Hanna Straß-Senol | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (original) (raw)

Papers by Hanna Straß-Senol

Anglophone Literature and Culture in the Anthropocene, edited by Gina Comos and Caroline Rosenthal, 2019

As the title proposes, this contribution aims at exploring how indigenous North American literatu... more As the title proposes, this contribution aims at exploring how indigenous
North American literature relates to the concept of the Anthropocene and how it intervenes in the currently dominant Anthropocene discourse that figures humankind as a geophysical agent who has visibly transformed the planet to an unprecedented extent. In order to do so, this chapter looks at two literary case studies: Chantal Bilodeau’s play and contribution to The Arctic Cycle, Sila (2015), and Thomas King’s recent novel The Back of the Turtle (2014).

The Sea in the Literary Imagination: Global Perspectives, eds. Ben P. Robertson, Ekaterina V. Kobeleva, Shannon W. Thompson, Katona D. Weddle, 2019

Recent scholarly engagement with the representation of the mermaid figure in popular culture (e.g... more Recent scholarly engagement with the representation of the mermaid figure in popular culture (e.g., in Disney’s film The Little Mermaid) commonly focuses on the investigation of how current depictions of mermaids ultimately substantiate heteronormative conceptions of emininity, beauty, and sexual desirability. While the heterogeneous make-up of a mermaid’s body (half woman, half fish) seems predestined to embody Otherness figuratively, so far, an exploration of how mermaids can function as a means to epitomize the foreign and exotic within a colonial discursive framework in, for example, eighteenth-century sea literature remains a desideratum. This chapter fills the gap by focusing on how the figure of the mermaid serves as an embodiment of racialized and gendered Otherness in Herman Melville’s South Sea fictions, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846) and Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), both of which take to task contemporary discourses about race and civilization, missionary work, and American expansionism.
In the following, I argue that Typee and Omoo exhibit what Robert J. C. Young calls “colonial desire.” The texts provide sexually charged narratives of white, male protagonists whose desires are projected onto exoticized indigenous women. In both texts, these are referred to repeatedly as mermaids and nymphs. My analysis explores how the texts’ references to these fantastic creatures substantiate a colonial discourse about South Sea women, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, expose the ultimate impossibility of colonial appropriation of the exotic Other.

Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 33 - Meteorologies of Modernity, 2017

Climate change, by now widely accepted as an anthropogenic phenomenon, is currently the most cent... more Climate change, by now widely accepted as an anthropogenic phenomenon, is currently the most central concern in global environmental discourse. Erratic weather events, like freak storms or inundations, and long-term alterations of climatic conditions, such as sustained droughts or uncommon amounts of precipitation, negatively affect an increasingly growing number of communities on earth. Engaging with the cultural perception and responses to these events, the humanities – in particular the field commonly labelled as ecocriticism – have augmented their involvement in research on climate
change.
Recent ecocritical work has shown that climate change and its possible effects need to be mediated and staged by way of narratives which make this vast and diverse phenomenon “more easily perceptible, intelligible, and concrete” (Mayer 23). Fictional literature can be ascribed a central role in this mediation process. In her essay “Explorations of the Controversially Real: Risk, the Climate Change Novel, and the Narrative of Anticipation,” Sylvia Mayer suggests that there are two types of fictional narratives that are used in response to climate change and its possible long-term effects: the “narrative of catastrophe” and the “narrative of anticipation” (24). While these two categories possibly match most of the contemporary cli-fi novels produced in the US, my contribution to the present volume looks at a novel that cannot easily fit into either of these two definitions. I argue that Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale (2008) is a novel that addresses and mediates climate change risks without imagining a catastrophic future or through anticipating a catastrophe to come: Hogan’s novel tells the story of a Native American community which has already been immediately affected by a disastrous climatic event.
Foregrounding the influence of human actions on ecological and meteorological processes, Hogan’s novel can be read as an allegorical story about the adverse effects of exploitative behavior with respect to natural resources. By embedding its criticism within a narrative that draws connections between colonialism, neo-colonialism and capitalist exploitation, People of the Whale makes a strong environmental justice argument that emphasizes the interconnection of social and environmental concerns and proposes a nonanthropocentric environmental ethic.

