This chapter considers four of the most significant books on plastic theory and studies published in 2022: Alice Mah’s Plastic Unlimited: How Corporations Are Fuelling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It, Heather Davis’s Plastic Matter, Catherine Malabou’s Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion, and Ranjan Ghosh’s The Plastic Turn. It tries to show the common threads among these works and to see how their differences bespeak contemporary notions of plastic and plasticity that allow a diversity of thinkers to reflect not only on the emergency of a plastic and ecological crisis, but also on the role of ‘plastic thought’ in modernity, modern thought and science, and modernism. By way of conclusion, it looks at a notion that repeats itself among most of the volumes, the platonic term khôra, and how it relates to our conceptions of plasticity.
{"title":"Plastic Theory/Studies","authors":"J. Martell","doi":"10.1093/ywcct/mbad007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mbad007","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This chapter considers four of the most significant books on plastic theory and studies published in 2022: Alice Mah’s Plastic Unlimited: How Corporations Are Fuelling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It, Heather Davis’s Plastic Matter, Catherine Malabou’s Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion, and Ranjan Ghosh’s The Plastic Turn. It tries to show the common threads among these works and to see how their differences bespeak contemporary notions of plastic and plasticity that allow a diversity of thinkers to reflect not only on the emergency of a plastic and ecological crisis, but also on the role of ‘plastic thought’ in modernity, modern thought and science, and modernism. By way of conclusion, it looks at a notion that repeats itself among most of the volumes, the platonic term khôra, and how it relates to our conceptions of plasticity.","PeriodicalId":35040,"journal":{"name":"Year''s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90705764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter begins with an overview of 2022’s monumental place in the study of poetics, as marked by the centenary anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the publication of Dionne Brand’s Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems. From the retrospective celebration of literary modernism and the projective appraisal of new diasporic writing, this review then goes on to examine several new works in the field of poetics, including one journal article and five books. These works are investigated according to four major topics: 1. The Poetics of Inconvenience; 2. World-Building Poetics; 3. The Poetics of Articulation; and 4. Typewriter Poetics; before 5. Ending with a Joke. The case studies of the year’s work in poetics are wide in their array, such that they include modernist sound writing, suicidal ideations in film and literature, and digital trans of color bioart. Ultimately, however, these works are united by one tendency, which is to extend the field of poetics across populations, nations, and disciplines. What these works do is ‘loosen’ the concept of poetics: ‘to make it available to transition’ (Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People, p. 12), in order ‘to provide dimension, texture, and resonance for emergent and ongoing’ (p. 13) forms in the field.
{"title":"Poetics","authors":"Jessica MacEachern","doi":"10.1093/ywcct/mbad006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mbad006","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This chapter begins with an overview of 2022’s monumental place in the study of poetics, as marked by the centenary anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the publication of Dionne Brand’s Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems. From the retrospective celebration of literary modernism and the projective appraisal of new diasporic writing, this review then goes on to examine several new works in the field of poetics, including one journal article and five books. These works are investigated according to four major topics: 1. The Poetics of Inconvenience; 2. World-Building Poetics; 3. The Poetics of Articulation; and 4. Typewriter Poetics; before 5. Ending with a Joke. The case studies of the year’s work in poetics are wide in their array, such that they include modernist sound writing, suicidal ideations in film and literature, and digital trans of color bioart. Ultimately, however, these works are united by one tendency, which is to extend the field of poetics across populations, nations, and disciplines. What these works do is ‘loosen’ the concept of poetics: ‘to make it available to transition’ (Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People, p. 12), in order ‘to provide dimension, texture, and resonance for emergent and ongoing’ (p. 13) forms in the field.","PeriodicalId":35040,"journal":{"name":"Year''s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82408415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Varieties of posthumanism in literature and popular culture received sustained attention, as expected, in 2022. Human–nonhuman relationships, whether in terms of the human–animal or human–artificial-being relationship; issues of care for/of the nonhuman; theological debates around posthumanism, especially with regard to rituals, practices of belief, and the ‘digital afterlife’; and the different genealogies of the posthuman, were themes that informed a large number of essays and books. This chapter aims for a comprehensive survey of the year’s work and is organized around six sections that seek to summarize the major contributions to work in posthumanism: 1. Theorizing Posthumanism; 2. Literary Posthumanisms; 3. Popular Posthumanisms; 4. Posthumanism and the Disciplines; 5. The Nonhuman; and 6. Posthumanism after the Pandemic.
