Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10943177
Dave Wilson
This article reflects on the participation of humans and other species as listening and sounding entities in creating sonic environments. The article offers a preliminary reflexive consideration of the author’s current composition-improvisation project, discussing how the project’s pieces transform and transport particular sonic environments of the author’s experience to new settings. The author meditates through birdsong on what it sounds like to compose, improvise, and perform with the sonic affordances of our surroundings. The article suggests that extensions of interspecies and interhuman acoustic assemblages and sonic affordances in composition and improvisation can bring overlapping elements of world-making projects into focus and open up potentialities for new ones. In the article, the author blends reflection with musical description and analysis of one of the project’s pieces, refusing to situate nature as other and rejecting a posture that uses nonhuman sound for personal (human) benefit. By focusing on the edge effects of the overlapping world-making projects at the site of the Zealandia Te Mārā a Tāne Wildlife Sanctuary in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, and on challenging settler colonial listening practices, the article reflects on the implications of sharing spaces with other humans and with countless species beyond our own.
本文探讨了人类和其他物种作为听觉和发声实体参与创造声学环境的问题。文章对作者目前的作曲-即兴创作项目进行了初步的反思性思考，讨论了该项目中的作品如何将作者经验中的特定声学环境转变和转移到新的环境中。作者通过鸟鸣沉思了利用周围环境的声学能力进行作曲、即兴创作和表演的感觉。文章认为，在作曲和即兴表演中扩展物种间和人类间的声学组合和声学能力，可以使世界创造项目的重叠元素成为焦点，并为新项目开辟潜力。在这篇文章中，作者将反思与音乐描述相结合，并分析了该项目中的一首作品，拒绝将自然视为他者，也拒绝为了个人（人类）利益而使用非人类声音的姿态。通过关注新西兰奥特亚罗瓦惠灵顿 Te Whanganuia-Tara Wellington 的 Zealandia Te Mārā a Tāne 野生动物保护区内重叠的世界创造项目的边缘效应，以及挑战殖民定居者的聆听实践，文章反思了与其他人类和我们以外的无数物种共享空间的意义。
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Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10943137
Jane Robbins Mize
This article argues that Lorine Niedecker’s 1968 poem “Lake Superior” reveals a limitation of recent scholarly investments in the concept of geological “deep time.” “Lake Superior” is a meditation on deep time; the Europeans who colonized the Great Lakes; and Lake Superior’s assemblage of rocks, bodies, and bodies of water across timescales. In analyzing Niedecker’s poem alongside her research notes, this article claims that, even as the speaker’s invocation of deep time troubles settler-colonialist historical narratives, she nevertheless remains mired in what Mark Rifkin calls “settler time.” The poem’s geological timescale fails to liberate the speaker from a settler-colonialist representation of and relation to the environment. While many scholars contend that deep time offers an alternative to anthropocentrism, this article argues that deep time is also a colonialist construct that can reinforce harmful Western epistemologies and obscure non-white ways of relating to the environment. Indigenous scholarship and activism offer alternative timescales that might allow us to care for the environment without minimizing the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman beings, without relying on settler-colonialist logics, and while centering Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty.
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Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10943105
Tim Watson
This essay analyzes Miami as a place where plants are a major component of urban infrastructure. The centrality of tropical plants to the growth of Miami connects that city to the history of empire, where control of plant matter was the violent model for the standardization and distribution practices of modern infrastructure. In Miami, the US Department of Agriculture established a Plant Introduction Garden in 1898, with “Agricultural Explorer” David Fairchild activating networks connecting India, Kew Gardens, and Washington to bring mostly Asian tropical fruits, shrubs, and flowers to South Florida. A close reading of archives of botanical gardens, plant nurseries, and community organizations shows that Miami plant infrastructure was created jointly by these elite political/scientific networks and by vernacular, informal networks of Black labor migration and horticultural know-how. The essay focuses on the cultivation of Miami’s best-known plant product, the Haden mango, and the vital role in its propagation played by Black Bahamian gardener Nathan Sands, whose letters to his employer David Fairchild are preserved in the latter’s papers. Recovering the stories of people like Nathan Sands is vital to understanding the development of a global metropolis whose plant infrastructure erased the Black horticultural work on which it depended.
