The Sixth Tamkang International Conference on Ecological Discourse

In this lecture, I imagine moving beyond the Anthropocene, a term proposed by geographers to demarcate the complex problems becoming more visible in a biosphere today. Overwhelming scientific evidence suggests that one species, the human, is interfering with large-scale bio-geochemical cycles and thus endangering all life on the planet. But what if, instead of focusing solely on “anthropos” or the human, we focused on multispecies relationships that might move us towards more equitable and sustainable communities? With articulation of this vision of the future in mind, I build on my research in multispecies ethnography and biosemiotics to explore how environmental humanists are redefining anthropomorphism, not as “pathetic fallacy,” but as “dis-anthropocentric strategy.” Both of these forms of material ecocriticism explode self-referential analytics focused only on (human) language, culture, society and history and re-ground notions of communication between humans and nonhumans in entangled relations that can be “read” using the tools of literary analysis, semiotics, biology, chemistry, and physics, among other humanistic and material sciences. Whereas the humanities and sciences were once separated, the disciplines are now coming together, as humanists explore human relationships with rivers, mountains, climate, invasive plants, microbes and toxins, which are all engaged in semiotic processes that have been explained by different humans and human groups from indigenous Amazonians to North American tribal groups to Charles Darwin to, more recently, Franz Boaz, Zora Neale Huston, and Debra Bird Rose.

In readings of story cycles from around the world, from ancient almanacs to recent films, I illustrate how “material ecocritics” are bringing multispecies ethnography and biosemiosis into their analysis. Stories of “forest mothers,” for example, can help to explain not only how humans should behave ethically in forest ecosystems, but also, the ways in which trees collect sunlight in their canopies, turn it into energy and send it to mutually beneficial arrangements of fungus on the forest floor which, in turn, employ a chemical vocabulary of nutrients to feed sprouting tree seedlings and nourish the root systems of other entangled root systems. These fungal formations indicate that even some of the simplest organic forms have semiotic capabilities for communicating, recognizing, and discriminating. This will illustrate how, ecocritics, who are making the material sciences more central to their work, are “reading” oral traditions and trees and fungal networks as sites of narrativity, or “storied matter,” which can both be articulated to the “minds of human agents” and recognized as inherent “in the very structure of nature’s own self-constructive, and agentic, forces" (Adamson 2014; Iovino and Oppermann 2012).

The new materialist paradigm recognizes the agential capacity of animate and inanimate matter, claiming that agency, as the ability to coordinate dynamic interrelations, is characteristic not only of biological organisms but also of the most elementary units of matter/nature. All constituents of nature (biotic and inorganic), in this perspective, are complexly entangled with human realities, manifesting not only in art works, literature, cultural objects, but also materializing in bodily natures and trans-corporeal connections. Metals, rocks, electricity, chemicals, food, bodies, for example, have a common point: they are potent agents with embodied stories interlaced with and affecting health policies, political economy, cultural discourses, and medical practices. This is the storied world of living nature/matter which material ecocriticism interprets as a site of narrativity, focusing on the expressive function of matter we call narrative agency. Emerging from the complex interchanges of organisms and the environment, the storied world is scripted onto DNA molecules, cells, landscapes, and all the physical elements with countless combinations. These narrative agencies, or nature's nonhuman individuals that often form uncanny kinships with humans (like bacteria in our digestive tract), should not surprise us, because "organism-environmentcoupling," as Wendy Wheeler affirms, is "akind of narrative of conversational developments" (126).

There are many ways to imagine the death of a city. A recurrent literaty tropos, the “Death in Venice” found its quintessential embodiment in Gustav von Aschenbach, the German nobleman who acts as the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s novel. Considered in an ecological perspective, however, the death in Venice has other meaningful materializations: it can have the face of dioxin and hepatic Angiosarcoma, spread in the Lagoon by the Montedison petrochemical factory of Porto Marghera, just a few miles from San Marco Square. It can have the face of the waters, and tides and fluxes of energy generated by global warming. These latter elements are coupled with the engineering systems implemented to control the ever-increasing high tides affecting Venice, with the unsustainable tourism of humongous cruise ships, and with the normal human activities interfering with the delicate ecosystem of the Venetian Lagoon.

Drawing from the methodological insights of material ecocriticism, this talk concentrates on Venice as a text made out of embodied stories—a material text, in which natural dynamics, cultural practices, political visions, and industrial choices are interlaced with human bodies in issues of justice, health, and ecology.

This discourse is part of my current book project. Titled Ecocriticism and Italy: Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation, the book attempts to collect the "material stories" of some particularly dense places in Italy as segments of the vast ecological and eco-cultural horizon of this country. The idea is that, in this (local) scenery of (global) crisis, literature and critical practices enact forms of ecological resistance and cultural liberation.

In her recent memoir The Faraway Nearby, the environmental writer Rebecca Solnit writes: “A place is a story, and stories are geography, and empathy is first of all an act of imagination, a storyteller’s art, and then a way of traveling from here to there.” Mississippi, where I have lived for the past twenty-five years, suffers from severe environmental degradation that cannot be separated from its history of poverty and racial oppression. Yet the state also possesses great natural beauty and a rich and complex culture, one interwoven from the many voices that have made up its identity. At the Tamkang International Conference on Ecological Discourse, I will present work from an ekphrastic project titled Mississippi for which I am writing poems in collaboration with the photographer Maude Schuyler Clay—poems that (like the photographs) explore both this degradation and this beauty. My work, I believe, answers your call for presentations focusing on material poetics, relations between human and nonhuman beings, regional frames of reference, and relationality.

Maude Schuyler Clay is a well-known photographer from the Mississippi Delta whose work is exhibited in many American museums. I am a poet and coeditor of The Ecopoetry Anthology, a groundbreaking collection of American poetry from Whitman to the present published by Trinity University Press in 2013. Mississippi, from which I will read poems and present photographs at the Conference on Ecological Discourse, will become my fifth book of poems.