Nonhuman Subjects

Abstract

The surging wave of indigenous politics, rights of nature, and social movements acting with rocks, rivers, glaciers, and lakes has brought to light an ecology of nonlife. Its protagonists are 'earth-beings,' geobodies that question deep-seated Western notions of personhood. Mountains in the Andes, erratic boulders, a landfill in the Swiss Alps, the sacred stones of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, and the works of contemporary artists who have engaged with nonlife reveal the subjectivity of beings that are not sentient and alive as biological organisms.