Session: 2b
Day: Wednesday 15 April
Time: 14.00–15.30
Room: JK2–3 0.19
Chair: Béné Meillon
Andrea Cabezas-Vargas (University of Angers), “A Cry for Justice, from Water to Land: The Rebellion of the Frogs in Jayro Bustamante’s La Llorona (2019)”
Abstract: In the cosmogony of the Maya peoples, animals hold a very important place within their worldview and are a fundamental part of the lives of men and women. For the Maya, amphibians had a close connection to aquatic deities and the underworld. Frogs and toads were animals closely linked to water and rain, as they were found near bodies of water, and their croaking was considered an omen of rainfall. In the film La Llorona by Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante, the past and the present merge, giving these freshwater animals a symbolic significance typical of the indigenous peoples of the Central American continent, thus updating the Mesoamerican indigenous cosmogony while denouncing the horror of the historical reality of the Mayan peoples.
My presentation aims to analyze the aesthetic representations and socio-political symbolism of the frog in the film La Llorona. From a poetic-political perspective, I will first address the role of frog croaking within the film’s narrative to demonstrate that, rather than a simple naturalistic illustration, it functions as a silent form of denunciation. Secondly, I will analyze how the aquatic aesthetics associated with frogs allow the depth of Mayan thought to crystallize, giving the aquatic element, and with it the frog, a poetic and political value. Finally, I will show how, albeit in a subtle way, the metaphor of the passage from water to land and then from land to water reveals a world in symbiosis between human beings and the Mayan peoples, reminding us that the genocide of the Mayan people is also an ecocide of the Guatemalan jungle.
Bio: Andrea Cabezas Vargas holds a PhD in Arts (History, Theory, and Practices of the Arts) and is Associate Professor in Latin American Cinema at the Department of Hispanic and Hispanic-American Studies at the University of Angers. Her research focuses primarily on the relationship between cinema and history and the collective memory of a nation. She is a member of the 3L.AM research team at the University of Angers, as well as a member of RedISCA (European Research Network on Central America), a member of the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary scientific program on the Greater Caribbean “Horizons Caribéens” and a member of the CompArte (Compromisos y Arte en el siglo XX y XXI) research group. She is co-author of the book Libertad de expresión y libertad de creación en el istmo centroamericano, siglos XIX-XXI (Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Creation in the Central American Isthmus, 19th-21st Centuries) (2022).
Caroline Durand-Rous (University of Nîmes), “Liquid Survivance: Construing Post-chaos Co-living in Waubgeshig Rice’s Novels”
Abstract: Moon of the Crusted Snow and Moon of the Turning Leaves are two dystopian novels by Anishinaabe author Waubgeshig Rice, set twelve years apart and depicting the ordeals and searing moments of intensity experienced by a band of First Nation Canadians after the apocalyptic collapse of Western civilization. Set in Northern Ontario, a liminal territory marked by a myriad of rivers, lakes, and interconnected wetlands, which are cyclically metamorphosed by snow and thaw, both works explore and question the human ability to adapt to powerful natural agencies once humans find themselves deprived of their technological apparatus. In that regard, Rice offers the reader two “sustainable texts”, to borrow Hubert Zapf’s terminology, in that they stand as challenging narratives aiming to disrupt the biased belief in a permanent progress of humankind and its subsequent mastery over a compliant and servile nature. Noticeably, water in all its shapes and literary utterances plays the key role in this process as it induces the rediscovery of the so-called “old ways”: Gradually reinstating a totemic link to the territory, the surviving protagonists succeed in rekindling ancestral covenants with wildlife, thus restoring a crucial multi-species solidarity. Tapping into Paula Gunn Allen’s concept of “separation trauma” and Joni Adamson’s notion of “contested landscapes,” this talk will analyze the subtle superimposition of social and environmental injustice operated by both texts. I will then examine the multidimensional significance of the liquid element as it infuses the narratives and triggers the transformation of the characters. Lastly, I will delve into the proposed remedy to our current alienation from the natural realm.
