Thesis by Karsten Levihn-Kutzler
Some of the most important and most contentious political questions of our time concern the antic... more Some of the most important and most contentious political questions of our time concern the anticipation and pre-emption of future harm. The fight against the corona pandemic, with its focus on precautionary measures and projections of case numbers is only one example in a long line of threats that include nuclear war, climate change, and transnational terrorism, all of which challenge us to act based scenarios and predictions of future harm.
The apprehension of such threats is to our experience of globality in the contemporary world. However, these hazards are very often removed from immediate perception, so that our knowledge of global risks is often second-hand knowledge, shaped as much by science as by transcultural flows of images, metaphors and narratives about technological hazards. The book explores how 20th and 21st century Anglophone fiction narrate the experience of living at risk from global technological and environmental hazards.
In six contrastive readings that bring British, American, and postcolonial anglophone writing into dialogue, the book examines how the politics of fictional texts are connected to its narrative strategies for writing global risk: Engaging global risks means focusing on events which have not taken place yet and which are often hard or impossible to localize in a single geographical setting. Moreover, understanding how texts engage the temporality and location of global hazards not only helps us comprehend the role of fiction in debates about global risk, it also helps us explore how scenarios of the future are imagined and narrated more broadly.
Drafts by Karsten Levihn-Kutzler
“Modernity was not a ‘virus’ that spread from the West to the rest of the world”, Amitav Ghosh wr... more “Modernity was not a ‘virus’ that spread from the West to the rest of the world”, Amitav Ghosh writes in his treatise on literature and climate change, The Great Derangement. It is, rather, a “global and conjectural phenomenon”, and what is unique about Western modernity is only “its insistence on its own uniqueness” (2016, 95). Throughout Ghosh’s work, his plots unearth the disparate roots and entangled trajectories of multiple modernities. This includes Ghosh’s science novels, The Hungry Tide and The Calcutta Chromosome, which demonstrate that the notion of science as a uniquely Western form of knowledge production is a colonial construction. On first glance, both novels seem to position indigenous, colonial subjects as preter- or even supernatural sources of knowledge: In The Hungry Tide, an illiterate fisherman’s intimate understanding of river dolphins and their movements through the Sundarbans delta occasions a scientific breakthrough for the novel’s cetologist heroine; and in The Calcutta Chromosome, a cult-like conspiracy of Indian “counter-scientists” are portrayed as the puppet masters behind Roland Ross’s discovery of the transmission of malaria in colonial India. However, on closer inspection, in both novels, the positioning of colonial subjects as the Other of scientific knowledge production is subverted: The Hungry Tide’s illiterate fisherman is not a font of ancient local knowledge, he is a patient observer who looks at the dolphins with scientific precision; The Calcutta Chromosome’s shadowy conspirators are not keepers of occult knowledge but are working within and through the laboratories of colonial scientists to do their own original research. Like modernity, then, science has many roots and entangled trajectories in Ghosh’s fiction.
Papers by Karsten Levihn-Kutzler
Anglistik 33.2, 2022
For Victorian scientists, the dodo provided an intriguing object of study that touched on central... more For Victorian scientists, the dodo provided an intriguing object of study that touched on central questions of the emergent science of biology – the extinction of species and their spatial distribution. But Victorian scientists were reconstructing a bird that they had never known and which had been extinct for more than 150 years. Before the 1860s, when a number of subfossil dodo bones were discovered on Mauritius, Victorian "dodology" was also working in the near absence of physical evidence. It thus became an issue of philological detective that had Victorian scientists return, time and again, to unreliable manuscripts and contradictory illustrations, constantly intertwining the study of the 'real' dodo and its 'imaginary' counterpart. The paper focusses on two influential Victorian texts about the dodo: Hugh Edwin Strickland and Alexander Gordon Melville's The Dodo and its Kindred, published in 1848, which includes an exhaustive critical evaluation of written witness accounts and illustrations of the dodo. It establishes these accounts as crucial sources of knowledge about the dodo, but at the same time he works out the limits of their reliability. The second text considered, Memoir of the Dodo, published in 1866 by the eminent palaeontologist Richard Owen draws on the subfossil bones discovered on Mauritius the year before. Nevertheless, his scientific reconstruction of the dodo is shaped by depictions of the dodo as bulky and inept creature intertwined ridiculed and blamed for its own extinction. Meanwhile, the 'real' dodo remained elusive, and thus the effort to divide fact from fiction continues to the present day.
Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 2017
Review essay of Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner's The Anticipation of Catastrop... more Review essay of Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner's The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture and Molly Wallace's Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty. Resumen Ensayo reseña de The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture de Sylvia Mayer y Alexa Weik von Mossner, y de Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty de Molly Wallace.
Open Library of Humanities, 2018
Climate change is at the heart of recent critical debates about the role of the global and the lo... more Climate change is at the heart of recent critical debates about the role of the global and the local in the critical practice of the environmental humanities. While critics like Ursula K. Heise and Timothy Clark have argued for putting the global at the conceptual centre of inquiry, others have warned that such a wide focus obscures the localized effects of climate change and their connection to histories of colonial and capitalist exploitation. Rather than privileging one side of this argument over the other, this paper seeks to put both perspectives into a productive dialogue that focusses on how literature can connect the local histories and global environmental risks. The paper draws on two relatively unknown novels, Susannah Waters’ Cold Comfort (2007) and Daniel Kramb’s From Here (2012), in order to show how the threat of climate change disrupts understandings of scale that structure our social lives by linking global forces to moments of domestic and intimate crisis. From Here’s protagonist is a cosmopolitan culture worker, whose perpetual uprootedness becomes the vantage point for her political engagement with the threat of climate change. Cold Comfort’s Alaska Native protagonist finds her house literally tilting due to the melting permafrost ground, while domestic violence and sexual abuse make her home uninhabitable. Despite the huge disjuncture in the contexts they portray, the texts share an interest in the disjuncture between awareness and agency, in the impact of climate change on domestic and intimate relationships, and in links between the private, the political and the planetary.
Post-Empire Imaginaries? Anglophone Literature, History, and the Demise of Empires. Edited by Barbara Buchenau and Virginia Richter with Marijke Denger
Non-academic by Karsten Levihn-Kutzler
Book Reviews by Karsten Levihn-Kutzler
Ecozon@, 2017
Review essay of Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner's The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Enviro... more Review essay of Sylvia Mayer and Alexa Weik von Mossner's The Anticipation of Catastrophe: Environmental Risk in North American Literature and Culture and Molly Wallace's Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty.
Presentations and Talks by Karsten Levihn-Kutzler
Presentation at the Anglistentag 2021 (Section “Limits of Knowledge – Knowledge of Limits”), 20 –... more Presentation at the Anglistentag 2021 (Section “Limits of Knowledge – Knowledge of Limits”), 20 – 21 September 2021
Victorians, a commonplace goes, were fascinated with extinction. And apart perhaps from dinosaurs, no extinct animal fascinated the Victorians quite like the dodo – at one point tellingly named Didus ineptus by Linné – did. Following an appearance in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the dodo became a staple of Victorian visual and popular culture, attaining an iconic status it has not relinquished since. This is perhaps surprising, given how little Victorians actually knew about the dodo, which had then been extinct for about 200 years. Without a complete specimen surviving and with only a few bones and a contradictory record of eye-witness accounts to draw on, the reconstruction of the dodo became a game of Chinese Whispers that lead to the image of the dodo as the plump, dumb creature we still know today, even though newer scientific reconstructions have found it to be a much spryer, more agile creature.
The Victorian fascination with the dodo is even more striking when compared to the cultural memorialization of other anthropogenic extinctions that Victorians could have known about, such as Steller's sea cow or the great auk. The greater range of these creatures meant that 19th-century naturalists always assumed that there were some specimens left, somewhere “out there” in hitherto unexplored space. Their depiction in 19th-century fiction – for instance in texts by Kipling and Charles Kingsley – thus revolved around the trope of lonely, isolated survivors. By contrast, the dodo was known to have been restricted to Mauritius, and thus it became the first popularly confirmed case of human-caused species loss. From our perspective, this fate might read as a reminder of the ecological limits of colonial resource exploitation and industrial modernity. But the memorialization of the dodo – founded as it was on a constitutive lack of first-hand knowledge about the creature – confirmed, rather than undermined Victorian narratives of progress. For all its benign ineptitude, the Victorian dodo signified the social Darwinist underpinnings of Victorian ideology. It was, put bluntly, a bird to dumb to live, a quaint but pointless form of life swept aside by the march of progress.
Part of the panel "Subjects of Human Knowledge: Anthropology in Contemporary Fiction" at the Brit... more Part of the panel "Subjects of Human Knowledge: Anthropology in Contemporary Fiction" at the British Society for Literature and Science annual Conference, 7 – 9 April 2021.
