Session: 2i
Time: 14.00–15.30
Room: JK2–3 2.17
Chair: Trisha Bhaya
Christian Lenz (TU Dortmund University), “Predators and Protectors: Rethinking the Jungle in Anaconda and Kong: Skull Island”
Abstract: The jungle is generally considered to be a perilous place of oppressive climate, mystery and danger: one can get lost and the number of venomous animals and poisonous plants appears limitless. However, people still venture into rainforests either to explore or to exploit nature and sometimes they find more than they bargained for – animals which are larger and cleverer than expected.
In my talk I will consider two horror movies, Anaconda (1997) and Kong: Skull Island (2017). Despite their twenty-year age gap, both movies are similarly constructed as each narrative follows a mainly American crew that has to fight against an animal which is more dangerous than anybody anticipated. I approach these films from an eco-critical perspective that contests the idea of the anaconda and King Kong as merely bizarre creatures that threaten humans. My argument is therefore twofold and addresses both sides in the conflict:
First, the Americans depicted in these films display a persistent desire to dominate or even colonise the jungle so as to harvest its riches. Therefore, their actions invite retribution, as both the anaconda and the gorilla enact revenge, punishing human transgressions. In doing so, the films simultaneously reinforce and subvert the fundamental divide between humans and animals.
Second, standing in for other movies with similar tropes, these two filmic examples show that the jungle is a construction that is far from docile and passive – it is a network of agents that sends out the eponymous two animals to protect its realm against intruders. My talk challenges traditional readings of the rainforest as merely an exotic backdrop and demonstrates that the jungle and its protectors both fuel and maintain the idea of a lush Garden of Eden that can turn dark very quickly.
Bio: Christian Lenz is an associate professor of British Literary and Cultural Studies at TU Dortmund University (Germany). He has written his first book about the geographical implications of romantic relationships in chick and lad lit and has been interested in (cultural) geography ever since. He is currently writing his second book on the spatial implications of representations of the jungle. His research interests include – apart from cultural geography – erotic texts and horror literature, as well as youth culture.
Berit Huntebrinker (University of Agder), “There Goes Tokyo Again: Posthuman Entanglements in Shin Godzilla”
Abstract: Environmental themes are central to kaijū eiga, Japanese monster movies. Godzilla, the first and most famous of these monsters, is a central figure in the genre of ecohorror. Ever since he emerged in Japan in 1954 as a reaction to the atomic bomb, he has been understood as the embodiment of humanity’s hubris and environmental irresponsibility. In my paper, I will discuss the complicated entanglements between Godzilla and the humans, which can be called a precarious coexistence. My focus will lie on the 2016 film Shin Godzilla, a stand-alone production where the monster has been read as a metaphor for the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster and the tsunami that preceded it. In Shin Godzilla, the monster appears as an evolving force of nature compared to more anthropomorphic depictions of him in earlier instalments. Rather, Godzilla can here more clearly be understood as a representation of nonhuman resistance.
I argue that Shin Godzilla depicts the monster as a posthuman figure that scrutinises narratives about human control over the environment, and our role in the Anthropocene. My discussion centres around the ecohorror and how Godzilla installs fear in humans, while also being a result of their doing. Aspects of Stacy Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality also come into play. Being a result of nuclear waste dumping, Godzilla’s body is deeply entangled with his environment, which humans have impacted heavily. The film’s ending takes this another step further, showing skeletons with both human and monstrous features emerging from Godzilla’s tail. I will also go into the film’s critique of the Japanese government in light of the catastrophe that Godzilla embodies. Godzilla’s entanglements with humans and natural disasters connects discourses of the environmental humanities and popular culture. In this way, mainstream cinema can contribute as a site for environmental discourses.
Bio: Berit Huntebrinker is associate professor of didactics as the University of Agder, Norway, where she defended her PhD thesis on environmental citizenship in comics and picturebooks in January 2023. Her background is in Comparative Literature, Scandinavian Studies, and Latin American Studies with an M.A. from Goethe-University in Frankfurt (Main). Her research areas and areas of interest are ecocriticism and econarratology, comic book studies, children’s and young adult literature, and popular culture.
Christian Hummelsund Voie (University of Southeast Norway), “Invasive Alien Ecologies: Troubling Tribbles and Cannibal Space Worms”
Abstract: In “Reduced Ecologies: Science Fiction and the Meanings of Biological Scarcity” (2012) Ursula K. Heise maintains that “Science fiction novels … have set their plots on planets with limited or no biodiversity so as to explore to what extent environmental conditions shape human cultures and codes of ethics, and to what extent humans themselves shape these conditions” (99). The four novels published so far in David Gerrold’s unfinished The War against the Chtorr do exactly the opposite for the same purpose, setting its story against the encounter between earth’s ecology and an unlimited and overwhelmingly aggressive alien biodiversity, to explore human culture and ethics when pushed to their uttermost ecological limit. Published 30 years ago, The War against the Chtorr has the frame and appearance of a science fiction pulp story, a low-budget B movie premise within which carnivorous space worms square off against men and women armed with flamethrowers. Yet within that rather preposterous frame, readers and reviewers of the series find that a surprisingly sophisticated thought experiment with uncontrollable ecological change, and its potential social and human ramifications, takes precedence over the occasional spectacular showdown with giant killer worms. In this series of novels, humanity, in an alternate version of our current time period, finds itself poised on the threshold, not of the Anthropocene, but of what one might call the Chtorrocene, an era in which aliens, not humans, become the primary agents of change in the surface systems of the earth.
The series opens in the dystopian aftermath of a sequence of sudden global pandemics that have precipitated a catastrophic global population crash, followed by the almost complete disintegration of all non-military infrastructure. Gradually, the remnants of humanity come to realize that the plagues were just the vanguard of an unusual invasion – the infestation of the entire biosphere by an exotic alien ecology, widely recognized as one of the most complexly realized ecologies in modern science fiction. As the deeply traumatized survivors begin to take stock, the conclusion seems inescapable that the infestation represents a deliberate act of terraforming – or chtorraforming – of earth to suit the needs of absent extraterrestrial invaders, colonizers whose orchestration of events is inferred, but never confirmed. These creatures, known as the Chtorr, thus assume the place of the anthropos in the Anthropocene, as the primary ecologically hostile architects of the current era, while humanity, already fractured and badly divided over the old wounds of imperialism, colonialism, and the uneven distribution or wealth and resources, races towards systemic tipping points beyond which the chtorraforming processes are expected to become irreversible. This paper will argue that the four volumes of The War against the Chtorr explore and reframe pressing real world issues of ecological decline and environmental injustice, in terms of how we might perceive these issues very differently if they were not the results of our own behavior, but the actions of an outside agency.
Bio: Christian Hummelsund Voie is an associate professor of English at the University of Southeast Norway. His teaching subjects include academic writing, American literature, Anglophone literature, the environmental humanities, and literature and the environment in America. He defended his dissertation Nature Writing of the Anthropocene at Mid Sweden University in 2017 with Scott Slovic as his opponent. He has published various articles on literature and the environment, and the title of his dissertation reflects many of his current research interests. They include nature writing, the Anthropocene, ecocriticism, material ecocriticism, ecofeminism, environmental justice, postcolonial ecocriticism, the environmental humanities, environmental literature, environmental memory, environmental generational amnesia, blue ecocriticism, science fiction and the environment, Norwegian black metal and the environment and Louisiana and the environment. He is also the co-chair of the research group for environmental aesthetics at the University of South-East Norway, which organizes several minor and major research events, such as seminars, symposia and conferences, at USN each year.