Session: 1b
Time: 11.15–13.00
Room: JK2–3 0.19
Chair: José Manuel Marrero Henríquez
Estelle Krewiss (University of Münster), “‘They can disappear just like that:’ Contact by the Shore from Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea to Eva Saulitis’ Into Great Silence”
Abstract: The shoreline is a contact zone, where ecosystems and species encounter one another. However, it is also a place of instability, increasingly shaped by the ecological crisis where human and nonhuman vulnerabilities intersect. This presentation examines two works of nonfiction by marine biologists—Rachel Carson’s The Edge of the Sea (1951) and Eva Saulitis’ memoir Into Great Silence (2013)—to explore how each author engages with the shore and its nonhuman inhabitants and, through Saulitis’ later example, environmental instability. Integrating the Blue Humanities with Affective Ecocriticism, this presentation draws on Mary Louise Pratt’s theorization of contact zones as places of meeting and transformation, and Donna Haraway’s staying with the trouble, to reframe shorelines as places that present forms of nonhuman resistance. While Affective Ecocriticism often centers on relations that only come to light when lost—or are on the verge of being lost—such a focus risks overlooking what is alive. Through an analysis of Carson’s early example of attentiveness to intertidal life, to Saulitis’ recounting the lasting impact of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill on a local orca population—the Chugach transients—I ask: What forms of contact emerge by the shore, and how do they challenge human ways of knowing? In this shifting space, both authors present nonhumans as active presences grounded in the shore’s complex dynamics. Their work models an epistemic humility and ethics of attentiveness—a way of being-with that recognizes the limits of human knowledge as well as the possibilities emerging from staying present to what is alive. The shore they write of offers a vision of relationality marked by presence, estrangement, and open-endedness.
Bio: Estelle E. E. Krewiss is a PhD student in American Studies at the University of Münster. Her dissertation, titled: Feeling Blue? Environmental Change and Emotional Responses by the Shore in Contemporary U.S. Literature, investigates the cultural significance of shorelines as complex sites of encounters and affective diversity—beyond grief—in the context of ecological crises. Drawing from the blue humanities and affective ecocriticism, it highlights how the shore offers fresh perspectives on ecological resilience and relationality.
Mohammed Afsal (Jamia Millia Islamia), “Archipelagic Assemblages: Decolonial Ecologies and Multispecies Resistance in Contemporary Fiction”
Abstract: Building on Édouard Glissant’s notion of Relation, archipelagic studies emerge as an interdisciplinary framework for spatializing connections across scales and dimensions. For Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor, its key strength lies in challenging fixed boundaries, (2004) Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor (2004) emphasize its challenge to fixed boundaries, while Jenny R. Isaacs characterizes the archipelago as at once a geographical formation, a site of multispecies encounter, a metaphor of interconnection, a topology of power, a socioecological assemblage, and a spatial ontology—altogether a “multiscalar, multispecies, multidimensional assemblage” (2020). Drawing on posthumanism, new materialism, environmental philosophy, multispecies studies, and political ecology, recent scholarship foregrounds the archipelago as an analytic lens for studying multispecies entanglements, decolonial ecologies, and planetary interdependence, underscoring its vitality for reimagining histories, confronting present socioenvironmental crises, and envisioning just futures.
Examining contemporary fictions such as Richard Powers’ Playground (2024), Rivers Solomon’s The Deep (2019), Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), J. M. Ledgard’s Submergence (2011), Linda Hogan’s People of the Whale (2008), Zakes Mda’s The Whale Caller (2005), and Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider (1987), where marine flora and fauna—from plankton to cetaceans—emerge as agential and expressive forces, this paper looks how the potential of archipelagic thinking is materialised across literary studies. Through these narratives that depict oceans and oceanic beings as agential and expressive, intervening in, disrupting, or resisting human projects such as extractive capitalism and colonial violence, this paper will foreground the ocean as a site of insurgency, where multispecies collectivities challenge human exceptionalism and enact visions of coexistence grounded in care, reciprocity, and resilience.
By situating these literary works within the intersecting fields of critical posthumanism, archipelagic/blue humanities, and decolonial/postcolonial ecology, I show how they mobilize the archipelago as both metaphor and material assemblage to not only critique ecological injustice and imagining alternative futures, but also to extend the scope of the “orca uprising” beyond singular spectacles of nonhuman resistance, toward a broader ethic of solidarity and survival across scales, histories, and species.
Bio: Mohammed Afsal holds a Master’s Degree in English from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, along with a Junior Research Fellowship certification. He is currently in search for a prospective PhD position and is independent researcher in Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, Anthropocene and Climate Change, New Materialisms and Posthumanisms, Blue (Oceanic) Imaginaries, Contemporary Anglophone Literature, World Ecologies and Literatures.