Meteorologies of Modernity explores the ways in which literature reflects and participates in dis... more Meteorologies of Modernity explores the ways in which literature reflects and participates in discourses on weather and climate – historically as well as at our contemporary moment. Literature contains a huge meteorological archive built throughout the centuries. The essays collected in this volume therefore ask to what extent literature can bring the vastness and complexity of climate change into view, how literature offers ways to think through the challenges of the Anthropocene both culturally, historically, and aesthetically, and, last but not least, how it helps us to conceptualize a radically new understanding of what it means to be human.
The thirteen contributions from literary and cultural studies address weather and climate discourses from a variety of conceptual angles and cover a broad range of historical and geographical contexts. Topics include representations of tropical climates in Shakespeare, the close yet tense relationship between literature and the rising discipline of meteorology in the nineteenth century, allegories of climate change in postcolonial literature, and climate catastrophes in the contemporary cli-fi novel. By employing a historicizing and comparative approach, the volume addresses the need for studying representations of climate and climate change in an interdisciplinary, transnational and transhistorical framework, overcoming traditional disciplinary boundaries and creating new collectives of theory and criticism that are essential when debating the Anthropocene.

published in Habjan, Jernej und Fabienne Imlinger (eds.): Globlizing Literary Genres. London/New ... more published in Habjan, Jernej und Fabienne Imlinger (eds.): Globlizing Literary Genres. London/New York: Routledge, 2015. pp.228-240. Print.

Komparatistik: Jahrbuch der DGVAL, 2014

Books by Hanna Straß-Senol

Conference Presentations by Hanna Straß-Senol

Dispossession, resettlement and the confinement to reservations was the fate of countless Native ... more Dispossession, resettlement and the confinement to reservations was the fate of countless Native people in the US and a tacit component of its national self-perception. From the early colonial phases onwards, white America has constructed its exceptionalism and superiority based on a differentiation from the Native American populations that already inhabited the continent. Hence, the American national narrative has always been predicated on exclusionary tendencies (Kaplan, Ray). Such exclusionary tendencies, as Sarah J. Ray has shown, still prevail in mainstream environmental discourse.
Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale (2008) challenges such a mainstream environmentalist discourse and its emphasis on wildlife preservation. Most critics interpret the novel’s environmental conflict, which results from the A’atsika men’s mission to hunt a whale, as structured along the fracture between preservationist environmentalism and traditional tribal customs. However, by embedding the conflict over the whale hunt into a narrative that evokes the injustices that Native Americans suffered, the novel points to the historical inequities upon which American environmentalism is predicated. Juxtaposing such concepts as the ‘ecological Indian’, preservationism, and “ecocide” (Bennett), the novel opens up a variety of approaches to the environment. My analysis focuses in particular on the story of Thomas, a Vietnam War veteran, which recounts his traumatizing experiences during the war. Thomas eventually returns to his tribe and hopes to find a way of reconnecting to his past life through participating in the controversial whale hunt but fails. By providing a decidedly complex perspective on this conflict, the novel succeeds in dismantling the double standards that are being employed when it comes to different environments. It illustrates how American national self-perception is founded on environmental conservationism and, at the same time, on environmentally destructive acts of war.

Dealing with the question of justice in postcolonial contexts undoubtedly requires taking histori... more Dealing with the question of justice in postcolonial contexts undoubtedly requires taking historical, political, economic and social dimensions into account. The environment as a place of colonial injustice, however, has often been neglected in scholarly debates. Yet, colonialism and its aftermath entailed detrimental effects to the environment, such as the exploitation of natural resources, the destruction of sources of the livelihood of native populations, the dispossession and relocation of peoples to less fertile areas, the spread of communicable disease, the contamination of environments with military and industrial toxins, etc. When addressing questions of justice and retribution in this context, an environmental justice perspective, explicitly combining social and environmental concerns, provides new insights.
The novel analysed in this paper engages with an environmental justice problem that affected, albeit in varying degrees of intensity, different countries throughout the world: nuclear colonialism (Huggan/Tiffin 2010). Kiana Davenport’s novel House of Many Gods (2006) deals with the effects of nuclear pollution caused by U.S. military practices on the Hawaiian Islands. Placing nuclear pollution at its centre, the novel engages with the temporal complexities of what postcolonial ecocritic Rob Nixon has termed “slow violence” (2011, 2-3).
While the narrative’s main story line follows the life of Ana, a young doctor, who is diagnosed with breast cancer – very likely the result of the contamination of her home valley with radioactive materials –, the novel’s other two story lines link Ana’s story to the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, British and French atomic testing in Australia and the Pacific, as well as to accidents of nuclear power plants and industrial toxic pollution in Russia. By juxtaposing instances of toxic pollution in different geographical locales, the novel provides an ‘ecoglobal perspective’ (Adamson 12). In this sweeping motion, however, it proposes a universal victimhood of those affected. Despite such an undifferentiated – and no doubt problematic – universal claim (cf. Buell 2001), the novel not only points to the continuance of colonial structures of oppression but also presents global alliances of resistance.
As I will show in this paper, the novel does this by employing the deformed or diseased body as a metaphor for the (post)colonial condition and the polluted environments in which these bodies exist. While on a political level the native Hawaiian characters fight against the military occupation of their lands, the protagonist, Ana, similarly struggles on a personal level against the cancer’s ‘occupation’ of her body. Cancer, an invasive and harmful disease, can hence be read here as metonymic of the colonial occupation of Hawai'i. The novel thereby illustrates that questions of environmental justice and environmental health are pertinent to discussion of postcolonial justice.

