What is Posthumanism?Edit

According to the Oxford English Dictionary:

1. post-humanism: A system of thought formulated in reaction to the basic tenets of humanism, esp. its focus on humanity rather than the divine or supernatural

2. posthumanism: The idea that humanity can be transformed, transcended, or eliminated either by technological advances or the evolutionary processl artistic, scientific, or philosophical practice which also reflects this belief

...to find more information on this history of the word Posthumanism, click HERE

N. Katherine Hayles was born in St. Louis Missouri on December 16, 1943. She attended Rochester Institute of Technology where she earned a B.S. in Chemistry. She then attended the California Institute of Technology and earned a M.S. in Chemistry as well. In 1977, she went to the University of Rochester and earned a Ph.D. in English Literature.

N. Katherine Hayles is popular critic of posthumanism. She is most known for being the author of "How We Became Posthuman". She believes that although we can put our intellect into another machine, we still need to keep in mind who we are and that our information is not completely transferable-- we still need the use of our own bodies. She has become a critic to many believers of posthumanism who believe the body acts as a piece of hardware just as any other computer.

thumb|316px|left|Interview with N. Katherine Hayles by Stacey Cochran

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Hayles' paper on posthumanism intertwine with one another as Hayles believes in a "Separation between body and mind is a consequence of historical change rather than what must inevitably happen as part of their materialized life." As we progress further into a new age of humans slowly developing into an android-like state (people getting prosthesis to help them function better) we are not going against humanity but simply flowing with the tides of history. With this kind of change, we are brought with the question: what makes us human? In DADES the only method to determine who is a human and android is by one concept: empathy. Some of the humans follow a religion known as Mercerism which is based on empathy. By utilizing an empathy box, it links them to other humans as they take upon the obstacles that Mercer faces as a cohesive unit. We are brought upon a concept of how humans, identify ourselves as individuals and as members of a group through Mercerism by being able to feel empathy towards each other. The novel toys with the concept of expanding this group to the few existing animals on Earth, and even androids. These androids are advanced to the point where it is only possible to determine whether or not one is human or android by a test involving empathy. When the bountyhunter in DADES, Deckard, has to retire these androids, he begins to ponder if he in fact is human. He believes that if being human is the ability to feel empathy, then how can he truly be human without feeling empathy when he retires the androids. In order to expand the definition of human to androids, Hayles and Dick both believe that a new mixture of man and machine must occur to fulfill this expanded category to androids. A mixture of machine and man are already amongst us (as shown in one group's presentation of a man with a robot eyeball) and many already have robotic arms/legs etc.

Bladerunner is a movie based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric sheep. The film did not fare well in box offices, but has since become a classic. Some may say the film needed time to catch on but it is used in classrooms all around the United States to teach about posthumanism.

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Shelley Jackson was born in the Phillippines in 1963. Jackson attended Stanford undergraduate and Brown for her M.F.A. in creative writing. While at Brown Jackson was inspired to create her first hypertext fiction titled, Patchwork Girl. This work at the time was the best selling CD for electronic litterature and is considered a cornerstone in starting the electronic litterature movement. Jackson is currently teaching in The New School in New York City.

Similar to These Waves of Girls, "My Body" is a Hypertext Fiction that explores a young girl's memories of childhood and growing up. Many of the memories involve stories relating to growing up, sexuality, and body development. This hypertext fiction maps out different parts of a woman's body for readers to click and to discover the author's inner thoughts.

To navigate for yourself click HERE

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A lot of people use the terms posthuman and transhuman interchangeably. To some extent, its reasonably okay to excuse them because these are both fairly new terms.

Posthumanism is traversing the current human condition to eliminate the things that are considered human nature. In other words, a post human state is where humans and genius machines are completely integrated so that its difficult to discern whats human. According to posthuman transcribers, the post human project will change the current perspective of everything considered human, as information patterns that are limiting the potential of humans will all be unlocked. The focus of Posthumanism is therefore on function as opposed to form.

Transhumanism, on the other hand, refers to physically transforming humans with any new technology, including bioengineering, digital technology, genetic engineering and others, to enhance their abilities; for example, making them more intelligent, stronger, immortal, and so on. In a conventional way, transhumanism can be classified as a sub-class of posthumanism. Transumanists are already using certain implants to modify their bodies for enhanced senses or brain power, so the focus is now on using prosthetics and other accessories or modifications as opposed to compensating for human abilities.

The major difference between the two is that Posthumanism puts a lot of emphasis on systems and their components, while transhumanism fully focuses on changing the form and abilities of the present human body. Another difference is that posthumans place importance on information and system theories (cybernetics) and their main relationship is with digital technology, while this is not the same for transhumans.

Posthumanism is a term that has been derived from the term post-human which represents death of a human subject. But what makes human is the qualities in the subjects. So with information these qualities can be modified for a posthuman body. Transhumanism, on the other hand, looks at life from the perspective of using the technology available to produce a super human being, a human of the future, a transhuman.

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What Is The Difference Between Posthumanism And Transhumanism?

This section looks at some of the pioneering work in ecocriticism, as well as some of the most read work introducing the subject. Meeker 1972, presenting comedy and tragedy as ecological concepts, connects literary and environmental studies as a cohesive field of study. As an ethnologist and comparative literature scholar, Meeker helped to pioneer the critical discussion of ecocriticism in what he called literary ecologies. Following Meeker, Rueckert 1996 (first published 1978) actually coined the term ecocriticism, arguing for a way to find the grounds upon which the two communitiesthe human, the naturalcan coexist, cooperate, and flourish in the biosphere (p. 107). Love 1996 builds on the work of Meeker and Rueckert by essentially anticipating the explosion of and need for ecocriticism in just a few years. Ecocriticism as a literary and cultural theory significantly expanded in the 1990sparalleling other forms of literary and cultural theory, such as postcolonialism and critical race studieslargely due to the publication of Glotfelty and Fromm 1996 (cited under Collections of Essays), the first edited collection of essays and anthology to introduce a comprehensive critical outline of ecocriticism. Buell 1995, another critically dense and timely study, outlines the trajectory of American ecocriticism by way of Henry David Thoreau as a central figure. Kerridge and Sammells 1998 (cited under Collections of Essays), which expanded studies in race and class, as well as ecocritical history, followed both Glotfelty and Fromm 1996 and Buell 1995. Phillips 2003 offers a skeptical and refreshing critique of ecocriticism amid otherwise quite praiseworthybordering on mysticalcelebrations of nature in the scholarship of the 1990s. Garrard 2012 (first published 2004), along with Coupe 2000 (under Anthologies) and Armbruster and Wallace 2001 (under Nature Writing), serves as a political and theoretical turn in ecocriticism because it addresses more of the second wave concerns about animals, globality, and apocalypse. Clark 2011 is a contemporary overview that integrates a unified critical history of the waves, including nature writing, literary periods, theory, and activism, while it also provides sample readings that deploy specific ecocritical methods to literary texts. Garrard 2014 is the most recent overview volume, with many noteworthy ecocritical scholars; it serves as a somewhat updated version of Glotfelty and Fromm 1996. (See also Anthologies and Collections of Essays for some other notable overviews.)