Belén González Morales (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), “Breathing, Poetizing, and Archipelagic Thinking”
Abstract: The Poetics of breathing explores relationships among diverse literary manifestations, recognizing that all artistic expressions –from those inspired by indigenous oral cultures to those rooted in Western technologized literate cultures– breathe in unison with the Earth and its temporal-spatial regularities. This poetics, privileging collaboration over confrontation, constitutes Marrero Henríquez’s ecologically-rooted general theory of literature, finding resonance in various currents addressing insular literatures.
This paper hypothesizes that Édouard Glissant’s judgments on literature and insularity within archipelagic thinking and the Poetics of Relation have generated interpretative frameworks of nature and culture that challenge the homogenizing, hegemonic paradigms of European colonization. Within these centuries-forged archipelagic expressions, a shared eco-poetics emerges.
The objective of this article is to identify ecosystemic interpretative sources that form part of the Poetics of Breathing. Three specific objectives are addressed: first, to explain the Poetics of Breathing and the place that Glissant’s thought holds within it; second, to examine two relevant concepts of the Martinican author: archipelagic thinking and the poetics of Relation; third, to analyze how this framework contributes to the post-anthropocentric solidarity promoted by the Poetics of Breathing.
The methodology employs documentary and literary analysis, beginning with the review of theoretical sources to deepen understanding of the interpretative resources that archipelagic thinking offers to the Poetics of Breathing.
The results contribute to defining the ecosystemic interpretative sources for the Poetics of Breathing, revealing how archipelagic solidarity extends beyond human boundaries to encompass interspecies and ecological relationships. This approach demonstrates literature’s capacity to generate alternative epistemologies that challenge colonial hierarchies while fostering collaborative coexistence models. The research illuminates how insular literary expressions serve as laboratories for developing post-anthropocentric thought, offering vital contributions to contemporary ecocritical discourse and environmental humanities.
Bio: Belén González Morales is professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Las Palmas Gran Canaria. PhD in Literature and Theory of Literature, currently teaching at the Bachelor’s Degree in Hispanic Language and Literature and the Master’s Degree in Audiovisual and Literary Culture. Her doctoral thesis focused on insular Modernism in Spain. Research lines include contemporary Spanish literature and its relationship with cinema, and the poetics of insularity, topics she has explored in congresses and publications.
Irene Pessot, “From Feminist Margins to the Ocean: Envisioning More-than-Human Solidarity with Le Nemesiache (1970–1980s)”
Abstract: From the depths of the sea, its inhabitants rise together, calling strikes and assemblies, rebelling against extractivism and pollution. Confronted with the ocean’s crisis, all its creatures gather to hold a referendum, seeking a way to confront the immense challenge. So speaks the voice that guides the viewer in the film Il mare ci ha chiamate (The sea has called us), created in 1978 by the Neapolitan feminist grassroot collective Le Nemesiache. This paper explores how the collective envisioned the sea and its inhabitants as part of a reciprocal, non-hierarchical relational paradigm, anticipating debates on multispecies justice and more-than-human solidarity.
Active since 1970, Le Nemesiache employed art and performance as instruments of social intervention in marginalized contexts. Their feminism, rooted at the margins, linked the oppression of women, trans people and those confined in prisons or psychiatric institutions to the violence perpetrated against the planet, all traced back to a common matrix of male violence. Thus, they aligned themselves with nonhuman beings, conceived not as objects but as active interlocutors with agency and political relevance. They reject the concept of nature as historically constructed like the category of woman—linked for centuries to nature to legitimize women’s subjugation. They conceive the land and their own body as a collective corporeality, a vision that resonates with the notion of cuerpo-territorio theorized by non-Western feminisms.
Existing scholarship has largely focused on their artistic output, leaving the philosophical and political dimensions less explored. This paper addresses that gap, drawing on the 2022 archive at the National Library of Naples and planned oral interviews with former members. The aim is to investigate the originality and ongoing resonance of their political thought, offering ways to rethink our relationship with the world and its nonhuman inhabitants.
Bio: Irene Pessot is a PhD researcher in Gender Studies at the University of Palermo. Her work focuses on the history of grassroots movements and oral history, with particular attention to the intersections between feminist activism and anti-psychiatry in the period between the 1970s and the 1990s. She also engages with feminist approaches to animal studies and recently published “Becoming a Seal: Narratives of Eco-Transfeminist Resistance” in the antispeciesist feminist journal Seeds, examining interspecies metamorphosis in folklore.