scholarly journals “The One Who Comes from the Sea”: Marine Crisis and the New Oceanic Weird in Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé (2015)

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 86
Author(s):  
Sharae Deckard ◽  
Kerstin Oloff
Keyword(s):  
Global Climate ◽  
Caribbean Literature ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Geological Time ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Us Imperialism ◽  
Achy Obejas ◽  
Caribbean Fiction ◽  
The One ◽  
European Colonialism

Caribbean literature is permeated by submarine aesthetics registering the environmental histories of colonialism and capitalism. In this essay, we contribute to the emergent discipline of critical ocean studies by delineating the contours of the “Oceanic Weird”. We begin with a brief survey of Old Weird tales by authors such as William Hope Hodgson and, most famously, H.P. Lovecraft, who were writing in the context of a world still dominated by European colonialism, but increasingly reshaped by an emergent US imperialism. We explore how these tales are both ecophobic and racialized, teeming with fears of deep geological time and the alterity of both nonhuman life and non-European civilizations, and argue that they register the oil-fuelled, militarised emergence of US imperial naval dominance. Subsequently, we turn to Rita Indiana’s neo-Lovecraftian novel, La mucama de Omicunlé [Tentacle, trans. Achy Obejas 2019], set in the Dominican Republic, as a key example of the contemporary efflorescence of ecocritical New Weird Caribbean fiction. We explore how the novel refashions Oceanic Weird tropes to represent the intertwining of marine ecological crisis in an era of global climate emergency with forms of oppression rooted in hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, and class.

The Question Concerning Geo-Engineering

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Byron Williston ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Philosophy Of Technology ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Species Level ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Anthropogenic Climate Change ◽  
Earth System ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The One ◽  
Climate Crisis

The Anthropocene, as we encounter it now, is the age in which we can no longer avoid postnaturalism, that is, a view of the ‘environment’ as largely ‘built.’ This means that we exist in a highly technologically mediated relationship to the rest of the earth system. But because the Anthropocene has barely emerged this time is best thought of as a transition phase between two epochs, i.e., it is ‘the end-Holocene.’ The end-Holocene is essentially a period of ecological crisis, the most salient manifestation of which is anthropogenic climate change. Given our political inertia, some have suggested that we should we respond to the climate crisis through technological manipulation of the global climate: geoengineering. The proposal raises many questions. The one I am interested in here is whether or not geoengineering represents an objectionable species-level narcissism. Will deployment of these technologies effectively cut us off from contact with anything non-human? This is what I’m calling ‘the question concerning geoengineering.’ I show how Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, especially his concept of ‘enframing,’ can help us think about the issue with the seriousness it demands.

What being an owner can also mean: A socio-anthropological study on the development of a forgotten relationship to objects

2021 ◽  
pp. 205157072110144
Author(s):  
Isabelle Dabadie ◽  
Philippe Robert-Demontrond
Keyword(s):  
Economic Models ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Anthropological Study ◽  
Possessive Individualism ◽  
The One

In a context of ecological crisis, new economic models have developed based on the replacement of ownership by access. While they have been studied at length, the very idea of ownership, which is supposed to be abandoned in this process, has rarely been questioned. This is the aim of our research, which investigates the meanings of the concept of ownership for consumers. A socio-anthropological investigation and an ethnographic study on various sharing systems (for houses, boats and clothes) reveals the development of a relationship to ownership, which differs from the one that prevails in the society. In this paradigm, which questions possessive individualism, the owner appears as the ‘custodian’ of his possessions. The identification of his expectations opens managerial and societal perspectives to build the offers that will enable him to fulfil this role.

Becoming fertile in the land of organic milk: Lesbian and queer reproductions of femininity and motherhood in Sweden

Sexualities ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 1021-1038 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrika Dahl
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Family Formation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Organic Milk ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Lesbian Motherhood ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

This article draws on popular culture, ethnographic materials and mainstream commercials to discuss contemporary understandings of the relationship between fertility, pregnancy and parenthood among lesbians and other queer persons with uteruses. It argues that, on the one hand, same-sex lesbian motherhood is increasingly celebrated as evidence of Swedish gender and sexual exceptionalism and, on the other, queers who wish to challenge heteronormative gender disavow both the relationship between fertility and femininity, and that of pregnancy and parenthood. The author argues that in studying queer family formation, we must move beyond addressing heteronormativity and begin studying how gender, sexuality, race and class get reproduced in queer kinship stories.

