Session: 5e
Day: Thursday 15 April
Time: 11.30–13.00
Room: JK2–3 2.17
Chair: Jaya Sarkar
Roman Bartosch (University of Cologne), “Diegetic Disanthropy: Confrontational Empathy in Venomous Lumpsucker, Afterworld, and A Children’s Bible”
Abstract: In narratives of multispecies (in)justice, a frequent strategy for engaging more-than-human empathy is to imagine a world in which human beings come under threat or are extinguished. Greg Garrard has coined the term “disanthropy” for those fictions invoking a world without humans. The aim of my presentation is to investigate how such a world, and the processes leading to such a world, are staged in different narratives and with different narrative and affective goals: In Ned Bauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker, a researcher tasked with securing the survival of an unimposing, yet excessively clever fish, entertains dreams of self-annihilation and animal revenge. In Debbie Urbanski’s Afterworld, readers follow the final days of one of the last human survivors after an apocalyptic pandemic and encounter the ways in which an AI explains why humans had to be wiped out for the greater ecological good. And in Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible, it is not humans as such, but the parental generation who, from the perspective of some concerned and ecologically-minded children, have lost their right to survival. In order to assess the different strategies employed in these texts and outline both their potential and their shortcomings with regard to matters of multispecies justice, I will use findings from empathy research and, in particular, Carolyn Pedwell’s notion of “confrontational empathy” to show how these arguably very different texts explore the difficult terrain of empathy in (fictional) worlds devoid of care and concern and the different forms of resistance these engagements index.
Bio: Roman Bartosch is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures and the Teaching of English as well as Co-Director of the Research Hub for Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities (MESH) at the University of Cologne, Germany. He has published on postcolonial ecocriticism, human-animal studies, ecological and climate literacies as well as resilience and resistance. His recent book is collected volume, co-edited with Ursula K. Heise and Kate Rigby, called Unsettling Extinction (published with Bloomsbury).
Lena Leimgruber (Umeå University), “Blackfish City and the Orca Uprising: Speculative Resistance in the Neo-Colonial Arctic”
Abstract: This paper explores Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City (2018) as a speculative reimagining of multispecies resistance in a post-climate collapse Arctic. Set in Qaanaaq, a floating Arctic city characterised by stratified class divisions, the novel centres on a mysterious woman who arrives riding an orca. Her deep, possibly bio-engineered bond with the animal symbolises a realignment of human–nonhuman relations, challenging existing power structures. She and her nonhuman companions disrupt the socio-political fabric of the city. I read these animals as symbols of ecological disruption, but even more so as agents of resistance who challenge extractivist logics and forge unexpected solidarities. In Blackfish City, nonhuman resistance emerges not as a binary opposition to human action but as a complex, entangled force. The novel imagines alternative alliances across species boundaries, suggesting that survival and justice in a neo-colonial Arctic depend on multispecies configurations of care, memory and resistance.
Framing Blackfish City within the context of “orca uprising” imaginaries and neo-colonial ecologies, Miller’s narrative complicates anthropocentric binaries and opens speculative space for more-than-human justice. The paper argues that the novel’s depiction of a flooded, fractured Arctic critiques contemporary climate futures and interrogates the intersection of environmental collapse, corporate sovereignty and Indigenous erasure. Drawing on multispecies theory (Haraway 2008; Tsing 2015) and decolonial ecocriticism (DeLoughrey 2019), I explore how Blackfish City imagines the Arctic as a zone of reinvention: a site where nonhuman agents catalyse collective action in the ruins of climate capitalism.
Bio: Lena Leimgruber is a doctoral student in English Literature at Umeå University, Sweden. Her research focuses on speculative fiction, postcolonial literature and ecocriticism, with a focus on the Arctic region. She is particularly interested in how literature can address and complicate the intersections of climate change, resource exploitation and Indigenous experiences in the Arctic. Lena also has an interest in academic writing and previously worked as a writing tutor at several Swedish universities.
Ann Imke (University of Bremen), “Narrating Speculative Space at Sea: Floating Cities and More-than-Human Ecologies”
Abstract: In speculative climate fiction, imaginary cities act as discursive sites for negotiation between dominant and alternative understandings of climate change. Pushing back against Eurocentric tropes which focus on apocalypse and extractavism, climate fiction can be used to explore alternative imaginaries which foreground both social and ecological justice. In the context of climate change and rising sea levels, future visions of human survival are frequently staged in liminal spaces between land and sea, such as floating cities.
These unmoored urban spaces occupy both natural and social dimensions, illustrating how human dwellings are embedded directly in the environment. However, in recent years, seasteading (a portmanteau from “sea” and “homesteading” to describe floating societies) has also attracted serious interest from the super-rich due to its potential for political and financial autonomy.
Floating cities are therefore paradoxical – while assuming a certain level of technological sophistication, they simulataneously embody precarity through exposure to the elements, directly juxtaposing human exceptionalism and fragility in the face of natural forces. I argue that these urban environments serve as posthuman contact zones where encounters are staged not only between humans, but also with non-human entities and materialities. These spaces therefore open up possibilities for staging both nonhuman resistance and envisioning alternative alliances beyond the human.
Building on Erin James’ concept of econarratology, I examine floating urban spaces both as a formal literary element and in relation to modern day site-specific contexts. Through close-reading case studies of floating cities from Sam Miller’s Blackfish City (2018) and Ned Beauman’s Venemous Lumpsucker (2022), I examine how human structures and movement interact with ecological forces and spaces. In doing so, I pay particular attention to tensions between competing visions of humanity’s relationship with the natural environment, noting how narratives of aquatic cities spaces draw distinctions or explore entanglement with the more-than-human.
Bio: Ann Imke is a doctoral fellow in the DFG Research Training Group “Contradiction Studies” at the University of Bremen. With a background in literary, media and cultural studies, her dissertation investigates how climate fiction negotiates contradictions between dominant and marginalized climate imaginaries, analyzing narrative space and perspective through the lenses of ecocritical, posthuman and postcolonial theory.