Narrating Extinctions for Survivance

Abstract

This article navigates the obligatory relationship between extinction narratives and future imaginaries through the lens of an artist’s films. Taking Chinese artist Mao Chenyu’s works as case studies, the first part examines the notion of extinction that his video essay Becoming Father (2021) complicates through the perspective of rice (Oryza sativa) and humans in Dongting Lake. It reveals adaptive evolution, hetero-reproduction, and geontopower as three political regimes where extinctive pressures accumulate through the erosion of biocultural inheritability. The second part engages with this tripartite politics by questing for alternative models of inheritance from Mao’s ethnographic films. It centers on how the artist invests in shamanist, geomantic, and animist practices to envision alternative modes of inheritance. Based on this, the article argues that the conception of extinction beyond mass death demands counterextinction measures to aim for more than survival. This volition can be summarized by the term survivance, an ethical way of living in end-times. It concludes by contextualizing Mao’s work in post–Green Revolution China, where a logic of survival has driven mass extinction. On this basis, it proposes that extinction studies could benefit from cultivating a historical consciousness, especially regarding how extinctions are connected to the ideological underpinning of specific Anthropocene processes.