Overstory. 14. Proulx, Barkskins. 15. Genette, “Boundaries of Narrative,” 1.

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16. Said, Culture and Imperialism. 17. James, “The Value of Old Stories.” 18. Keen, “Narrative Empathy.” 19. Watt, Rise of the Novel. 20. McEwan, Solar. 21. Ghosh, The Great Derangement. 22. Ryan, “Possible Worlds.” 23. Trexler, Anthropocene Fictions. 24. LeMenager, “Climate Change.” 25. Robinson, “Forward.” 26. Hegglund, “Unnatural Narratology.” 27. Nixon, “Great Acceleration.” 28. Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History.” 29. Caracciolo, “Notes,” 172. 30. James and Morel, “Introduction,” 2. 31. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 13. 32. Ibid., 34. 33. White and Whitlock, “Life: Writing and Rights,” 2. 34. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2. 35. Iovino, “Stories,” 451. 36. See Nixon, Slow Violence. 37. James, The Storyworld Accord. 38. James and Morel, Environment and Narrative.

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park. 1814. Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Caracciolo, Marco. “Notes for an Econarratological Theory of Character.” Frontiers of Narrative Studies 4, no. 1 (2018): 172–189. Casper, Cord-Christian. “What is it not Like to be a Skylark?: Apophatic Form in Nature Writing.” SubStance, forthcoming. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 197–222. Christie, Michael. Greenwood: A Novel. New York: Hogarth, 2020. Genette, Gérard. “Boundaries of Narrative.” New Literary History 8, no. 1 (1976): 1–13. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

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Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Hegglund, Jon. “Unnatural Narratology and Weird Realism in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.” In Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology, edited by Erin James and Eric Morel, 27–44. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020. Herman, David. Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Iovino, Serenella. “Stories from the Thick of Things: Introducing Material Ecocriticism.” In “Material Ecocriticism,” edited by Heather Sullivan and Dana Phillips. Special issue, ISLE 19, no. 3 (2012): 448–460. Iser, Wolfgang. Der Akt des Lesens. 1976. 2nd, rev. ed. München: Fink, 1984. James, Erin. The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. ———. “The Value of ‘Old’ Stories: A Response to Marco Caracciolo’s ‘Negotiating Stories in the Anthropocene.’” DIEGESIS 9, no. 2 (2020): 34–44. ———, and Eric Morel, eds. Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020. ———. “Introduction: Notes Toward New Econarratologies.” In Environment and Narrative: New Directions in Econarratology, edited by Erin James and Eric Morel, 1–24. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020. Kalmus, Peter. “To My Fellow Climate Scientists: Be Human, Be Brave, Speak Truth.” Yes! February 7, 2017. Accessed March 19, 2021. https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/science/2017/02/07/to-­my-­fellow-­climate-­scientists­be-­human-­be-­brave-­tell-­the-­truth/. Keen, Suzanne. “Narrative Empathy.” In The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn et al. Hamburg: Hamburg University. Accessed March 8, 2021. http://www.lhn.uni-­hamburg.de/article/narrative-­empathy. LeMenager, Stephanie. “Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre.” In Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, edited by Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor, 220–238. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949. McEwan, Ian. Solar. London: Jonathan Cape, 2010. Nixon, Rob. “The Great Acceleration and the Great Divergence: Vulnerability in the Anthropocene.” MLA/Profession 2014. Accessed March 18, 2021. https:// profession.mla.org/the-­g reat-­a cceleration-­a nd-­t he-­g reat-­d ivergence­vulnerability-­in-­the-­anthropocene/. ———. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Olson, Randy. Houston: We Have a Narrative: Why Science Needs a Story, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

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Index1

A Accountability, 4–6, 27, 87, 196, 214 See also Responsibility Actant / actor, 3, 6, 27, 44, 45, 59, 73, 80, 81, 217 Aesthetics, 33, 58, 124, 131, 140–146, 210 See also Beauty Agency agent, 80 distributive, 6, 188, 189, 248 material / of matter, 237, 238 narrative, 14, 30, 37, 236–238 (see also Life writing) Agential realism, 166, 178, 179n25 See also Barad, Karen Alaimo, Stacy, 6, 102, 117n27, 192, 196 Alien, 136, 137, 160