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

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Looks back at the history of American nature writing through literary analysiswith Thoreaus Walden as a reference pointto establish a history of environmental perception and imagination. It examines how humanistic thought, particularly through literary nonfiction, can imagine a more ecocentric or green way of living. (See also Nature Writing.)

Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

E-mail Citation

Provides updated introductory material to previous studies. It offers an excellent range of topics, and despite serving as an introduction, it employs incisive analysis of previously overlooked issues in introductory books on ecocriticism, such as posthumanism, violence, and animal studies. It is one of the best contemporary overviews.

Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2012.

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Examines a wide range of literary and cultural works. Two notable strengths: (1) it acknowledges the political dimension of ecocriticism; and (2) it explores a range of issues, from animal studies and definitions of wilderness and nature, to postapocalyptic narratives. It is available as an inexpensive paperback. Originally published in 2004.

Garrard, Greg, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

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One of the most ambitious collections to date, with thirty-four chapters, this book is aimed at both general readers and students, but it also revisits the previous twenty years of ecocriticism to offer contemporary readings from the most prominent names in the field. It is an essential work for ecocritics.

Love, Glen. Revaluating Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism. In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 225240. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

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Argues that literary studies must engage with the environmental crisis rather than remaining unresponsive. This essay advocates for revaluing a nature-focused literature away from an ego-consciousness to an eco-consciousness (p. 232). Originally published in 1990. See also Loves Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003).

Meeker, Joseph. The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology. New York: Scribners, 1972.

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One of the founding works of ecocriticism. It spans many centurieslooking at Dante, Shakespeare, and Petrarch, as well as E.O. Wilsonand analyzes comedy and tragedy as two literary forms that reflect forces greater than that of humans. The comedy of survival is at its core an ecological concept.

Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195137699.001.0001E-mail Citation

One of the more prominent critiques of ecocritical theory, this book challenges neo-Romantic themes explored by ecocritics, many of which Phillips argues support the use of mimesis as a standard way to read environments, instead of looking at more pragmatic approaches.

Rueckert, William. Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism. In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 105123. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

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Notable primarily because it was the first publication to use the term ecocriticism as an environmentally minded literary analysis that discovers something about the ecology of literature (p. 71). Originally published in 1978.

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ENGLISH/FRENCH SIMULTANEOUS TRANSLATION

For a few years now, transhumanism has been a movement of thought whose influence can no longer be denied, both internationally within the media and in the academic, political, and economic worlds. However, recognising the emergence of a phenomenon is not the same as knowing it. Many questions remain unanswered about the very nature of transhumanism(s).

The purpose of ETHConference2018 is to analyze the current state of the art on these questions, exploring transhumanisms and their narratives. More broadly, the conference welcomes all abstract, panel and participatory workshop proposals related to transhumanism, posthumanism, hyperhumanism and their many related topics. Proposals from a wide range of disciplines are warmly welcomed.

TheConference is organised in such way that it will enable different audiences (scholars, professionals, citizens, politicians,...) to intermingle, combining the ambition and usual components of a high-level academic event (talks, panels, round tables,...)and a thought-provoking off-conference range of artistic,pedagogicaland cultural activities (audience-focused scientific workshops, participatory forums, predictive justice debating, theatre performance,public discussion of a cult film, a transhumanism-themed escape game, and others).

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ETHConference2018

Introduction

Ecocriticism is a broad way for literary and cultural scholars to investigate the global ecological crisis through the intersection of literature, culture, and the physical environment. Ecocriticism originated as an idea called literary ecology (Meeker 1972, cited under General Overviews) and was later coined as an -ism (Rueckert 1996, cited under General Overviews). Ecocriticism expanded as a widely used literary and cultural theory by the early 1990s with the formation of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) at the Western Literary Association (1992), followed by the launch of the flagship journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (cited under Journals) in 1993, and then later the publication of The Ecocriticism Reader (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996, cited under Collections of Essays). Ecocriticism is often used as a catchall term for any aspect of the humanities (e.g., media, film, philosophy, and history) addressing ecological issues, but it primarily functions as a literary and cultural theory. This is not to say that ecocriticism is confined to literature and culture; scholarship often incorporates science, ethics, politics, philosophy, economics, and aesthetics across institutional and national boundaries (Clark 2011, p. 8, cited under General Overviews). Ecocriticism remains difficult to define. Originally, scholars wanted to employ a literary analysis rooted in a culture of ecological thinking, which would also contain moral and social commitments to activism. As Glotfelty and Fromm 1996 (cited under Collections of Essays) famously states, ecocriticism takes an earth-centred approach to literary studies, rather than an anthropomorphic or human-centered approach (p. xviii). Many refer to ecocriticism synonymously as the study of literature and the environment (rooted in literary studies) or environmental criticism (interdisciplinary and cultural). Ecocriticism has been divided into waves to historicize the movement in a clear trajectory (Buell 2005, cited under Ecocritical Futures). The first wave of ecocriticism tended to take a dehistoricized approach to nature, often overlooking more political and theoretical dimensions and tending toward a celebratory approach of wilderness and nature writing. Ecocriticism expanded into a second wave, offering new ways of approaching literary analysis by, for example, theorizing and deconstructing human-centered scholarship in ecostudies; imperialism and ecological degradation; agency for animals and plants; gender and race as ecological concepts; and problems of scale. The third wave advocates for a global understanding of ecocritical practice through issues like global warming; it combines elements from the first and second waves but aims to move beyond Anglo-American prominence. There are currently hundreds of books and thousands of articles and chapters written about ecocriticism.