Over the past decade or so, a substantial number of novels featuring anthropologist protagonists have been published to wide-spread acclaim. Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees (2013), Lily King’s Euphoria (2014), both set in the south Pacific, and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019), set in an alternative-history London, all draw on phases in the twentieth century history of anthropology (from the 1920s to the 1980s). In addition, they share further characteristics. The novels all feature fictional – or fictionalised – anthropologists that are engaged in complex constellations of anthropological observation and situate anthropological inquiry in relation to other scientific disciplines as well as evolving cultural concerns. In all three novels, too, the production of anthropological knowledge coincides with the death or destruction of the beings investigated.
Each novel revisits a moment in the history of anthropology, laying bare the internal fault lines of the discipline, as well as anthropology's distinctive position in the knowledge discourses of modern societies. In a discipline precariously poised between the claim of scientific practice and cultural reflexivity, the problematization of the role of the observer has historically been a disciplinary hallmark. The novels engage with this problematization through several characteristic structural elements, which recur with variations in all three novels (such as triangular character constellations or shifting subject-object relations). In addition, all three novels interrogate the entanglement of observation and destruction that became foundational for the modern understanding of the human, as it emerged in the processes of colonial encounters that form the framework of anthropological field work.
In the novels, this is manifested in characteristic plot patterns which are based on an encounter of several individuals each with a problematic history of their own, who join in situations of 'field work' which in turn lead them into encounters with the objects of anthropological observation. In these situations, the objects of anthropological observation are never truly allowed to achieve a reciprocity of perspective. The novels aim to highlight the destructive consequences of the anthropological encounter for the 'objects observed' by showing how the relationship with the anthropological observer leads to the death of the observed. Paradoxically, however, by keeping the anthropological observers squarely in the focus of the narrative, they also repeat the epistemological erasure of the perspectives of the individuals and communities they observe. In this way, all three novels also demonstrate the limits of a metropolitan critique of anthropology's colonial entanglements.
A presentation at the British Society for Literature and Science annual early career researcher s... more A presentation at the British Society for Literature and Science annual early career researcher symposium, 18 November 2021 – watch here: https://vimeo.com/616937224
As the extinction of signature species like the Dodo, the Passenger Pigeon, or the Tasmanian Tiger shows, the current crisis of biodiversity is intertwined with the history of European colonialism. Colonialism caused overexploitation and the destruction of habitats, spread invasive European species, and restructured colonial landscapes. Moreover, the rise of the scientific discourse of extinction, itself contingent on a new conception of geological time and on the emergence of uniform taxonomic systems, does not only historically coincide with the height of European colonialism, they are also conceptually intertwined. Emergent discourses of species extinction overlapped with colonial discourses of cultural and linguistic extinction that apply the principles of biological taxonomy to the social world. The analogy of species and cultures as distinct, self-enclosed, and stable epistemological units was foundational to how Europeans understood indigenous cultures, and in discourses of “endangered” cultures, it continues to structure our thinking even today.
My paper will use a close reading of William Henry Hudson's romance Green Mansions (1904) to explore the ambivalent fascination of colonial discourse with extinction. In the portrayal of its doomed romantic object, the native girl Rima, the novel conflates biological, cultural, and linguistic extinction, whilst also justifying genocidal violence against native populations in the name of conservation. Extinction thus emerges as a highly malleable, but also highly ambivalent trope that is both legitimizing and subverting colonial authority and European narratives of progress. My larger argument is that a close analysis of the function of extinction in colonial discourse not only helps us to understand the colonial roots of the current crisis of biodiversity, but also questions the utility of extinction to frame cultural and linguistic processes in a globalized world.
The paper explores how Janette Turner Hospital’s Orpheus Lost and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows ... more The paper explores how Janette Turner Hospital’s Orpheus Lost and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows critique the ideology of pre-emptive counter-terrorism as it emerged after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The logic of pre-emption legitimises large-scale data collection and mandates acting on suspicious patterns rather than concrete evidence. “High risk” individuals are subjected to surveillance, disenfranchisement, and incarceration in the name of absolute security. Turner Hospital and Shamsie re-frame this logic by tracing its continuities with older forms of state violence, racism, and totalitarian ideology – Nazism, Australian xenophobia, and white supremacism in the US in Orpheus Lost, the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the violence of Indian partition, and the US-sponsored anti-Soviet insurgency in Afghanistan in Burnt Shadows. Moreover, both novels take the perspective of falsely accused outsiders. Their respective protagonists are ethnically ambivalent cosmopolitans that defy the categories of pre-emptive security. As “foreign bodies”, they are suspect to a logic of pre-emptive action that acts on suspicion rather than evidence, and their unstable identities become misinterpreted as subterfuge. The novels thus foreground a racial undercurrent in the regime of pre-emptive security, a politics of life and death in which some lives inevitable matter more than others.