Ancestor / ancestors, 29, 39, 166, 167, 170, 171, 173, 176, 180–181n52 Animal / animals, 4, 11, 13, 25, 35, 38, 40, 43, 45, 48n3, 56, 59, 69, 71–76, 100, 103, 109, 111, 123, 126, 133, 135, 141, 142, 147, 160, 170, 179n25, 187–189, 191–197, 199, 199n19, 220n25, 233, 243, 245 Anthropocentrism, 6, 8, 9, 31, 45–48, 65, 72, 100, 101, 195, 196, 206, 218, 239–242, 247, 248 Anthropogenic, 5, 7, 16n33, 46, 185, 213, 225, 234 Anthropomorphism / anthropomorphic, 74, 193, 208, 211, 212, 239 strategic, 218

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 I. Batzke et al. (eds.), Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77973-3

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258 

INDEX

Anthropos, 1, 7, 66, 81, 149n8, 187 Anti-human, 209 Aotearoa / New Zealand, 132, 217 Ascidian, 133–135, 137–140, 146, 150n47, 151n61 See also Tunicate Astrofuturism, 206, 207 See also Ganser, Alexandra Atanasoski, Neda, 212–214, 220n35 Atlantic, 97, 103, 135 See also Ocean Authority, 9, 36, 37, 89n36, 164, 243 Autobiography autobiographical pact, 3, 28, 30, 37, 49n23 tool-box, 3 Autonomous, 6, 9, 23, 24, 29, 30, 47, 50n32, 56, 66, 82, 235, 240 self, 2, 3 B Bacteria, 82, 114–116, 139 Barad, Karen, 166, 168–170, 178, 179n25, 180n49 Beauty, 61, 62, 76, 113, 125, 232 See also Aesthetics Becoming, 11, 46, 47, 55–87, 137, 145, 169, 170, 186–193, 198, 240, 242 Bennett, Jane, 45, 104, 112, 177, 188 Bezos, Jeff, 13, 206, 207, 213–215 The Big Picture, 11, 55–87 See also Rosenthal, Rachel Bioart, 100, 116n15 Biocentrism, 217, 218 Biology, 136, 140, 151n61 marine biology, 123, 135 Bios, 11, 24–26, 28–33, 36, 43, 45, 47, 48, 48n3, 50n35, 50n37, 56, 99, 186 Bioscape, 131 Bird

birds of prey, 187 corncrake, 99, 108–110, 115 goshawk, 186, 187, 189, 190, 194, 197 Body / bodies corporeality, 78 embodiment, 64 Boes, Tobias, 185, 199n4 Bolsonaro, Jair, 175, 181n72 Boundaries, 2, 6, 13, 14, 25, 27, 29, 32, 33, 37, 39, 40, 47, 77, 80, 86, 100, 108, 110, 142, 163, 164, 166, 169, 173, 180n39, 187, 188, 192, 195, 196, 198, 214, 217, 233, 235 blurring, 40, 100 Braidotti, Rosi, 8, 11, 31, 47, 48n3, 56, 58, 64–68, 72, 76, 82–87, 88n14, 162, 186–188, 190, 192, 195, 196, 209, 210, 220n25 Brazil, 64, 160, 161, 167, 172 Butler, Judith, 208, 219n15 C Capitalism / capitalist, 7, 9, 67, 70, 78, 90n74, 113, 172, 212–214, 218 Capitalocene, 69, 70, 90n74 Care care-work, 196 caring, 131, 141, 196 Cartesian, 68, 75, 160, 162, 163, 165, 169, 170, 176, 180n52 Categorization, 3, 40, 247 Center / centeredness, 12, 26, 30, 36, 41, 46, 77, 147, 176, 194, 206, 215, 226, 229, 235 decentering, 2, 5, 11, 23–48, 82, 104, 192, 193, 196 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 7, 8, 46, 185, 245