Environmental justice research has shown that environmental degradation and exploitation have con... more Environmental justice research has shown that environmental degradation and exploitation have conspicuously adverse effects on economically and politically marginalized communities in the global South. In his recent book, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Rob Nixon analyses the role of activist writers who decry the exploitation and contamination of the environments of the poor in their works. Nixon argues persuasively that economic and political structures of oppression corroborate and enhance the negative effects of the environmental crisis, engendering a new form of violence, a “slow violence” (Nixon 2). Characteristic of slow violence is that “its calamitous repercussions [are] playing out across a range of temporal scales” (ibid.) and, he proceeds to add, also across space. This complex temporality provides a major representational challenge to authors who engage with issues of environmental injustice and slow violence.
In this paper, I’m analyzing Robert Barclay’s novel Meļaļ: A Novel of the Pacific (2002) and the narrative strategies he uses to foreground the temporal complexity of nuclear colonialism’s slow violence on the Marshall Islands. In the years between 1946 and 1963, when the archipelago served as a nuclear test site for the U.S. military, more than 90 nuclear devices were detonated, to the effect that many islands remain uninhabitable until today and a great number of Marshallese suffer from severe health disorders, like cancer, infertility or birth defects (Robie 30).
The novel has an interesting narrative framework with two converging story lines. The contemporary narrative strand is told in the past tense, whereas the mythological narrative strand, which stretches from a “time even before time itself” (Barclay 27) onward, is presented in the present tense. This temporal framing suggests a correlation of environmental time with the temporality of Marshallese mythology. It thereby not only embeds the Marshall Islands’ nuclear colonial history within a history of prolonged colonial occupation, but also foregrounds the Islands’ precarious situation as endangered habitable space as a result of human agency (cf. Chakrabarty’s “geological agents”, 206). Apart from contextualising the environmental destruction of the Marshall Islands within these more encompassing temporalities, the novel also discloses the oppressive historical and political complexities of colonialism. By employing something that I call ‘postcolonial toxic gothic’, Barclay draws attention to the contaminating, corroding and pathogenic repercussions of nuclear colonialism. Referring to demonic presences from Marshallese mythology, the novel merges the gothic imagery characteristic of toxic discourses (Buell 38) with indigenous mythology. The ‘postcolonial toxic gothic’, thus, discloses contingencies between gothic representations of toxic contamination in a postcolonial condition and their origin in the ‘magical’ reality of indigenous cosmology.