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Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10943089
Emma Blackett
This article discusses the settler-colonial femininity at work in two films that foreground the Pacific Ocean, Blue Crush (John Stockwell, 2002) and The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993). With these film readings it offers a critique of the feminist new materialist turn toward water. The feminist hydrological turn aims to amplify the oceanic sensorium’s potential to dissolve the always-already-illusory boundedness of Western subjectivity into a recognition of watery enmeshment, and it aligns, though does not often directly engage, with Indigenous Pacific and trans-Pacific anti-colonial hydropolitics. This article brings feminist hydrological writing into conversation with psychoanalysis and explains that blue crush cinema has the following elements and functions: (1) it tells of a settler woman with a powerful draw toward the water—here crush is polyvalent; (2) the ocean is at once literal and psychic; (3) the film camera allows water’s diffractive animacy to distort human form, a distortion that hydrological feminists associate with dissolving Western subjectivity, and that psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva associates with “oceanic feeling”; but (4), in the end, the blue crush enables the settler woman to return to colonial work. This final function has critical implications for feminist readings of water, which, as this article’s central speculation goes, may work paradoxically to recuperate Western thought.
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Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10943097
Colin Hoag
Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar chronicles prize-winning college student Esther Greenwood’s descent into melancholy and attempted suicide. An emerging writer, Esther sees clearly the paths available to her under 1950s US patriarchy: homemaker or eccentric intellectual. Each on its own is untenable, and choosing one precludes the other. The bell jar metaphor conjures a sense of confinement and suffocation, but this essay offers a multispecies reading that shows why such an interpretation is too narrow. The essay looks carefully at the bell jar, its function within her story, and the context within which Plath encountered it, namely, as a student of botany at Smith College conducting lab exercises on photosynthesis using the South African silverleaf geranium (Pelargonium sidoides). Through archival research on Plath and botanical instruction at the college, the essay shows that the bell jars Plath used were not tools of oppression. Rather, they were tools for growing plants from faraway places that require higher atmospheric humidity: technologies for making dislocated life possible. Plath’s cross-species encounters with exotic plants at the conservatory were critical to her conception of life as a woman under patriarchy—like the silverleaf geranium, living in a world not built for her.
{"title":"The Bell Jars","authors":"Colin Hoag","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10943097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10943097","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar chronicles prize-winning college student Esther Greenwood’s descent into melancholy and attempted suicide. An emerging writer, Esther sees clearly the paths available to her under 1950s US patriarchy: homemaker or eccentric intellectual. Each on its own is untenable, and choosing one precludes the other. The bell jar metaphor conjures a sense of confinement and suffocation, but this essay offers a multispecies reading that shows why such an interpretation is too narrow. The essay looks carefully at the bell jar, its function within her story, and the context within which Plath encountered it, namely, as a student of botany at Smith College conducting lab exercises on photosynthesis using the South African silverleaf geranium (Pelargonium sidoides). Through archival research on Plath and botanical instruction at the college, the essay shows that the bell jars Plath used were not tools of oppression. Rather, they were tools for growing plants from faraway places that require higher atmospheric humidity: technologies for making dislocated life possible. Plath’s cross-species encounters with exotic plants at the conservatory were critical to her conception of life as a woman under patriarchy—like the silverleaf geranium, living in a world not built for her.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140402995","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 : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10943121
Yen Vu
Exiled writer Dương Thu Hương is one of the most renowned contemporary female writers of Vietnam, famed also for her criticism of the Communist Party. In her works The Zenith (2007) and Paradise of the Blind (1993), translated and published abroad, she uses the recurring themes of excess and deficit to comment on the political deterioration of the state, a tragic reality that began just years after gaining independence from France. The hunger that ravages the villages is countered by the ironic gluttony of ghosts, and the performative asceticism practiced by party members only masks the actual greed underlying their political decisions. On one level, this article examines how the politics of excess, playing with different human virtues and vices, reveals a deep irony in the governing systems of Vietnam and the rhetoric of independence. On another, it also points out how Duong Thu Huong uses karmic energy as a narrative force which mercilessly punishes, humiliates, and educates, ultimately promising a restoration of equilibrium. The article argues that ecocritical engagements with Southeast Asian literature must take into account both a natural and supernatural understanding of the environment. This leads to new understandings of diaspora and spiritual allegiances to the homeland that are especially pertinent for the Vietnamese community abroad.