{"title":"Posthumanism","authors":"P. Nayar","doi":"10.1093/ywcct/mbad005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mbad005","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Varieties of posthumanism in literature and popular culture received sustained attention, as expected, in 2022. Human–nonhuman relationships, whether in terms of the human–animal or human–artificial-being relationship; issues of care for/of the nonhuman; theological debates around posthumanism, especially with regard to rituals, practices of belief, and the ‘digital afterlife’; and the different genealogies of the posthuman, were themes that informed a large number of essays and books. This chapter aims for a comprehensive survey of the year’s work and is organized around six sections that seek to summarize the major contributions to work in posthumanism: 1. Theorizing Posthumanism; 2. Literary Posthumanisms; 3. Popular Posthumanisms; 4. Posthumanism and the Disciplines; 5. The Nonhuman; and 6. Posthumanism after the Pandemic.","PeriodicalId":35040,"journal":{"name":"Year''s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82364632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this chapter I survey, highlight, and critically reflect on recent work in animal studies, a field that continues to yield deeply researched scholarship and incisive works of critical and cultural theory, all in spite of its relative lack of institutional footholds. This is my first outing as a YWCCT reviewer, and so my ambition for this initial venture is modest. I wish, quite straightforwardly, to explore a handful of publications that caught my attention in 2022. I do not pretend to have a robust rationale for my criteria for inclusion. Instead, let me say that these are all publications that excited me in some way, that excited something in me, and that I believe will excite others too. I have divided the chapter into four sections: 1. ‘Living Machines of Imperialism’ examines two postcolonial animal histories, Saheed Aderinto’s Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa and Jonathan Saha’s Colonizing Animals; 2. ‘I Dream of Dogs’ briefly considers Lydia Pyne’s Endlings before focusing on Margret Grebowicz’s short book of cultural critique on dog ownership, Rescue Me; 3. ‘The Gay Frog Is the Opposite of the Gay Penguin’ turns to recent issues of Humanimalia and Green Letters, and a special section of Environmental Humanities, co-edited by Sarah Bezan and Ina Linge; and 4. ‘Inside the Slaughterhouse’ looks at recent publications in the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series, concentrating mostly on Sune Borkfelt’s Reading Slaughter. I end the chapter by reflecting on the links between these publications; I introduce my own monograph, Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature, to tie together the review’s key ideas. In all of this I have tried not to impose a grand narrative on the books reviewed, nor isolate them as symptoms of broader ideological tendencies. Yet if there is an argument here it is this: animal studies continues to remind us that human–animal relations are not natural, timeless, or inevitable. They are historical. They can be transformed.