This section looks at some of the pioneering work in ecocriticism, as well as some of the most read work introducing the subject. Meeker 1972, presenting comedy and tragedy as ecological concepts, connects literary and environmental studies as a cohesive field of study. As an ethnologist and comparative literature scholar, Meeker helped to pioneer the critical discussion of ecocriticism in what he called literary ecologies. Following Meeker, Rueckert 1996 (first published 1978) actually coined the term ecocriticism, arguing for a way to find the grounds upon which the two communitiesthe human, the naturalcan coexist, cooperate, and flourish in the biosphere (p. 107). Love 1996 builds on the work of Meeker and Rueckert by essentially anticipating the explosion of and need for ecocriticism in just a few years. Ecocriticism as a literary and cultural theory significantly expanded in the 1990sparalleling other forms of literary and cultural theory, such as postcolonialism and critical race studieslargely due to the publication of Glotfelty and Fromm 1996 (cited under Collections of Essays), the first edited collection of essays and anthology to introduce a comprehensive critical outline of ecocriticism. Buell 1995, another critically dense and timely study, outlines the trajectory of American ecocriticism by way of Henry David Thoreau as a central figure. Kerridge and Sammells 1998 (cited under Collections of Essays), which expanded studies in race and class, as well as ecocritical history, followed both Glotfelty and Fromm 1996 and Buell 1995. Phillips 2003 offers a skeptical and refreshing critique of ecocriticism amid otherwise quite praiseworthybordering on mysticalcelebrations of nature in the scholarship of the 1990s. Garrard 2012 (first published 2004), along with Coupe 2000 (under Anthologies) and Armbruster and Wallace 2001 (under Nature Writing), serves as a political and theoretical turn in ecocriticism because it addresses more of the second wave concerns about animals, globality, and apocalypse. Clark 2011 is a contemporary overview that integrates a unified critical history of the waves, including nature writing, literary periods, theory, and activism, while it also provides sample readings that deploy specific ecocritical methods to literary texts. Garrard 2014 is the most recent overview volume, with many noteworthy ecocritical scholars; it serves as a somewhat updated version of Glotfelty and Fromm 1996. (See also Anthologies and Collections of Essays for some other notable overviews.)

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

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Looks back at the history of American nature writing through literary analysiswith Thoreaus Walden as a reference pointto establish a history of environmental perception and imagination. It examines how humanistic thought, particularly through literary nonfiction, can imagine a more ecocentric or green way of living. (See also Nature Writing.)

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Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

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Provides updated introductory material to previous studies. It offers an excellent range of topics, and despite serving as an introduction, it employs incisive analysis of previously overlooked issues in introductory books on ecocriticism, such as posthumanism, violence, and animal studies. It is one of the best contemporary overviews.

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Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. New York: Routledge, 2012.

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Examines a wide range of literary and cultural works. Two notable strengths: (1) it acknowledges the political dimension of ecocriticism; and (2) it explores a range of issues, from animal studies and definitions of wilderness and nature, to postapocalyptic narratives. It is available as an inexpensive paperback. Originally published in 2004.

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Garrard, Greg, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

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One of the most ambitious collections to date, with thirty-four chapters, this book is aimed at both general readers and students, but it also revisits the previous twenty years of ecocriticism to offer contemporary readings from the most prominent names in the field. It is an essential work for ecocritics.

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Love, Glen. Revaluating Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism. In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 225240. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

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Argues that literary studies must engage with the environmental crisis rather than remaining unresponsive. This essay advocates for revaluing a nature-focused literature away from an ego-consciousness to an eco-consciousness (p. 232). Originally published in 1990. See also Loves Practical Ecocriticism: Literature, Biology, and the Environment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003).

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Meeker, Joseph. The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology. New York: Scribners, 1972.

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One of the founding works of ecocriticism. It spans many centurieslooking at Dante, Shakespeare, and Petrarch, as well as E.O. Wilsonand analyzes comedy and tragedy as two literary forms that reflect forces greater than that of humans. The comedy of survival is at its core an ecological concept.

Find this resource:

Phillips, Dana. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195137699.001.0001Save Citation Export Citation E-mail Citation

One of the more prominent critiques of ecocritical theory, this book challenges neo-Romantic themes explored by ecocritics, many of which Phillips argues support the use of mimesis as a standard way to read environments, instead of looking at more pragmatic approaches.

Find this resource:

Rueckert, William. Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism. In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 105123. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

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Notable primarily because it was the first publication to use the term ecocriticism as an environmentally minded literary analysis that discovers something about the ecology of literature (p. 71). Originally published in 1978.

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Ecocritical scholarship owes a great debt to environmental philosophers, historians, sociologists, and biologists who have helped to conceptualize the relationship among humans, nonhumans, nature, and culture. Although a complete list of possible influential writings would be enormous, the following provides a brief outline of some instrumental works. Leopold 1949, from a conservationist perspective, is a monumental work that challenges anthropocentric thinking with the now famous concept of Thinking like a Mountain as part of The Land Ethic. Carson 2002 (first published 1962) challenged the industrial-chemical complex by arguing that the use pesticides are, contrary to popular science at the time, both socially and environmentally harmful. Whereas Carson pioneered the activist strain in ecocriticism, Marx 2000 (first published 1964) did so through literary and historical criticism by questioning the American pastoral imagination as an environmental threat. White 1996 (first published 1967) located the root cause of the historical ecological crisis in Judeo-Christian values. White, along with many other later ecological writings, condemned Judeo-Christian theology for neglecting to care for the present physical world in anticipation of the eternal one hereafter. Rooted in cultural and Marxist theory, Williams 1973 adroitly analyzed the urban-rural dialectic between the city and country. This work partly influenced ecocritical scholarship to challenge the Eurocentric divide between nature and culture. Nash 1989 brought the ethical and social ecological dimension into contemporary debates by promoting the rights of nonhuman organisms. Williams 1992 is a multi-genre personal account of the ecological crisis; it has become a widely read work in classrooms as well as cited in ecocritical scholarship.

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002.

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Considered by many to have initiated the contemporary environmental and ecological movements. It addresses the systemic problem of environmental degradation brought on by corporate industry and advocates for protection through public awareness and resistance. Originally published in 1962.