In debates about the implications of human-made climate change for postcolonial studies and the h... more In debates about the implications of human-made climate change for postcolonial studies and the humanities in general, the term ‘Anthropocene’ has recently gained gained prominence. The term denotes a geological era defined by humanity’s cumulative effect on the planet and its climate. Among others, Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out that this concept forces us re-conceptualize human agency in order to understand our collective impact as a species on a new scale. At the same time, ongoing debates about climate justice draw attention to the role of global economic and political inequalities, uneven development and environmental racism in shaping human-made climate change.
In my paper, I would like to explore the tension between these two – seemingly opposite – perspectives by looking at Susannah Waters’ 2006 novel Cold Comfort. Waters portrays a native Alaskan community co-opted into global Petro-Capitalism even as the thawing of the Arctic permafrost destroys their basis of life and the coordinates of indigenous culture. While their houses literally begin to sink into the melting ground, the community remains dependent on providing unskilled labour to the oil industry for income. The novel is told from the perspective of an adolescent girl who begins to realize how Petro-Capitalism leaves her people exposed to both climate hazards and material immiseration. The resulting desintegration of the social manifests in gendered violence and cultural alienation. However, Cold Comfort’s images of a community dependent on an industry that destroys them can also be read as an allegory of our own dependence on fossil fuels. In such a reading, the novel’s depiction of local vulnerability also serves as pars pro toto of the larger, planetary repercussions of climate change. My argument is that it is the very tension between these two interpretations that makes the novel’s approach to climate change so productive: Cold Comfort suggests that we can understand climate change’s double nature – universal threat and source of particular injustices – only by looking at the disenfranchised margins of global carbon culture.
At first glance, Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake are two novels that c... more At first glance, Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake are two novels that could not be more different, both in their aesthetic preferences and their political program. Atwood uses the framework of speculative fiction to engage in a didactic critique of the social and environmental destructiveness of capitalist modernity, while McEwan’s meticulous realism stays ostensibly agnostic about the political challenges of the post-9/11 world its protagonist inhabits. However, both novels do share a similar set of concerns. They both feature a protagonist navigating a threatening cityscape, both depict the impossibility of maintaining security through isolation and the invasive and virulent nature of terror. Both address questions about the relation of science, society, and security, and about the nature of the ‘human’ in an age of biological engineering and neuroscience. Moreover, Saturday fleetingly anticipates the world that Oryx and Crake openly imagines: a dystopian future after modernity. For both novels, this future is the anchor for a re-negotiation of the idea of modernity and human nature. Seen from this angle, Saturday’s optimism about scientific progress turns into melancholia as the novel mourns a modernity that seems already lost. The dystopian pessimism of Oryx and Crake, on the other hand, paradoxically ends up affirming the idea of human agency and creativity.
The experience of being exposed to threats of global reach, such as climate change, financial and... more The experience of being exposed to threats of global reach, such as climate change, financial and economic crises, or attacks by terrorist networks, is one of the characteristic modes in which we experience globality in our everyday lives. Such global risks can have a paradoxical, globalizing effect. By forcing people to cooperate across social and national boundaries to avoid hazards, they can create transnational communities of risk and give rise to cosmopolitan movements and public discourses. Yet very often, risk is merely deferred form the rich to the poor, from the powerful to the powerless, thus entrenching existing social boundaries.
In Indra Sinha’s fictional treatment of the Bhopal disaster and its aftermath, Animal’s People, these contradictory dynamics are at play. Sinha’s novel depicts the victims’ difficult struggle for recognition and their precarious existence in a toxic environment. But it strives to move beyond a simple victimization of the affected community. It places the issues of risk and recognition in a cosmopolitan public sphere marked by the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the ‘war on terror’, itself another another risk-scenario. Ultimately, Animal’s People invites a more cosmopolitan understanding of risk – a postimperial imaginary – in which risk figures as an underlying dynamic of modernity that affects people across social and national boundaries.
Some of the most important and most contentious political questions of our time concern the antic... more Some of the most important and most contentious political questions of our time concern the anticipation and prevention of hazards of global reach. Threats such as nuclear war, the consequences of environmental destruction, or transnational terrorism transcend national borders – we seem to live in an age of global risks. How do literary texts engage discourses of global risk? More specifically, how do 20th and 21st century Anglophone novels compound, revise, subvert or deconstruct such discourses?
