Present at the Crossroads: Walking In-Between the Worlds of New Animism and New Materialism (original) (raw)
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Recently the concept of animism has been radically rethought at the crossover of postcolonial ethnography, environmental humanities and science studies. This reconceptualisation aims at decolonising western sciences, destabilising an anthropocentric world picture and articulating an environmental and animal ethics in the current context of human-induced climate change and practices such as factory farming. It decisively abandons the controversial colonial epistemology in which animism was first introduced as a primitive and regressive belief in the supernatural spirits. In this essay I would like to situate this current cross-disciplinary rethinking of animism into a genealogy of historical discourses, following scholarship that has theorised one aspect of Enlightenment secularisation processes as the internalisation of spirits and ghosts from non-human materiality on the outside into the space of the human mind. Building on this approach, I propose that the current, post-Enlightenment, posthumanist, cross-disciplinary rethinking of animism can be said to mark a certain historical reversal: an externalisation of what has been seen as within and of the human mind, which I will in this essay term ‘mindedness’, to the outside non-human materiality (again).
Material Engagements: Science Studies and the Environmental Humanities
2010
at Arlington "[Matter] is not little bits of nature, or a blank slate, surface, or site passively awaiting signification, nor is it an uncontested ground for scientific, feminist, or Marxist theories. Matter is not immutable or passive. Nor is it a fixed support, location, referent, or source of sustainability for discourse" (Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 151) And the word environment. Such a bloodless word. A flat-footed word with a shrunken heart. A word increasingly disengaged from its association with the natural world. Urban planners, industrialists, economists, developers use it. It's a lost word, really. A cold word, mechanistic, suited strangely to the coldness generally felt toward nature. (Joy Williams Ill Nature 5) Karen Barad and Joy Williams alert us to the rather shabby theoretical and rhetorical treatment of "matter" and "environment" in the late twentieth century. "Matter," the vast stuff of the world and of ourselves, has been subdivided into manageable "bits" or flattened into a "blank slate" for human inscription. The "environment" has been drained of its blood, its lively creatures, its interactions and relations-in short, all that is recognizable as "nature"-in order that it become a mere empty space, an "uncontested ground," for human "development. Even though the target of Barad's critique is the linguistic turn within theory, especially feminist theory, when put next to Williams' critique of the word "environment," a troubling parallel arises between predominant theoretical conceptions of "matter" and a much wider disregard for the value of nonhuman nature. My book Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self addresses the de-materializing networks that cross through academic theory, popular culture, contemporary discourse, and everyday practices, by focusing on the possibilities for more robust and complex conceptions of the materiality of human bodies and the more-than-human world. Bodily Natures draws heavily upon, and, I hope, contributes to, the field of science studies, as it advocates a conception of "trans
Interlitteraria, 2014
The article explores ecocritically nature-culture interactions in contemporary British and Estonian literature: Monique Roffey's and Andrus Kivirähk's writing. I start by elucidating the portrayal of nature, the way in which the writers under discussion reconsider anthropocentrism and established boundaries. Both novelists turn a delicate eye to nature, portraying a posthuman world where nature and culture are no longer dichotomous but perpetually entangled, challenging anthropocentrism and indicating a different, more envirocentric approach to literature. I will focus first on human-nonhuman interactions, analysing next how the normative human and nonhuman beings are transformed beyond recognition, shattering the anthropocentric core of the concept of agency and voice. In line with material ecocriticism, the currently emerging ecocritical branch that re-conceptualises nature as an active agent, the writers mingle the nonhuman with the human as a Subject, posing a threat to anthropo-normativity and envisioning an uncannily different reality. The article's final section explores the way how nature and culture are inextricably merged, not only their voices but also bodies, indicating the key new materialist idea of trans-corporeality -both culture and nature as tangled corporealities. In line with new materialism, the writers importantly revision the dominant dichotomous anthropocentric world, laying out a future that is naturalcultural. Environment is one of the foremost present-day concerns in our environmentally fragile world, and this issue has also found its way into literary studies. Having gained prominence since the 1990s, ecocriticism as an environmental branch of literary criticism provokes thinking whether literature has done or should do anything to promote environmental awareness. Manifestations of the latter appear, for example, from such genres as apocalyptic narratives,
New Materialism and the Nonhuman Story
The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, edited by Jeffrey J. Cohen and Stephanie Foote. 2021, 2021
This chapter presents a brief genealogy of new materialism and examines the significance of the nonhuman stories it allows us to hear and tell. Those stories are now entangled in the ethical, political, scientific and theoretical complexities of the Anthropocene and crucial to the Environmental Humanities (EH). New materialism and EH inhabit each other with a range of commonalities, including bioethical, sociocultural, and scientific questions that arise from the challenges of Anthropocene quandaries (climate change, toxic bodies, postnatural places, multispecies tragedies, threats of extinctions, and posthuman futures). With their "pluralizing recourse" 1 to overlapping discourses, new materialism and EH converge on ecologically engaged collaborative thinking in responding to these challenges within the context of transdisciplinary knowledge practices.