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Leopold, Aldo. Sand County Almanac: With Essays on Conservation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949.

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Calls for a revolutionary Land Ethic as an environmental philosophy that every human should follow: A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise (p. 189). Reprinted in 2001.

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Marx, Leo. The Machine and the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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Largely a book about pastoralism in 19th- and 20th-century America, it traces the history of technology in society and culture. It argues that pastoralisma utopian theme of expansive landscapes for settlement and utilityhas and continues to define the environmental consciousness of America. Originally published in 1964.

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Nash, Roderick Frazier. The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

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Demonstrates the influence of environmentalism in various intellectual fields. It catalogues the green wave in society and politics, and questions the rights of other nonhuman organisms. As a piece of social ecology and environmental philosophy, it was a major influence on ecocriticism.

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White, Lynn, Jr. The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis. In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 314. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

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This famous essay reconsiders how cultural influence and social conditioningthrough beliefs and valuescan affect environmental consciousness. Specifically, the essay criticizes Judeo-Christianity for supporting anthropocentric superiority. Giving humans a licence to dominate the natural world has led to the contemporary environmental crisis. Originally published in 1967.

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Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

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Contextualizes the dialectic between rural and urban thinking that has divided culture from environments for centuries. Often framed as a pastoral critique from a Marxist perspective, this book anticipates holistic discussions about the integration of built and nonbuilt environments in contemporary ecocritical discourses.

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Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge. New York: Vintage, 1992.

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Part memoir, part naturalist writing, part tragedy, this book explores Williamss experience watching her mothers death from breast cancer while also watching the destruction of a bird sanctuary through flooding. It remains one of the most influential narrative books of ecocritical studies (e.g., see Narrative Ecocriticism).

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There have been massive amounts of collections of essays about ecocriticism, offering a diverse range of writings on interdisciplinary topics, which is what ecocriticism accomplishes as a literary and cultural theory. This list offers some of the noteworthy publications across many subjects, beginning with Glotfelty and Fromm 1996, which serves as both an anthology of previous publications (e.g., Meeker 1972, Rueckert 1996, and Love 1996, cited under General Overviews, Silko 1996, cited under Critical Race Studies), as well as many new essays at the time of its publication. Bennett and Teague 1999 is particularly significant for including urban or built environments as a central part of the ecocritical discussion; it helped to challenge the idea that ecocriticism focuses on tradition notions of nature. Slovic and Branch 2003 bridges the gap between the first and second waves of ecocritical studies, where scholars took a decidedly more theoretical turn in scholarship. Goodbody and Rigby 2011 largely differs from others in this list because it assemble an original collection focused on European ecocritical theory (see also Global Perspectives). Turning to pedagogy, Garrard 2012 is one of several collections on teaching ecocriticism in the classroom, a trend that began with Waages Teaching Environmental Literature: Materials, Methods, Resources (1985). Lynch, et al. 2012 also contains a section on pedagogy, but it is couched in the larger analysis of bioregional thinking (local community and sustainable culture). Westling 2013 is a collection on contemporary literary and cultural environmental concerns in the widely read Cambridge Companion series.

Bennett, Michael, and David W. Teague, eds. The Nature of Cities: Ecocriticism and Urban Environments. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999.

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The essays in this volume invite readers to think about the environment as a larger and more holistic concept, moving away from the separation of nonbuilt (nature) and built (cities) environments. It remains one of the few works about urban ecocriticism.

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Garrard, Greg, ed. Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

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Emphasizes the roots of ecocriticism as a teaching-activist-scholarly pursuit through a range of collected essays. This book stands out as one of the few collections or monographs to focus entirely on the pedagogy and practice of a green literary and cultural study.

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Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

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This landmark publication in the field is both collection and anthology; it provides previously published essays (e.g., Lynne White Jr., William Rueckert, Paula Gunn Allen, Leslie Marmon Silko), along with many original essays. It introduces the critical concept of ecocriticism as a response to the global environmental crisis.

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Goodbody, Axel, and Kate Rigby, eds. Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011.

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Noteworthy for representing a distinctively European ecocriticism, providing a break from the dominant North American voice. This collection theorizies ecocriticism, while keeping the practice and activist element intact, through European philosophy, theorists, and environmental thinkers.

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Kerridge, Richard, and Neil Sammells, eds. Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature. London: Zed Books, 1998.

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Serves as one of the early collections in the field and provides samples of what ecocritics do (p. 8). This collection contains essays on race and environmental justice, childrens environmental literature, pop culture, and body politics.

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Lynch, Tom, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster, eds. The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012.

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Aims to explain the idea in literary criticism of bioregionalisma sustainable sense of place on a day-to-day scale that we can inhabit beyond national or political boundaries. This collection is skilfully arranged in four sections: Reinhabiting, Rereading, Reimaging, and Renewal (forming a bioregional pedagogy).

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Slovic, Scott, and Michael Branch, eds. The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 19932003. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003.

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Based upon early essays published in the flagship ecocritical journal ISLE, this collection charts a thorough trajectory of the essays that defined the ecocritical movement in the 1990s. It provides an excellent overview of earlier prominent ecocritical scholarship in essay form.

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Westling, Louise, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

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Offers a range of introductory writings on ecocriticism, as other collections in this list do, but provides a more contemporary approach. Despite the title, it also includes essays about cinema and ecotheory as well.

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This section includes some of the more widely used anthologies that reproduce excerpts of previously published works by writers, essayists, travelers, and poets in environmental literature and culture. Lyon 1989 is as an early anthology used in environmental writing courses in the early to mid-1990s, during the early expansion of ecocriticism as a field. Another batch of anthologies emerged on the market in the late 1990s. Halpern and Frank 1998 diversifies the range of nature and environmental writers and even includes some international figures. Anderson, et al. 2013 is a comprehensive textbook and reader that differs from many of the readers in this list, which mainly reproduce experts of previously published material. Many of the earlier volumesLyon 1989, Halpern and Frank 1998, and even Branch 2004, the latter of which focuses on the origins of nature writingresemble each other in content and approach. The later volumes, starting with Coupe 2000, begin to address a wider range of second wave concerns. Coupe provides an extensive overview of literary periods in ecocriticism, beginning with the Romantics. Fisher-Wirth and Street 2013 is a volume devoted entirely to American environmental poetry. Hiltner 2014 is the most recent and comprehensive reader in this list, except for perhaps Coupe 2000, although it does not offer the pedagogical elements that Anderson, et al. 2013 does. A significant gap at the moment in ecocritical anthologies remains the lack of a complete anthology of environmental writers from around the globe.

