Session: 3f
Time: 16.00–17.45
Room: JK2–3 1.15
Chair:
Jennifer Leetsch (University of Trier), “Equiano’s Animals: Of Walruses, Whales and Flying Fish”
Abstract: Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 slave narrative, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, constructs the Black self in tandem with an oceanic world that teems with lively interspecies relations and unexpected ecological solidarities, but also with ecological dependencies and the eco- and genocidal realties of European (settler) colonialism and its deathly, extractive logics. The ocean is Equiano’s most constant companion, acting as both his greatest adversary and most trusted enabler. It is where he nearly dies repeatedly, yet he cannot stay away from it due to the relative financial security it promises and the contingent freedom aboard the ships traversing its watery depths. Its ecologies – currents, waves, coasts, shoals, marine flora and fauna – enrich and complicate Equiano’s experiences, pushing the boundaries of his ecological understanding and, in turn, the way he fashions himself within the Atlantic world.
This talk focuses on one aspect of Equiano’s oceanic environment: his animal encounters. During his travels, he meets a multitude of marine animals, from flying fish during the Middle Passage, to whales and walruses on his trip to the Arctic. Equiano’s animals are an integral part of his story, from slavery to freedom, from pain and horror to complicity and empowerment. They are imagined as bearers of slavery’s suffering, act as species companions, and help Equiano construct his humanity. Reading these encounters through the lens of more-than-human entanglement allows us to reconsider Equiano’s slave narrative as an early site of ecological and multispecies thought — one that, as I hope to show, complicates white, Western exceptionalism and opens up space for alternative forms of resistance, solidarity, and co-existence.
Bio: Jennifer Leetsch is Junior Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Trier, where her research and teaching explore three interrelated strands: 1) postcolonial literatures with an emphasis on Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean, 2) postcolonial Environmental Humanities and 3) Anglophone media cultures. Previously, she held a postdoctoral research position at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn. She is currently working on her second monograph, tentatively titled Black Atlantic Ecologies: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Black Life Writing beyond the Colonial Anthropocene.
Ruth Bryant (Utrecht University), “Spoils of Whaling: Commodifying Nature in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Arctic Genre Scenes”
Abstract: Dutch whaling played a foundational role in the rise of commercial whaling and the establishment of large-scale operations in the Arctic and Subarctic regions, positioning the Dutch Republic as a dominant whaling power of the seventeenth century. This article explores a group of seventeenth century depictions of the Dutch whaling industry, which I call Dutch Arctic genre scenes. As an understudied body, these paintings depict the complex mechanisms of the whaling industry, the Arctic landscape, and the Dutch dominance over both. These paintings, which appear to document human ingenuity and expansion, simultaneously render whales as commodified bodies, transformed into floating sources of oil. By isolating this class of painting, this article examines how the Dutch artists —Cornelis de Man (1621-1706) and Abraham Storck (1644-1708)— visually framed the Arctic as a space of economic opportunity, imperial aspirations, and normalized extractive activities. In doing so, the article traces these historical narratives of human exceptionalism embedded within Arctic genre scenes to the ongoing systemic violence embedded within global meat industries. The article concludes by purposefully re-centering of the perspectives of whales, emphasizing their socio-ecological relationships, agency, and resistance. In acknowledging the richness of whale life and culture, this article challenges the exploitative, human-centric logic that underpins Arctic genre scenes and their ideological legacies. This contemporary understanding of historical materials acts as a form of countervisibility, subverting the extractivist gaze and asserting alternative ways of seeing. By elucidating the ways in which whales have been falsely represented as passive, complicit creatures by Dutch painters, this article encourages a way of approaching Arctic genre scenes that acknowledges the tandem role of art and industry and the historic erasure of whale resistance to commodification.
Bio: Ruth Bryant is a Research Master’s student in Art History at Utrecht University, with a BA in Art History and Biology from Case Western Reserve University. Her research explores Early Modern Netherlandish art through ecocritical, global, and decolonial lenses. She has presented at the Graduate Humanities Conference (UU 2025), a Southeastern European silversmithing conference (Institute of Art Studies at Bulgaria Academy of Sciences, 2024), SUNY New Paltz Art Symposium (SUNY New Paltz, 2023) and co-organized the Canal to Cuyahoga symposium (Cleveland Museum of Art, 2023), linked to the 2023 U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Ruth Bryant has recently published a DURARE blog on historical reconstruction fifteenth century recipes for imitation pearls.