 INDEX 

Character, 11, 33, 45, 64, 65, 71, 74, 146, 215, 229, 232, 233, 239, 241–244, 249 Chthulucene, 81 Civilization, 174 Classification, 141, 247 See also Taxonomy / taxonomies Clavelina, 128, 129, 145 See also Sea, sea squirt Climate change, 1, 7, 10, 16n33, 69, 76, 165, 167, 168, 170, 175, 180n38, 180n39, 180n52, 185, 191, 195, 206, 207, 213, 214, 216, 218, 228, 242, 244, 246, 250 See also Crisis, climate crisis Colonize colonialism, 7, 46, 212, 217, 220n38 colonialist, 164, 165, 186 colonization, 13, 44, 117n26, 175, 176, 205–219 decolonization / (de) colonization, 141 Color / colour, 82, 124, 128–132, 145, 165 Commodity, 172 Communication, 27, 34, 63, 72, 73, 90n70, 169, 170, 211, 235 science, 228–230 Compost, 125, 149n8 Connectedness, 5, 9, 47 interconnectedness, 41, 50n32, 56, 58, 70, 73 Copernican, 125 Coral, 125, 129, 131, 144, 145 Cowley, James, 118n91 Creatures, 72, 110, 112, 113, 123, 124, 127, 129, 138, 139, 148, 160, 194, 243 Crisis, 5, 7, 8, 12, 59, 70, 148, 165, 190, 214, 219n15, 246 climate crisis, 176, 206, 216, 219 Critical race studies, 206

259

Critters, 60, 79, 123, 124 See also Haraway, Donna Crutzen, Paul, 5, 14n1 Culture, 58, 71, 101, 136, 138–141, 165, 167, 171, 190, 206, 208, 231, 234, 239, 240, 246 feudal, 195 Cyborg, 88n7, 113 See also Haraway, Donna D Darwin, Charles, 134, 145, 160–165 Davenport, Christian, 214, 215 Death, 29, 34, 44, 66, 71, 83–86, 109, 168, 174, 191, 194, 196, 207–210, 212, 219n15 dying, 83, 84, 86, 90n64 Deep time, 12, 13, 81, 159–178 Denaturalize, 13 Derdeyn, LeeAnn, 188, 189 Dhanawade, Anirudha, 143 Discourse, 2, 8, 12, 14, 75, 76, 82, 124, 135, 136, 145, 148, 164, 197, 206, 207, 209, 210, 212–218, 220n37 Displace, 171 displacement, 72, 166, 167, 232 Diving, dive, 127–130 Domination, 7, 13, 71, 193, 197, 217 E Eakin, Paul John, 2, 24, 25, 33, 50n32 Earth, 2, 4, 5, 8, 13, 14, 36, 55, 58, 60, 65, 67, 69, 70, 76, 77, 79, 81, 82, 85, 86, 102, 107, 125, 126, 139, 160, 173–178, 197, 205, 206, 209, 211–214, 216–219, 225 See also Planet; Terra / terrestrial Ecobiography, 11, 37, 97–116

260 

INDEX

Ecocriticism / ecocritical, 2, 5–7, 9, 10, 15n28, 25, 26, 31, 40, 41, 66, 81, 163, 216, 248, 251, 252 Ecofeminism, 196 Ecology / ecological, 1, 5, 10, 12, 55, 61, 65, 70, 78, 79, 82, 87, 101, 109–111, 124–126, 136, 141, 142, 146–148, 166, 195, 196, 230 Ecosystem, 2, 90n76, 98–102, 107, 109–111, 113, 115, 135, 139, 197, 214, 216, 217 Ecozoic, 146, 147 Ecozoic Era, 146 Einstein, Albert, 169, 180n49 Empathy, 13, 74, 198, 199, 232, 233, 241, 243 Encounter, 35, 38, 45, 73, 76, 104, 114, 124, 125, 141, 146, 148, 191–193, 197, 198 Energy, 26, 56, 79, 106, 108, 111–113, 127, 143, 169, 207, 208, 246, 247 Enlightenment, 26, 77, 92n117, 141, 162, 165, 167, 173, 175, 177, 178, 178n2 Entanglement / entangled, 5, 6, 10, 11, 13, 26–28, 55, 59, 68, 114, 126, 159, 163, 164, 166, 169–174, 176–178, 194, 197, 218, 243, 247 Entrepreneurs, 214, 216, 217 New Space Entrepreneurs, 206, 214 See also Bezos, Jeff; Musk, Elon Environment environmental humanities, 226–228, 233, 234, 239–241, 247, 248, 250, 251 environmentalism, 82 environmental justice, 8, 195 environmental racism, 7 Environmental health, 195