My hypothesis is that the political dimension of literary engagement of global risk can only be fully understood if its textual presentation is considered. After all, dealing with global risks poses a challenge to the conventional form of the novel. While the ‘realist’ novel claims to ‘represent’ events that happen in a specific place, dealing with global risks means focussing on events which have not taken place yet, and which are often hard or impossible to localize. Understanding the construction of global risk in a given text thus requires close attention to the temporality and the location of risk in that text.
Uploads
Thesis by Karsten Levihn-Kutzler
The apprehension of such threats is to our experience of globality in the contemporary world. However, these hazards are very often removed from immediate perception, so that our knowledge of global risks is often second-hand knowledge, shaped as much by science as by transcultural flows of images, metaphors and narratives about technological hazards. The book explores how 20th and 21st century Anglophone fiction narrate the experience of living at risk from global technological and environmental hazards.
In six contrastive readings that bring British, American, and postcolonial anglophone writing into dialogue, the book examines how the politics of fictional texts are connected to its narrative strategies for writing global risk: Engaging global risks means focusing on events which have not taken place yet and which are often hard or impossible to localize in a single geographical setting. Moreover, understanding how texts engage the temporality and location of global hazards not only helps us comprehend the role of fiction in debates about global risk, it also helps us explore how scenarios of the future are imagined and narrated more broadly.
Drafts by Karsten Levihn-Kutzler
Papers by Karsten Levihn-Kutzler
Non-academic by Karsten Levihn-Kutzler
Book Reviews by Karsten Levihn-Kutzler
Presentations and Talks by Karsten Levihn-Kutzler
Victorians, a commonplace goes, were fascinated with extinction. And apart perhaps from dinosaurs, no extinct animal fascinated the Victorians quite like the dodo – at one point tellingly named Didus ineptus by Linné – did. Following an appearance in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the dodo became a staple of Victorian visual and popular culture, attaining an iconic status it has not relinquished since. This is perhaps surprising, given how little Victorians actually knew about the dodo, which had then been extinct for about 200 years. Without a complete specimen surviving and with only a few bones and a contradictory record of eye-witness accounts to draw on, the reconstruction of the dodo became a game of Chinese Whispers that lead to the image of the dodo as the plump, dumb creature we still know today, even though newer scientific reconstructions have found it to be a much spryer, more agile creature.
The Victorian fascination with the dodo is even more striking when compared to the cultural memorialization of other anthropogenic extinctions that Victorians could have known about, such as Steller's sea cow or the great auk. The greater range of these creatures meant that 19th-century naturalists always assumed that there were some specimens left, somewhere “out there” in hitherto unexplored space. Their depiction in 19th-century fiction – for instance in texts by Kipling and Charles Kingsley – thus revolved around the trope of lonely, isolated survivors. By contrast, the dodo was known to have been restricted to Mauritius, and thus it became the first popularly confirmed case of human-caused species loss. From our perspective, this fate might read as a reminder of the ecological limits of colonial resource exploitation and industrial modernity. But the memorialization of the dodo – founded as it was on a constitutive lack of first-hand knowledge about the creature – confirmed, rather than undermined Victorian narratives of progress. For all its benign ineptitude, the Victorian dodo signified the social Darwinist underpinnings of Victorian ideology. It was, put bluntly, a bird to dumb to live, a quaint but pointless form of life swept aside by the march of progress.
Over the past decade or so, a substantial number of novels featuring anthropologist protagonists have been published to wide-spread acclaim. Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees (2013), Lily King’s Euphoria (2014), both set in the south Pacific, and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019), set in an alternative-history London, all draw on phases in the twentieth century history of anthropology (from the 1920s to the 1980s). In addition, they share further characteristics. The novels all feature fictional – or fictionalised – anthropologists that are engaged in complex constellations of anthropological observation and situate anthropological inquiry in relation to other scientific disciplines as well as evolving cultural concerns. In all three novels, too, the production of anthropological knowledge coincides with the death or destruction of the beings investigated.
Each novel revisits a moment in the history of anthropology, laying bare the internal fault lines of the discipline, as well as anthropology's distinctive position in the knowledge discourses of modern societies. In a discipline precariously poised between the claim of scientific practice and cultural reflexivity, the problematization of the role of the observer has historically been a disciplinary hallmark. The novels engage with this problematization through several characteristic structural elements, which recur with variations in all three novels (such as triangular character constellations or shifting subject-object relations). In addition, all three novels interrogate the entanglement of observation and destruction that became foundational for the modern understanding of the human, as it emerged in the processes of colonial encounters that form the framework of anthropological field work.
