Abstracts

Reflecting upon our recent fieldwork in the Gulf States, this two-part paper explores the ways in which literary imaginaries can inform methodological practice in memory studies research. We examine how our own methodologies overlap with recent examples of creative cartography by adopting an interdisciplinary, multidirectional approach that makes the overlapping injustices arising from the plantation pasts and petrochemical presents of the region culturally and critically visible.

Cultural memory studies has always enjoyed an intimate relationship with trauma studies but has particularly benefitted from reconceptualizations of the traumatic that move beyond notions of the unrepresentable and the unique, notions that have paradoxically been exported to frame nonwestern experiences. The decolonization of trauma studies has buttressed cultural memory studies’ attention to colonial, neocolonial and iniquitous socio-economic scenarios and their structures of oppression through which traumatic violence unfolds in a chronic manner. This recalibration of trauma has equipped cultural memory studies’ more recent turn to the representational challenges posed by the Anthropocene, our new geological epoch in which humanity has become the primary geo-physical force in (catastrophically) shaping the planet’s chemistry. However, and as this paper, argues, in addressing environmental catastrophe, and the catastrophic entanglements of human and more-than-human worlds, environmental memory studies has inadvertently reintroduced a potentially universalizing version of trauma that homogenizes the experience and effects of ecological disaster, that does not sufficiently differentiate between victims and perpetrators of environmental harms, and that is imprecise in allocating agency (across humans and nonhumans) in the Anthropocene. To illustrate its argument, this paper will draw on recent African American fiction and its exploration of environmentally mediated and racialised historical violence, alongside theoretical discourses on environmental trauma that have recently emerged in the humanities.  

This paper responds to ongoing debates about capitalism, climate change, and environmental hope by confronting the philosophical argument of Martin Hägglund's This Life (2019) with Michel Faber's elegiac science fiction novel The Book of Strange New Things (2014). Both books explore the role of memory and mortality in human life and reflect on the limitations of stoicist and capitalist mindsets. They also draw attention to the afterlife of religion and to the existential threat of the climate crisis. In doing so, these books articulate a form of environmental hope as well as conceptual resources for anti-capitalist resistance. A detailed comparison shows, moreover, that Hägglund's thought-provoking argument can be enriched via Faber's reflections on embodiment and ecology across different planets.

Focussing on the work of Micronesian poet and activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, I wish to explore some of the ongoing Eurocentric limitations of the study of literature and memory. Literary studies of memory still overwhelmingly privilege print culture more generally, and the novel more specifically as the paradigmatic genre of mnemonic (world) literature. This focus not only tends to exclude major literary traditions and genealogies of knowledge which have existed and continue to thrive outside of print culture; it also tends to favour monadic subjectivity over relational being, the individual over the collective, the logic of appropriation over depropriation, etc. It remains deeply entangled in the nexus of the colonial/modern. 

I find it intriguing in this context how poets like Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner forge new alliances across the globe by largely bypassing print culture. They produce fast literature against the slow violence of climate change, using video performances and the internet as primary channels of dissemination. They both tap into global flows of digitized information as well as into ancestral traditions of knowledge to promote ways of being in and relating to the word which challenge capitalism and colonialism, anthropocentrism and patriarchy. They thus also help to rethink the nexus between planet, memory and literature beyond Eurocentric limitations.

Air is often regarded as the insubstantial, fleeting part of the environment, at opposite ends with the material sediments that register the planet’s memories. In the age of anthropogenic climate change, however, air has become the most enduring memorial of human impact on the environment. Its elemental consistence preserves past actions that affect us today and will affect us ever more existentially in the future. Pollutants do not simply disperse in the air, as even scientists believed into the second half of the twentieth century. On the contrary, air is what preserves them. Air is the element, and the sphere, where they accumulate and return to us: the return of the repressed becomes traumatic because it returns in the very breath of life, in the element we cannot survive without. These ambivalences became increasingly apparent in the course of the twentieth century, a period in which humans’ perception of the air underwent fundamental transformations that culminated in today’s debates about climate change and the anthropocene. My paper traces how these transformations are negotiated in poems by E. E. Cummings, Derek Walcott, and others. In particular, the paper will trace these poems’ reflections on the unique medial relations traditionally ascribed to poetry and air: on the longstanding ideas that poems can inscribe and be read in the air (air as poetry) and that poetry consists of and speaks through air (poetry as air).

Dionne Brand’s novel At the Full and Change of the Moon appeared in 1999, a year prior to the millennium, which is conveniently seen as threshold to the “planetary moment” (Elias & Moraru vii), a contested term, or “turn”, and yet one that has challenged the humanities to reconsider established paradigms, approaches and forms of articulation and reading. Brand’s oeuvre – and the novel in question in particular – provide similar challenges to established ways of reading. Neither can it be unambiguously located as literature of the global South or North, nor can it be easily situated in generic terms, following as it does the 'logic' of dreams and dream sequences. In a range of literary traditions dreams highlight cross-relational understandings of life, the planet and the universe; Brand develops this tradition further by bestowing an agential, resistant quality on dreams. By "dreaming generations", Brands' protagonists, deprived of a coherent or viable past, engage in risky projections of the future whose consequences reflect both ways. In this context I explore the ways in which Brand’s novel stages memory, as well as forgetting, as a material quality that emerges out of an organic relation between bodies, natural elements and luminary forces and gains traction where human archives prove to be deficient and flawed.