Anderson, Lorraine, Scott P. Slovic, and John P. OGrady, eds. Literature and the Environment: A Reader on Nature and Culture. New York: Pearson Longman, 2013.

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Ecocriticism - Literary and Critical Theory - Oxford Bibliographies

Everything has been said, but not everything has been said superbly, and even if it had been, everything must be said freshly over and over again. Paul Horgan

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The times they are a-changing, especially in the realm of self-publishing.Acres of verbiage have been expended on the pros and cons of authors doing it for themselves.We will have to content ourselves here with saying, Not all tomes produced in this fashion are valueless. Heres one worthy candidate: Cherubimbo (Xlibris, trade paper, $19.99, 190 pages, ISBN 978-1-4628-4731-0) by Gabriel S. de Anda. With prior publication credits in several respectable zines, these stories come pre-vetted by an editorial acumen that is so often absent in other DIY productions. A practicing lawyer, de Anda infuses a couple of pieces with stefnal legal expertise, in the vein of Charles Harness. Time travel offers him lots of room for playful speculation, particularly in the emotionally resonant 1969. And some colorful posthumanism informs My Year To Be A Horse. De Andas touch is solid yet light-hearted, a winning one-two punch.

Paul Di Filippo 2013

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Here are a two more books by Gabriel S. de Anda.

The rest is here:

Gabriel S De Anda | Writer

This timely book examines the rise of posthumanism as both a material condition and a developing philosophical-ethical project in the age of cloning, gene engineering, organ transplants and implants.

Nayar first maps the political and philosophical critiques of traditional humanism, revealing its exclusionary and speciesist politics that position the human as a distinctive and dominant life form. He then contextualizes the posthumanist vision which, drawing upon biomedical, engineering and techno-scientific studies, concludes that human consciousness is shaped by its co-evolution with other life forms, and our human form inescapably influenced by tools and technology. Finally the book explores posthumanisms roots in disability studies, animal studies and bioethics to underscore the constructed nature of normalcy in bodies, and the singularity of species and life itself.

As this book powerfully demonstrates, posthumanism marks a radical reassessment of the human as constituted by symbiosis, assimilation, difference and dependence upon and with other species. Mapping the terrain of these far-reaching debates, Posthumanism will be an invaluable companion to students of cultural studies and modern and contemporary literature.

See the original post:

Wiley: Posthumanism - Pramod K. Nayar

On November 8, 2016 Donald Trump won the US Presidential election. Just under a month later, the US Army Corps of Engineers temporarily halted the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline following large protests heavily covered by the media. These events frame Shela Sheikhs essay Translating Geontologies, which contends with an emerging (or at least, for some, a newly visible) political landscape marked by an insidious violence that is more often than not environmental and affecting the bodies of racialized subjects.

First published in the issue And Nowof theAvery Review, Sheikhs essay considers Elizabeth Povinellis conception of geontology, or the regulation of distinctions between Life and Death/Extinction/Nonlife under late liberal governancea sort of updated version of Foucauldian biopolitics. Sheikh, following Povinelli, questions how to make struggles against environmental dispossession, in particular those of indigenous communities, legible and visible without either reducing them into a broad, global image of indigeneity or retreating into a complicit silence. In short, the essay interrogates the efficacy of our current political vocabularies, asserting the need for, and imagining the contours of, a new political language and praxis. Months after the essay was written, the Trump administration announced that construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline was moving forward, proving the urgency of this line of inquiry into the co-constitution of social, political, colonialist and ecological violences.

Translating Geontologies will be included in the forthcoming bookan expansion of the journal issueAnd Now: Architecture Against a Developer Presidency (Essays on the Occasion of Trumps Inauguration). The volume, which is edited by James Graham, Alissa Anderson, Caitlin Blanchfield, Jordan H. Carver, Jacob Moore, and Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt, explores potential roles for architecture during the administration of a self-proclaimed Builder-in-Chief. How is architecture already complicit in neoliberal forms of governance? In the displacement and dispossession of peoples? For the editors, Naming these complicities and the injustices they perpetuate is a first step toward addressing them

The 52nd iteration of Archinects recurring series Screen/Print, recently expanded to include books alongside journals and magazines, features Translating Geologies.

Translating Geographies

ByShela Sheikh

November 8, 2016: Donald Trump wins the US presidential election. December 4, 2016: The US Army Corps of Engineers announced that it would temporarily halt the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota to allow for an environmental impact review. Undoubtedly, these two dates mark events, the effects of which have resonated globally. In contrast to the former, the latter provided a moment of hope, a glimpse of effective alliance-building on a national and international scale that will need to be carried forward in the coming months and beyonda moment of effective, indigenous-led environmental protest. This protest did more than simply reject the Dakota Access Pipeline. Rather, in its rhetoric of protection, it sought to lay the groundwork for a future that has been precipitously threatened by Trumps open support for the pipeline and drilling for oil across US national parks, not to mention his private investments in the project and his public denial of the scientific facts of environmental violence and climate change.

Fig 1: Sitting Bull with protectors in Canon Ball, ND. Photograph by Joe Brusky.

But neither of these events came out of nowhere and as such are to be distinguished from a more philosophical definition of event, as marking an unprecedented rupture. Behind each is a long accumulation of grievances that allowed them to unfold. In the former case, speculation is rife regarding the persuasion of the electorate; behind the latter lies decades of what the anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli names quasi-events, which often elude our apprehension as ethical and political demands but which at times achieve the status of events through their amplification by the media. As we have seen in the case of Standing Rock, despite the initial lack of coverage by mainstream media, the campaign was exemplary in its garnering of both national and international support. These quasi-events take the form of dispersed violence, patterns of uneventful dispossession, or what Rob Nixon names slow violencetypically not even perceived as violence, attritional and of delayed effects, an insidious violence that is more often than not environmental and affecting the bodies of racialized subjects.