Toxicity and toxic pollution play an important role in currently ongoing discussions of environme... more Toxicity and toxic pollution play an important role in currently ongoing discussions of environmental in/justice. Frequently, problems of toxic contamination are embedded in structures shaped by a history of colonialism, military oppression and neo-colonial capitalism. As a result, diseases caused by anthropogenic toxins and contaminants are similarly tied in with these historical conditions. Fictional literature offers the possibility to make visible and negotiate questions of environmental injustice, toxicity and illness creatively by transcending the mere reporting of toxic pollution and pointing to the systemic social and political structures that foster environmental injustices. Fictional narratives, even though providing localized narratives of toxic pollution, can offer a multifaceted perspective on the global complexities of environmental injustices such as toxic pollution as well as illustrate survival strategies of affected communities and imagine solutions to problems of toxic contamination.
In my paper, I analyse two recently published postcolonial novels that deal with toxicity's post-/neo-colonial historical entanglements as well as the effects of environmental pollution. Both novels are environmental illness narratives, illustrating the repercussions of toxic contamination in human populations. My analysis is informed, on the one hand, by Stacy Alaimo's work Bodily Natures (2010) and the connections she draws between environmental justice struggles, environmental health and conceptions of the body and, on the other hand, by postcolonial readings of toxicity in literary analysis (cf. e.g. Nixon 2011, Mukherjee 2010). As the analysis will show, the narratives employ the image of the deformed or diseased body as a metaphor for the postcolonial condition and polluted environment in which these bodies exist.
Hawaiian author Kiana Davenport's House of Many Gods (2006) deals with the effects of nuclear pollution caused by the U.S. military. Davenport's novel is a cancer narrative which describes the traumatic experience of cancer as an invasive illness, thereby challenging the imagined separateness of the human body from the non-human. The cancer the main protagonist suffers from is most likely an effect of the nuclear pollution caused by weapon tests conducted by the U.S. military on the Hawaiian Islands. With the U.S. military as the perpetrator and major polluter, the novel pits the occupying forces against the native Hawaiian population which is disproportionally affected by the environmental damage done to the islands and, thus, introduces a distinctly postcolonial perspective into the narrative. While on a political level the native Hawaiian characters resist the military occupation of their lands, the protagonist, on a personal level, similarly fights against the cancer's 'occupation' of her body. The novel, hence, links the image of cancer as an invasive and harmful disease to the colonial occupation of Hawai'i by the U.S., facilitating a postcolonial reading of the cancer narrative.
Indian writer Indra Sinha's Animal's People (2007), which is concerned with the effects of contamination with chemical substances, is equally explicit about the connections between environmentally induced illnesses in poor or minority populations and structures of oppression. The novel tells the fictional life story of a survivor of an accident in a chemical factory – based on the notorious chemical accident of a Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal in 1984 – who suffers from a severe bodily deformation. The novel deals not only with questions of environmental pollution and subsequent diseases, but also with problems of justice posed by global capitalism, free trade and neo-colonial notions of development. It offers itself up to a postcolonial reading in which the deformed body can be read as metaphor for the postcolonial or neo-colonial condition of the novel's characters and the historical inequities that determine their lives.

Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Print.
Mukherjee, Upamanyu P. Postcolonial environments: Nature, culture and the contemporary Indian novel in English. Basingstoke [England] ;, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.
Nixon, Rob. Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2011. Print.

Other by Hanna Straß-Senol

With the formation of the interdisciplinary field 'Animal Studies,' animals are increasingly movi... more With the formation of the interdisciplinary field 'Animal Studies,' animals are increasingly moving into the purview of literary and cultural studies. In the environmental humanities, an animal oriented perspective is beginning to establish itself as a dynamic and productive sub-field. Greg Garrard, for example, devotes an entire chapter to animals in Ecocriticism (2012). The way humans read animals shapes culture just as much as culture shapes the way we read animals (Baker in Garrard, 153). This mutually constitutive relationship makes 'animal' a central trope in environmental thinking and discourse. In this workshop, we want to take a closer look at how Ecocriticism and the theoretical and methodological concerns of Animal Studies can interact productively with each other. What links Ecocriticism and Animal Studies is the concern with the politics of representation that shape human interactions, material and discursive, with animals. The conceptual separation of the human animal from non-human animals is at the center of most mainstream environmental and philosophical thinking. In continental European thought, human exceptionalism is based on a variety of concepts, such as that of an immortal soul, existential freedom, or symbolic language. With its roots in the Enlightenment tradition, human exceptionalism still informs most scholarly practice in the humanities and underwrites even theoretical approaches that are interested in conceptualizing nonhuman forms of subjectivity, as posthumanist scholar Cary Wolfe points out in his seminal monograph Animal Rites (18). In this tradition, the ways in which humans relate to animals are predominantly shaped by a presumed hierarchy in which animals rank below humans. From the prevalent utilitarian perspective, animals are regarded primarily as a resource for human use, which finds expression in cultural practices like animal husbandry (esp. raising animals for human consumption) or the display of animals in zoos but also in the ways humans relate to animals through language. During this workshop, the linguistic, textual, and visual expressions of animal imaginaries that illustrate and comment on, and at the same time influence and shape, human-animal-relationships are at the center of our concern.

Anglophone Literature and Culture in the Anthropocene, edited by Gina Comos and Caroline Rosenthal, 2019

The Sea in the Literary Imagination: Global Perspectives, eds. Ben P. Robertson, Ekaterina V. Kobeleva, Shannon W. Thompson, Katona D. Weddle, 2019

Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature Volume 33 - Meteorologies of Modernity, 2017

Komparatistik: Jahrbuch der DGVAL, 2014