{"title":"Animal Studies","authors":"D. O’Key","doi":"10.1093/ywcct/mbad002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mbad002","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this chapter I survey, highlight, and critically reflect on recent work in animal studies, a field that continues to yield deeply researched scholarship and incisive works of critical and cultural theory, all in spite of its relative lack of institutional footholds. This is my first outing as a YWCCT reviewer, and so my ambition for this initial venture is modest. I wish, quite straightforwardly, to explore a handful of publications that caught my attention in 2022. I do not pretend to have a robust rationale for my criteria for inclusion. Instead, let me say that these are all publications that excited me in some way, that excited something in me, and that I believe will excite others too. I have divided the chapter into four sections: 1. ‘Living Machines of Imperialism’ examines two postcolonial animal histories, Saheed Aderinto’s Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa and Jonathan Saha’s Colonizing Animals; 2. ‘I Dream of Dogs’ briefly considers Lydia Pyne’s Endlings before focusing on Margret Grebowicz’s short book of cultural critique on dog ownership, Rescue Me; 3. ‘The Gay Frog Is the Opposite of the Gay Penguin’ turns to recent issues of Humanimalia and Green Letters, and a special section of Environmental Humanities, co-edited by Sarah Bezan and Ina Linge; and 4. ‘Inside the Slaughterhouse’ looks at recent publications in the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series, concentrating mostly on Sune Borkfelt’s Reading Slaughter. I end the chapter by reflecting on the links between these publications; I introduce my own monograph, Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature, to tie together the review’s key ideas. In all of this I have tried not to impose a grand narrative on the books reviewed, nor isolate them as symptoms of broader ideological tendencies. Yet if there is an argument here it is this: animal studies continues to remind us that human–animal relations are not natural, timeless, or inevitable. They are historical. They can be transformed.","PeriodicalId":35040,"journal":{"name":"Year''s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90583814","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter discusses three notable books concerning film theory that were published in 2022 which are particularly significant in what they reveal about the current understanding of form within the discipline. The chapter is divided into four sections: 1. Kyle Stevens (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory; 2. Eugenie Brinkema, Life-Destroying Diagrams; 3. Jordan Schonig, The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement. 4. Conclusion.
{"title":"Film Theory","authors":"Dominic Lash","doi":"10.1093/ywcct/mbad004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mbad004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This chapter discusses three notable books concerning film theory that were published in 2022 which are particularly significant in what they reveal about the current understanding of form within the discipline. The chapter is divided into four sections: 1. Kyle Stevens (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory; 2. Eugenie Brinkema, Life-Destroying Diagrams; 3. Jordan Schonig, The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement. 4. Conclusion.","PeriodicalId":35040,"journal":{"name":"Year''s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87903078","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract It’s a cliché, of course, to open an annual review by pointing out how the texts under discussion reflect our contemporary moment. And none of the books reviewed here are modish responses to passing scholarly fads. All speak first and foremost to concerns located at the very heart of the theatre medium itself: the imaginative construction of alternative shared worlds, and the exploration of our hopes and fears around modes of interpersonal touch and intimacy. So, forgive me just one brief reflection on how it is surely no coincidence that the books that intervene most excitingly and meaningfully in the scholarly field this year are also those that speak to some of the most pressing anxieties and desires in the broader world as well, in the wake of pandemic contagion, the #MeToo movement, a cost-of-living crisis, and continued dystopic crises in both the academic industry and in national and global politics. The first section of this chapter, ‘Utopia’, reviews three monographs that discuss the intersections between theatre, concepts of utopia and utopian thinking: Siân Adiseshiah’s Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre, Selina’s Busby’s Applied Theatre: A Pedagogy of Utopia and Ryan Claycomb’s In the Lurch: Verbatim Theater and the Crisis of Democratic Deliberation. The second section, ‘Touch and Intimacy’, reviews two books that cast an eye on questions of touch and intimacy onstage, from a contemporary practice-based and historical scholarly perspective respectively: Supporting Staged Intimacy: A Practical Guide for Theatre Creatives, Managers, and Crew, co-authored by Alexis Black and Tina M. Newhauser, and Alex MacConochie’s Staging Touch in Shakespeare’s England.