For many, the present moment calls for a new language: a new political praxis that entails effective communication on a municipal, national, and international level, through forums that would involve speaking with one another through antagonism and about uncomfortable matters. What, then, of our critical lexicon? What new terms are needed? What currency do the academic terms currently at our disposal, above all in the Euro-Western academy, hold? What formations of power and governmentality might we be overlooking?

If alliances across national borders between seemingly independent strugglesexemplified in the support for the water protectors at Standing Rockare necessary not only for the achievement of short-term goals but also for the building of public consciousness regarding those struggles interconnectedness, then so, too, are alliances across disciplinary borders. For a start, as is applicable to mobilizations like the one at Standing Rock, as Rob Nixon and others have suggested, North American environmentalism and post/decolonial/indigenous studies must join forces, making way for what has been termed postcolonial ecologies. In their accounting for the manners in which certain bodies are culturally and politically constructed as disposable or sacrificeable, above all in the context of climate and environmental violence, scholars of postcolonial studies teach us valuable lessons. These lessons are all the more urgent in the context of the unabashedly racist, xenophobic, and misogynist rhetoric unleashed during the entirety of the Trump presidential campaign.the present moment calls for a new language: a new political praxis that entails effective communication on a municipal, national, and international level

Likewise, key figures in indigenous studies and anthropology (notably Povinelli and Glen Sean Coulthard) have made use of postcolonial theory to expose the cunning of state-sanctioned, late liberal politics of recognition and multiculturalism in governing difference and maintaining structures of subjugation beneath the veneer of rights and reconciliation. This work also points to an imperative to examine not simply primitive accumulation but also original accumulationthe dispossession of indigenous or Aboriginal land. Here, the resulting extermination of life and lifeworlds functions, once again, through the mechanisms that render certain bodies and forms of life sacrificeableexposed to the abovementioned quasi-events at best, genocide at worst. And it is precisely this eventfulness and legal categorization of various intensities of violencetheir visibility and assignability, as well as their extricability from environmental violencethat is at stake here.

The work of postcolonial ecology is already well under way, and it is becoming all too clear that this must be supplemented by decolonial, indigenous, and feminist critiques of Anthropocene discourse, as well as of the attendant posthumanism that seeks to counter the Anthropocene industrys prevailing anthropocentrism. But even beyond this, as William E. Connolly articulates in his forthcoming Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming, additional borders require dismantling: the aggregate of postcolonial ecology in and of itself is not enough. Rather, this must dialogue more forcefully than ever before with eco-movements and with new practitioners of earth sciences. In other words, the lessons learned from the anti-colonial or anti-imperial ecological struggles that have taken place outside the old capitalist centers and in depressed urban areas within them demand to be translated into what Connolly names a cross-regional pluralist assemblage, one that presses states, corporations, churches, universities, and the like from inside and outside simultaneously. Furthermore, for such lessons to be effective in our contemporary climate, attention must be paid to the geological. While a partial response to this can be located in something like geographer Kathryn Yusoffs theorizations of geologic life within the geological epoch of the Anthropocene, the recent work of anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli is particularly useful here. Though she may not explicitly use the term postcolonial ecology, Povinelli implicitly offers much for a necessarily postcolonial conceptualization of eco-movements and eco-activism (above all where each is concerned with aesthetic strategies and creative practices), precisely in her foregrounding of the relationship between Life and Nonlife, the biological and the geological, biopower and geontopower, under the conditions of settler late liberalism.

Fig 2: Elizabeth A. Povinellis Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Published by Duke University Press, 2016.

Povinellis latest book, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, was published in September 2016, simultaneous to the growing mobilization against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Recapitulating earlier presentations on the same topic, Geontologies at once forms the third part of Povinellis trilogy on late liberalism (which includes the Empire of Love [2006] and Economies of Abandonment [2011]) and also revisits her reflections on governance in settler late liberalism begun in her 1993 book Labors Lot. Geontologies is a dense work that resists being described in telegraphic terms, based as it is in dazzling and far-reaching theoretical and philosophical readings. But Povinellis key concepts of geontology and geontopower are an invaluable contribution to our much-needed critical lexicon, evoked above, and reading her work from this perspective suggests that the concepts and modes of engagement presented in Geontologies, though firmly rooted in the experience and particular governance of Australian late-settler liberalism, demand to be taken up and translated in other contexts. When Povinelli speaks of late liberalism in Geontologies, she is specifically referring to the strategies of power that took shape in the late 1960s and early 1970s that exposed the emerging politics of recognition and open markets as methods of conserving liberal governance and the accumulation of value for dominant classes and social groups rather than as means to ameliorate social and economic injustices (169). In her earlier Economies of Abandonment, she elucidates the way that late liberalism refers to a strategy for governing the challenge of postcolonial and new social movements, with Geontologies demonstrating how this governing takes place precisely through the management of the perceived relationship between the biological and the geological. Despite this specificity, the offerings of Geontologies call to be translated, both geographically and conceptually, and provide a lens through which to read the protests surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline or other instances in North America, where the residues of settler colonialism persist, even ifcruciallythis persistence is often denied. critical theorists struggle to maintain a difference between all forms of Life and the category of Nonlife

As a consequence of attempts to grapple with the reality and concept of the Anthropocene in recent years, ontology, as Povinelli notes, has reemerged as a central problem across disciplines: philosophy, anthropology, literary and cultural studies, as well as science and technology studies, for a start (14). Hence the rise of posthumanistand, we might add, more-than-human or multispeciespolitics and theory. But critical theorists struggle to maintain a difference between all forms of Life and the category of Nonlife, with the crumbling ontological distinctions between biological, geological, and meteorological existents opening up onto the proliferation of new object ontologies (new materialisms, speculative realisms, and object-oriented ontologies) (14). A posthuman critique is giving way to a post-life critique, being to assemblage, and biopower to geontopower (14). This might not sound like news to readers who follow these theoretical debates, but what is novel about Povinellis analysisand indeed what makes it so prescient for the United States context with which we beganis the mode through which geontopower is analyzed, or, rather, the manner through which the experience of geontopower is framed and narrated, made visible.

