Session: 3d
Time: 16.00–17.45
Room: JK2–3 0.19
Chair: Rebecca Jordan
Jaya Sarkar (Mahindra University), “When the Water Revolts: Representation of Nonhuman Resistance in Netflix’s Kaala Paani”
Abstract: The proposed paper will demonstrate how the 2023 Indian survival drama thriller television series Kaala Paani (Black Water) critiques the ‘human’ condition and focuses on a symbiotic relationship configured between humans, non-humans, and the ecology. By engaging with Timothy Morton’s theories on posthuman ecology and Stacy Alaimo’s theory of trans-corporeality, among others, this article will argue that the posthumans in Kaala Paani strive to integrate into the environment, resulting in a radical openness to the world. The proposed article will conceptually outline the posthumanist and ecocritical theories to arrive at posthuman ecology, with which Kaala Paani will be analyzed in order to get a critical reflection on the emerging reconceptualization of connectedness, entanglements, and belonging through scientific, literary, and cultural interfaces. The paper will further demonstrate how the creator, Sameer Saxena, deftly portrays characters who forge new connections with the world in a time when a mysterious water-borne disease comes down upon the Andaman and Nicobar Islands due to human fallacies. The proposed paper will explore how human responsibility figures as an integral part of the series by evoking the way humanist ways of thinking and being are required to be replaced by interlinked posthuman and ecocritical viewpoints in order to survive in an apocalyptic world where interconnections with nature and non-humans are the only way for survival. The co-constitution of different species and non-humans through mutual connections in Kaala Paani forges a posthuman reality that blurs the human/non-human, disability/ability, and nature/culture distinctions. The posthumans become entangled with the non-humans and the elements of the planet and open up a passage for a praxis of care and response. The proposed article will conclude with the significance of a posthuman ecological approach, which proposes a value system that is integral to understanding the ecology and to emphasizing the accountability of humans and knowledge practices towards the environment.
Bio: Dr. Jaya Sarkar is an Assistant Professor of English at the School of Law, Mahindra University, Hyderabad, India. She is a member of the board of directors of The Posthuman Lab and is a Fellow of the Indian Posthumanism Network. She has been published in the Journal of Posthuman Studies, Convergence, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, Journal of Posthumanism, Edinburgh Architecture Research, Journal of Narrative and Language Studies, Transpositiones, and EASST Review. She has also written chapters that are included in books published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Bloomsbury, ibidem-Verlag, and Routledge.
Dominik Ohrem (University of Cologne), “Willfulness: On Human Sovereignty’s Wayward Animals”
Abstract: This paper situates itself in longstanding debates about forms and possibilities of animal agency under conditions of human control by mobilizing a concept that has received little theoretical attention from animal studies scholars. “Willfulness” – together with its close semantic cousins “obstinacy” and “self-will” – is defined by an insistence on autonomy (bodily, spatial, temporal) and self-direction in the face of heteronomous impositions. At its most basic, it can be understood as an embodied subject’s response to the experiential rift created between the capacity to perceive one’s environment and the freedom to engage with it in ways that align with one’s interests, needs, or desires. In this paper, I explore the utility of this concept for (historical) animal studies, specifically with respect to the relations between animal agency (and/as resistance) and the routines of human sovereignty at work in the exploitation of animal labor. To do this, I turn to German historian Alf Lüdtke’s (1943–2019) work on Eigensinn, a concept he employed to identify the spatial and temporal niches of “self-willed freedom” and forms of “self-willed corporeality” that factory workers in the decades around 1900 managed to carve out for themselves amid the disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms of the industrial labor regime. Lüdtke stressed that Eigensinn was not the “turning against” often equated with resistance but registered a kind of distancing from, a leaving out of account – a turning away from “sovereign impositions” (herrschaftliche Zumutungen). Drawing on examples from my own historical research in the North American context, I underline the extent to which willfulness operated as an explanatory framework in recurring practical confrontations with unwanted animal behavior. Willfulness, I suggest, indexed an implicit folk theory of animal mind in which working animals like mules, horses, and oxen figured (for better or worse) as willing subjects with interests, desires, motivations, and tendencies of their own, which were often exasperatingly at odds with a more or less clearly articulated cluster of human demands and expectations.
