Arcadiana

A Blog about Literature, Culture and the Environment

Tag: ecocriticism

  • CALL FOR PAPERS – Fluid Archives: Rethinking Agency in the Hydro-Commons

    CALL FOR PAPERS – Fluid Archives: Rethinking Agency in the Hydro-Commons

    In the “storied seas” of the Anthropocene, water is never merely a backdrop; it is an archive (Oppermann 2019). Its ebb and flow resemble the turning over of eternal epigraphs. The sustained contact between groundwater and surface water over centuries—and indeed, for as long as the earth has existed—has established persistent waterscapes that give life to and sustain numberless ecosystems and communities. Yet, beyond its sustaining and linear role in waterscapes, comprising both the waters and their beneficiaries, water has been an active site of non-linear, cyclical growth, memory, and change. In parallel with its web-like expansion and reliction, water serves as a medium of transfer and a regenerative site where traumas, histories, and possibilities dissolve and reform.

    Consequently, the traumas of the Middle Passage, and figures like the “mad woman in the attic” are not solely buried deep in the human psyche—they are submerged in the waterscape itself. Water, like the rest of the physical world, is articulate; it writes and narrates stories in the interstices of its waves (Oppermann 2013; Iovino and Oppermann 2014; Oppermann 2019). Aligning with this “oceanic ontology,” we view the “living metaphors” that surround water not as mere symbols, but as active physical agents that swallow, reveal, and transform memory. Accordingly, the “sunken ships” of colonial oceanic routes conjure the horrifying stories of capture and enslavement while simultaneously expressing the physical reality of marine life.

    This call for papers seeks to navigate the fluid intersections of Feminisms, Ecocriticism, Environmental Humanities, and (De)Coloniality. As Arcadiana Blog, we invite contributions that challenge the terrestrial and aquatic bias found in traditional ecocritical analysis to witness the storied existence of the seas, blending their semiotic fabric with the physical.

    Drawing from Astrida Neimanis’s concept of hydrofeminism, we acknowledge that we are all “bodies of water”—fluidally interconnected and leaking into one another. However, this watery embodiment is not a neutral state. For an elaborate critique of our fluxive status as subjects, we can turn to Françoise Vergès to interrogate the “Capitalocene” and the racialized politics of exhaustion that play out in our waterscapes (Vergès 2019, 2024). Who pollutes and toxifies our waters, and whose waters are poisoned? When bridged with the narrative agency of water, can our waters give us answers or show us the way—not just through observation, but through being-with water?

    From a parallel perspective, when we layer Neimanis’s hydrofeminism with María Lugones’s “coloniality of gender,” we seek to understand how the masculine tradition of settler colonialism—which prescribed the oceanic routes of the slave trade—also historically mapped the exploitation of the waters that bear the stories of women. Therefore, as Val Plumwood observed, the “feminine closeness to nature” has hardly been a compliment, but rather a justification for mastery and erasure (Plumwood 1993).

    Plumwood’s critique would also imply the urgent need to recognize waterscapes and maritime spaces not solely as economic transit zones, but as gendered and extractive ecologies. Yet, such maritime environments remain largely subdued by patriarchal and racial capitalist structures—the same logics that govern the land. This systemic erasure heavily neglects the agency of women, Indigenous populations, and subaltern communities, as well as their knowledge-making practices.

    Therefore, extending this call to reimagine hydro-narratives through frameworks of care and reciprocity, we ask: Whether in ecological art, oceanic cartographies, or climate fiction and environmental literature, how can we rethink human agency not as positioned above the waves, but as deeply embedded within them? Moreover, if we view waterscapes as incorporating more-than-human elements—ranging from commodities in trade routes to the toxins, chemicals, and pesticides that now inhabit the waves—how might we reimagine a more-than-human relationality that dismantles the paradigms of mastery Plumwood identifies?

    Guiding Questions

    We invite students, scholars, multi-disciplinary artists to explore the ways around dissolving traditional binaries around waterscapes. We ask questions like these:

    • How do contemporary or historical fictions portray the agency of water?
    • How has our relationship with waterscapes evolved as evidenced by literature and art?
    • How can “thinking with water” disrupt colonial and patriarchal narratives?
    • What is the relationship between “haunted” minds and “haunted” waters?
    • How do we decolonize the Blue Humanities? How can we shift focus from the romanticized “blue sublime” to the materialized realities of toxic waters, and the labor of those who live most intimately with the water?

    Suggested Subtopics

    We welcome submissions that engage with, but are not limited to:

    • Hydro-narratives, or Stories of Water
    • Waterways and Water Structures
    • Hydropolitics; Politics Around Canals, Oceanic Borders etc.
    • Water Scarcity: Shortage and Stress
    • Toxicity and Waterscapes
    • Slow Violence and Waterscapes
    • Hydro-Colonialism, or the Coloniality of Water
    • Decolonial Feminism and Waterscapes
    • Ecofeminism and Marine Conservation
    • Water in Elemental Ecocriticism
    • Blue Biopolitics & Toxic Bodies
    • Gender and Maritime Labor
    • Indigenous Epistemologies on Water
    • Maritime Ecologies and the Posthuman
    • Oceanic Relationality and More-than-Human Maritime Ethics

    We invite academic contributions as well as semi-academic, creative, and curatorial work related to the topics outlined above, or that drifts into related currents and uncharted waters fitting the spirit of this call.