Let us rewind a little

In the wake of the events of 9/11, the crash of financial markets, and the ongoing, spectacular manifestations of Anthropogenic climate change (all visible crises), much of critical thought has, understandably, focused on sovereignty and the relationship between biopolitics and biosecuritya manner of thought that includes variations such as necropolitics, thanatopolitics, neuropolitics, and so on. But as Povinelli argues, this focus has obscured the systematic re-orientation of biosecurity around geo-security and meteoro-security: the social and ecological effects of climate change (19). This is not to say that biopolitics should be entirely replaced by geontopower but rather that biopolitics, as Kathryn Yusoff has shown, is increasingly subtended by geology (14) and geontopower. Thus, our preoccupation with the image of power working through lifea preoccupation that perhaps doubles as a typical definition of biopoliticshas, in fact, obscured the revelation of formation that is fundamental to but hidden by the concept of biopower (4). This newly revealed formation is what Povinelli terms geontological power or geontopower. Unlike biopower, geontopower does not operate through the governance of life and the tactics of death but is rather a set of discourses, affects, and tactics used in late liberalism to maintain or shape the coming relationship of the distinction between Life and Nonlife (4). The terms geontology and geontopower thus intensify the contrasting components of nonlife (geos) and being (ontology) currently at play in the late liberal governance of difference and markets (5).

To return to my evocation of translatability: central to Geontologies, and indeed to Povinellis broader practice as an anthropologist, is the specific rootedness of her work in the fragile coastal ecosystem of Northern Territory of Australia and the allegiances staked with my Indigenous friends and colleagues (13). The concept of geontopower presented in Povinellis text arises first and foremost from the perspective of the Karrabing Collective, a grassroots, supermajority indigenous alternative media collective and social project of which Povinelli is a member. The work of the Karrabing Collective emerges from and elucidates the experience of the massive neoliberal reorganization of the Australian governance of Indigenous life (24) and the slow, dispersed accumulations of toxic sovereignties (27) against the backdrop of, among other things, indigenous land rights claims over mining leases. Geontologies is structured around the Karrabings engagement with various modes of existence, often referred to as Dreaming or totemic formationsa rock and mineral formation; a set of bones and fossils; an estuarine creek; a fog formation; and a set of rock weirs and sea reefsas well as their desire to maintain them, and their challenges to the states violation, desecration, or misrecognition of each respective formation.

Film still from Wutharr: Saltwater Dreams by the Karrabing Film Collective, 2016. Courtesy of the Karrabing Film Collective.

Here, it is not humansper sethat have exerted such a malignant force on the meteorological, geological, and biological dimension of the earth but only some forms of human sociality (13)just as it is not humansper sewho bear the brunt of this or of Anthropocenic climate change. Hence the critiques of Anthropocene discourse and the inadequacy of the Anthropos as a universalizing species paradigm: taking the general category of the human as a framing device conceals the distinctions between those people who drive the fossil-fuel economy and those who dont, between those populations engaged in colonial-slash-imperial agendas and those on the receiving end. But just when we attempt to distinguish between different modes of inhabiting the planet in order to identify those culpable, we find that our gaze cannot remain localized. From the Northern Territory or Dakota, we must look further afield (Povinellis metaphor moves between the telescope and binoculars): following the flows of toxic industries and their by-products means stretching the local across seeping transits, suspended between the local and the globalhereish, to use Povinellis term (13).

If the task, as articulated by Nixon, is to render the grievances of slow violence legibleto find forms through which to aestheticize and narrate the quasi-events of, for instance, environmental dispossessionthen in the case of geontopower, it is preciselythroughthe late liberal governance of difference and markets that geontology can be best revealed. This late liberal model of governance works only insofar as the distinctions between the vital and inert, Life and Death/Extinction or Nonlife are maintained (9). And here, the lessons offered by the settler colonial Australian context are in many ways applicable to the United States. Geontology and geontopower, for Povinelli, are conceptsmeant to help make visiblethe figural tactics of late liberalism as a long-standing biontological orientation and distribution of power crumbles, losing its efficacy as a self-evident backdrop to reason (56, emphasis modified). More specifically, just as necropolitics, openly operating in colonial Africa, subsequentlyrevealed its shapein Europe, so geontopower has long operated openly in settler late liberalism and been insinuated in the ordinary operations of its governance of difference and markets (5). To quote Povinelli at length:

All sorts of liberalisms seem to evidence a biopolitical stain, from settler colonialism to developmental liberalism to full-on neoliberalism. But something is causing these statements to be irrevocably read and experienced through a new drama, not the drama of life and death, but a form of death that begins and ends in Nonlifenamely the extinction of humans, biological life, and, as it is often put, the planet itselfwhich takes us to a time before the life and death of individuals and species, a time of the geos, of soulnessness.(89)

Industrial capital depends upon the separation between forms of existence in order to implement certain forms of extractionRecalling the question of lexicon that we began with, for Povinelli, the termsgeontologyandgeontopowerare intended to highlightthe difficulty in finding a critical languageto account for the moment in which a form of power long self-evident in certain regimes of settler late liberalismis becoming visible globally (5, my emphasis).

Let me be clear: it is neither my intention here either to carelessly reduce the specificity of the Australian settler late liberalism from which Povinelli writes to the system of governance of the United States, nor to make such a crude move as to put forward a blanket, global conception of indigeneity and indigenous lifeworlds, and thus to betray the very specificity ofPovinellis work that I am here celebrating, even if my gesture is to stress its partial translatability. Rather, my point is to emphasize the potential usefulness of Povinellis analytics and vocabulary in the context of the impending populism and even nativism of the United States and to stress that the still all-too-tangible residues of North American settler colonialism (as well as what decolonial thinkers would term coloniality) not be left out of our myriad political conversation. As Povinelli herself stresses in a recent discussion about settler colonialism in Palestine, the identity of settler indigenous populations is a conscious, visible part of everyday national politics in Canada and Australia, while in the United States this is far from the case.

To clarify yet another aspect of translatability (and in allusion to the postcolonial or indigenous ecology signaled earlier), it is precisely through a colonial mind-set that late liberalismand indeed liberalism of all sorts across the globe, not to mention capitalism more generally and the impending Republican administrationreacts so violently to maintain the distinction between Life and Nonlife and to police and to manage those whose lifeworlds presume otherwise. Industrial capitalthough one could also refer to something like the Dakota Access Pipeline more specificallydepends upon the separation between forms of existence in order to implement certain forms of extraction (20). In the context of settler liberalism, the belief that Nonlife acts in ways only available to Life must be contained in the brackets of the impossible if not the absurd (21) and the attribution of aninabilityof various colonized people to differentiate the kinds of things that have agency, subjectivity, and intentionality of the sort that emerges with life has been the grounds for casting them into a premodern mentality and a postrecognition difference (5).