In the novels, this is manifested in characteristic plot patterns which are based on an encounter of several individuals each with a problematic history of their own, who join in situations of 'field work' which in turn lead them into encounters with the objects of anthropological observation. In these situations, the objects of anthropological observation are never truly allowed to achieve a reciprocity of perspective. The novels aim to highlight the destructive consequences of the anthropological encounter for the 'objects observed' by showing how the relationship with the anthropological observer leads to the death of the observed. Paradoxically, however, by keeping the anthropological observers squarely in the focus of the narrative, they also repeat the epistemological erasure of the perspectives of the individuals and communities they observe. In this way, all three novels also demonstrate the limits of a metropolitan critique of anthropology's colonial entanglements.
As the extinction of signature species like the Dodo, the Passenger Pigeon, or the Tasmanian Tiger shows, the current crisis of biodiversity is intertwined with the history of European colonialism. Colonialism caused overexploitation and the destruction of habitats, spread invasive European species, and restructured colonial landscapes. Moreover, the rise of the scientific discourse of extinction, itself contingent on a new conception of geological time and on the emergence of uniform taxonomic systems, does not only historically coincide with the height of European colonialism, they are also conceptually intertwined. Emergent discourses of species extinction overlapped with colonial discourses of cultural and linguistic extinction that apply the principles of biological taxonomy to the social world. The analogy of species and cultures as distinct, self-enclosed, and stable epistemological units was foundational to how Europeans understood indigenous cultures, and in discourses of “endangered” cultures, it continues to structure our thinking even today.
My paper will use a close reading of William Henry Hudson's romance Green Mansions (1904) to explore the ambivalent fascination of colonial discourse with extinction. In the portrayal of its doomed romantic object, the native girl Rima, the novel conflates biological, cultural, and linguistic extinction, whilst also justifying genocidal violence against native populations in the name of conservation. Extinction thus emerges as a highly malleable, but also highly ambivalent trope that is both legitimizing and subverting colonial authority and European narratives of progress. My larger argument is that a close analysis of the function of extinction in colonial discourse not only helps us to understand the colonial roots of the current crisis of biodiversity, but also questions the utility of extinction to frame cultural and linguistic processes in a globalized world.
In my paper, I would like to explore the tension between these two – seemingly opposite – perspectives by looking at Susannah Waters’ 2006 novel Cold Comfort. Waters portrays a native Alaskan community co-opted into global Petro-Capitalism even as the thawing of the Arctic permafrost destroys their basis of life and the coordinates of indigenous culture. While their houses literally begin to sink into the melting ground, the community remains dependent on providing unskilled labour to the oil industry for income. The novel is told from the perspective of an adolescent girl who begins to realize how Petro-Capitalism leaves her people exposed to both climate hazards and material immiseration. The resulting desintegration of the social manifests in gendered violence and cultural alienation. However, Cold Comfort’s images of a community dependent on an industry that destroys them can also be read as an allegory of our own dependence on fossil fuels. In such a reading, the novel’s depiction of local vulnerability also serves as pars pro toto of the larger, planetary repercussions of climate change. My argument is that it is the very tension between these two interpretations that makes the novel’s approach to climate change so productive: Cold Comfort suggests that we can understand climate change’s double nature – universal threat and source of particular injustices – only by looking at the disenfranchised margins of global carbon culture.
In Indra Sinha’s fictional treatment of the Bhopal disaster and its aftermath, Animal’s People, these contradictory dynamics are at play. Sinha’s novel depicts the victims’ difficult struggle for recognition and their precarious existence in a toxic environment. But it strives to move beyond a simple victimization of the affected community. It places the issues of risk and recognition in a cosmopolitan public sphere marked by the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the ‘war on terror’, itself another another risk-scenario. Ultimately, Animal’s People invites a more cosmopolitan understanding of risk – a postimperial imaginary – in which risk figures as an underlying dynamic of modernity that affects people across social and national boundaries.
My hypothesis is that the political dimension of literary engagement of global risk can only be fully understood if its textual presentation is considered. After all, dealing with global risks poses a challenge to the conventional form of the novel. While the ‘realist’ novel claims to ‘represent’ events that happen in a specific place, dealing with global risks means focussing on events which have not taken place yet, and which are often hard or impossible to localize. Understanding the construction of global risk in a given text thus requires close attention to the temporality and the location of risk in that text.
