Introduction: Multispecies Chronotopes— Keywords for Thinking Creatively Beyond the Human

Abstract

The essays, poetry, and visual art collected here consider the more-than-human cultures of our multispecies world. At a time when humanity's impact has put our planet's ecosystems into great jeopardy, the book explores literary, sonic, and visual imaginaries that feature encounters between and across a variety of living creatures: beetles and bisons, people and pigeons, trees and spiderwebs, vegetables and violets, orchards and octopi, vampires and tricksters. Offering a wide range of critical and creative contributions to Human Animal Studies, Critical Plant Studies and the Nonhuman Turn, the volume seeks to foster new ways of imagining a more »response-able« coexistence on our shared Earth.

Plantness, Animalness, and Humanness: plant placement within animacy and adjacent scales

“…Linguistically, plants are generally classified as inanimate because their mobility is much slower and of a different appearance than that of animals; this is typically an understood rule within languages (e.g., the Slavic languages (Radanović & Milin, 2011) and Persian (Bayanati & Toivonen, 2019)). However, there are languages, especially indigenous languages, where plants and sometimes even clearly inanimate and non‐living objects are recognized as animate (Gillon, 2019; Holmberg, 2022; Kimmerer, 2017). The Meso‐Melanesian language groups legless animals and plants within a single animacy class while utensils and other inanimate objects are present within both this class and the higher class that contains humans and the other animals (Palmer, Butt, & King, 2012).…”

“…The general consensus within linguistics places plants as inanimate (Bayanati & Toivonen, 2019; Radanović & Milin, 2011). Although some languages do label some plants as animate, many of these do so with mixed groupings of plants with genuinely inanimate objects or they have a lack of animacy for closely related and functionally similar plants (Gillon, 2019; Holmberg, 2022). For many Native Americans, plants are viewed as one group among many in an intricate and expansive system, in which not only humans and animals but also natural kinds, such as rocks and water, are perceived as alive (Herrmann, Waxman & Medin, 2010). )…”