{"title":"Theatre and Performance","authors":"Hannah Simpson","doi":"10.1093/ywcct/mbad001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mbad001","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract It’s a cliché, of course, to open an annual review by pointing out how the texts under discussion reflect our contemporary moment. And none of the books reviewed here are modish responses to passing scholarly fads. All speak first and foremost to concerns located at the very heart of the theatre medium itself: the imaginative construction of alternative shared worlds, and the exploration of our hopes and fears around modes of interpersonal touch and intimacy. So, forgive me just one brief reflection on how it is surely no coincidence that the books that intervene most excitingly and meaningfully in the scholarly field this year are also those that speak to some of the most pressing anxieties and desires in the broader world as well, in the wake of pandemic contagion, the #MeToo movement, a cost-of-living crisis, and continued dystopic crises in both the academic industry and in national and global politics. The first section of this chapter, ‘Utopia’, reviews three monographs that discuss the intersections between theatre, concepts of utopia and utopian thinking: Siân Adiseshiah’s Utopian Drama: In Search of a Genre, Selina’s Busby’s Applied Theatre: A Pedagogy of Utopia and Ryan Claycomb’s In the Lurch: Verbatim Theater and the Crisis of Democratic Deliberation. The second section, ‘Touch and Intimacy’, reviews two books that cast an eye on questions of touch and intimacy onstage, from a contemporary practice-based and historical scholarly perspective respectively: Supporting Staged Intimacy: A Practical Guide for Theatre Creatives, Managers, and Crew, co-authored by Alexis Black and Tina M. Newhauser, and Alex MacConochie’s Staging Touch in Shakespeare’s England.","PeriodicalId":35040,"journal":{"name":"Year''s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136314173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This chapter provides an overview to central contributions to feminist theory published in 2022. It focuses on three topics around which many contributions congealed: (1) the relationship between transgender and feminist praxis; (2) ecofeminist approaches to violence; and finally (3) feminism’s entanglements with neoliberalism. The chapter outlines the contexts of the publications’ interventions and speculates about what might come next.
{"title":"Feminist Theory","authors":"S. Clare","doi":"10.1093/ywcct/mbad003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mbad003","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This chapter provides an overview to central contributions to feminist theory published in 2022. It focuses on three topics around which many contributions congealed: (1) the relationship between transgender and feminist praxis; (2) ecofeminist approaches to violence; and finally (3) feminism’s entanglements with neoliberalism. The chapter outlines the contexts of the publications’ interventions and speculates about what might come next.","PeriodicalId":35040,"journal":{"name":"Year''s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84056272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This review considers three monographs that use innovative archival recovery techniques to expand our understanding of the connections between the history of science and medicine and sociopolitical and cultural phenomena across the early modern period to the present. Divided into three sections, our review first considers Kalle Kananoja’s Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa: Medical Encounters, 1500–1850, which demonstrates the ways that Atlantic African healers resisted colonial influence and adapted their practices to reflect innovative uses of global plant-based medicines. Part 2 of this review, Black Reproductive Health, examines Sara Clarke Kaplan’s The Black Reproductive: Unfree Labor and Insurgent Motherhood, which, importantly, revises longstanding assumptions about the ways that we understand and document reproductive health and justice, especially in the American Black community. Part 3, ‘Healthy’ Eating, discusses Elizabeth A. Williams’s Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750–1950, which deconstructs the so-called connection between appetite and wellness in science and medicine. We have chosen to focus on these works both for the important new insights that they offer to the field of the history of science and because they each speak to contemporary crises in public health and health inequity that continue to affect our local and global landscapes. We suggest that works such as these have the capacity not only to expand our field but also to counteract narratives of white supremacy and other cultural beliefs that stigmatize and oppress; these works show us how expanding our understanding of the origins and current practices of medical knowledge beyond our traditional Western narratives can help provide healthier and more equitable forms of care and wellness.