流亡女作家 Dương Thu Hương 是越南当代最著名的女作家之一，也因批评共产党而闻名。她的作品《天顶》（The Zenith，2007 年）和《盲人天堂》（Paradise of the Blind，1993 年）被翻译成多种语言并在国外出版，在这两部作品中，她以反复出现的 "过剩 "和 "赤字 "为主题，对国家政治恶化进行了评论。肆虐村庄的饥饿被鬼魂讽刺性的贪婪所反衬，而党员们表演性的禁欲主义只是掩盖了他们政治决策背后的实际贪婪。本文从一个层面探讨了过度政治如何玩弄人类不同的美德和恶习，揭示了越南执政制度和独立言论中的深刻讽刺。另一方面，文章还指出 Duong Thu Huong 如何将业力作为一种叙事力量，无情地惩罚、羞辱和教育，最终承诺恢复平衡。文章认为，对东南亚文学的生态批评必须考虑到对环境的自然和超自然理解。这将导致对散居地和对故乡的精神忠诚的新理解，这对海外越南社区尤为重要。
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Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10943113
Aparajita Majumdar
This article analyzes how a failed rubber crop from the plantations of British India became indispensable to the shaping of Indigenous ecologies in the India-Bangladesh borderlands. While a growing scholarship focuses on plants that became profitable within plantation histories, this article instead shows that failed commodity crops like Ficus elastica, locally known as Jri Bamon in Meghalaya, India, exhibited recalcitrance to a range of state and scientific regimes. In an argument that disrupts the European-centered narrative about the triumphant expansion of knowledge and territory, the author introduces “recalcitrance” as an interspecies co-laboring between humans and plants, unknowable through botanical and capitalist practices emerging in a colonial context. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, the article first studies the nineteenth-century colonial frontier in Assam in British India, where Jri Bamon was molded as a rubber crop in the plantation regimes. Second, it studies the present-day Indigenous ecologies of the Khasi Hills in Meghalaya, near India’s international border with Bangladesh, where this tree is historically grown as an infrastructure of mobility, called the living root bridge. The recalcitrant materiality of Jri Bamon surfaces through each of these human-plant encounters, providing pathways for those who would engage with it on its own terms.
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Pub Date : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10943169
Kaitlin Stack Whitney, Kristoffer Whitney
Field guides have been a vital part of biology disciplines for centuries. This article focuses on recent pedagogical innovations in biological fieldwork, in fields such as entomology and ecology—specifically, the creation of informal field guide photographs that depict insects as ecologists-in-training are most likely to encounter them: dead and squished on cards, in nets, and on other types of insect traps. This article examines the training of ecology technicians to identify collected insects in the field and the laboratory. Technicians (whether students or volunteers) are trained to the squished reference images, with the goal of improving their insect identification skills and aid in ecological knowledge production. Using this empirical example, the article argues that squished bugs more importantly represent a pedagogical opportunity to instill an ethical reflexivity in field technicians operating well outside of academic environmental humanities circles. Drawing on multispecies studies’ (and its animal studies antecedents’) focus on environmental ethics, as well as the scant but growing attention to “unloved others” like invertebrates, squished bugs are used as a way of reckoning with the destruction and deformation of life for the sake of conservation knowledge and, as Donna Haraway has suggested, “staying with the trouble” of killing insects.
