Mardi 5 novembre 2024 18h Salle 126 Bâtiment Saint-Charles 1 & ZOOM
Julia Kuznetski (Tallinn University) "Blue Humanities and Fluid Stories"
This talk uses Blue Humanities, an emerging field reflecting the “fluid turn” in new materialism, as a framework to reimagine human-environment relationships, drawing on the work of scholars like Serpil Oppermann, Astrida Neimanis, Elizabeth DeLoughry and Stacy Alaimo, who advocate "thinking with water" as a way to challenge the rigid boundaries between humans and the natural world. This interdisciplinary approach merges cultural studies, climate science, social politics and narrative research, emphasising the interconnectedness of matter and stories.The presentation examines how water shapes our understanding of bodies, matter and agency, drawing on Astrida Neimanis' concept of "bodies of water" to highlight the paradoxical relationship between humans and water—something we are composed of but cannot inhabit. This separation is reflected in cultural narratives, where water is often represented as an alien, uncontrollable force to be feared or subdued.
The two case studies explored in the presentation employ Blue poetics and generic fluidity, while addressing themes of historical injustice and ecological crisis. The first example is Monique Roffey's The Mermaid of Black Conch (2021), stages a fantasmagorical encounter between a mermaid, previously a human woman from an extinct indigenous Taino tribe on a pre-Columbian Caribbean island, extractivist western capitalists and present-day Caribbeans, who are caught in a thick history of migration, expulsion of indigenous population by guns, slave trade, damaging European viruses and today’s global capitalism that thrives on the abuse of the sea as resource. The novel stages the transcorporeal body (Alaimo 2010) as a site of memory and vulnerability. The narrative combines standard English, Caribbean pidgin, Taino skin markings and sign language to explore modes of embodied communication. The second example is The Deep by Rivers Solomon (2019), an Afrofuturist novel depicting a non-binary underwater people descended from enslaved African women who were jettisoned overboard on the Middle Passage and are now populating the ocean, which is changing, due to extractivist deep-sea mining. The novel addresses memory and ecological justice, as protagonist Yetu, the tribe's memory keeper, struggles with the burden of her role. The narrative connects historical trauma with contemporary ecological concerns, such as ocean warming and extractivism, as forms of “fast” and "slow” violence (Nixon 2011), while exploring the materiality of the body, water and memory.
Both novels emphasise the materiality, fluidity and ambivalence of water, eroding distinctions between human and nonhuman, the real and the fantastical. They disrupt conventional narratives, urging a recognition of shared vulnerability with the water environment, thus encouraging a more conscious engagement with the histories and ecologies that shape our present.
BIO
Julia Kuznetski is a Professor of English at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University, Estonia. Her research interests include present-day Anglophone literature and culture, new materialism, environmental humanities, blue humanities, gender studies, ecofeminism, and transcultural literature. Her publications include a co-edited volume (with Silvia Pellicer-Ortín) titled Women on the Move: Body, Memory and Femininity in Present-Day Transnational Diasporic Writing (Routledge, 2019), a special issue of Women: A Cultural Review “‘We Too’: Female Voices in the Transnational Era of Crises, Migration, Pandemic and Climate Change” (2023) and, most recently, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Crisis (co-edited with Siliva Pellicer-Ortin and Chiara Battisti 2024). She is currently working on a monograph with Bloomsbury academic titled Currents and Storytides: Transnational Women Writers on the Environment, Memory and the Future and starting a research project “Memory and Environment: The Intersection of Fast and Slow Violence in Transnational European Literatures“.
References
Alaimo, S. (2010) Bodily Natures: Science, Environment and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana UP.
Alaimo, S. (2016) Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times.
Minneapolis: Minnesota UP.
DeLoughrey, E. (2023a). “Mining the Seas: Speculative Fictions and Futures.” In I. Braverman (ed). Laws of the Sea: Interdisciplinary Currents. New York: Routledge, pp. 145–163.
Neimanis, A. (2017) Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury.
Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard: Harvard UP.
Oppermann, S. (2023) Blue Humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Lien pour rejoindre ce séminaire à distance : https://univ-montp3-fr.zoom.us/j/94203872685?pwd=ay06MpgfLl2KcA96IWHbq9Vzrldu7t.1