Annette Louise Bickford (York University, Toronto), “Yacht-Ramming Orcas: Towards Democratic Interspecies Communities”
Since May 2020, an unprecedented series of interactions between a critically endangered subpopulation of Iberian orcas (Orcinus orca) and vessels off the coasts of Spain and Portugal has attracted global attention. What began as 49 documented incidents in 2020 has escalated to more than 750 encounters by mid-2025, including at least six sinkings and damage to over 250 vessels. These events, primarily involving yachts of approximately twelve meters, typically involve coordinated ramming and rudder-targeting behavior lasting from 30 minutes to two hours. Curiously, orcas have not harmed mariners, despite the sometimes-grave injuries they inflict.
Marine biologists identify ramming participants with the suffix “Gladis,” adapted from an early vernacular name for the species, Orca gladiator. The behavior is widely attributed to cultural transmission, possibly originating with the matriarch known as White Gladis. While some scientists and journalists frame these encounters as fad-like, or “just the playful curiosity of these animals,” comparisons to transient orca “trends” risk obscuring the persistence and apparent intentionality of the behavior. Ramming has caused severe head wounds in at least one male juvenile.
This paper interrogates dominant interpretations that trivialize these interactions as curiosity or play. It asks instead whether such actions might be understood as expressions of exasperation, fury, revenge, and resistance to anthropogenic pressures? Situating the phenomenon within broader debates following the 2012 Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness, I examine the tension between growing scientific acknowledgment of other-than-human consciousness and the continued framing of sentient, chronically stressed marine mammals as benign, mechanistic actors.
Three questions guide this inquiry: First, how can we distinguish between epistemic limitations of our capacity to better understand orcas on their own terms and our collective unwillingness to do so? Second, how does reason function as a technology of power reinforcing human exceptionalism? Given our veneration of reason as a marker of superiority and entitlement, would empirical evidence of orcas’ complex cognition be enough to persuade us to rethink our human-animal dualism? Third, how might solidarity with these “voices from below” contribute to forms of ecological rationality grounded in solidarity and deep democracy? Drawing on marine neuroscience, environmental ethics, and political philosophy, the paper argues for a reframing of these encounters as ethically and politically significant, rather than anomalous curiosities.
Bio: Annette Louise Bickford is an Associate Professor on faculty in the Department of Social Science, York University, and is cross appointed with the Graduate Programs in Social & Political Thought and Humanities. Trained as an historical anthropologist, she now works in interdisciplinary social science, with current research interests in the anthropology of animals and the anthropology of consciousness. Her book, Southern Mercy: Empire and American Civilization in Juvenile Reform, 1890-1944 (University of Toronto Press, 2016) critically analyzes our present-day state of supposed “post-raciality through an historical examination of citizenship, national belonging, and alterity in the American South during the Progressive and New eras.
Nguyễn Huy Hoàng, “Mơ mơ màng màng: On the Aesthetic-Ontological Ambiguity of the Holy Whale in Vietnam”
Abstract: This paper examines the more-than-human coexistence between fishermen in Quy Nhơn – a South Central city in Vietnam and the Holy Whale, who are worshiped for his saving of the fishermen at times of exigency on the sea and harmonious weather conditions for seafaring business. The Holy Whale, for his ability to induce the fishermen into a trance-like state of “mơ mơ màng màng” (half-dreamy, half-awake) upon his saving, is recognised as a force of divine otherness, thus occupying an ontological rupture compared to the fishermen. Solution to ontological ruptures by prevalent theoretical Western-centric paradigms like the Ontological Turn involves radicalizing them further with the creation of new linguistic concepts. While recognising the premise of ontological differences between the fishermen and the Holy Whale, this paper proposes an alternative analytics of co-existence: a shared aesthetic world of ambiguity. That is, I argue that Quy Nhơn fishermen continuously think through him with their techniques of imagination instead of defining Cá Ông in discrete linguistic terms. Respectively, the conceptual shape to their thoughts, I advance, is that of flow, as opposed to a linear line putrifying all differences. This aesthetics sustains ambiguity across minds, believers, and generations, for the fishermen to keep “mơ mơ màng màng” and engage with this force of divine otherness.
Bio: Hoàng Nguyễn-Huy holds a BA degree in Social Studies from Fulbright University Vietnam. His research focuses on the figure of the non-humans in anthropology and how they relate to larger ecological relations and the process of worlding or building world(s). At the intersection of theoretical tenets such as nature-culture, myth, aesthetics, ecology, and cosmopolitics, Hoàng’s bachelor thesis examines flows of ontological ambiguity surrounding the Holy Whale (Cá Ông) as worshipped by fishermen in Quy Nhơn, Vietnam.