The Unspoken Commons
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9–12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
Organized by Erin James (University of Idaho) and Taylor Eggan (Pacific Northwest College of Art)
How can we be sure that we are talking about the same thing when, from our various disciplinary and experiential vantages, we speak of “the commons?” This question gains significance and urgency when we consider how unevenly land and resources are distributed, and how disproportionately this uneven distribution affects different communities. Although the ...
Climate Change and the Death Drive
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
This panel will investigate the premise that the death drive—as it manifests in normative subjects in the contemporary West—has generated destruction on a macro scale in the form of global climate change. Though the death drive might seem to confirm homo sapiens’ inevitable suicide—extinction is what normative Western subjects actually desire—perhaps the death drive is not always-already destructive, but is rather something that can be partnered with ...
Primacy of Making Kin in Seeking a Common Ecological Imaginary
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
Rather than forecasting a bleak future, Weisman’s The World Without Us is mostly uncovering humans’ failures and errors that led the Earth in a downward spiral to doom–the inevitable end to a prolonged human reign of corrosive, toxic and self-destructive domination. Thus, his speculative imaginary has shed fresh light on one pivotal duty of the ecological sci-fi writings which most other sci-fi writers have either overlooked or ...
Narrative at the Dull Edge of Extinction
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
As declines in species populations, distributions, and diversity are felt globally, a growing body of work in the environmental humanities has taken up the topic of extinction. Fields like ecocriticism and extinction studies have considered the cultures that emerge at “the dull edge of extinction” (van Dooren Flight Ways, 2014; Rose et al. Extinction Studies, 2017). Across this body of work, scholars have paid particular attention to ...
Going Home: Relocating the Commons with William Stafford
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
Oregon’s most famous poet is William Stafford, a National Book Award recipient, U.S. Special Consultant to the Library of Congress (now called Poet Laureate), and author of over 60 books. Stafford’s poetry assumes a companionable commonality with the things of this world, people, animals, the other than human. Robert Bly wrote, “Of all the American poets of the last thirty years, I think William Stafford broods most ...
Archiving the Commons
Deadline extended till December 20, 2022
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
“The moment of the archive,” Stuart Hall writes, “represents the end of a certain kind of creative innocence, and the beginning of a new stage of self-consciousness, of self-reflexivity in an artistic movement” (2001: 89). This panel engages the moment of the archive in a time of planetary emergency. How do artists, scholars, curators, librarians, and other archive-builders constitute a record of ...
Borders of New Earth: Blue Ecocriticism, Geophilosophy and Decoloniality
Very few attempts have been made so far to decolonize the expanse of Blue Humanities yet it stands as an ensemble of creative renewals. With Ian Buchanan’s ‘Must we eat Fish’ we get to encounter the topography of such renewals. With his essay Buchanan effects a relation between ‘the foundational non-humanity of our being’ and oceans while Probyn, whose standpoint he critiques, seeks a persistence of exploitative humanist relationality with the same in the guise of “amplifying the level of felt relatedness to ...