Till Örebro universitet

Lucy Ellmann’s expansive Ducks, Newburyport (2019) is pervaded by frequently gendered tensions, for instance related to motherhood and domestic labor, the role of the individual in the collective, as well as abundance and middle-class consumption in an age of extinction and scarcity. The majority of the novel comprises a single sentence, well over nine hundred pages long, which presents the associative stream-of-consciousness musings of an unnamed Ohioan mother as she performs her daily tasks. This sprawling sentence comprises lists, tangents and snatches of lyrics and is punctuated by the repeated phrase “the fact that” which introduces each new turn of thought. Other interruptions include a section typographically presented as free verse, and the stylistically more conventional third-person narrative centered on a mountain lioness which appears in several parts. 

In this presentation, I consider the manner in which the angry, rambling first-person sentence functions as a narrative of accretion that both represents and reproduces the “infowhelm” identified by Heather Houser as characteristic of Anthropocenic information overload. Through the seemingly unordered accretion of information or “facts”, the first-person narrator explores her entanglement in multiple spheres, including motherhood, domesticity and family life, American history and contemporary politics, and environmental crises. This relentless accretion also creates a sense of overwhelming Anthropocenic entanglement. However, the highly gendered subjectivity and lived experience of the narrator, coupled with her outrage at the state of the world and relative political impotence, result in a notion of entanglement that is at odds with the often-valorized entanglement of new-materialist becoming. Although some aspects of the entanglement experienced and described by the narrator are empowering, as indicated by the overall narrative parallel between the human mother and the mountain lioness, entanglement is instead regularly associated with entrapment and involuntary complicity in anthropogenic crisis. 

This presentation explores conceptualisations of objects’ other-than-human relationality in the light of Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s recent experimental novel The Box (2023). Wong’s novel draws on philosophical traditions such as object-oriented ontology and vital materialism to place the titular box – an unopenable, handwoven object – at the centre of the narrative. The box serves no discernible everyday purpose in the fictional world yet is neither reduced to metaphor nor work of art. Instead the reader is invited to consider its very thingness, as well as the different “form[s] of life” (229) of various other objects. As both a philosophical intervention and an aesthetic exploration of more-than-human relationalities, The Box highlights some of the ethical quandaries faced when exploring the relationality of objects. Perhaps inevitably, such relationality is always storied in the novel. Conceptualisations of more-than-human relationality are thus shown to face a similar double bind as that encountered in critiques of human exceptionalism, which are necessarily performed from a human point of view, although this is to some extent countered by Wong’s focus on nonlinear causality and seams. 

Daisy Hildyard’s book-length essay The Second Body (2017) as well as her novel Emergency (2022) are concerned with interconnection, boundaries, and leakage between bodies on scales ranging from the individual to the planetary. Climate change looms large in The Second Body, which ranges from the Earthrise images to molecular biology, and from butcheries to floods. The titular ‘second body’ – each physical body’s uncanny embeddedness in a global ecosystem of consumption and emissions – encompasses more than an individual ecological footprint, and here the concept is used to read the dark pastoral sketched in Emergency. In the novel, the overwhelming production of interconnections not only threatens to dissolve individuals but also to fill the seemingly empty spaces of the represented countryside to overflowing. This proliferation of interconnections, however, shows little of the exuberance often used to describe entanglement, and instead both the recalled pastoral setting and the pandemic present of Emergency are shown to be overdetermined through interconnection.

Seeds are both termini and beginnings. Inscribed with the past, they are simultaneously repositories of future potential. At a time of acute biodiversity loss and cascading environmental crises, seeds also figure large in fictional narratives concerned with issues of land, heritage, belonging, cultivation and food security. By juxtaposing the sterility of industrial agricultural monoculture with the promiscuity and unpredictable agency of open-pollinated heirloom varieties, authors like Leslie Marmon Silko, Ruth Ozeki, Diane Wilson and Barbara Kingsolver show how communities are shaped by their crops as much as they shape their crops through selective cultivation. In the work of these authors, dormant seeds have agency: they are the vehicles of complex intertwined histories of continuity and disruption that span generations, peoples and sometimes continents. Seeds narratively bridge past and future by genetically encoding local growing conditions, their breeding, displacement and survival. They further present a biological record of the collective experiences of the humans who sow, harvest and store seed. While seeds frequently signify abundance and diversity in the fiction under consideration, I here try to pay attention to the representation of their dormancy, to show how the theme of dormant agency is manifest in these texts.

A girl or young woman facing new or dangerous challenges without the support of a family is a recurring motif in Nnedi Okorafor’s multiple award-winning fiction. Okorafor’s protagonists tend to reinvent traditional conceptions of families and create new family constellations through assemblage. These may include members of different human tribes, or even extraterrestrial, engineered or magical nonhuman creatures – and such assemblages are driven by the desire to find new ways of being in the world and relating to others. This chapter examines the kinmaking strategies of four of Okorafor’s protagonists to show how they form cross-culture and cross-species kinships. Binti, Onyesonwu, Phoenix, and Fatima/Sankofa all reinterpret traditions and create new families ranging beyond biological reproduction or kinship ties. To some extent, all the texts under discussion here could be classified as coming-of-age stories, in which assembled families complement and often replace biological families; the assembled families populating Okorafor’s texts are both vehicles of individual agency and utopian expressions of malleable traditions in an ecologically fragile world fraught with racial tension. Although agential assemblage through naming and storytelling has utopian implications in Who Fears Death (2010) and the Binti Trilogy (2015–18), assemblage is also central in the death and dying in The Book of Phoenix (2015) and Remote Control (2021). The assembled families populating Okorafor’s fiction are both vehicles of individual agency and utopian expressions of malleable traditions in an ecologically fragile world fraught with racial tension. Assemblage thus seems central to Okorafor’s utopian Africanfuturist impetus, and the chapter therefore concludes with a brief reflection on the role of narration in Okorafor’s agential assemblages. 

Environmentalist discourse has long relied on various reproductive futurisms, ranging from the now almost clichéd appeals to our ethical responsibilities to future generations to more radical demands to end human dominance over the planet by ending humanity itself. Such antinatalist stances are burdened by the legacies of Malthusianism, colonialism, classicism, and racism, and tend to pit current humans against future ones. This article explores the intersection of climate change discourse and antinatalist ideas in contemporary British public discourse and cultural expressions by considering some recent examples which highlight tensions between the individual and collective spheres. These include much publicised calls to reduce the human population for environmental reasons, spectacularised poverty and its associations with uncontrolled reproduction, as well as controversial contradictions between the public stances of prominent figures on overpopulation and their personal reproductive choices. This is followed by a reading of the satirical take on antinatalist environmental policies presented in the recent dystopian novel The Offset (2021), published under the pen name Calder Szewczak. The novel, set in a future Britain ravaged by climate change, troubles the ethics of environmentalist antinatalism by showing how easily environmentalist measures morph into ecofascism. Finally, the quandary of imagining an ahuman future is briefly discussed. While all imaginaries of the future necessarily entail considerations of reproduction, art allows for insightful probing of nonreproductive futurisms.