Epistemology / epistemological, 13, 25, 160, 178, 195 See also Knowledge Epoch, 2, 5, 14n1, 125, 227, 239, 245 Ethics / ethical, 4, 6, 9, 10, 15n26, 58, 65, 66, 71, 83, 86, 163, 186, 190, 194–197, 212, 216, 217 Eurocentrism / Eurocentric, 4, 8, 38, 64, 134 Europe, 137, 164 Evolution, 59, 85, 140, 151n61, 165, 210, 220n35 Exceptionalism / exceptionalist, 3, 6, 26, 66, 160, 174, 190, 250 Expansion, 25, 176, 213, 251 Experience, 24–26, 36, 43, 57, 58, 61, 62, 64, 66, 73, 78, 89n36, 98, 103, 105–107, 114, 160, 168, 170, 177, 178, 187, 195, 197–199, 206, 207, 211, 226, 228, 230–233, 235, 237, 244–246 Exploration / explore, 10, 13, 26, 32, 40, 72, 75, 79, 102, 112–114, 123, 148, 159, 198, 207, 209, 212–216, 225, 235 External, 11, 98, 101, 106, 115 Extractivist, 213, 218 F Falconry, 13, 186, 187, 190, 193–198, 200n19 falconer, 187, 188, 195–199 See also Bird, birds of prey Family, 32, 39, 40, 61, 62, 64, 101, 106, 109, 111, 160, 165, 167, 171, 172 Fanon, Frantz, 7, 16n29 Farr, Cecilia Konchar, 101 Farrier, David, 141

 INDEX 

Feminism, 64, 99, 206, 247 See also Ecofeminism Fiction, 26–28, 33, 39, 49n26, 210, 214, 242–245, 250 First Nations, 101, 102, 116n26 Food, 62, 64, 70, 71, 85, 104, 132, 135, 137–138, 150n36, 150n46, 196 Freud, Sigmund, 168 Frontier Martian, 220n37 myth, 215 Fungi, 59, 126 Future, 9, 39, 46, 69, 70, 86, 92n138, 147, 169, 170, 177, 180n39, 205, 207, 209–212, 215, 216, 229, 233, 234, 236, 251 future of humanity / humanity’s future, 207, 209 G Gaard, Greta, 82, 195 Gaia, 79–82, 84–86 Gammage, Bill, 114 Ganser, Alexandra, 206, 207 Gatens, Moira, 6 Gender, 10, 64, 67, 82, 102, 114, 178n2, 195–198, 247 Genre, 1–5, 8–11, 29–33, 43, 48, 49n26, 99, 100, 113, 114, 161, 164, 177, 178, 243 Geology / geological, 2, 5, 7, 9, 14n1, 43, 46, 85, 92n138, 104, 105, 159, 161, 163, 171, 175, 185, 225, 237, 245 time, 5 Ghosh, Amitav, 13, 160, 165–168, 170–173, 177, 178, 181n52, 228, 242–244 Gilmore, Leigh, 100 Global

261

Global North, 216 Global South, 164, 216 global warming, 9, 140, 206 (see also Climate change) Grief, 83, 148, 228 Grusin, Richard, 164, 179n25 Gusdorf, Georges, 24 H Haefner, Joel, 100, 189, 193 Haraway, Donna, 10, 25, 27, 38, 47, 51n86, 57, 59, 60, 64, 72, 73, 76, 81, 82, 88n7, 90n74, 100, 112, 113, 117n27, 123, 125, 179n25 Hayles, Katherine, 8, 9 Heise, Ursula, 9, 216, 227 Hengel, Louis van den, 3, 25, 27, 50n37, 100, 147 Herman, David, 9, 191, 226, 233 Heteronormativity / heteronormative, 24, 206, 212, 215 History of science, 124 Western, 226 Hornung, Alfred, 148 Huff, Cynthia, 3, 4, 15n6, 24, 25, 27, 28, 48n4, 49n23, 98–100, 126, 189, 192, 193 Huggan, Graham, 163 Human-free, 210, 212, 213 Humanist / humanistic, 6, 9, 14, 31, 61, 64, 66, 74, 160, 162, 165, 174, 176, 178, 190, 193, 200n19, 235 Humanities, 1, 2, 5–9, 12, 13, 23, 31, 38, 47, 48n3, 65, 76, 82, 83, 113, 114, 159–178, 185, 189, 193, 194, 205–207, 209, 210, 212–217, 247 Humanization, 208

