Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10232473
Daniel Ruiz-Serna
Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples often describe the harm caused by armed conflict in terms of damage inflicted on their traditional territories. To these peoples, the concept of territory makes reference not only to their lands but to a set of emplaced practices and relationships through which they share life with wider assemblages of human and other-than-human beings. It is the threat faced by these large communities of life that was invoked by Indigenous organizations when they succeeded in including the territory as a victim in the transitional justice framework recently implemented by the Colombian state. This article argues that the consideration of the territory as a victim means more than the full enjoyment of the land ownership rights Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples are entitled to. Instead, said consideration challenges some received notions regarding justice and reparation, particularly because war becomes an experience that extends beyond human losses and environmental degradation. The terms and practices mobilized by Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples compel us to examine the limits that concepts such as human rights, reparation, or even damage have in the understanding of war and its aftermath.
{"title":"Transitional Justice beyond the Human","authors":"Daniel Ruiz-Serna","doi":"10.1215/17432197-10232473","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-10232473","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples often describe the harm caused by armed conflict in terms of damage inflicted on their traditional territories. To these peoples, the concept of territory makes reference not only to their lands but to a set of emplaced practices and relationships through which they share life with wider assemblages of human and other-than-human beings. It is the threat faced by these large communities of life that was invoked by Indigenous organizations when they succeeded in including the territory as a victim in the transitional justice framework recently implemented by the Colombian state. This article argues that the consideration of the territory as a victim means more than the full enjoyment of the land ownership rights Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples are entitled to. Instead, said consideration challenges some received notions regarding justice and reparation, particularly because war becomes an experience that extends beyond human losses and environmental degradation. The terms and practices mobilized by Indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples compel us to examine the limits that concepts such as human rights, reparation, or even damage have in the understanding of war and its aftermath.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75400394","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10232487
Ravi Agarwal, Janet Laurence, D. G. Brooks
{"title":"Evocations of Multispecies Justice","authors":"Ravi Agarwal, Janet Laurence, D. G. Brooks","doi":"10.1215/17432197-10232487","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-10232487","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76011994","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10232502
Sria Chatterjee
This essay considers a series of examples of contemporary and early twentieth-century artistic projects done in collaboration and conversation with plant scientists around the theme of plant sentience. In particular, it zooms in on the work of the Indian biophysicist Jadagish Chandra Bose and the Indian artist Gaganendranath Tagore in the 1920s and the Italian plant scientist Stephano Mancuso and German artist Carsten Höller in the 2020s. The essay has four interconnected aims. The first is to investigate how and why plant sentience is visually and spatially represented by artists. The second is to show through two broad examples how plant science can be and has been co-opted to serve different political, economic, and ideological positions. The third and broader aim of this essay is to counter a widespread ethical assertion in environmental humanities and animal studies that destabilizing human-nonhuman binaries intrinsically lends itself to projects of environmental justice by encouraging humans to coexist more equitably with other species. In other words, we should not assume that artistic production is spontaneously aligned to ethics of multispecies justice. The fourth and concluding aim is to make the related argument that plant sentience and other ways of knowing and relating across species need to be understood within the context of colonial and extractive histories.
{"title":"Political Plants","authors":"Sria Chatterjee","doi":"10.1215/17432197-10232502","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-10232502","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay considers a series of examples of contemporary and early twentieth-century artistic projects done in collaboration and conversation with plant scientists around the theme of plant sentience. In particular, it zooms in on the work of the Indian biophysicist Jadagish Chandra Bose and the Indian artist Gaganendranath Tagore in the 1920s and the Italian plant scientist Stephano Mancuso and German artist Carsten Höller in the 2020s. The essay has four interconnected aims. The first is to investigate how and why plant sentience is visually and spatially represented by artists. The second is to show through two broad examples how plant science can be and has been co-opted to serve different political, economic, and ideological positions. The third and broader aim of this essay is to counter a widespread ethical assertion in environmental humanities and animal studies that destabilizing human-nonhuman binaries intrinsically lends itself to projects of environmental justice by encouraging humans to coexist more equitably with other species. In other words, we should not assume that artistic production is spontaneously aligned to ethics of multispecies justice. The fourth and concluding aim is to make the related argument that plant sentience and other ways of knowing and relating across species need to be understood within the context of colonial and extractive histories.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88132401","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10232516
S. Reid
The continued campaign of violence by extractivists against multibeing relations, embodied beings, and ecological living is bewildering. Coded by mastery, and as a carrier of its values, international laws of the sea facilitate these campaigns by legitimating ecological abuse. As such, responding to the ocean's declining conditions with more laws and regulations alone misses how underlying cultural values contribute to the production of ecological harm. This article considers how the imaginary of mastery underpinning dominant ocean governance regimes enables the production and distribution of vulnerability. Thinking with the ocean reveals how anthropogenic harms manifest and proliferate both materially and through the discursive networks of ocean governance. Though material vulnerability is a condition that brings us into being interconnectedly with other worlds, it also (unevenly) implicates us in ocean harm. This article draws on feminist posthumanist, legal, and marine scientific work to examine these issues in the context of an emerging concept of ocean justice, in which the conditions for cohabiting well with the seas might be imagined and activated.