    Format: If you are submitted an academic article or blog post, please aim for a maximum of 2000 words. You are free to choose a referencing system to use, but please be consistent in its application throughout your article. Semi-academic, artistic, creative, and curatorial work is welcome in any format.

    Submissions & Deadline

    Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis through May 31, 2026.

    Please send your submissions, along with a short bio, to [email protected].

    References

    Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann. “Introduction: Stories Come to Matter.” Material Ecocriticism. Ed. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann. Indiana UP, 2014.

    Lugones, María. “The Coloniality of Gender.” Feminisms in Movement: Theories and Practices from the Americas. Ed. Lívia De Souza Lima, Edith Otero Quezada and Julia Roth. Transcript Verlag, 2024.

    Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury, 2017.

    Oppermann, Serpil. “Material Ecocriticism and the Creativity of Storied Matter.” Frame — Journal Of Literary Studies, vol. 26, no.2, 2013, pp. 55-69.

    ——. “Storied Seas and Living Metaphors in the Blue Humanities.” Configurations, vol. 27, no. 4, 2019, pp. 443-461.

    Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 1993.

    Vergès, François. “Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender.” E-flux Journal, is. 100, 2019.——. Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism. Goldsmiths, 2024.

  • Ecocriticism and Birding

    Ecocriticism and Birding

    Having written a PhD dissertation about human–bird relations in contemporary Scandinavian novels while also being an active birder, I’ve often thought about the links between birding, literary fiction, and ecocriticism. While my dissertation is grounded in literary theory, only drawing on field experience in indirect ways, surely there must be more to be said about writing and birding. As Jemma Deer (2022) points out, birds “have been making music, visual art, and aesthetic judgments for far longer than humans have,” and “provide the blueprint or muse for much human artistic production” (10). One would think that texts about birds, aside from reflecting interest in them, might be influenced by the practice of birding in ways that are evident in form and style.

    Among literary scholars, however, the notion that observing birds and writing about them go together is far from being the rule. On the contrary, until the late twentieth century it was commonplace to read birds in literature solely as symbols or metaphors. While Beryl Rowland (1978) primarily saw birds as Jungian symbols, Atle Kittang (1988) argued that birds in poetry rarely if ever correlate with the models from which they are derived and are not intended to do so either. Then again, as early as 1972, Joseph Meeker (1997) argued that birds can provide a mirror “to help us to understand human relationships” (108) and that “human conversation is not much different from birdsong” (109). Leonard Lutwack, in Birds in Literature (1994), tentatively suggested the possibility of reading birds ecologically, but it was only with the emergence of ecocriticism as a distinct field that reading environmental texts through a framework of “kinship between nonhuman and human” was recognized as a legitimate critical pursuit (Buell 1995, 180).

    The University of Stavanger, where I did my research, is located at the edge of Jæren, a coastal plain in south-western Norway known for its rich birdlife. I would spend the day writing about books about birds and then, on my way home, stop off by one of the nearby lakes to catch up on actual birds, taking notes and photos and often reporting my observations. In late spring, a pair of European oystercatchers would nest on a roof below our third-floor office space, bringing food for their young and driving away intruders, and in winter, hooded crows and jackdaws in their hundreds could be seen flocking to and from their communal nighttime roost. With literary birds in the office and actual birds out the window, I took my cue from what Lawrence Buell, with reference to Barry Lopez, calls “the aspiration to write and think more ecocentrically,” acknowledging that one’s approach to art and scholarship is not exclusively formed through reading but also through embodied experience of specific environments (Buell 2005, 99).

    Strolling or hiking through natural landscapes tends to trigger reflection, which can be conducive to writing, but this is not necessarily true of birding, where one is wholly absorbed in detecting and identifying species or interpreting their behavior and vocalizations. Where some make a case for “slow birding” (e.g. Strassmann 2022), this is a reaction to the realization that birding generally is not a particularly slow practice. Birding engages one’s senses of sight and hearing, as well as memory and intuition, in direct and immediate ways, and even when a birder is stationary, waiting for a skulking bird to show, attention tends to be directed outward, toward the bird, rather than to inner thought processes. To combine birding with writing or literary scholarship can therefore seem like a precarious endeavour. If nothing else, birding is a source of inspiration, and the genre of the trip report is not entirely unrelated to that of nature writing.

    Standing beneath the highway bridge at the mouth of the Hafrsfjord, watching Arctic terns and common terns at their breeding colonies, I had Charlotte McConaghy’s dystopian novel Migrations (2021) fresh in mind. Considering that the narrator of Migrations tries to follow the last Arctic terns on their migration to Antarctica, seeing them as a last remnant of wildness in a world destroyed by humans, I couldn’t help but read the terns as beacons of hope. While a life of birding offers a wealth of peak experiences, it can also lead to a keen awareness of habitat loss and population declines. Arctic terns are not endangered yet, though their populations are decreasing in some places (BirdLife International 2018). In Norway, a more pressing concern is a dramatic regional decline in the population of common terns, which has led to their being categorized as Endangered on the National Red List (Stokke et al. 2021). Regardless of Red List assessments, I counted myself lucky to see the two species breeding side by side, despite overfishing, predation from American mink, and the mounting threat of climate change. While Arctic terns migrate further and see more daylight in the year than any other known species, common terns are not far behind.