Bio: Dominik Ohrem is Research Associate at MESH – Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities and Postdoctoral Researcher at HESCOR (Cultural Evolution in Changing Climate: Human and Earth System Coupled Research) at the University of Cologne. His research is focused on the history and philosophy of human-animal relations, with an interdisciplinary orientation. His most recent publication is Humans, Animals, and U.S. Society in the Long Nineteenth Century: A Documentary History (Routledge, 2025).
Piotr Piekutowski (University of Silesia in Katowice), “Why Look at Rabbits? Narrative Representations of More-than-Human Resistance”
Abstract: In the presentation, I want to take part in the discussion raised by Éric Baratay on animal history (2012), particularly cases of resistance, and its bonds with conventional, human-centred history. A non-obvious example of a complex connection of human and animal emancipation and more-than-human resistance that I would focus on in the paper is the history of rabbits in the divided Berlin during the Cold War, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As an analytical material, I intend to use Rabbit a la Berlin (2009), a Polish–German documentary film directed by Bartosz Konopka, and nominated for the Academy Awards in 2010. The non-fiction film tells the multifaceted story of several generations of rabbits who populated the “death strip” in Berlin, and who simultaneously populated the imagination of Berliners as living metaphors, e.g. resistance, freedom, or victims. Konopka’s film used to be interpreted as a vivid allegory of political oppression on Berliners, but I propose a re-reading of the film narration in an econarratological method (James 2015; 2022) and shed a new light on animals’ agency and signs of defiance. In the analysis, I am going to borrow David Herman’s categorization of strategies for projecting nonhuman experiences in storyworlds (2018, 138–156), to show diegetic representations of more-than-human resistance in Rabbit a la Berlin. Narrative forms as perspective, narration, animal characters, focalization, but also allegory or anthropomorphization problematize one-dimensional recipients of the work. Formal models of imagining animal experience and narrating animal resistance are located on a spectrum, with unstable positions that can produce different meanings. Rabbit a la Berlin, with various narrative techniques, could be seen as an anthropocentric or zoocentric story, or a record of an unideal but interspecies and inclusive way to emancipation.
Bio: Piotr F. Piekutowski – PhD, assistant professor of Polish and literary theory at University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland), where he leads the National Science Centre grant project “Poetics of Entanglement. The Nonhuman Side of Polish Literature in Econarratological Approach”. His research interests include narrative theory, econarratology, posthumanism, contemporary Polish prose, and Anthropocene fiction. Member of the European Narratology Network (ENN) and the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).
David Ingram, “Violence and Revenge in Ecohorror”
Abstract: The image of a pod of orcas seemingly engaging in an act of resistance to their exploitation raises the question of the role of violence and revenge in ecohorror and in ecopolitical thinking in general. Rust and Soles’ define ‘ecohorror’ as ‘those instances in texts when nature strikes back against humans as punishment for environmental disruption’. This ‘punishment’ usually takes the form of violence and revenge, which are expectations of the horror genre. In graphically violent horror cinema, Xavier Reyes describes the affective-corporeal dimension of watching such films as ‘a form of masochistic pleasure gained from exposure to affect through a contractual encounter with, among other things, corporeal transgression’. The politics of such films are survivalist. Violent horror films invite their viewers to take aesthetic pleasure in a mental and physical ordeal of negative affect in a test of their endurance and resilience.
Bataille linked the pleasures of violence to wider questions of ecology. For him, human beings seek to overcome their feeling of separateness from the rest of nature through rituals of violent sacrifice. ‘A violent death’, he wrote, ‘disrupts the creature’s discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one.’ Bataille extrapolated from this an ecology based, it should be noted, not on sustainability and conservation, but on expenditure and waste.
In contrast, psychologist Renée Danzinger seeks to explain the wishful desires for violent revenge and retribution in global popular culture by arguing that revenge has a ‘feelgood’ factor, because it is a ‘means of restoring a sense of self’ from perceived harm. Fantasies of revenge become popular responses to intractable social and political problems in the perceived absence or ineffectiveness of alternatives.
Bio: Dr. David Ingram is the author of Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (University of Exeter Press, 2000) and The Jukebox in the Garden: Ecocriticism and American Popular Music Since 1960 (Rodopi, 2010), as well as several articles on ecocriticism in film, music and literature. He taught Film and Television Studies at Brunel University, London until his retirement in 2020.