这篇综述考虑了三本专著，它们使用创新的档案恢复技术来扩展我们对早期现代到现在的科学和医学史与社会政治和文化现象之间联系的理解。我们的评论分为三个部分，首先考虑Kalle Kananoja在大西洋非洲的治疗知识:医学遭遇，1500-1850，它展示了大西洋非洲的治疗师抵制殖民影响并调整他们的做法以反映全球植物性药物的创新使用的方式。这篇评论的第二部分，黑人生殖健康，研究了萨拉·克拉克·卡普兰的《黑人生殖:不自由的劳动和反叛的母性》，重要的是，它修正了长期以来关于我们理解和记录生殖健康和正义的方式的假设，特别是在美国黑人社区。第三部分，“健康”饮食，讨论Elizabeth A. Williams的胃口和它的不满:科学，医学和吃的冲动，1750-1950，解构了科学和医学中所谓的胃口和健康之间的联系。我们选择关注这些作品，既是因为它们为科学史领域提供了重要的新见解，也是因为它们都谈到了当代公共卫生危机和健康不平等，这些危机和不平等继续影响着我们的地方和全球景观。我们认为，这样的作品不仅可以扩展我们的研究领域，还可以抵制白人至上主义的叙事和其他侮辱和压迫的文化信仰;这些作品向我们展示了如何扩展我们对医学知识起源和当前实践的理解，超越我们传统的西方叙事，有助于提供更健康、更公平的护理和健康形式。
{"title":"Science and Medicine","authors":"A. Ramos, Danielle Spratt","doi":"10.1093/ywcct/mbac017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mbac017","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This review considers three monographs that use innovative archival recovery techniques to expand our understanding of the connections between the history of science and medicine and sociopolitical and cultural phenomena across the early modern period to the present. Divided into three sections, our review first considers Kalle Kananoja’s Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa: Medical Encounters, 1500–1850, which demonstrates the ways that Atlantic African healers resisted colonial influence and adapted their practices to reflect innovative uses of global plant-based medicines. Part 2 of this review, Black Reproductive Health, examines Sara Clarke Kaplan’s The Black Reproductive: Unfree Labor and Insurgent Motherhood, which, importantly, revises longstanding assumptions about the ways that we understand and document reproductive health and justice, especially in the American Black community. Part 3, ‘Healthy’ Eating, discusses Elizabeth A. Williams’s Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750–1950, which deconstructs the so-called connection between appetite and wellness in science and medicine. We have chosen to focus on these works both for the important new insights that they offer to the field of the history of science and because they each speak to contemporary crises in public health and health inequity that continue to affect our local and global landscapes. We suggest that works such as these have the capacity not only to expand our field but also to counteract narratives of white supremacy and other cultural beliefs that stigmatize and oppress; these works show us how expanding our understanding of the origins and current practices of medical knowledge beyond our traditional Western narratives can help provide healthier and more equitable forms of care and wellness.","PeriodicalId":35040,"journal":{"name":"Year''s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85791571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Much ecocriticism scholarship published in 2021 sought to tackle the question of environmental emergency. The work considered in this essay covers a considerable range of topics, temporalities, and spaces, ranging from British histories of industrial extraction to Canada’s polluted waterways in the present, and draws upon an array of disciplinary contexts, including work from literary theory, media studies, the environmental humanities, waste and discard studies, Black studies, feminist theory, and Indigenous studies. I examine works that suggest new ways of understanding our current ‘crisis’ through a reframing of timescales and an emphasis on infrastructures; works that think explicitly about extraction and extractivism by considering what critical and cultural theory can offer to help better conceptualize both the climate crisis and the structures of racial capitalism on which it is grounded; and works that employ and develop experimental, hybrid forms of creative-theoretical research methods, operating outside the bounds of what we might traditionally understand as ecocriticism. I conclude by suggesting that these experimental modes of theory exemplify how ecocriticism and the environmental humanities are increasingly turning to new forms to imagine possible routes out of contemporary intersecting crises. The essay is divided into four key sections: 1. Introduction: Code Red for Humanity; 2. The Colonial Logics and Infrastructures of Environmental Crisis; 3. Theorizing Extraction and Extractivism; 4. Finding New Forms.