Chronique d’une écologie décoloniale dans C’est ma terre de Fabrice Bouckat

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 189-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Françoise Naudillon
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Agent Orange ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The West ◽  
The One

The documentary film C’est ma terre by Fabrice Bouckat screened during the 2019 edition of Terrafestival is one of the first large-scale films produced locally on the crisis of the chlordecone molecule. This article will examine from a decolonial perspective, how its director, a Martinican with Gabonese origins who lives and works in Guadeloupe, develops a synthetic and universal vision of environmental crises, and thus demonstrates that destruction of ecosystems crosses time and space, cultures and lands, languages and peoples by bringing ecological crisis in the West Indies closer to the one experienced by the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange.

scholarly journals Towards Net Zero export credit: current approaches and next steps

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Hale ◽  
Andreas Klasen ◽  
Norman Ebner ◽  
Bianca Krämer ◽  
Anastasia Kantzelis
Keyword(s):  
Business Models ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Export Credit ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Climate Targets ◽  
Net Zero ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One ◽  
Investment Portfolios ◽  
Export Credit Agencies

As the world economy rapidly decarbonises to meet global climate goals, the export credit sector must keep pace. Countries representing over two-thirds of global GDP have now set net zero targets, as have hundreds of private financial institutions. Public and private initiatives are now working to develop new standards and methodologies for shifting investment portfolios to decarbonisation pathways based on science. However, export credit agencies (ECAs) are only at the beginning stages of this seismic transformation. On the one hand, the net zero transition creates risks to existing business models and clients for the many ECAs, while on the other, it creates a significant opportunity for ECAs to refocus their support to help countries and trade partners meet their climate targets. ECAs can best take advantage of this transition, and minimise its risks, by setting net zero targets and adopting credible plans to decarbonise their portfolios. Collaboration across the sector can be a powerful tool for advancing this goal.

Global Climate Change: Real or Myth?

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael H. Fox
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Greenhouse Gases ◽  
Global Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
An Inconvenient Truth ◽  
The World ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Earth’S Climate ◽  
The One

We, the teeming billions of people on earth, are changing the earth’s climate at an unprecedented rate because we are spewing out greenhouse gases and are heading to a disaster, say most climate scientists. Not so, say the skeptics. We are just experiencing normal variations in earth’s climate and we should all take a big breath, settle down, and worry about something else. Which is it? A national debate has raged for the last several decades about whether anthropogenic (man-made) sources of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) and other so-called “greenhouse gases“ (primarily methane and nitrous oxide) are causing the world to heat up. This phenomenon is usually called “global warming,” but it is more appropriate to call it “global climate change,” since it is not simply an increase in global temperatures but rather more complex changes to the overall climate. Al Gore is a prominent spokesman for the theory that humans are causing an increase in greenhouse gases leading to global climate change. His movie and book, An Inconvenient Truth, gave the message widespread awareness and resulted in a Nobel Peace Prize for him in 2008. However, the message also led to widespread criticism. On the one hand are a few scientists and a large segment of the general American public who believe that there is no connection between increased CO2 in the atmosphere and global climate change, or if there is, it is too expensive to do anything about it, anyway. On the other hand is an overwhelming consensus of climate scientists who have produced enormous numbers of research papers demonstrating that increased CO2 is changing the earth’s climate. The scientific consensus is expressed most clearly in the Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 by the United Nations–sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the fourth in a series of reports since 1990. The IPCC began as a group of scientists meeting in Geneva in November 1988 to discuss global climate issues under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program.

Introduction

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Berner
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Carbon Dioxide ◽  
Carbon Cycle ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Geological Time ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Quaternary Period ◽  
Geological Time Scale ◽  
The Earth

The cycle of carbon is essential to the maintenance of life, to climate, and to the composition of the atmosphere and oceans. What is normally thought of as the “carbon cycle” is the transfer of carbon between the atmosphere, the oceans, and life. This is not the subject of interest of this book. To understand this apparently confusing statement, it is necessary to separate the carbon cycle into two cycles: the short-term cycle and the long-term cycle. The “carbon cycle,” as most people understand it, is represented in figure 1.1. Carbon dioxide is taken up via photosynthesis by green plants on the continents or phytoplankton in the ocean. On land carbon is transferred to soils by the dropping of leaves, root growth, and respiration, the death of plants, and the development of soil biota. Land herbivores eat the plants, and carnivores eat the herbivores. In the oceans the phytoplankton are eaten by zooplankton that are in turn eaten by larger and larger organisms. The plants, plankton, and animals respire CO2. Upon death the plants and animals are decomposed by microorganisms with the ultimate production of CO2. Carbon dioxide is exchanged between the oceans and atmosphere, and dissolved organic matter is carried in solution by rivers from soils to the sea. This all constitutes the shortterm carbon cycle. The word “short-term” is used because the characteristic times for transferring carbon between reservoirs range from days to tens of thousands of years. Because the earth is more than four billion years old, this is short on a geological time scale. As the short-term cycle proceeds, concentrations of the two principal atmospheric gases, CO2 and CH4, can change as a result of perturbations of the cycle. Because these two are both greenhouse gases—in other words, they adsorb outgoing infrared radiation from the earth surface—changes in their concentrations can involve global warming and cooling over centuries and many millennia. Such changes have accompanied global climate change over the Quaternary period (past 2 million years), although other factors, such as variations in the receipt of solar radiation due to changes in characteristics of the earth’s orbit, have also contributed to climate change.