Povinellis concept of geontologies provides a timely addition to current theorizations and diagnoses of power and governance, between human and nonhuman, Life and Nonlife, in the settler colonial context of both Australia and the United States. But it is Povinellis book, in its architectural framework (each chapter derives from a vignette, a narrative of the Karrabings analytics and engagement with respective forms of Dreaming), itself derivative of her anthropology of the otherwise, that provides most currency for the political tasks that lie aheadabove all where this concerns the move from academia to (postcolonially informed) socially engaged praxis and back again. For while the mobilizations at Standing Rock drew a staggering number of gestures of solidarity (in situ or otherwise), from an academic perspective, the warnings posed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her seminal 1988 essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? prove as prescient as ever, albeit relating to different forms of subaltern. Beyond the Indian subaltern woman who is at the center of Spivaks original essay, we now see the dangers of mis-representing and speaking for not only indigenous subjects, whose worldviews/lifeworlds often remain stubbornly (and productively, one might add) untranslatable or incommensurable with the prevailing mind-set of both late liberalism and neoliberalism but also nature itself, or the nonhuman more generally. In other words, the conundrum remains as to whether any form of representation, however well-intentioned, necessarily involves at least some form of colonization: a rendering passive or mute. Hence the necessity of vigilance when faced with the impossible necessity, to use Astrida Neimaniss term, ofengaging withthose who more often than not bear the brunt of the slow violence and quasi-events with which we began.

Against this kind of colonization, Povinellis intention is not to represent anyone, let alone to allow the nonhuman modes of existence to speak (26). Rather, we might say that she aims to stand with rather than speak for, and she situates the genesis of her claims in the effects of late liberal forces moving through that part of our lives that we [Povinelli and the Karrabing collective] have lived together (23). Such an approach provides a useful point of orientation for those of us who find ourselves caught in the discomforting space between, as Neimanis puts it, a representationalist rock and a hard place of complicit silence.Geontologies, writtenwithPovinellis indigenous colleagues-slash-family, provides just one example of the vital work being done by scholars and activists across the globe, as the Mtis scholar and artist Zoe Todd puts it, to decolonize and Indigenize the non-Indigenous intellectual contexts that currently shape public intellectual discourse (including, Todd adds, the discourse of the Anthropocene).

Film still from Wutharr: Saltwater Dreams by the Karrabing Film Collective, 2016. Courtesy of the Karrabing Film Collective.

How, then, might this project of making visible proceed? One possibility can be found in the films created by the Karrabing collective itself. As Povinelli notes, the various forms of critique that have attempted to tackle the theoretical challenges inherent to this age of the Anthropocenequestions of multiple ontologies, the difference between Life and Nonlife, our coming post-extinction worldhave tended to lag behind fiction (14). The aesthetic objects that are the Karrabings films operate through an improvisational realism or improvisational realization. As much an art of living as an artistic style, the genre, if we can call it this, seeks to manifest reality (a realization) through a mixture of fact and fiction, reality and realism (86) that makes visible or illuminates the quasi-events that occur within the cramped space in which my indigenous colleagues are forced to maneuver as they attempt to keep relevant their critical analytics and practices of existence (6). But this making visiblethis translation or rendering legible across registersoperates precisely through a certain illegibility or incomprehensibility: a stubborn resistance that explicitly rejects the representations from withoutthe demand for a certain (global) (self-)image of indigeneity, or indeed the demand of the anthropological imaginarythrough which authentic indigeneity is managed, marketed, and circulated. As such, read through the polysemy of translation, the productive paradox here is that this filmmaking practice is effective in its revealing the functioning of geontopower precisely through its partial untranslatability and incommensurability Rather than providing a representation of their lives, the films are intended as a means of self-organization and analysis, revealing new forms of collective indigenous agency precisely in relation to various Dreaming formations. Crucially, the films function as a constantly improvisational response to the suffocating state management of such relations.

Despite the increasing solidification of global borders, epitomized by the rhetoric of the Trump campaign, members of the Karrabing Collective have nonetheless recently been able to acquire passports in order to travel to participate in international screenings and discussions. But beyond this, platforms running supplementary to mainstream media (evoking Nancy Frasers subaltern counter-publics, here digital) provide crucial means for the virtual translation of what, as evoked above, functions precisely through a certain level of stubborn opacity. Explicitly rejecting state forms of land tenure and the politics of recognition, with membership that elides blood ties, the composition of the Karrabing Collective resonates with the gestures of solidarity from the diverse constituencies who traveled to Standing Rockgestures made in the face of the United States mainstream medias attempts to reduce the claims and representational practices of indigenous struggle (their attempts to communicate) to mere incommunicable noise. While the Karrabing Collectives practice elucidates and narrates the dispersed quasi-events brought about by toxic sovereignty and geontopower, this elucidation is far from a straightforward translation. Nonetheless, there is an urgency to translate geontology across todays multiple and overlapping crises, especially as these pertain to colonial or imperial debris: (settler-)colonialisms ongoing effects of ruination.

Sheila Sheikh is a lecturer at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, where she convenes the MA Postcolonial Culture and Global Policy. Prior to this, Sheikh was research fellow and publications coordinator on the ERC-funded Forensic Architecture project based in the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths. She is currently working on a book about the phenomenon of the martyr video-testimony, read through the lens of deconstruction; and a multi-platform research project around colonialism, botany, and the politics of the soil. As part of the latter, Sheikh is co-editing, with Ros Gray, a special issue ofThird Texttitled The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions.

For a version of this text with endnotes, please head over here.

Screen/Print is an experiment in translation across media, featuring a close-up digital look at printed architectural writing. Divorcing content from the physical page, the series lends a new perspective to nuanced architectural thought.

For this issue, we featured "Translating Geontologies" fromAnd Now: Architecture Against a Developer Presidency (Essays on the Occasion of Trumps Inauguration)

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Screen/Print #52: Shela Sheikh Searches for New Political Vocabularies in 'And Now: Architecture Against a Developer ... - Archinect