{"title":"Ecocriticism","authors":"Rebecca Macklin","doi":"10.1093/ywcct/mbac016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mbac016","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Much ecocriticism scholarship published in 2021 sought to tackle the question of environmental emergency. The work considered in this essay covers a considerable range of topics, temporalities, and spaces, ranging from British histories of industrial extraction to Canada’s polluted waterways in the present, and draws upon an array of disciplinary contexts, including work from literary theory, media studies, the environmental humanities, waste and discard studies, Black studies, feminist theory, and Indigenous studies. I examine works that suggest new ways of understanding our current ‘crisis’ through a reframing of timescales and an emphasis on infrastructures; works that think explicitly about extraction and extractivism by considering what critical and cultural theory can offer to help better conceptualize both the climate crisis and the structures of racial capitalism on which it is grounded; and works that employ and develop experimental, hybrid forms of creative-theoretical research methods, operating outside the bounds of what we might traditionally understand as ecocriticism. I conclude by suggesting that these experimental modes of theory exemplify how ecocriticism and the environmental humanities are increasingly turning to new forms to imagine possible routes out of contemporary intersecting crises. The essay is divided into four key sections: 1. Introduction: Code Red for Humanity; 2. The Colonial Logics and Infrastructures of Environmental Crisis; 3. Theorizing Extraction and Extractivism; 4. Finding New Forms.","PeriodicalId":35040,"journal":{"name":"Year''s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87124816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The works reviewed in this year’s essay on the New Materialisms raise questions about the field’s orientation to knowledge creation and to its subjects of study, critiquing universalizing discussions of the Anthropocene, questioning notions of ‘pure’ or ‘pristine’ Nature, and proposing considerations for ethical and scholarly attention. Along the way, they touch on the problems of human ontology, employ the New Materialisms as a method for scholarship across the disciplines and for applied scholarly and creative work, raise the question of the New Materialisms’ political stakes (or lack thereof), and attempt to negotiate relationships between Western academic knowledge-making and other forms and situations of knowledge. Following an overview of these questions in the introduction, the essay is divided into four sections: 1. Utopia Now, focusing on Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds; 2. Clutter Culture, which discusses Rebecca R. Falkoff’s Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding; 3. National Dirt, on Mieka Erley’s On Russian Soil: Myth and Materiality; and 4. Cartographies of the Anthropocene, which considers Anna L Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou’s multimedia online project Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene.
在今年的《新唯物主义》文章中回顾的作品提出了关于该领域对知识创造及其研究主题的取向的问题，批评了对人类世的普遍化讨论，质疑了“纯粹”或“原始”自然的概念，并提出了伦理和学术关注的考虑。在此过程中，他们触及了人类本体论的问题，将新唯物主义作为跨学科学术研究和应用学术和创造性工作的一种方法，提出了新唯物主义的政治利害关系(或缺乏政治利害关系)的问题，并试图协商西方学术知识创造与其他形式和知识情境之间的关系。在引言中概述了这些问题之后，本文分为四个部分:1。《现在的乌托邦》——以杰娜·布朗的《黑人乌托邦:思辨生活与其他世界的音乐》为例2. 《杂乱文化》，讨论丽贝卡·r·福尔科夫的《占有:囤积的文化史》;3.。米卡·埃尔利的《俄罗斯土地:神话与物质性》;和4。《人类世的制图》，其中包括Anna L . Tsing、Jennifer Deger、Alder Keleman Saxena和菲菲周菲菲的多媒体在线项目《野生地图集:超越人类的人类世》。
{"title":"New Materialisms","authors":"Samuel Diener","doi":"10.1093/ywcct/mbac012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ywcct/mbac012","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The works reviewed in this year’s essay on the New Materialisms raise questions about the field’s orientation to knowledge creation and to its subjects of study, critiquing universalizing discussions of the Anthropocene, questioning notions of ‘pure’ or ‘pristine’ Nature, and proposing considerations for ethical and scholarly attention. Along the way, they touch on the problems of human ontology, employ the New Materialisms as a method for scholarship across the disciplines and for applied scholarly and creative work, raise the question of the New Materialisms’ political stakes (or lack thereof), and attempt to negotiate relationships between Western academic knowledge-making and other forms and situations of knowledge. Following an overview of these questions in the introduction, the essay is divided into four sections: 1. Utopia Now, focusing on Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds; 2. Clutter Culture, which discusses Rebecca R. Falkoff’s Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding; 3. National Dirt, on Mieka Erley’s On Russian Soil: Myth and Materiality; and 4. Cartographies of the Anthropocene, which considers Anna L Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou’s multimedia online project Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene.","PeriodicalId":35040,"journal":{"name":"Year''s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78711335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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