Session: 6b
Day: Friday 17 April
Time: 9.15–11.00
Room: JK2–3 1.15
Chair: Mia You
Demi Wilton (Birmingham City University), “Interspecies Conquest and Interplanetary Displacement in Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius”
Abstract: This paper examines Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius (2017) through the lens of multispecies hierarchies and entanglements, situating the novel within ongoing debates on colonial violence and climate change-related displacement in First Nations Australia. Coleman’s science fiction allegory reimagines British colonization as an alien invasion by ‘Toads’, amphibian settlers whose ecological precarity drives interplanetary conquest. Drawing upon the cane toad’s destructive introduction into Australia as both biological and symbolic colonizer, the novel employs human and nonhuman histories of invasion as a troubling backdrop to present-day climate threat.
By recasting Indigenous histories of forced removal within a speculative future, Terra Nullius critiques the violent logic of the modern capitalist world-system, in which populations deemed surplus have been consigned to sacrifice zones both historically and in our present moment. Yet, the Toads’ vulnerability to drought and ecological collapse also destabilizes colonial hierarchies, highlighting the limits of extractive expansion and the shared exposure of colonizers and colonized to climate breakdown. Taking this into account, this paper argues that Terra Nullius stages a critical intervention in debates on climate justice by foregrounding the historic endurance of subjugated communities to the kinds of conditions that climate change threatens to enact globally. In this, Coleman’s novel hinges on the timely and pressing question: will climate change exacerbate or mitigate inequality between First Nations and non-First Nations communities in Australia? Reflecting on this, the paper questions the fluid nature of both human and nonhuman hierarchies in an increasingly hostile world.
Bio: Demi Wilton is a Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham City University. Her research is particularly concerned with representations of climate change, migration, and knowledge production in twenty-first century world-literature. She is currently working on her first monograph, Environmental Displacement and World-Literature. Demi has served as an elected committee member for the Association of Literature and Environment, UK and Ireland (ASLE-UKI) since June 2021, most recently as the association’s Diversity Officer.
Caitlin MacDonald (University of Cape Town), “Mouthful of Mud: Unearthing the Anthropocene in Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist”
Abstract: Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974) enters into the well-worn language of the South African pastoral, assembling its players: the outstretched flatness of the Transvaal farm, the white master, the obedient herdsman, questions of inheritance, the collapse of territorial and sexual conquest. Yet, at every turn, the idyll of white dominion unravels; its cohesion is infected by the presence of an anonymous black corpse found at the perimeter of the farm. The discovery of the body, its shallow burial by police, exhumation by a torrent of rain, and eventual funeral mark the passing of time in a novel with an often slippery, dream-like chronology. The landscape participates in the unsettling of the pastoral genre, as rot, decay, animal infanticide, drought, and flood pervade the narrative. Examining the ambivalent symbol of burial in the text, and in the broader tradition of the plaasroman, this analysis will read the novel as a gradual funeral rite – both an elegy for the unnamed corpse and a portent of the unseating of white dominion over the land. Drawing on Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None and J.M. Coetzee’s notion of “dream topographies”, this paper argues that the novel stages the embedded fates of exploited earth and the subaltern, revealing the already-haunted textscape of the pastoral mode and the possibilities of more-than-human solidarity between the land and the landless.
Bio: Caitlin MacDonald is a writer and Master’s student in the Environmental Humanities South programme at the University of Cape Town. Her research concerns the intertwined politics of land, language, and species loss implicated in the Bleek and Lloyd archive, which houses records of extinct and endangered languages of Southern African hunter-gatherers. She also co-authored Clay Formes: Contemporary Clay from South Africa, a book of lyric essays that surveys the work of thirty significant artists.
Lisa Cristea (TU Braunschweig), “Sonic Sensescapes and Multispecies Entanglements in Indian English Short Stories”
Abstract: Textual representations of sound and their particular aesthetics have often been neglected in literary studies. Informed by my Phd research on the affordances of aesthetic forms in Indian English eco-fiction, this paper argues for vivid sonic sensescapes as a narrative strategy to negotiate multispecies entanglements in urban spaces as exemplified by two short stories, “Listen: A Memoir” (2021) by writer Priya Sarukkai Chabria and “The Songs that Humanity Lost Reluctantly to Dolphins” (2021) by Shweta Taneja.
In the first story, “Listen: A Memoir” by Sarukkai Chabria, a Tamil child living in a futuristic Indian city learns to communicate with the more-than-human ‘environment’ by listening to the ‘songs’ of animals, oceans and stars. In the second story, “The Songs that Humanity Lost Reluctantly to Dolphins” by Taneja, human children from all over the world are ‘infected’ by the songs of dolphins, transforming the children’s bodies and rewiring their brains towards more empathy for the more-than-human world, much to the fear of the adults. Drawing on New Materialist concepts such as Iovino and Oppermann’s storied matter, Alaimo’s trans-corporeality and econarratological notions, such as Caracciolo’s multiscalarity and interdependency, I argue that both stories evoke what Brandon LaBelle has called ‘sonic agency’, a relational understanding of sound that aims to disturb hegemonic power structures and foster empathetic and emancipatory “acoustics of assembly and resistance” (Sonic Agency 4).
By investigating the aesthetics of the sonic sensescapes in both short stories, I argue that sounds in the two stories are intimately bound up with embodied memory and work to unsettle rigid (post)human/more-than-human boundaries by ‘reactivating’ human’s recognition of their trans-corporeal enmeshment with the more-than-human world. Thus, these two short stories imagine an ethics of human/more-than-human entanglement and kinship based on sonic affects, thereby appealing towards more just futures of multispecies coexistence.
Bio: After graduating in English Studies at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Lisa Cristea is now a research assistant and doctoral candidate in the interdisciplinary project OPEN_Cultures at TU Braunschweig. Her research interests include the Environmental Humanities, Postcolonial Studies and Inter- and Transdisciplinarity. In her research project, she is concerned with formal and aesthetic reconfigurations of materiality in Indian English fiction and their affective affordances, on which she has already presented a paper at the German Association for the Study of English.