Session: 1j
Time: 11.15–13.00
Room: JK2–3 2.17
Chair: Merve Tabur
Deniz Gündoğan Ibrişim (Kadir Has University), “Currents of Solidarity: Black Feminist Generations and Interspecies Resistance in Undrowned”
Abstract: This paper examines relational ethics, multispecies imagination, and intergenerational thinking through Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned (2020), a visionary work that blends Black feminist thought, speculative imagination, and ancestral memory. Gumbs’ conception of generations is expansive and transformative, encompassing human ancestors, oceanscapes and marine mammals, situating nonhuman life within a continuum of survival, more-than-human care, and relational accountability. By foregrounding oceanic creatures alongside ancestral and future generations, Undrowned significantly models interdependence and collective resilience, offering a literary framework for nonhuman resistance and interspecies solidarity. The text envisions alternative forms of more-than-human coexistence grounded in practices and principles of care, respect, and multispecies justice, demonstrating how Black feminist speculative approaches to generationality can inform ethical engagement across species. This study highlights how literature can cultivate imaginative and ethical modes of collective action, expanding the possibilities for relational survival and justice beyond the human.
Bio: Dr. Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim is a literary scholar whose research spans cultural trauma and memory studies, postcolonial theory, Anglophone literatures—with particular focus on Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East—and the environmental and blue humanities. A Fulbright Fellow, she earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. From 2021 to 2023, she was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Sabancı University, where she led a major project on climate witnessing in the literary and visual cultures of the Mediterranean. Her work explores how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone literatures and arts engage the ecological imagination as a form of counter-memory, mapping affective and archival traces of colonial and decolonial histories across fractured geographies. Positioned at the intersection of trauma theory, environmental humanities, and global literature, her research has appeared in Journal of World Literature, Safundi, Memory Studies, Scrutiny2, and in edited volumes including Mapping World Anglophone Studies, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, and Ecologies of Turkish Literature and Film. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature in the Core Program at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. Her first monograph, Slow Trauma and Environment in Anglophone World Literature: Relational and Response-able Narratives, is in its final stages.
Marta Werbanowska (University of Vienna), “Undrowning, Together: Black Hydropoetics and More-Than-Human Liberation”
Abstract: When I recommend Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s 2020 Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals to students or colleagues, I am often met with surprise at the ‘original’ or ‘singular’ pairing of concepts in the book’s title. However, a deeper dive into African American, Afro-Caribbean, and other Afro-diasporic literary traditions finds various forms of marine life – from plankton and coral, whales and sharks, to merfolk and aquatic deities – populating the Black ecological imagination. Given the violent maritime origins of Black diasporic presence in the so-called ‘New World’ with the transatlantic slave trade, it comes as no surprise that Black thinkers and writers would (re)turn to oceanic histories, materialities, and metaphors in search of wisdom and inspiration. More specifically, contemporary Black poetry abounds in lyrical and experimental visions of kinship and solidarity with various aquatic life forms, often presenting such entanglements as pathways to more-than-human liberation from what Gumbs describes as “the chokehold of racial gendered ableist capitalism” (2). This presentation will be an invitation to explore the seascapes of recent Black hydropoetics while dipping our feet into the intersecting currents of Black Studies and Blue Humanities. With poems by Gumbs, Rajiv Mohabir, Marilyn Nelson, Camille Dungy, and Toi Dericotte, among others, we will take a swim with whales, octopuses, jellyfish, and other marine creature-teachers of transspecies kinship. Finally, we will dive into Samantha Thornhill’s “Ode to a Killer Whale” – a 2010 poem in which animal liberation meets the Black radical tradition, and whose incendiary call for liberatory solidarity resonates with new urgency in the wake of recent “orca uprisings.”
Bio: Dr. Marta Werbanowska is a Postdoctoral Associate in American Literature and Culture at the University of Vienna, Austria. She obtained her Ph.D. from Howard University in 2019, and was a Fulbright Scholar at UNC Charlotte in 2014-15. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary African American and Caribbean poetry, literatures of social and environmental justice, Black Studies, and Environmental Humanities. Her scholarship has been published in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), the College Language Association Journal (CLAJ), and the James Baldwin Review, among others. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, tentatively titled Vital Necessity: Ecological Thinking in Contemporary Black Poetry.