262 

INDEX

I Imagination, 32–39, 41, 72, 165, 192, 198, 209, 234, 252 imaginaries, 13, 37, 82, 142, 205–219 Imperialism / imperial, 7, 213, 239, 240 Indigenous, 7, 28, 30, 41, 46, 47, 50n32, 51n86, 135, 172, 175, 181n72, 213, 217, 220n38, 239 Inequality, 7–9, 190, 196, 206 Inhuman, 66, 83, 84, 147, 190, 194, 209 inhumanity, 189, 206 Injustice, 70, 83, 188, 190, 192, 199, 246 International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), 5 International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), 5 Iovino, Serenella, 26, 41, 45, 104 Island, 97, 98, 102–110, 112, 114, 160, 240 J James, Erin, 6, 14, 198, 225–252 Jamie, Kathleen, 113–115 Jellyfish, 141, 143 Jordan, David Starr, 124 K Karpiak, Kevin, 124 Kennedy, Rosanne, 9 Kin kin-making, 140, 141 kinship, 31, 37–39, 44, 45, 66 Knowledge, 2, 37, 47, 64, 66, 117n27, 141, 145, 173, 207, 209, 213, 230, 231, 245, 247 See also Epistemology / epistemological

Krenak, Ailton, 13, 160, 172–178 Krenak, 173 Krenak people, 172, 175, 177 L Landscape, 33, 35–37, 40–44, 69, 106, 112, 114, 115, 191 Language, 7, 25, 27, 46, 60, 68, 75, 78, 124–127, 134, 138, 141, 143, 146, 147, 176, 192, 193, 227, 232, 239, 249 Latour, Bruno, 80, 81, 125, 179n25 Leisure, 9, 187, 191, 195 Life extraterrestrial, 13, 205–219 marine, 125, 135, 140, 147 small, 124, 125, 130 underwater, 126, 145 Life writing, 1–14, 23–48, 99–102, 111, 123–127, 133, 134, 140, 141, 145, 147, 148, 159–178, 186, 193, 198, 205–207, 209, 214, 216, 218, 225–230, 232–236, 239, 240, 245, 248 Liptrot, Amy, 11, 97–116 Lovelockian, 80, 125 Lucretius, 161 M Macdonald, Helen, 13, 185–199 Macfarlane, Robert, 113, 114, 148 MacGregor, Sherilyn, 198 Macro, 124, 169 See also Photography Mars colonization, 206, 207, 212, 216–218, 219n9 Red planet, 207, 209, 211, 216, 218, 219n9 rover, 13, 205–219, 220n35 Marshal, Kate, 185, 199n4

 INDEX 

Masculinity male, 14, 24, 61, 68, 69, 81, 113, 176, 187, 195–197, 199, 206 masculinist, 13, 186, 193 men, 67, 68, 75, 193, 214–219 See also Patriarchy / patriarchal Mass extinction, 99, 115, 217 Matter material ecocriticism, 25, 40 materiality, 43, 45 vibrant matter, 6 (see also Bennett, Jane) Mbembe, Achille, 220n34 Memoir, 13, 28, 29, 33, 37–39, 100, 148, 186, 189, 192, 194–198 Mental illness, 105, 106 Messeri, Lisa, 209 Migration immigrant, 136, 148, 180n52, 190 migrant, 171, 190, 191 More-than-human, 25, 35, 38, 39, 41, 44–47, 67, 81, 83, 87, 227, 228, 237 Movement / moving, 14, 31, 65, 76, 80, 86, 103, 109, 110, 125, 126, 128, 132, 135–137, 142, 143, 145, 163, 169, 171, 226, 241, 245 Musk, Elon, 13, 206, 207, 213–215, 217, 219n9, 221n45 N Naess, Arne, 135, 141, 147 Narrative life narrative, 3, 10, 11, 13, 14, 24–28, 37, 40, 46, 98, 100, 116n26, 124, 126, 163, 165, 173, 177, 178, 193, 207, 218, 225–252 narrativity, 14, 233–238, 249 narratology / narratological, 14, 233, 236, 238, 239, 246–251

263

See also Life writing Narratology cognitive, 234, 250 evolutionary, 237 NASA, 13, 205–219, 228 Nature natural world, 99, 101, 108, 114, 115, 147, 148, 161, 162, 242 naturecultures, 188 (see also Haraway, Donna) nature writing, 12, 40, 99, 113–115, 148, 159–161, 163, 165, 173, 234, 248 new nature writing, 113–115, 148 Nixon, Rob, 8, 163, 216, 245, 246, 248 Nomadism nomadic, 64, 186–189 See also Braidotti, Rosi Nonfiction, 49n26, 185, 235 Non-human, 2, 4–6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 24, 25, 28, 31, 32, 46, 48, 48n3, 56–58, 60, 65, 66, 71, 73–76, 79, 99–102, 104, 109–111, 114, 115, 123, 147, 162, 164, 169, 175, 186–199, 199n19, 209, 216–218, 225, 227–229, 232–235, 237–239, 242, 243, 245 Nonhuman Nonsense, 207, 216, 218 Non-living / nonlife, 9, 12, 79, 101, 113, 217, 218 Non-Western, 162, 245 Novel, 32, 34, 35, 39, 233, 236, 239, 241–244 O Objectivity, 164, 167, 177, 178, 228 Ocean, 106, 110, 115, 131, 133, 136, 137, 146, 148, 165, 177 See also Sea Oppermann, Serpil, 104, 196, 197