The apprehension of such threats is to our experience of globality in the contemporary world. However, these hazards are very often removed from immediate perception, so that our knowledge of global risks is often second-hand knowledge, shaped as much by science as by transcultural flows of images, metaphors and narratives about technological hazards. The book explores how 20th and 21st century Anglophone fiction narrate the experience of living at risk from global technological and environmental hazards.
In six contrastive readings that bring British, American, and postcolonial anglophone writing into dialogue, the book examines how the politics of fictional texts are connected to its narrative strategies for writing global risk: Engaging global risks means focusing on events which have not taken place yet and which are often hard or impossible to localize in a single geographical setting. Moreover, understanding how texts engage the temporality and location of global hazards not only helps us comprehend the role of fiction in debates about global risk, it also helps us explore how scenarios of the future are imagined and narrated more broadly.
Victorians, a commonplace goes, were fascinated with extinction. And apart perhaps from dinosaurs, no extinct animal fascinated the Victorians quite like the dodo – at one point tellingly named Didus ineptus by Linné – did. Following an appearance in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the dodo became a staple of Victorian visual and popular culture, attaining an iconic status it has not relinquished since. This is perhaps surprising, given how little Victorians actually knew about the dodo, which had then been extinct for about 200 years. Without a complete specimen surviving and with only a few bones and a contradictory record of eye-witness accounts to draw on, the reconstruction of the dodo became a game of Chinese Whispers that lead to the image of the dodo as the plump, dumb creature we still know today, even though newer scientific reconstructions have found it to be a much spryer, more agile creature.
The Victorian fascination with the dodo is even more striking when compared to the cultural memorialization of other anthropogenic extinctions that Victorians could have known about, such as Steller's sea cow or the great auk. The greater range of these creatures meant that 19th-century naturalists always assumed that there were some specimens left, somewhere “out there” in hitherto unexplored space. Their depiction in 19th-century fiction – for instance in texts by Kipling and Charles Kingsley – thus revolved around the trope of lonely, isolated survivors. By contrast, the dodo was known to have been restricted to Mauritius, and thus it became the first popularly confirmed case of human-caused species loss. From our perspective, this fate might read as a reminder of the ecological limits of colonial resource exploitation and industrial modernity. But the memorialization of the dodo – founded as it was on a constitutive lack of first-hand knowledge about the creature – confirmed, rather than undermined Victorian narratives of progress. For all its benign ineptitude, the Victorian dodo signified the social Darwinist underpinnings of Victorian ideology. It was, put bluntly, a bird to dumb to live, a quaint but pointless form of life swept aside by the march of progress.
Over the past decade or so, a substantial number of novels featuring anthropologist protagonists have been published to wide-spread acclaim. Hanya Yanagihara’s The People in the Trees (2013), Lily King’s Euphoria (2014), both set in the south Pacific, and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (2019), set in an alternative-history London, all draw on phases in the twentieth century history of anthropology (from the 1920s to the 1980s). In addition, they share further characteristics. The novels all feature fictional – or fictionalised – anthropologists that are engaged in complex constellations of anthropological observation and situate anthropological inquiry in relation to other scientific disciplines as well as evolving cultural concerns. In all three novels, too, the production of anthropological knowledge coincides with the death or destruction of the beings investigated.
Each novel revisits a moment in the history of anthropology, laying bare the internal fault lines of the discipline, as well as anthropology's distinctive position in the knowledge discourses of modern societies. In a discipline precariously poised between the claim of scientific practice and cultural reflexivity, the problematization of the role of the observer has historically been a disciplinary hallmark. The novels engage with this problematization through several characteristic structural elements, which recur with variations in all three novels (such as triangular character constellations or shifting subject-object relations). In addition, all three novels interrogate the entanglement of observation and destruction that became foundational for the modern understanding of the human, as it emerged in the processes of colonial encounters that form the framework of anthropological field work.
In the novels, this is manifested in characteristic plot patterns which are based on an encounter of several individuals each with a problematic history of their own, who join in situations of 'field work' which in turn lead them into encounters with the objects of anthropological observation. In these situations, the objects of anthropological observation are never truly allowed to achieve a reciprocity of perspective. The novels aim to highlight the destructive consequences of the anthropological encounter for the 'objects observed' by showing how the relationship with the anthropological observer leads to the death of the observed. Paradoxically, however, by keeping the anthropological observers squarely in the focus of the narrative, they also repeat the epistemological erasure of the perspectives of the individuals and communities they observe. In this way, all three novels also demonstrate the limits of a metropolitan critique of anthropology's colonial entanglements.
