Session: 2j
Time: 14.00–15.30
Room: JK2–3 2.18
Chair: Laura Löslein
Panel description: “If there was ever a time to humbly submit to the mentorship of marine mammals it is now”, recommends Alexis Pauline Gumbs in her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020:7), as a way of dealing with the challenges of an escalating climate crisis. Following thinkers such as Gumbs, this panel addresses critical engagements with representations of multispecies injustices in aquatic environments across literature, film, and visual art.
Doing so, we focus on an exploration of alliances between land dwellers and critters of planetary waters. The panel therefore asks, how practices of cross-species resistance against multispecies injustices are fabricated in and through narration, critically examining the employed modes of storytelling:
How do non-/fictional texts reproduce extractivist logics, rendering aquatic life as resource, spectacle, or absence? How might narration trace contemporary manifestations of systemic racism, colonial injustice, and global power imbalances across planetary waters? And how might storytelling contribute to practices of multispecies resistance, where swordfishes, jellyfish, sea turtles, seals, corals and humans meet in their fight against aquatic suffering and systemic injustice?
Clara Hebel (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main), “Contaminated Waters: Multispecies Petro-Resistance in Planetary Anglophone Literatures”
Abstract: The term petroculture describes how “society today is an oil society through and through,” shaped not only in “physical and material ways” by petroleum, but also in terms of its “values, practices, habits, beliefs, and feelings” (Szeman et al. 9). Petroculture is a transcultural phenomenon with planetary implications, and it is intimately linked to water. The release of CO2 during the combustion of fossil fuels disrupts the planetary water cycle, while oil spills and other petro-products, such as plastics and pesticides, poison bodies of water around the world. Water and oil do mix, then, and with devastating consequences.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks, “What is the story we tell ourselves that lets us fill the air with something we ourselves do not know how to breathe?” and Amitav Ghosh links the climate crisis to a crisis of imagination (343; 9). In this light, the role of literature within petroculture becomes apparent. Importantly, however, there is also storytelling that imagines resistance to the all-encompassing allure and power of petroleum and to the systems upholding it.
In my selected texts, this resistance centres on aquatic creatures, which feature as key figures in the narratives: in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014), a swordfish stabs into an underwater oil hose, sparking a revolutionary uprising in Lagos; while in Triangle of Sadness (2022), directed by Ruben Östlund, dead sea urchins, rough waters, and pirates provoke an intense, hierarchy-transforming experience of embodiment among the passengers of a luxury cruise. This paper provides a comparative analysis of these two works of planetary anglophone fictions, examining their depiction of multispecies forms of petro-resistance. Both texts, each in their own way, imagine aquatic multispecies collaborations that resist the violence of petroculture. Significantly, these transformations are guided by a consciousness of our planet’s deep relationalities, which are substantially formed through and with water. Upending the myth of human exclusivity and domination, it is through direct encounters with multidirectional, more-than-human agencies that this consciousness emerges.
Bio: Clara Hebel is a PhD candidate at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. She specialises in World Anglophone Studies with a focus on transculturality, planetarity, ecocriticism and the Blue Humanities. Clara has studied in London, Toronto and Frankfurt and has presented her work at international conferences, including in Nairobi, Zaragoza and Zurich. In her PhD project, she investigates how across vast regions, literatures and films are created that mobilise the aquatic for their expressions of relations. Her research is funded by the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
Laura Löslein (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main), “Animal Allies in the Arctic. From Hunting Seals to Healing Trauma with Jellyfish in Bernd Späth’s Novel Is There Ice in Oklahoma?”
Abstract: The Arctic’s extreme climate conditions and distinct ecosystem demand resilience from its inhabitants. The region now faces several significant threats such as the loss of sea ice. Its melting reflects the breakdown in the relationship between humans and planetary waters. Ice is both vulnerable and powerful, embodying strength and fragility. From a hydrofeminist perspective, ice is not merely considered to be frozen water, but rather an active and relational entity.