264 

INDEX

Opportunity, 28, 57, 66, 73, 114, 207–209, 217 See also Mars, rover Organism, 59, 79, 129, 131, 133, 139, 140, 174, 235 Other Otherness, 178n2, 218 other-than-human, 2, 3, 11, 12, 25, 81, 83 P Pacific, 132, 137 See also Ocean Paleoproterozoic Era, 176 Pascoe, Bruce, 114 Patriarchy / patriarchal, 13, 190, 193, 195, 197, 198, 213 People of color, 82, 165 Perception, 4, 59, 100, 145, 146, 160, 168, 178, 188, 192, 193, 195, 243, 249 Performance, 11, 25, 36, 55–65, 67, 73–76, 80, 83, 84, 86, 89n36, 166, 169 performance art, 3, 11, 55–87 Perspective, 1, 10, 14, 24, 26, 29, 30, 36, 41, 45–47, 49n23, 60, 61, 66, 69, 74, 76, 77, 83, 87, 117n27, 131, 159, 160, 163, 165, 168, 169, 173, 175–178, 186, 193, 198, 199, 207, 216, 217, 221n45, 226, 228, 229, 233, 234, 237, 239, 242, 247, 251 Pharmacopoeia, 135, 138–140 Photography, 41, 42, 124, 145 macro, 124 Phytography, 100 See also Plants Planet Blue Planet, 125

planetarity, 216 planetary, 4, 14, 76, 124, 126, 206, 209, 212, 216, 217 planetary personhood, 207, 216–218 sense of planet, 9 (see also Heise, Ursula) See also Earth; Mars Plants, 11, 35, 36, 38, 40, 43, 45, 56, 59, 100, 101, 111, 123, 126, 135, 136, 191, 243, 245 Poetics, 124, 128, 140–145, 163, 208 poetics of dwelling, 146 See also Aesthetics; Zoopoetics Poletti, Anna, 3, 15n11 Pollution, 7, 40, 44, 135, 148, 248 Porosity / porous, 6, 25, 27, 32, 36, 47, 65, 66 Postcolonial, 7, 10, 12–14, 159–178, 233, 235, 239, 245–248, 251 Posthumanism critical posthumanism, 13, 126, 185–199 posthuman, 1–14, 23–28, 31, 56, 64–67, 76, 83, 85–87, 100, 113, 115, 125, 126, 133, 134, 140, 145, 147, 148, 160, 178, 186–193, 198, 199, 205–219, 225–252 Power, 4, 9, 31, 56, 58, 60, 66, 67, 72, 73, 75, 76, 79–82, 99, 112, 113, 126, 145, 147, 148, 165, 172, 188, 206, 208, 214, 218, 251 power structures, 164 Prepositions, 126, 127, 146, 147 Privatization, 13, 213, 214, 216, 219n9 Progress, 175, 205, 212, 214 Protick, Sarker, 171 Purdy, Jedediah, 185

 INDEX 

Q Quantum mechanics, 169, 170 physics, 65, 169, 179n25 See also Barad, Karen Queer / queering, 100, 161, 211, 212, 215, 247 R Realism, 228, 239, 241–246 Reason, 15n26, 49n26, 69, 70, 74, 77, 78, 87, 112, 175, 239, 242, 243, 249 Redfield, Peter, 213 Relationality, 2–7, 9–12, 14n2, 23–48, 56, 58, 61, 63, 64, 66, 72, 73, 76, 82, 83, 87, 98, 100, 125, 141, 145–147, 193, 198, 199 relational / relation, 2, 4–7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 24, 26, 28–47, 49n26, 50n32, 56, 57, 64, 67, 73, 75, 76, 78, 87, 99, 100, 102, 110, 126, 127, 137, 141, 143, 145–147, 151n69, 159, 160, 162, 163, 166, 170, 173, 176–178, 186, 189–192, 194–196, 213, 214, 218, 239, 244 Representation, 13, 14, 56, 62, 75, 89n36, 98, 113, 129, 131, 208, 209, 211–213, 218, 232, 234–239, 250, 252 representationality, 4, 98, 192 Reproduction / reproduce, 14, 71, 129, 145, 148, 163, 206, 212, 218 Resistance, 172, 175, 176, 190 Resources, 9, 83, 87, 112, 115, 135, 164, 172, 173, 192, 216, 218, 245