"A Lateral Continuum: Ecocriticism and Postmodern Materialism"
19.3 (Summer 2012)
This essay is part II of "Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych."(Part I is by Serenella Iovino, titled "Material Ecocriticism:A Paradigm Proposal") The essays are part of ISLE's Special Cluster on “Dirt, Waste, Bodies, Food, and Other Matter,” co-edited by Heather Sullivan and Dana Phillips. In preparation of our co-edited book on Material Ecocriticism, we propose a “diptych”--a double vision of converging paths--about the key concepts of this new interpretive paradigm for ecocritical studies. The diptych provides a map of its most notable formulations (theoretical models for the intertwining of bodies, discourses, and natures), and examines the effects of the “material turn” on ecocriticism in our combined vision. (Forthcoming in Spring 2012) "
This review essay illustrates the proliferation of studies about the "new materialisms" and examines the potential influx of this conceptual trend on ecocriticism. In the discussion, in particular, I provide a comparative analysis of four books: Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, Eds. Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2008), Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana U P, 2010), Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke U P, 2010), David Abram, Becoming Animal (New York: Vintage Books, 2010).
Southern African Journal of Environmental Education, 2024
By bringing feminist science studies scholar Donna J. Haraway's A manifesto for cyborgs (1985) and Situated knowledges (1988) in line with contemporary critical new materialist thought (see Colman & Van der Tuin, 2024; Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012; Geerts, 2022), this critical pedagogical and philosophical think piece tackles the problematic of Anthropocenic disruptions of the planetary biosphere for critical pedagogies and higher education (also see Carstens, 2016). It additionally encourages its readers to think through their own pedagogical conceptions and praxes by means of irruptive (Geerts & Carstens, 2024; Koro-Ljungberg, 2015) selfreflection-stimulating questions. Our situated-and thus limited and open-ended-response to this all-encompassing Anthropocenic crisis is rooted in a rethinking of Harawayan cyborgian and situated knowledges and the critical pedagogical lessons drawn from the latter. Rereading Haraway's work through contemporary critical new materialist and related scholarship reveals that it already contained an ecofeminist onto-epistemological shift toward more-than-human agency and relationality. This shift has major consequences for all things critical pedagogical and educational, as our pedagogical thinking-doings are deeply embedded in today's crisis-ridden lifeworld. This rereading exercise furthermore underlines the necessity of an updated critical new materialist pedagogical praxis for learning and teaching, inspired by Harawayan ecofeminism, that takes the entanglements between human, dehumanised, and more-than-human actors seriously.
Stories from the Thick of Things: Introducing Material Ecocriticism.
ISLE--Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 19.3 (Summer). , 2012
In preparation of our co-edited book on Material Ecocriticism, we propose a “diptych”--a double vision of converging paths--about the key concepts of this new interpretive paradigm for ecocritical studies. The diptych provides a map of its most notable formulations (theoretical models for the intertwining of bodies, discourses, and natures), and examines the effects of the “material turn” on ecocriticism in our combined vision. Please quote my part as S. Iovino, Stories from the Thick of Things: Introducing Material Ecocriticism. Part I of S. Iovino and S. Oppermann, Theorizing Material Ecocriticism: A Diptych.