Beyond A Common Future
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9–12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
“By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already ended,” the poet Franny Choi writes. “It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending world spun in its place.” Thinking alongside Choi’s depiction of ending and ongoing times, we turn our attention to the art and communities and labor that emerge when the future is called into question. How does futurelessness ...
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 ...
Oecologies Sponsored Panel: Re/Imagining the Medieval and Early Modern Commons
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
In Sir Thomas Moore’s Utopia, his narrating character, Raphael Hythloday, uses the Utopian society to critique the expanding use of enclosures occurring in England during the beginning of the 16th century. Hythloday tells the Cardinal that “Your sheep…that commonly are so meek and eat so little; now, as I hear, they have become so greedy and fierce that they devour human beings themselves” (63). Hythloday’s commentary on ...
Convection Currents in Latin American and Caribbean Geo-aesthetics
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
Much like tectonic plates, which are shifted by underground convection currents that transfer heat and exert pressure from below, Latin American and Caribbean aesthetics form in fluid exchange with planetary processes and the region’s geological forces. From rock formations to hydrological cycles, aesthetics assemble around often contested geological features, engendering deep social lives that converge, shift, erupt, and leak in many directions. To strategically attend to the ...
Commons Salmon
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
This panel seeks original contributions to the literature of salmon in any genre: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, long-form journalism, investigative reporting, new media. The vitality of wild salmon has long fed the shifting ecologies, cultures, and economies of the Pacific Northwest and Pacific Rim continents and islands. Salmon, past and present, locate multigenerational efforts by elders and experts to sustain disrupted communal management practices. Salmon also ask ...