265

Responsibility, 4–7, 9, 10, 12–14, 44–48, 58, 66, 70, 74, 82, 87, 109, 148, 162, 177, 192, 194, 198 response-ability, 10, 27, 64, 247 Rich, Adrienne, 134 River flood, 42, 44, 171, 180n52 Padma River, 166, 171 Watu River, 172, 174, 176, 177 Robots / robotics, 72, 168, 208, 210–212, 215, 220n35 See also Mars, rover Rock, 35, 38, 40, 43, 45, 98, 104, 105, 127, 129, 131, 132, 137, 142, 176, 177, 214–219 Rosenthal, Rachel, 11, 55–87 Ryan, John, 100 S Savi, Milena, 163 Scale, 76, 78, 124, 129, 159, 165, 167, 169, 170, 191, 194, 246 Science / scientific, 2, 65, 66, 73, 78, 109, 124, 125, 127, 134, 136, 140, 141, 148, 160, 161, 163, 164, 167, 205–210, 212, 213, 228–230, 232, 244 Sea, 98, 103–107, 110, 114–116, 125, 127–129, 131, 132, 137–140, 160, 172, 238 sea squirt, 12, 123–148 See also Ocean Self self life writing, 37, 99 self-representation, 8 Semiotic barnacle, 123, 124 See also Critters

266 

INDEX

Sense / senses, 5, 15n11, 15n28, 27, 28, 35, 38, 39, 45, 46, 51n86, 56–58, 60–67, 74, 76, 78, 79, 85, 87, 98, 107–110, 114, 115, 117n27, 124, 127, 131, 143, 145, 146, 148, 166, 170, 188–190, 193, 198, 211, 214, 215, 229, 232, 234, 235, 237, 238, 240, 249, 252 sense of planet, 9 (see also Heise, Ursula) Sentient / sentience, 12, 123–148, 189 sentient ecology, 125, 146 See also Sea, sea squirt Serres, Michel, 126, 136, 137 Shape, 10, 60, 64, 77, 82, 98, 100, 102, 104, 112, 114, 127, 131, 142, 143, 180n52 Sheller, Mimi, 213 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 11, 23–48 Situated theorizing, 102, 117n27 See also Alaimo, Stacy Skin, 60, 86, 110, 111, 115, 132, 134 Smith, Sidonie, 14n2, 24, 50n32, 101, 102, 163 Snyder, Philip, 101 Sobel, Adam, 167 Society, 8, 58, 70, 162, 190, 209, 212 South America, 163, 164 Space outer space, 205, 206, 212, 214 privatization, 216 Space Barons, 207, 214–216, 218 travel, 205, 213–215, 221n45 Spacetimemattering, 169 See also Barad, Karen Speak for, 4, 74, 75, 192 See also Ventriloquize Species interspecies, 72, 141 interstellar species, 214

Spinoza, Baruch, 186 Spiritualism, 81 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 216, 233, 239 Story, 8, 11, 26–37, 39–41, 43–47, 50n32, 62, 63, 100–103, 111–113, 116, 116n26, 127, 165, 166, 168, 170, 172, 174, 177, 209, 216, 230, 231, 233, 235 storied matter, 236–238, 248 See also Narrative Stroemer, Eugene, 5, 14n1 Subject / subjectivity, 2, 4, 5, 7, 11–13, 15n26, 23, 24, 29–31, 34–39, 42, 43, 50n32, 56, 60–68, 72, 75–77, 83–85, 87, 89n55, 98–100, 102, 111, 113, 124–127, 134, 144, 145, 147, 151n61, 159, 160, 162–167, 170, 174–178, 178n2, 186–193, 198, 199, 206, 211 slippery subjects, 126 Superiority, 9, 188, 193, 197, 199 See also Anthropocentrism; Domination Sustainability / sustainable, 71, 173, 174, 218 Sway, 142–145 Sympoiesis / sympoietic, 11, 24, 25, 27, 47, 55–87 T Taxonomy / taxonomies, 134, 145 Technology / technological, 220n25 technoliberal, 13, 216 technomorphism / technomorphization, 211 (see also Vertesi, Janet) Tectonic plates, 171 Temmen, Jens, 13