In Bernd Späth’s novel Gibt es Eis in Oklahoma? (2012) (Engl.: Is There Ice in Oklahoma?), we follow the story of Hagen, an Arctic hunter and cold-hearted father to his sensitive son, Halvard. They encounter various types of wildlife during their hunt. While Halvard reacts with hesitation and compassion, Hagen embodies the archetypal Arctic hunter. As Hagen aggressively kills a seal, a part of the ice sheet has broken off, leaving them adrift on an erosive ice sheet in the Tempelfjord, Svalbard.
Being confronted with death, Hagen comes to rethink his relationship with his sun and with other more-than-human beings. In his final moments, he drifts imaginatively through the Arctic Ocean, surrounded by jellyfish. In Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us (1951), Jellyfish are described as delicate yet resilient creatures, symbolising the unfamiliar, the uncanny, death, fragility and the ocean’s timeless cycles. Immersed in the Arctic environment, Hagen’s uncompromising character dissolves into an interconnected state with marine life. The jellyfish become his allies, helping him to process his experiences of violence, loss, and trauma.
This paper examines how the novel transforms the binary narratives of human/non-human relationships, nature/culture, masculinity/femininity and ice/water, and turns them into narratives of connection and care. To conduct a thorough analysis, I will consider the links between sea ice and the materiality of the Arctic and its non-/human inhabitants through the lens of hydrofeminist theories.
Bio: Laura Löslein is a PhD candidate at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. Her project is focused on the Arctic and Antarctic ocean in contemporary literature from a Blue Humanities‘ perspective. Laura has studied German Literature and philosophy in Kassel and Frankfurt am Main, where she works as a guide at the Senckenberg Museum of natural history.
Simon Probst (University of Vechta), “Coral Collaborations. A Short History of Reef Building as a Practice of Multispecies Justice”
Abstract: Coral reefs emerge from interspecies collaborations. They grow through the symbiotic metabolisms of tiny polyps and photosynthesizing zooxanthellae producing carbonate rocks. Today, threatened by climate change and ocean acidification, reefs form new alliances with members of the very same species responsible for their precarious situation. Drawn into the coral’s spell, scientists, activists, artists, and divers are building artificial reefs, using old tram waggons, ships, recycled plastic or yarn, joining the interspecies collaboration between polyps and zooxanthellae to build reefs.
Two hundred years before these alliances between reef building sea critters and humans in the face of planetary crisis, political movements already called to corals as symbols of political justice. As humans learned in the 18th and 19th century how tiny polyps create coral reefs in an intergenerational and collective effort, corals became a powerful metaphor for political life (Navakas 2023). At first, corals were used rhetorically as a legitimization of mass labour, serving the greater good of nation or empire building, but soon the collective way of coral life became an inspiration for feminist and black movements who saw in corals not only symbols for their own invisibilized contribution but found in them a vision to fight back for a just and equal society, already realized in the ocean but yet to be achieved in human life.
The paper draws on the history of these material-semiotic alliances, where humans and animals meet in reef building efforts, and brings them into dialogue with contemporary positions: E.J. Swift’s climate fiction novel The Coral Bones (2024), Indigenous reef knowledge, and reef-building artworks (Crochet Coral Reef project). Thinking reef-building as a practice of multispecies justice, the paper explores the alliances between humans and corals in academic thought, activist struggles, and artistic work, fighting against extinction and injustice on land and in the seas.
Bio: Simon Probst works as a postdoctoral scholar in the DFG-project „Natural-cultural Memory in the Anthropocene. Archives, Media, and Literatures of Earth History” (2024-2026, University of Vechta), which addresses cultural dimensions of planetary crises such as climate change or the sixth mass extinction from the perspective of interdisciplinary memory studies. He is also conducting a smaller project in citizen humanities on natural-cultural transformation in Lower Saxony collecting individual climate stories by citizens.