{"title":"Ocean Justice","authors":"S. Reid","doi":"10.1215/17432197-10232516","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-10232516","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The continued campaign of violence by extractivists against multibeing relations, embodied beings, and ecological living is bewildering. Coded by mastery, and as a carrier of its values, international laws of the sea facilitate these campaigns by legitimating ecological abuse. As such, responding to the ocean's declining conditions with more laws and regulations alone misses how underlying cultural values contribute to the production of ecological harm. This article considers how the imaginary of mastery underpinning dominant ocean governance regimes enables the production and distribution of vulnerability. Thinking with the ocean reveals how anthropogenic harms manifest and proliferate both materially and through the discursive networks of ocean governance. Though material vulnerability is a condition that brings us into being interconnectedly with other worlds, it also (unevenly) implicates us in ocean harm. This article draws on feminist posthumanist, legal, and marine scientific work to examine these issues in the context of an emerging concept of ocean justice, in which the conditions for cohabiting well with the seas might be imagined and activated.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81954191","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10232544
H. Singer
Abstract:This essay is a broken elemental thing composed of cuts, by which is meant outtakes. Outtakes are scenes or sequences that never make it into a film. The scenes collected here have been retrieved from the cutting floor of the editing suite in its author’s mind and reassembled in ways that hold onto an ambitious claim—to think of narrative cuts and silences as interruptive forces in the operation of writing and the imaginative rendering of the abattoir. Working with outtakes helps the author approach, in a new way, questions the author has been exploring for a while now: How can writers critically respond to the existence of abattoirs? What strategies might writers engage to render normalized forms of violence against animals strange and even intolerable through particularly literary practices, strategies, and generic forms? Literally, caesura means “cutting.” It evokes pause. Space for breath, for detours in modes of multispecies literary representation. If the line—working on the assembly line and writing a certain kind of poetic line—is an orientation that draws literature and the abattoir together, as Joseph Ponthus’s autofictional poem essay On the Line: Notes from a Factory (2021) suggests, this essay also suggests that the slash is an allied critical-creative orientation that equally requires engagement.
{"title":"Meditations on Writing Hell","authors":"H. Singer","doi":"10.1215/17432197-10232544","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-10232544","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay is a broken elemental thing composed of cuts, by which is meant outtakes. Outtakes are scenes or sequences that never make it into a film. The scenes collected here have been retrieved from the cutting floor of the editing suite in its author’s mind and reassembled in ways that hold onto an ambitious claim—to think of narrative cuts and silences as interruptive forces in the operation of writing and the imaginative rendering of the abattoir. Working with outtakes helps the author approach, in a new way, questions the author has been exploring for a while now: How can writers critically respond to the existence of abattoirs? What strategies might writers engage to render normalized forms of violence against animals strange and even intolerable through particularly literary practices, strategies, and generic forms? Literally, caesura means “cutting.” It evokes pause. Space for breath, for detours in modes of multispecies literary representation. If the line—working on the assembly line and writing a certain kind of poetic line—is an orientation that draws literature and the abattoir together, as Joseph Ponthus’s autofictional poem essay On the Line: Notes from a Factory (2021) suggests, this essay also suggests that the slash is an allied critical-creative orientation that equally requires engagement.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75382891","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10232459
C. Winter
Abstract:Multispecies justice is a developing field—or perhaps more accurately, a set of fields. It draws together a range of academic disciplines to examine human and nonhuman relationships. These include relationships of respect, responsibility, and, to some, reciprocity. The extent of those relationships and the range of species, forms, and being to be included, however, remains indistinct and variable. Whereas within traditional theories of justice concern for other beings remains tied to the desire to enhance human experience, life opportunities, goods, and virtues, the call to multispecies justice is motivated by the recognition that the nonhuman realm has intrinsic value and values. This article’s argument is that given the relative infancy of multispecies justice as a field of study in the Western academy, there is an opportunity to ensure that it examines not only how to avoid damaging domination of the nonhuman realm but also the ongoing colonial domination of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. The article does not suggest an appropriation of Indigenous knowledge but rather an exploration of ways in which the field may remain sufficiently nuanced and open to accommodate multiple epistemological and ontological framings of theory. Drawing from Mātauranga Māori the article discusses an aspect of that decolonial project—why the scope of multispecies justice needs to be open to all planetary being and all time.