 INDEX 

Terra / terrestrial extra-terrestrial, 13, 205–219 terraforming, 218 terra nullius, 212, 217, 220n38 terrestrial history, 206, 217 Territory / territorialization, 41, 125, 212, 241 Testimony, 4, 27, 47, 74 Theory, 4, 10, 56, 59, 64, 66, 87, 89n36, 100, 102, 136, 163, 169, 179n25, 186, 233, 239, 245–247, 252 narrative, 230, 233, 247, 250, 252 (see also Life writing) Thoreau, Henry David, 160–165, 177 Time, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 28–31, 33–35, 37–41, 43–45, 47, 50n45, 56, 57, 59, 60, 62–65, 68, 70, 75, 78, 80, 82, 84, 86, 92n117, 92–93n138, 93n171, 99, 103, 105, 107, 112, 123, 126, 127, 129, 140, 142–144, 159–161, 163–173, 175–178, 178n1, 185, 186, 188, 190–192, 207, 214–217, 219n15, 221n45, 225, 231, 235, 237, 239, 241, 244, 246–249, 251, 252 See also Deep Time Trans-corporeality, 194, 196 See also Alaimo, Stacy Transformation / transformative, 57, 58, 61, 66, 72, 73, 83, 85, 86, 147, 190, 192, 205–207, 214, 216, 218, 248 Transnational, 163, 214–216 Tropics, 140, 213 Tunicate, 129, 131–133, 135, 139, 140, 150n36, 151n61 See also Sea, sea squirt

267

U Umwelt, 40, 192 Uncanny, 168–170 Underwater Lives, 12, 148 Urgency, 7, 32, 163, 167, 172 Use, 36, 37, 41, 42, 44, 63, 72, 77, 90n63, 102, 109, 110, 113, 124, 126, 132, 135, 139–141, 145, 148, 150n47, 168, 169, 174–176, 192, 226, 229, 230, 233, 237, 246 V Ventriloquize, 98, 100 See also Huff, Cynthia; Representation; Speak for Vermeulen, Pieter, 185 Vertesi, Janet, 211 Vibrant matter, 6 See also Bennett, Jane; Matter Violence, 73, 82, 174, 175, 190, 191, 193, 198 slow violence, 7, 248, 249 (see also Nixon, Rob) Vitality, 26, 45, 76, 147, 177 Voice, 3, 4, 10, 11, 23–48, 69, 70, 75, 80, 82, 84, 100, 142, 147, 162, 192 Vora, Kalindi, 212–214, 220n35 Vulnerable / vulnerability, 7, 8, 13, 57, 60, 70, 76, 83, 109, 110, 190, 198 W Wallace-Wells, David, 221n48, 221n57 War, 137, 175, 179n20, 187, 189–191, 219n15

268 

INDEX

Watson, Julia, 3, 24, 50n32, 101, 102, 163 Watts, Laura, 103, 104, 112 Weather, 69, 103, 104, 108, 112, 127, 149n16, 214, 231, 243 White, Gilbert, 113 White, Jessica, 3, 11, 12 White, Terence Hanbury, 193, 194, 197, 198, 200n19 Whitlock, Gillian, 3, 4, 15n6, 26, 100 Wind, 36, 98, 99, 102, 104–107, 112, 115, 116, 127, 142, 180n52 Wobble, 142, 143, 145 Wolfe, Cary, 68, 188, 199 Worldbuilding, 241, 244, 251 Writing, 2, 3, 11, 23–25, 27–30, 34, 39, 40, 48n4, 49n26, 70, 99–101, 111, 113, 115, 116n26,

124, 125, 136, 144, 148, 160, 165, 167, 171, 190, 196, 199, 218, 226–228, 234, 235, 240, 243, 245, 246 writing back, 111–113 Y Yusoff, Kathryn, 7 Z Zoe, 11, 24–26, 28–33, 36, 43, 45, 47, 48, 48n3, 50n37, 56, 58, 66, 68, 69, 71, 73, 80, 83–87, 147, 186, 189, 198 Zoegraphy, 25, 100, 147, 148 Zoopoetics, 147