What role do museums play in elevating the Sixth Mass Extinction Event within public consciousness? How is an increasing awareness of human-made extinctions and global biodiversity loss transforming the representational techniques employed by natural history curators? And what are the prevailing ideologies and emotional registers of contemporary exhibitions about anthropogenic extinctions? This essay answers these questions by analysing recent natural history exhibitions which explore and communicate the Sixth Extinction through the affects of grief, loss and sadness. By unfolding a tripartite analysis, one which brings together natural history curatorial practices, theoretical critique from critical heritage studies and environmental humanities, and anti-institutional activists such as Extinction Rebellion, I make the argument that while these exhibitions have the potential to develop posthumanist practices of curation that disrupt the dominant anthroponormativity of natural history, there remain unresolved questions surrounding their representational reliance on mourning.
In 2016, the English-language translation of Han Kang's 2007 novel The Vegetarian was awarded the Booker group's International Prize for fiction. Although reviewers have tended to interpret the novel's plot pessimistically, as a perilous descent into starvation, literary critics have argued that The Vegetarian dramatises an ecofeminist refusal of carnism and patriarchy. Yet both of these interpretations neglect crucial textual and extra-textual features of Han's novel. In fact, the text's generic and narrative ambiguities on the one side, and its celebrated position within contemporary world literary publishing culture on the other, suggest that there are limits to reading The Vegetarian as a radically posthumanist tale of becoming-plant. This essay therefore reconsiders The Vegetarian in light of its narrative form and its incorporation into the world literary canon. By doing this I will not only complicate existing close readings of Han Kang's work. I will also develop literary-sociological analyses of prize-giving and the publishing industry, while at the same time interrogating the extent to which contemporary literature challenges and becomes folded into global capital.
This essay argues that the concept of extinction, polysemous if not overdetermined, is becoming an emergent keyword of contemporary public life as it faces the climate crisis. To make this argument the essay critically considers the ways in which extinction is currently being made public—within and by the environmental humanities but also in the wider public sphere of political and cultural contestation. The essay begins by problematizing the concept of extinction itself, positing that it makes sense to think of the Sixth Extinction as the first historical extinction event—that is, as a social articulation of an organic process in which the causes and impacts are at once natural and social. Then the essay discusses the different extinction imaginaries that have operated across modernity, before finally turning to the writings of the Extinction Studies Working Group, whose conception of extinction as a process rather than event, and whose arguments that mass extinction presents an ethical call to responsibility, have become a template for how extinction is thought about within the field of the environmental humanities. The essay ends by posing some companionly criticisms of the extinction studies project.
In this chapter I survey, highlight, and critically reflect on recent work in animal studies, a field that continues to yield deeply researched scholarship and incisive works of critical and cultural theory, all in spite of its relative lack of institutional footholds. This is my first outing as a YWCCT reviewer, and so my ambition for this initial venture is modest. I wish, quite straightforwardly, to explore a handful of publications that caught my attention in 2022. I do not pretend to have a robust rationale for my criteria for inclusion. Instead, let me say that these are all publications that excited me in some way, that excited something in me, and that I believe will excite others too. I have divided the chapter into four sections: 1. ‘Living Machines of Imperialism’ examines two postcolonial animal histories, Saheed Aderinto’s Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa and Jonathan Saha’s Colonizing Animals; 2. ‘I Dream of Dogs’ briefly considers Lydia Pyne’s Endlings before focusing on Margret Grebowicz’s short book of cultural critique on dog ownership, Rescue Me; 3. ‘The Gay Frog Is the Opposite of the Gay Penguin’ turns to recent issues of Humanimalia and Green Letters, and a special section of Environmental Humanities, co-edited by Sarah Bezan and Ina Linge; and 4. ‘Inside the Slaughterhouse’ looks at recent publications in the Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature series, concentrating mostly on Sune Borkfelt’s Reading Slaughter. I end the chapter by reflecting on the links between these publications; I introduce my own monograph, Creaturely Forms in Contemporary Literature, to tie together the review’s key ideas. In all of this I have tried not to impose a grand narrative on the books reviewed, nor isolate them as symptoms of broader ideological tendencies. Yet if there is an argument here it is this: animal studies continues to remind us that human–animal relations are not natural, timeless, or inevitable. They are historical. They can be transformed.
Review of Juno Salazar Parreñas, Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation. Experimental Futures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 288 pp.; 7 illus. $26.95 (pb).
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