{"title":"Unearthing the Time/Space/Matter of Multispecies Justice","authors":"C. Winter","doi":"10.1215/17432197-10232459","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-10232459","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Multispecies justice is a developing field—or perhaps more accurately, a set of fields. It draws together a range of academic disciplines to examine human and nonhuman relationships. These include relationships of respect, responsibility, and, to some, reciprocity. The extent of those relationships and the range of species, forms, and being to be included, however, remains indistinct and variable. Whereas within traditional theories of justice concern for other beings remains tied to the desire to enhance human experience, life opportunities, goods, and virtues, the call to multispecies justice is motivated by the recognition that the nonhuman realm has intrinsic value and values. This article’s argument is that given the relative infancy of multispecies justice as a field of study in the Western academy, there is an opportunity to ensure that it examines not only how to avoid damaging domination of the nonhuman realm but also the ongoing colonial domination of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. The article does not suggest an appropriation of Indigenous knowledge but rather an exploration of ways in which the field may remain sufficiently nuanced and open to accommodate multiple epistemological and ontological framings of theory. Drawing from Mātauranga Māori the article discusses an aspect of that decolonial project—why the scope of multispecies justice needs to be open to all planetary being and all time.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86665886","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10232445
Astrida Neimanis
How can we cultivate an underground multispecies justice with beings whose lifeworlds are unknown and unknowable? This article examines this question through a consideration of stygofauna: miniscule deep-time creatures who make their home in the watery seams of the earth. Taking a cue from these critters—many of whom have evolved without eyes to make their way differently in the darkness of their watery subterranean homes—the article troubles the assumption that knowledge, care, and justice must be predicated on a kind of knowing that insists that humans literally bring other worlds to light. Through a specifically situated exploration of stygofaunal worlds, knowledge, and mining in Australia, the article asks, How is knowledge-as-illumination complicit with complex regimes of knowledge where knowing in the name of justice is tangled up in knowing as a further (colonial, speciesist, ableist) violence? Refusing purity politics, the article's first aim is to demonstrate our complicity with extractive knowledge regimes even in a quest to care for underground worlds. Second, the article insists that knowing otherwise is both possible and already at work. It argues that to know stygofauna otherwise, one cannot eschew science or knowledge altogether. Instead, it proposes that multispecies justice depends on two moves: first, on safeguarding a mode of unknowability that the article refers to as estrangement, and second, on recognizing and cultivating knowledge practices that can cultivate nonextractive relations with subterranean species, even if imperfectly. It concludes with a short overview of several examples of knowing otherwise that push readers to think differently about knowledge as a practice of care and justice.
