Space for the bird to fly

Animal Studies Journal, 2019

Why, one could ask, does such a high proportion of the very best works of recently published literary and creative prose, which choose to engage with climate change, environmental shock, biodiversity crises, and extinction risks – the existential threats we face as a global multispecies population – all tell stories with and of nonhuman animals? My theory, one shared by Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement (although with differing conclusions) is that the very nature of the threats we face is a reckoning with our alienation from the nonhuman world. It is a reckoning we need to have, without ‘hiding’ away from our accountabilities. The argument here is that literature, poetry, and creative writings can help us have that reckoning by leading us to explore our storied relations with the nonhuman, especially animals. Ghosh, however, believes that the realist novel – and by implication the ‘highest’ forms of literature – has failed us in this need. This is because the novel has become a bourgeois vassal of numbing entertainments, and in such a form has wholly betrayed us, because it is not capable of coming to terms with the evidence of climate change: that, in simple terms, we are no longer connected to or a part of ‘nature’. That is, the realist bourgeois novel cannot admit we are, and always have been, ‘animals’ dependent on our very real environment.

Anglia

Aspirations of Flight: the Power of Ascent and Descent Imagery (Understanding Aerial Track Dance: The Ungrounded Dream) by Lisa Giobbi 2016 On stage, Lisa Giobbi explores the physicality of the body in anti-gravitational space, and associated cultural and personal notions of ascent and descent, of flight and fall. Flying is a metaphor for the universal desire for freedom: freedom from political, personal, and physical limitations, freedom from our inevitable return to the earth. Lisa Giobbi expresses these desires through the performing arts.

2017

textabstractIn this research, the political relationality in-between life and expression is viewed on through Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic anti-methodology. In the first part, the methodological context is elaborated and brought into relation with Arendt and Agamben's work. After Part I Dispositioning a Milieu in which I dispose the conceptual and paradigmatic frameworks of thinking within politics of flight; in Part II Exposition of Milieus the diversity of practices within the politics of flight are mapped out. This provides a politico-philosophical diagnosis in which the relationships between bodies and expression are always carried out in the same way in each chapter: from form of content to form of expression to matter of expression to matter of content. Form of content is the territorial setting in which bodies are assembled in a certain way; these assemblies are strengthened by form of expression. Yet, forms break and degrade, they never fully touch the unthinkable r...

in Sweet Sixties, G. Schöllhammer and R. Arevshatyan (eds.), 365-73, Berlin/New York, Stemberg Press, 2014.

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2018

Bird strikes were catapulted into headline news in 2009 when US Airlines flight 1549’s engines ingested a flock of Canada geese and lost all power, leaving the pilot no option but to ditch into the freezing cold Hudson River. Although everyone on board survived, thousands of birds were killed in the years that followed in attempt to redress aviation safety concerns. This article follows the story of Flight 1549 and considers the different stages of bird strike prevention at a variety of sites: the factory, the airfield, the sky and the accident aftermath. Drawn from empirical research and grey literature analysis of aviation safety documents, it unpicks the various assemblages that are formed at each site and how they are gathered together through inhuman air forces. Situated within theories of biopolitics, it moves beyond a materialist analysis of the solid and the visible and attends to the immateriality of air and its elemental properties which are integral to both life and death. Through an analysis of the aerial as a socio-material spatial categorisation, it considers bird strike management within a multispecies perspective by examining the frictions and entanglements of both human and non-human agency that are generated by differential air spaces. By highlighting the different forms of biopolitics produced by the aerial, it shows how configurations of life shift in relation to the dynamic and unpredictable inhuman forces of air, and how aviation safety practices attempt to harness these forces.

Telling Stories: Australian Life and Literature 1935-2012. Tanya Dalziell and Paul Genoni, eds. Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2013. 1-7.

This essay looks at the ways in which the legendary Australian aviator P.G.Taylor's aviation writing responded to the cultural poetics of flight and the celebrity of Sir Charles Kingsford Smith in the 1930s.

Technology and Culture, 2004

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2014