As the extinction of signature species like the Dodo, the Passenger Pigeon, or the Tasmanian Tiger shows, the current crisis of biodiversity is intertwined with the history of European colonialism. Colonialism caused overexploitation and the destruction of habitats, spread invasive European species, and restructured colonial landscapes. Moreover, the rise of the scientific discourse of extinction, itself contingent on a new conception of geological time and on the emergence of uniform taxonomic systems, does not only historically coincide with the height of European colonialism, they are also conceptually intertwined. Emergent discourses of species extinction overlapped with colonial discourses of cultural and linguistic extinction that apply the principles of biological taxonomy to the social world. The analogy of species and cultures as distinct, self-enclosed, and stable epistemological units was foundational to how Europeans understood indigenous cultures, and in discourses of “endangered” cultures, it continues to structure our thinking even today.
My paper will use a close reading of William Henry Hudson's romance Green Mansions (1904) to explore the ambivalent fascination of colonial discourse with extinction. In the portrayal of its doomed romantic object, the native girl Rima, the novel conflates biological, cultural, and linguistic extinction, whilst also justifying genocidal violence against native populations in the name of conservation. Extinction thus emerges as a highly malleable, but also highly ambivalent trope that is both legitimizing and subverting colonial authority and European narratives of progress. My larger argument is that a close analysis of the function of extinction in colonial discourse not only helps us to understand the colonial roots of the current crisis of biodiversity, but also questions the utility of extinction to frame cultural and linguistic processes in a globalized world.
In my paper, I would like to explore the tension between these two – seemingly opposite – perspectives by looking at Susannah Waters’ 2006 novel Cold Comfort. Waters portrays a native Alaskan community co-opted into global Petro-Capitalism even as the thawing of the Arctic permafrost destroys their basis of life and the coordinates of indigenous culture. While their houses literally begin to sink into the melting ground, the community remains dependent on providing unskilled labour to the oil industry for income. The novel is told from the perspective of an adolescent girl who begins to realize how Petro-Capitalism leaves her people exposed to both climate hazards and material immiseration. The resulting desintegration of the social manifests in gendered violence and cultural alienation. However, Cold Comfort’s images of a community dependent on an industry that destroys them can also be read as an allegory of our own dependence on fossil fuels. In such a reading, the novel’s depiction of local vulnerability also serves as pars pro toto of the larger, planetary repercussions of climate change. My argument is that it is the very tension between these two interpretations that makes the novel’s approach to climate change so productive: Cold Comfort suggests that we can understand climate change’s double nature – universal threat and source of particular injustices – only by looking at the disenfranchised margins of global carbon culture.
In Indra Sinha’s fictional treatment of the Bhopal disaster and its aftermath, Animal’s People, these contradictory dynamics are at play. Sinha’s novel depicts the victims’ difficult struggle for recognition and their precarious existence in a toxic environment. But it strives to move beyond a simple victimization of the affected community. It places the issues of risk and recognition in a cosmopolitan public sphere marked by the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the ‘war on terror’, itself another another risk-scenario. Ultimately, Animal’s People invites a more cosmopolitan understanding of risk – a postimperial imaginary – in which risk figures as an underlying dynamic of modernity that affects people across social and national boundaries.
My hypothesis is that the political dimension of literary engagement of global risk can only be fully understood if its textual presentation is considered. After all, dealing with global risks poses a challenge to the conventional form of the novel. While the ‘realist’ novel claims to ‘represent’ events that happen in a specific place, dealing with global risks means focussing on events which have not taken place yet, and which are often hard or impossible to localize. Understanding the construction of global risk in a given text thus requires close attention to the temporality and the location of risk in that text.
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 2001 novel By the Sea most contrasts flows of global mobility with the continued reality of exclusionary practices at state borders. Intriguingly, here it is the construction of a seemingly liberal, unified Europe that is used to obliterate a sense of historical obligation of Europe to its colonies and thus constructs the novel’s Zanzibari protagonist as outsider to Europe. Drawing on Derrida’s exploration of hospitality, the paper wants to demonstrate how By the Sea uses private hospitality as a trope to challenge these European border narratives. Rather than casting the immigrant as a mere ‘guest’, the novel depicts hospitality as a site of contingency, where guest and host enter into a situation of reciprocity that can challenge established notions of both national and personal identity.