{"title":"Stygofaunal Worlds","authors":"Astrida Neimanis","doi":"10.1215/17432197-10232445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-10232445","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 How can we cultivate an underground multispecies justice with beings whose lifeworlds are unknown and unknowable? This article examines this question through a consideration of stygofauna: miniscule deep-time creatures who make their home in the watery seams of the earth. Taking a cue from these critters—many of whom have evolved without eyes to make their way differently in the darkness of their watery subterranean homes—the article troubles the assumption that knowledge, care, and justice must be predicated on a kind of knowing that insists that humans literally bring other worlds to light. Through a specifically situated exploration of stygofaunal worlds, knowledge, and mining in Australia, the article asks, How is knowledge-as-illumination complicit with complex regimes of knowledge where knowing in the name of justice is tangled up in knowing as a further (colonial, speciesist, ableist) violence? Refusing purity politics, the article's first aim is to demonstrate our complicity with extractive knowledge regimes even in a quest to care for underground worlds. Second, the article insists that knowing otherwise is both possible and already at work. It argues that to know stygofauna otherwise, one cannot eschew science or knowledge altogether. Instead, it proposes that multispecies justice depends on two moves: first, on safeguarding a mode of unknowability that the article refers to as estrangement, and second, on recognizing and cultivating knowledge practices that can cultivate nonextractive relations with subterranean species, even if imperfectly. It concludes with a short overview of several examples of knowing otherwise that push readers to think differently about knowledge as a practice of care and justice.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83269984","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}
Pub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-10232530
D. Nassar, M. Barbour
This article develops the notion of the “embodied history of trees” and articulates its conceptual and ethical implications. It demonstrates how trees literally embody their environment in their very structure and argues that trees express their environments in the deepest, most responsive, and most immediate way. The article then moves to consider how trees fundamentally shape their environment, showing that just as trees are expressions of their contexts, so their contexts are expressions of the trees. By highlighting the deep reciprocity between trees and their environments, the article raises crucial questions about the usual modes of conceptualizing the relation between organism and environment, and points to the ways in which environmental ethics remains largely wedded to these problematic conceptualizations. It concludes by developing environmental ethical concepts in light of the embodied history of trees, noting how these concepts challenge assumptions within mainstream environmental ethics, while extending the insights of deep ecology, ecofeminism, and Indigenous relational ethics in illuminating ways.
{"title":"Tree Stories","authors":"D. Nassar, M. Barbour","doi":"10.1215/17432197-10232530","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-10232530","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article develops the notion of the “embodied history of trees” and articulates its conceptual and ethical implications. It demonstrates how trees literally embody their environment in their very structure and argues that trees express their environments in the deepest, most responsive, and most immediate way. The article then moves to consider how trees fundamentally shape their environment, showing that just as trees are expressions of their contexts, so their contexts are expressions of the trees. By highlighting the deep reciprocity between trees and their environments, the article raises crucial questions about the usual modes of conceptualizing the relation between organism and environment, and points to the ways in which environmental ethics remains largely wedded to these problematic conceptualizations. It concludes by developing environmental ethical concepts in light of the embodied history of trees, noting how these concepts challenge assumptions within mainstream environmental ethics, while extending the insights of deep ecology, ecofeminism, and Indigenous relational ethics in illuminating ways.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78707954","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1215/17432197-9964773
Amelyn Ng
Abstract:This essay contemplates the media histories and politics of the digital twin: an accurate three-dimensional model designed to offer data-based simulation, predictive capability, and remote control over a material entity. Currently being developed across the spheres of industry, design, and “smart city” governance, digital twins are “digital-physical” databases purporting not only to represent the appearance of an object but also to capture or simulate all changes to its physical and informatic state, down to the bolt or data point. What are the media histories and stakes of a real-time digital simulation of the world? What of the desire to imitate the physical world in fully machine-readable form? Through three episodes that contribute to the technological imaginary of the twin—the digital factory, the “smart” building model, and the 3D “dashboard” city—it shows how contemporary simulations do not simply reflect reality or create fictional ones but are committed to remaking reality over and over again—each time with greater efficiency, oversight, and predictability.
{"title":"From Models to Mirror Worlds","authors":"Amelyn Ng","doi":"10.1215/17432197-9964773","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-9964773","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay contemplates the media histories and politics of the digital twin: an accurate three-dimensional model designed to offer data-based simulation, predictive capability, and remote control over a material entity. Currently being developed across the spheres of industry, design, and “smart city” governance, digital twins are “digital-physical” databases purporting not only to represent the appearance of an object but also to capture or simulate all changes to its physical and informatic state, down to the bolt or data point. What are the media histories and stakes of a real-time digital simulation of the world? What of the desire to imitate the physical world in fully machine-readable form? Through three episodes that contribute to the technological imaginary of the twin—the digital factory, the “smart” building model, and the 3D “dashboard” city—it shows how contemporary simulations do not simply reflect reality or create fictional ones but are committed to remaking reality over and over again—each time with greater efficiency, oversight, and predictability.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78865945","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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