Alan Weisman's non-fiction book The World Without Us makes a broad range of educated guesses of how the Earth would change if humans were no longer around. From thriving mosquitos and elephants to the long-term effects of global warming and centuries of mining. Weisman is in good company with numerous writers and film-makers that with varying degrees of Schadenfreude imagine a world without humanity. In this presentation, I will address the fascination with the postapocalyptic in works by Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood and Michel Houellebecq, and how it can be linked to attempts to represent time-spans that goes far beyond human life and even historical time. The imagery of future ruins and a world without human also connects the postapocalyptic to romantic fascination of ruins, a fascination that persist in today's experience economy. Is this fascination also a rehearsal of a world without us?

Among the most hard-hit regions by global climate change and a long-standing theatre of capitalist ‘world-ecology’ (J. Moore), the Caribbean has emerged as a central reference point of Anthropocene discourse. More often than not, engagement with Caribbean environments and anthropogenic change attends to a sense of place and planet at the same time. This paper will take up recent work on ‘environmental memory’ (L. Buell et al.) in arguing for a historical turn in Anthropocene literary studies, revisiting Andrew Salkey’s A Quality of Violence (1959) and other mid-20th-century Caribbean fiction. Salkey’s novel adopts a historical perspective itself, by depicting a period of prolonged drought as well as its social and ecological repercussions in a remote area of Jamaica around 1900. Many other works from mid-20th-century Caribbean literary history similarly return to environmental legacies of colonial plantocracy and alternative indigenous ecologies. Such distant spatiotemporal depictions of human interaction with environmental change and catastrophe go a long way towards capturing the Anthropocene’s scalar complexity. As the paper will suggest, Caribbean Anthropocene novels avant la lettre hold a special potential for studying the region’s environmental memory as well as planetary memory at large, as a complement to current concerns with speculative and climate change fiction.

Poetry works by association, evocation, and relation; it defies fixity of meaning in favor of necessarily incomplete and shifting access to fluid processes of meaning-making. This includes not only ‘making meaning’ of human relations within and with their environment, but also revisiting the very foundations of if and how the human voice can explore the complexity and multilayeredness of planetary memory.

Planetary memory – if the ‘planetary’ is understood with Gayatri Spivak as an “imperative to responsibility, seen as a right precomprehending becoming-human, where the proper name of alterity is not God, in any language” (Aesthetic 347) – is necessarily mediated by language, by metaphor, by image borrowed and adapted; it is experienced by memory of place and body. In this talk, I will look at the work of three Native American poets – Joy Harjo, Gerald Vizenor, and Natalie Diaz – to ask how they each by different poetic means and in reference to a range of cultural repertoires mediate a memory of place and more-than-human kinship, to what extent the notion of planetary memory helps capture such mediation, and how these poets’ work might insist on thinking the social as constitutively encompassed by the planetary.

The phrase “planetary memory” captures the imperative to remember violence and injustice beyond national and species borders. Starting from the observation that cosmopolitan engagement and moral awareness are constitutive of contemporary literary value, this presentation looks at a number of recent works of fiction that negotiate the memory of the settlement of the Mexican-American border (and its contemporary survival in an immigration crisis): Yuri Herrera’s Signs Proceeding the End of the World and Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft (translated from the Mexican and published by independent publishers & Other Stories and Deep Vellum), Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt (celebrated by Oprah’s Book Club but critically vilified for its gratuitous appropriation of Mexican experience), and Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (critically celebrated and the object of an exceptionally large advance, but on the condition that Luiselli abandons Spanish for English). Diagramming the ways in which these novels differ in terms of form, reception, and translation history, my presentation argues that an understanding of the juncture of planetary memory and literature requires a consideration of what I call different “geographies of value”—geographies in which different engagements with planetary violence come to matter, and in which the Mexican-American border and New York (as the world capital of literary consecration) are crucial coordinates.   

In my 2014 essay, "Planet vs. Globe," I considered the different versions of totality connoted by the terms planet and globe and used Aldo Leopold's classic essay "Thinking like a Mountain" in order to tease out the literary, political, and ethical implications of human beings thinking that they could think like a planet. The same spirit animates my consideration in this talk of planetary memory, a notion that invites similar reflections on just how or what the planet might be said to remember. The changes to the Earth system named by the Anthropocene are something like the harm that the body of the planet remembers, but what are the implications of that thinking-by-analogy between human bodies and the planet's "body"? How can the conceptual resources of memory studies help us to understand the urgent contradictions of the present: humans (or some subset thereof) have inscribed themselves into the history and strata of the Earth, in a process whose effects will continue long into the future, and yet so much human activity continues to entrench a future trajectory at odds with, running headlong into, the as-yet unrealized effects of that past Thinking between metaphor and materiality, I will use Leslie Marmon Silko's novels Almanac of the Dead and Ceremony, among other texts, as key examples.

Evelyn Reilly’s experimental poetry collection “Styrofoam” (2009) imagines long-durée timelines beyond the disappearance of humans by placing ruins of enduring works of art such as Bernini’s sculpture The Ecstasy of St Theresa, on an equal footing with non-biodegradable, and thus eternal thermoplastics. The poems and multimedia illustrations in the collection address the extinction of humans and animals, and chart the extreme environmental damage produced by thermoplastics in an elegiac tone. The resulting collage is a deeply intertextual and intermedial dirge to the Anthropocene, and can serve as a meditation on the geological temporalities of cultural memory in an era of environmental disaster. In my paper, I analyse the visual-verbal dimensions of Reilly’s poetry in relation to recent scholarship on planetary memory (Bond, Rapson and De Bruyn) and discussions of the agency of the nonhuman (Barad, Yusoff), but also interrogate the limited representation of race in the collection.