Noémie Mil-Homens Cavaco (UCLouvain), “‘Flow’ and ‘Après nous, les animaux’: One Flood, Two Arks, and No Noah”
Abstract: On the one hand, over the last fifty years, the most widespread literary strategy for exploring climate change has been the flood (Trexler 2015:82): it has become “a convenient shorthand for climate crisis” (Bracke, 2019:281). Kluwick (2020:66) notes that floods no longer have a predominantly symbolic function in recent fiction, while also acknowledging an important use of “diluvian imaginary and aquatic language” – words and phrases associated with water and flood but referring to “non-aquatic contexts” – in contemporary literature to refer to climate change and its consequences (Kluwick, 2020:65). Therefore, the Flood which is explicitly or covertly haunting the contemporary imaginary (and possibly mirroring an “Anthropocene Anxiety” (Mundler, 2022:6) or an “Anthropocene unconscious” (Bould, 2021)) seems to be both literal and metaphorical. On the other hand, Noah’s Ark has been widely used as an inspiring political philosophical metaphor in the context of the ecological crisis, with Michel Serres’s natural contract (1990) or with Michel Lacroix calling for a shift from Prometheus (excessive modernization) to Noah (ethics of preservation) (1997). However, Malcom Ferdinand (2019) has recently warned against the dangers of such a metaphor and its violent “politics of boarding”. In this paper, two selected fictions, namely “Flow” (Zilbalodis 2024) and “Après nous, les animaux” (Brunel 2020), are analyzed with a specific attention given to the motives of the Flood and the Ark. It will be studied how, in both cases, the blurry limits between the outside (Flood) and the inside (Ark) of the always-evolving community tend to offer a powerful political metaphor, based on multispecism and collaboration, reminiscent of Haraway’s “oddkin” (2016). The paper will focus on the anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic representations of the animals, which, half-wild, half-domesticated, are left on a planet without any Noah figure, but are still haunted by humanity’s remains, both in the external world and within themselves.
Bio: Noémie Mil-Homens Cavaco has started a PhD in literary studies at UCLouvain (Belgium). In 2023, she graduated with summa cum laude after writing her Master’s thesis on the apocalyptic imaginaries in Democracia (Gutiérrez 2012) and Weather (Offill 2020). In 2024, she did a Fulbright research stay under the supervision of Professor Iñaki Prádanos with whom she learned more about decolonial thinking and posthumanism. Her thesis project focuses on rewritings of the Flood in the context of the global climate emergency.
Reeta Holopainen (University of Helsinki), “The Question of Water in Nordic Climate Change Poetics”
Abstract: In this paper, I examine the role of water in Nordic climate change poetics by focusing on two Finnish poetry collections, Paula Sankelo’s Katoava jää (‘Vanishing Ice’), published in 2024, and Nina Rantala’s Merenalaiset hulmuavat osat (‘The Fluttering Parts of the Underwater‘), published in 2022, as representatives of Nordic climate change poetry. The climate crisis and ecological phenomena related to it, such as the loss of snow, Arctic Sea ice decline, heat waves and cold waves, are common topics in the field of Finnish contemporary poetry. In Finnish climate change poetry, the theme of the climate crisis is often closely connected to the depiction of water, with its different states serving as crucial environmental motifs. Sankelo’s Katoava jää addresses the climate crisis by depicting the melting of glaciers and the rising sea levels in the Arctic environment, whereas Rantala’s Merenalaiset hulmuavat osat portrays the sea burdened by the plastic and explores the complex phenomenological dimensions of the sea. In my paper, I examine the environmental motif of water as an essential component of Nordic climate change poetics and discuss the agency of water in light of Sankelo’s and Rantala’s literary works. I propose that Sankelo’s and Rantala’s poetry collections address water both as a finite resource and as a non-human agent that transcends human power, challenging the anthropocentric worldview. The aim of my paper is to provide perspectives on the relationship between aquapoetics and climate change poetics and contribute to ongoing discussion of climate change poetry as a subgenre of ecopoetry. The theoretical framework of my paper is based on ecocriticism and the blue humanities.
Bio: Reeta Holopainen is a postdoctoral researcher of Finnish literature at the University of Helsinki. She has specialized in ecocriticism, ecolinguistics, and the study of poetry. Her current research focuses on the Finnish climate change poetry and Nordic climate change poetics.