    Watching the terns hovering and diving, catching fish and feeding their young, swooping and turning with supreme elegance, I recalled narratologist Marco Caracciolo’s (2020) concept of “kinesthetic empathy,” how empathy does not necessarily have to entail imagining our way into an individual mind but rather into a moving body, or even an assemblage of bodies (239–240). Accounting for “embodied collectivity” demands moving beyond the focus on individual agency that has been the norm in narratology and literary scholarship (241). Observing a murmuration of starlings, a skein of geese, or swallows gathered in their hundreds, our attention is drawn not to the individual, but to the group, of which the individual forms a part.

    Whether one is panning a bird in the viewfinder or taking in the jizz of a bird briefly glimpsed, kinesthetic empathy is integral to birdwatching. With time, one develops a knack for tracing—and anticipating—the movements of birds, effectively predicting where they’ll be from one moment to the next. Embodied skills are arguably also manifest in the process of reading fiction, the ability to trace plot developments and follow them through to their conclusion, while uncovering underlying themes and motifs. Ecocriticism and birding are both comparative practices in which subtle contrasts can be crucial. Beyond that, birding calls for keen eyes and ears, identification skills and field experience, while ecocriticism requires theoretical knowledge and sensitivity to cultural context. Where bird identification is based on diagnostic features, however, literary texts demand hermeneutical forms of interpretation that are rarely conclusive.

    If the relevance of birding to literary fiction can seem obscure, the “naturalist gaze” through which birders perceive the world (Cherry 2019, 9, 41–42) is central to analysis of nature writing. Some ecocritics are bound to disagree, but I would contend that birding can contribute toward sharpening or even reorienting one’s “ecocritical gaze.” Take a classic work of nature writing such as J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine (1967), written with such nuance and attention to detail that even those unfamiliar with the species described can appreciate its aesthetic qualities. Where non-birders are enamored by its form and style, its poetic, densely layered language, birders are led to recall the flight patterns of actual species ranging from snipe to kestrel, patterns that are not metaphorical but literal, idiosyncratic to the point of being diagnostic, easy to apprehend but difficult to describe. Rather than making intertextual references, Baker refers to a shared body of field-ornithological knowledge and transposes it into literary form. By presenting recognizable perceptual experiences in striking and unexpected ways, nature writing can challenge and broaden our worldview. Birds can be evocative of places, memories, and impressions, as well as entire narratives. There are countless ways to account for their presence, but no matter how dense a layer of metaphor we cloak them in, the starting point must surely be the birds themselves.

    References

    Baker, J. A. 1967. The Peregrine. New York Review of Books.

    BirdLife International. 2018. Sterna paradisaea. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2018-2.RLTS.T22694629A132065195.en. Accessed on 13 March 2024.

    Buell, Lawrence. 1996 (1995). The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

    Buell, Lawrence. 2005. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing.

    Caracciolo, Marco. 2020. “Flocking Together: Collective Animal Minds in Contemporary Fiction.” PMLA, vol. 135, no. 2, 239–253. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2020.135.2.239

    Cherry, Elizabeth. 2019. For the Birds: Protecting Wildlife through the Naturalist Gaze. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

    Deer, Jemma. 2022. “Birdwatching and Wordwatching: The Avian Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” In Danette DiMarco and Timothy Ruppert (eds.), Avian Aesthetics in Literature and Culture: Birds and Humans in the Popular Imagination, 9–23. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.

    Kittang, Atle. 1988. “Fuglar og poesi.”  In Atle Kittang, Møtestader: Utvalde artiklar om litteratur og litteraturteori, 52–67. Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget.

    McConaghy, Charlotte. 2021. Migrations. London: Vintage.

    Meeker, Joseph W. 1997. The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic. Third edition. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

    Rowland, Beryl. 1978. Birds with Human Souls: A Guide to Bird Symbolism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

    Stokke, B. G. et al. 2021. “Fugler: Vurdering av makrellterne Sterna hirundo for Norge.” In Norwegian Red List for Species 2021. Trondheim: Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre (Artsdatabanken). http://www.artsdatabanken.no/lister/rodlisteforarter/2021/31752

    Strassmann, Joan E. 2022. Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard. New York: TarcherPerigee.

    About the Author

    Endre Harvold Kvangraven recently defended his PhD dissertation in Nordic Literature at the
    University of Stavanger, Norway, with the title Literary Birding: Human–Bird Relations in
    Contemporary Novels from Norway and Sweden. He is also the author of Ulv i det norske
    kulturlandskapet (Wolves in a Cultural Landscape, Res Publica, 2021), a work of literary
    nonfiction tracing the role of wolves in Norwegian cultural history.