The Abyss Stares Back: Encounters with Deep Sea Life
By Stacy Alaimo. University of Minnesota Press, 2025.
In an era of accelerating extinctions, what does it mean to discover thousands of new species in the deep sea?
As we see the catastrophic effects of the Anthropocene proliferate, advanced technologies also grant us greater access to the furthest reaches of the world’s oceans, facilitating the discovery of countless new species. Sorting through the implications of this strange paradox, Stacy Alaimo explores the influence this newfound intimacy with the deep sea might have on our broader ...
ACLA Seminar on “Non-Human Archives”
This seminar places renewed critical interest in “the archive” in dialogue with the “non-human turn” in ecocriticism. Work on the non-human and/or posthuman in literary and cultural studies (Haraway 2003; Tsing 2014; Morton 2013 et al.) offers avenues for thinking agency, personhood, and subjecthood alongside other-than-human (and not always living) entities. Archives, which both rely and center upon humans, may seem like an unlikely place to seek out the nonhuman. We suggest, however, that the nonhuman is central to the archive, materially and ...