Bio: Dr. Caroline Durand-Rous is Associate Professor at the University of Nîmes, France. She specializes in Native Studies and Environmental Humanities. She explores reinvented totemism in contemporary Indigenous fiction, analyzing how ambivalent tutelar figures offer guidance to characters in disarray on the path to discovering hybrid identities and congruence in contested landscapes. Her latest research focuses on the polysemic value of water in North America, specifically in coastal wetlands (lagoons, marshes, and deltas) and freshwater systems (rivers and lakes). She has co-edited a volume titled Weaving Words into Worlds (Vernon Press, 2023), which brings together articles that home in on the entangled agencies of the human and more-than-human realms.
Bénédicte Meillon (University of Angers), “Tracking the Ecopoet(h)ical Evolution of Cephalopod (Mis)representations in Blue Literature and Art”
Abstract: Our capacity to integrate blue imagination, knowledge, representations, and affects in our dealings with Planet Aqua is inextricable from the influence of literature and the arts. Conversely, ecopoetic art can translate the attitude of a certain epoch toward the more-than-human world, usually reflecting the scientific understanding and beliefs of a given time and culture. As they represent Ocean creatures that seem alien to us, writers and artists may endow them with either monstrous or marvelous qualities that trickle down into the feelings we form in relationship to those creatures and to the worlds they inhabit. Focusing on the evolution of cephalopod representations in myths, arts, and literature, this paper will explore multispecies oceanic entanglements from a new materialistic and ecopoetic perspective. I will first focus on representations of cephalopods as sea monsters in ancient mythology or in classical texts by Victor Hugo, Les travailleurs de la mer, or Jules Verne’s Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers. I will explore the ecophobic and misogynistic underpinnings of such representations which I will moreover read through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s notion of the “abject” and George Bataille’s of the “formless.” I will then go over other pieces of literature and art that reveal a better grip on cephalopod’s amazing natures while translating and encouraging positive affects and ethics toward those Ocean critters. I will develop my contention that cephalopod literature and art provides a litmus test for the degree of ecophobia or biophilia that permeates our rapport with the Ocean and its many lifeforms. As recent literature and art specifically involving octopuses have contributed to a recent octopus craze and reenchantment of the Ocean, this paper gives a glimpse of my larger work on blue ecopoetics where I read literary and artistic octopuses as metonymies for the Ocean which shed light onto our own trans-corporeal and aquatic naturcultures.
Bio: Béné Meillon is Professeure des Universités (Full Professor) affiliated with the 3 L.AM at the Université d’Angers. She ran OIKOS, the ecopoetics research group in Perpignan from 2015 to 2023 and has created an Internet platform dedicated to ecopoetics and ecocriticism in France (https://ecopoetique.hypotheses.org). She is currently serving as President of EASCLE (2024-2026) and leads the cross-disciplinary Sea More Blue research program on blue ecopoetics and blue humanities based at the Université d’Angers. Initially a short story specialist, her research specifically explores ecocritical readings and the notion of reenchantment, focusing on magical realism and liminal realism, mythopoeia, and ecofeminism, while paying close attention to the ecopoetic intra-actions between nature and language. She has published papers dealing with ecocritical and ecopoetic readings of environmental fiction by Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Proulx, Linda Hogan, Ann Pancake, Ron Rash, Anne Sibran, as well as on contemporary dance performances choreographed by Maguy Marin. She has also written papers on fiction by Russell Banks, Roald Dahl, and Paul Auster. Her monograph Ecopoetics of Reenchantment: Liminal Realism and Poetic Echoes of the Earth, published by Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield), came out in 2022. She has organized many events to advance ecopoetics and has edited several publications in the field. She has also been engaged in creative projects that seek to restore ecological attention and is currently working on a multimedia project titled Dancing Bodies of Water.