Nationalization and Ethnicization

2021 ◽  
pp. 85-182
Author(s):  
Dieter Gosewinkel
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
World War ◽  
Emerging Democracies ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Fundamental Tension ◽  
Second World

The emerging world civil war is the subject of an extensive chapter on the interwar period and the Second World War. This phase was marked by a fundamental tension. On the one hand, there was the systematic codification and substantive expansion of political and social civil rights in the emerging democracies and social welfare states of Europe. Legal inequality between the sexes diminished; a social security net began to spread across all of Europe. On the other hand, these expanding rights were increasingly reserved for a country’s own citizens and thereby nationalized. This restrictive tendency escalated to the extreme with the race and class-based exclusion and extermination policies of the dictatorships in Europe’s “bloodlands” (Timothy Snyder) prior to the Second World War and intensified during its course. Citizenship changed its function and went from being an institution of governmental protection to one of discriminatory selection and extermination policy.

scholarly journals Creaturely Communal Ontology in Practice: John Zizioulas in Dialogue with Ritual Theory

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (9) ◽  
pp. 506
Author(s):  
John W. Compton
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate Change ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Full Diversity ◽  
Ritual Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Foundational Work ◽  
As If

This article is born out of a deep concern for our current ecological crisis and serves as a beginning foundational work for how the Christian tradition can address global climate change. Our current way of being gives precedence to the autonomous individual, whose freedom is characterized by disregard for other creatures. John Zizioulas’ communal ontology demonstrates that as the world was created out of God’s loving will, it is comprised of relationship. Living into individuation and division is a refusal of this communion with other creatures and God, but the Eucharist serves as the ritual that brings Christians into communion through the remembrance of Christ. Ian McFarland’s work on the theology of creation provides the helpful nuance that creaturely movement in communion must include the full diversity of creatures. I then turn to Bruce Morrill’s work to demonstrate that the Eucharistic practice must have bearing beyond the walls of the church. It leads practitioners to live into eschatological hope and kenotic service to the world. John Seligman’s ritual theory demonstrates that ritual practice can accomplish these goals because it creates a subjunctive ‘as-if’ world in the face of the world that is perceived as chaotic. Through the continuous practice of the ritual, participants are then formed to live into this subjunctive ‘as-if’ world without ritual precedence. In this way, the Eucharistic practice can prepare practitioners to live into the kenotic service to a world broken by individuation that has led to global climate change and creaturely destruction.

Caribbean literary theory: modernist and postmodern

1995 ◽  
Vol 69 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 103-109
Author(s):  
A. James Arnold
Keyword(s):  
Caribbean Literature ◽  
Alejo Carpentier ◽  
Aime Cesaire ◽  
Edouard Glissant ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Wilson Harris ◽  
Duke University ◽  
Caribbean Fiction ◽  
To Come ◽  
University Of Massachusetts

[First paragraph]The Repeating Mand: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. ANTONIO BENITEZ-ROJO. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1992. xi + 303 pp. (Cloth US$ 49.95, Paper US$ 15.95)Myth and History in Caribbean Fiction: Alejo Carpentier, Wilson Harris, and Edouard Glissant. BARBARA J. WEBB. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. x + 185 pp. (Cloth US$ 25.00)Caribbean literature has been overtaken of late by the quarrels that have pitted postmodernists against modernists in Europe and North America for the past twenty years. The modernists, faced with the fragmentation of the region that hard-nosed pragmatists and empiricists could only see as hostile to the emergence of any common culture, had sought in myth and its literary derivatives the collective impulse to transcend the divisions wrought by colonial history. Fifteen years ago I wrote a book that combined in its lead title the terms Modernism and Negritude in an effort to account for the efforts by mid-century Caribbean writers to come to grips with this problem. A decade later I demonstrated that one of the principal Caribbean modernists, Aimé Césaire, late in his career adopted stylistic characteristics that we associate with the postmodern (Arnold 1990). The example of Césaire should not be taken to suggest that we are dealing with some sort of natural evolution of modernism toward the postmodern. In fact the two terms represent competing paradigms that organize concepts and data so differently as to offer quite divergent maps of the literary Caribbean.

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