Session: 2l
Time: 14.00–15.30
Room: JK2–3 2.20
Chair: Sara Bédard-Goulet
Rūta Šlapkauskaitė (Vilnius University), “Coming to Their Senses: Genre Trouble in Robbie Arnott’s Dusk”
Abstract: In contrast to the crisis of imagination in contemporary geo- and ecopolitics, the literary responses to the ongoing “biosocial upheaval” (Haraway 2016) have been delivering a rich crop of genres and poetic forms which capture the scene of duress and offer new ecologies of the possible. This paper examines the use of the Western and the dark pastoral in Tasmanian author Robbie Arnott’s novel Dusk as a means to reflect on the conceptual links between the logics and legacies of settler colonialism and species extinction. By focusing on the chiasmic (Merleau-Ponty 1968) threads of sensory engagement and the transcorporeal flows of human-nonhuman intimacies in the novel, the paper calls attention to the ethical aporias of human/nonhuman, hunter/hunted, and care/cruelty, in which Dusk anchors the genres’ concern for looking at “current problems through the lens of past dilemmas” (White 2019). Embedded in the affective load of Arnott’s postcolonial inquiry, I argue, is an attempt to flesh out a relationship between social and planetary temporalities, measured by the dialectic of love and loss in the troping of loyalty, on the one hand, and fossilization, on the other. Given how the work of the senses in the novel scaffolds the acts of both tracking and remembering, tying its central narrative arc – the hunt for a puma called Dusk – to questions about kin and kind, it does well to trouble the conceptual boundaries of care, reframing interspecies antagonism into an uneasy sense of “entangled shared living and dying” (Haraway 2016), which problematizes not only the ethical parameters of genre, but also the labour of its critical reception by the reader.
Bio: Rūta Šlapkauskaitė is Associate Professor of English literature at Vilnius University, Lithuania. Her research interests include Canadian and Australian literature, neo-Victorianism, and environmental humanities. Among her recent publications are articles on the works of Emma Donoghue, Richard Flanagan, and Fred Stenson. Rūta is currently researching the conceptual relevance of genre in narrating the climate emergency in contemporary Anglophone literature.
Olivia Vázquez-Medina (University of Oxford), “Uncanny Intimacies: Larval Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin American Fiction”
Abstract: Latin American literature and thought have long been concerned with the material entanglements between humans and the natural world. In recent decades, writers have probed these categories in narratives largely centred on extractivism, toxicity, pollution, environmental degradation, and climate change. These themes have been explored through a wide range of aesthetic and literary forms, from eco-horror and dystopia to innovative versions of realism and the fantastic. This presentation focuses on selected stories from the collection Larvas (Larvae, 2025), by Uruguayan writer Tamara Silva Bernaschina, tracing both continuities and discontinuities with other approaches to the nonhuman in contemporary Latin American fiction. On the one hand, the collection continues the critical interrogation of the human-nature binary, emphasizing material interconnectedness as a fundamental condition of existence. On the other, unlike many recent texts, Silva Bernaschina’s narratives avoid tropes of ecological contamination and environmental catastrophe. Instead, they focus on eerie depictions of rural and semi-rural landscapes, exploring the agency of ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett 2010) through unsettling material interactions rooted in deeply intimate experiences. While focusing on human stories and emotions, Silva Bernaschina’s aesthetics attend to the animal, vegetal, and geological/mineral forms of the nonhuman world, emphasizing the material entanglements of the human and the nonhuman, and presenting them in highly charged affective scenarios. The presentation examines the ontological and affective dimensions of what I call Silva Bernarschina’s ‘larval’ aesthetics —a term that denotes potentiality, metamorphosis, and latency— through which the nonhuman exerts a disruptive force that challenges binary notions of ‘human’ and ‘nature’, undermines human exceptionalism, and proposes an alternative fabric of the world.
Bio: I am an Associate Professor in Spanish at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Wadham College. I specialise in modern and contemporary Latin American literature, with a particular interest in the environmental humanities, gender, and affect. Centring on the dynamics between affect and literary form, my current research project investigates how contemporary women writers from Latin America grapple with major problems faced by the region in the twenty-first century—including environmental degradation and violence against women—through innovative aesthetics and experimental modes of storytelling.
Thyase Madella (Universidade Federal de Sergipe), “The Borderlands as a Decolonial Multispecies Locale”
Abstract: This work analyzes how Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of the Borderlands (1987) functions as a decolonial multispecies perspective that counteracts humanistic rationality. The investigation focuses on the Borderlands as a geographically located material performativity that takes into consideration the knowledge and experience of marginalized multispecies subjects. Anzaldúa’s decolonial thinking develops from the dehumanization, violence, and exploitation inflicted upon the land, peoples, and all beings constituting this space she calls “Borderlands”. Consequently, her theorizations are grounded in the material reality and complex entanglements of Borderlands life. Within this framework, Anzaldúa forges kin companionships that are illegible within Enlightenment-based individualism. In doing so, she envisions new archetypes by drawing on Indigenous and non-human knowledge to imagine possibilities for existence outside the constraints of Western, white, colonial, and Anglo-European society. The onto-epistemology of the Borderlands thus counters the humanist discourse that relegates nonhuman existence, including humans who are marginalized or do not fit into a normative expectation, to inferiority. The rationality embedded in the coloniality of knowledge is dismantled by a theorization that values knowledge and beings from a marginalized space, which unfolds into the dismantling of binary constructions such as us/them, superior/inferior, human/nature, West/rest. Ultimately, this work argues that the Borderlands are constituted by the lands, territory, history, ancestors, spirituality, and the constant articulation between the human and nonhuman in creating these psychological and geographical spaces. The very concept of Borderlands, discussing the space in the multiplicity of the whole in which it is formed, is by itself a human and nonhuman articulation. The non-normative constitution of this kind of space is exactly what allows different possibilities of beings. This analysis is informed by the material and decolonial theories of Gloria Anzaldúa, Jasbir Puar, Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, and AnaLouise Keating.
Bio: Thayse Madella is a Professor of English at the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS), Brazil. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil, where her dissertation, Cartography of Chicana Desire, explored the intersections of subjectivity, space, and desire in Chicana literature. Her academic journey also includes research conducted at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, as a Fulbright grant recipient.