{"title":"Squished Bugs","authors":"Kaitlin Stack Whitney, Kristoffer Whitney","doi":"10.1215/22011919-10943169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10943169","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Field guides have been a vital part of biology disciplines for centuries. This article focuses on recent pedagogical innovations in biological fieldwork, in fields such as entomology and ecology—specifically, the creation of informal field guide photographs that depict insects as ecologists-in-training are most likely to encounter them: dead and squished on cards, in nets, and on other types of insect traps. This article examines the training of ecology technicians to identify collected insects in the field and the laboratory. Technicians (whether students or volunteers) are trained to the squished reference images, with the goal of improving their insect identification skills and aid in ecological knowledge production. Using this empirical example, the article argues that squished bugs more importantly represent a pedagogical opportunity to instill an ethical reflexivity in field technicians operating well outside of academic environmental humanities circles. Drawing on multispecies studies’ (and its animal studies antecedents’) focus on environmental ethics, as well as the scant but growing attention to “unloved others” like invertebrates, squished bugs are used as a way of reckoning with the destruction and deformation of life for the sake of conservation knowledge and, as Donna Haraway has suggested, “staying with the trouble” of killing insects.","PeriodicalId":46497,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Humanities","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.3,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140399306","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 : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1215/22011919-10943081
Susanne Ferwerda
The cultural study of water has seen a prismatic shift toward the color blue. This is often articulated as a move away from the terrestrial focus of green ecologies and environmentalism, toward blue aquatic inquiries. What happens when green becomes blue and the blue humanities take shape under the umbrella of the environmental humanities? This article examines the blue humanities to argue that its blues address colonial inheritances and critique colonial desires. Blue has long appealed to the colonial imaginary; it drew European ships across the seas to mine blue pigment from Afghan rocks and raise indigo plantations on stolen land, with stolen labor. The article analyzes the lapis lazuli series by Dutch artist Pieter Paul Pothoven and the performance of the poem “Unity” by Aotearoa New Zealand poet Selina Tusitala Marsh. Pothoven’s work shows how blue analysis accounts for the fact that the color blue has built empires, taken lives, and altered environments. Marsh’s poetry and presence in the heart of the British Empire visualizes blue resistance against imperial power and the persistent defiance of colonization in the Pacific region. The article argues that blue transoceanic European and Pacific colonial connections become disarticulated in the blue humanities and their aquatic encounters.
对水的文化研究出现了向蓝色的多棱镜转变。这通常被表述为从关注陆地的绿色生态和环境主义转向蓝色的水生研究。当绿色变成蓝色，蓝色人文学科在环境人文学科的保护伞下成形时，会发生什么呢？本文通过对蓝色人文学科的研究，论证了蓝色人文学科对殖民遗产的处理和对殖民欲望的批判。长期以来，蓝色一直吸引着殖民想象；它吸引着欧洲船只漂洋过海，从阿富汗的岩石中开采蓝色颜料，并用偷来的劳动力在偷来的土地上建立蓝靛种植园。文章分析了荷兰艺术家皮特-保罗-波托文（Pieter Paul Pothoven）的青金石系列作品，以及奥特亚罗瓦新西兰诗人塞琳娜-图西塔拉-马什（Selina Tusitala Marsh）的诗作《团结》。Pothoven 的作品展示了对蓝色的分析是如何说明蓝色曾建立帝国、夺走生命和改变环境这一事实的。马什的诗歌和她在大英帝国中心的存在将蓝色对帝国权力的反抗和太平洋地区对殖民化的持续反抗形象化。文章认为，蓝色跨洋的欧洲和太平洋殖民联系在蓝色人文及其水上遭遇中变得支离破碎。
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