Session: 1k
Time: 11.15–13.00
Room: JK2–3 2.18
Chair: Jordi Serrano-Muñoz
Panel Abstract: Extractivism refers to the system of large scale removal and processing of natural resources that prioritizes profit maximization over environmental and social consequences. It functions hierarchically, first assuming a right for humans to exploit the environment and then following a model where a so-called developed center takes advantage of its periphery. While portrayals of barren lands, contaminated rivers, or broken communities can convey the damage provoked by extractivism, they also rely on an incomplete paradigm that assumes only humans have agency in this relationship as aggressors, leaving the nonhuman as passive victims. This roundtable explores the potential of narratives, particularly fictional narratives, in depicting the relationship between humans and nonhumans through the critique against extractivist industries. In particular, we ask: what can we learn from stories depicting the nonhuman reacting and rebelling against extractivism?
Literature makes manifest the invisibility of extractivism and the violence that lies behind this process (Szeman et al. 2017). Patricia Yaeger, for instance, has proposed taking the term “energy unconscious” as a parallel to Jameson’s “political unconscious” in order to identify the repressed nature of our relationship with fuel sources (2011, 310). Following this line, Imre Szeman identifies that extractivism occupies four axes: 1) acting as an invisible and pervasive force that happens outside the direct attention of those who benefit most from it; 2) operating through its dilating nature, which started with natural resources but has grown to include data, attention, and even care; 3) expanding to become the main mode of late capitalism; and 4) occupying and supplanting the relationship that modern humans have towards the environment (2017, 443-445). While this framework illuminates extractivism’s pervasive influence, scholars have been mainly focused on the literary representation of extractivist industries’ impact on territories and their communities. In our presentations, we want to shift the focus towards the depiction of nonhuman species, and in particular, how nonhuman agents exercise agency to react and resist this system.
Through an econarratological lens, we suggest that resistance to extractivism happens beyond the themes of the stories to also include narrative form. The presentations move from critique of extractivism—both at the material and the epistemological level—to alternatives that arise from narratives of nonhuman resistance. Jordi Serrano-Muñoz uses Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron (2020) to address how questions of care and dynamics of extraction, presented as flawed attempts to address the climate crisis, are tied together in contemporary narratives’ imaginings of human-nonhuman relations. Gabriele D’Amato analyzes Rachel Kushner’s novel Creation Lake (2024) to reveal how contemporary narratives frame extractivism as both a material and epistemic practice that reshapes human-nonhuman relations by unsettling a linear espionage narrative through essayistic sections. Chiara Xausa’s presentation examines Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) as a narrative of resistance, enacted also in the novel’s structure, to extractivism in Nigeria’s oil-driven economy. Drawing on Black feminist environmental thought and critical animal studies, this paper argues that Lagoon advances decolonial imaginaries in which interspecies agency and practices of care challenge the material and epistemic logics underpinning extractivist exploitation. Shannon Lambert examines Loren Eiseley’s “Star Thrower” (1964) to argue that reading narrative and biological forms of adaptation and evolution alongside one another suggests a regenerative, rather than extractivist, approach to literary production and reception.
Bios:
Gabriele D’Amato is completing his Joint PhD program in Literary Studies between the University of L’Aquila (Italy) and Ghent University (Belgium). He obtained his MA in Italian Studies at the University of Bologna (Italy), with a thesis in literary theory. His PhD project, supervised by Prof. Federico Bertoni and Prof. Marco Caracciolo, examines multiperspective narratives across media, with a specific focus on their experiential effects and ethical implications. He is particularly interested in narrative theory, comparative literature, and the environmental humanities.
Shannon Lambert is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of Literary Studies at Ghent University. Her work focuses on intersections between literature and science, with a particular interest in topics like narrative and emotion in (citizen) science, and representations of the environment and nonhuman animals in literature. She is the author of Science and Affect in Contemporary Literature: Bodies of Knowledge (Bloomsbury, 2025), a book which explores how, in contemporary literature, emotions like desire, suffering, anxiety, and joy shape scientific persons, practices, and products. Beyond this, she is interested in questions of epistemic justice, scientific communication, and creative ways of engaging with science.
Jordi Serrano-Muñoz is a Maria Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, where he is conducting research on the representation of violent disasters in fiction. His research explores the relationship between literature, the climate crisis, and disasters in contemporary narratives, particularly from Japan, Latin America, and Australia. His approach challenges the tendency to portray disasters in climate fiction as isolated events and includes an exploration of ecofeminist concerns, particularly structures of interpersonal and interspecies care.
Chiara Xausa is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the University of Bologna (IT), the University of Idaho (US), and Ghent University (BE), where she leads a project exploring YA climate fiction, econarratology, and both empirical and affective approaches to ecocriticism. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow in Anglophone literature at the University of Bologna (2022–2024). Her first monograph, Intersectional Futures in Climate Fiction: Undoing the Anthropocene Master Narrative, was published by Peter Lang in 2025.