Waterways in The Road

Abstract

Water is at the centre of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I use my theory and method, Element Focused Inquiry, to demonstrate some of the ways water presents, and is traceable, in The Road. While The Road is about a man and his son surviving in a post-apocalyptic world, it is also about water’s influence and in particular, it is about the absent-presence of water in the text.

Bio

First, I acknowledge that I live and work on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg and Haudenosaunee peoples. The University of Waterloo is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes ten kilometres on each side of the Grand River. 

My name is Jen Doyle. I’m a theorist, artist, and academic in the final stages of completing my doctorate at the University of Waterloo. I am primarily occupied with ideas that bring the environment into the centre of our understanding of place and self. I’m interested in some of the ways that stories and artefacts facilitate our understanding of extreme otherness (elements and more-than-human beings) as points of collision. I have previous degrees in Gender Studies, Literature, Film, Education, and Fine Arts. As such, my research interests are varied and frequently cross-disciplinary.

Exceptional Life: Eroding the Everyman Hero in Black and Indigenous Cli-Fi

Abstract

Watersheds collect. As they gather the many into one, watersheds also homogenize. Some Anthropocene scholarship has offered similarly collective if flattening definitions of 'the human,' but cultural studies of global warming and Climate Fiction (or "Cli-Fi") increasingly question such unifying—and eliding—frames. For ALECC's 2020 "Watersheds" conference, I am focusing on a similarly homogenizing and collective literary trope, the everyman hero, and discussing how Métis and Black authors reject this character-type in speculative representations of earth's futures. 

Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves (2017) and N.K. Jemisin's The Broken Earth Trilogy (2015-17) dismiss the biologically homogenizing logic of species thinking and everyman heroes by attributing extraordinary powers to Black and Indigenous characters whose more-than-human abilities mark them as biologically different from other humans. My sense is that neither Dimaline nor Jemisin are appealing to the faux-logic of race science through these representations, though. Instead, their novels question the everyman-cum-homo economicus hero who fights climate change by buying more efficient light bulbs, recycling, or eating less meat, etc. Such homogenizing notions of heroism reduce human agency to consumerism and minimize the Anthropocene's colonial origins and racialized consequences. As an alternative, these speculative works imagine worlds where very literal power—the ability to dream and access ancestral knowledge; the ability to stop (or cause) earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions—lies in bodies and narrativesthat are denied everyman status.

Bio

Hi everyone, I'm L. Camille van der Marel, a settler scholar working as an assistant professor on a two-year LTA at Dalhousie University. I work and live in Mi'kma'ki, the unceeded territory of the Mi'kmaq people, land governed by the Peace and Friendship Treaties. I received my PhD from the University of Alberta in 2018, where my research focused on financial and ethical debt in Caribbean Canadian literature. Now I'm focusing on how similar obligations bring together critical race studies and ecocriticism. I've published on Al Purdy's representations of how the natural conditions of the Canadian North resist settler-colonial ideology, financial debt as a form of memory in novels by David Chariandy and Ramabai Espinet, Dionne Brand's and Susanna Moodie's respective evocations of diasporic melancholy with respect to land claims, and how anti-Black racism structures the CanLit graduate programs.

Caring for this Seismic Archive: Imagining Geologic Possibilities in the Colonial Anthropocene in N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy

Abstract

This paper reads the metaphors and materiality of geology and archives in the Anthropocene. Thinking also with Zoe Todd and Heather Davis’s articulation of colonialism as being a “seismic shockwave” (“On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” 774), and Kathryn Yusoff’s recent examination of how the discipline of geology has both epistemically and materially shaped the extractive economies of Black personhood and earth/property central to the transatlantic slave trade (A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None), I turn to N.K. Jemisin’s earthquake-rich Broken Earth trilogy and archival studies to ask: What would it mean to think of the earth, in this contemporary moment, as a seismic archive? What does care look like in the Anthropocene and in its archives, and how does this differ from preservation? Heeding Michelle Caswell’s call for humanities scholars to engage with the intellectual contributions made by archivists and archival studies (“‘The Archive’ is not an Archives”), this paper brings archival theory to bear on the terrestrial field of Earth itself and attends to the geologic intimacies of colonial histories, presents, and futures made legible in the planet’s archives. Working with and against the abundance of organic metaphors in archival theory, I argue that archival studies offers a generative way into thinking of change in the Anthropocene. I read Jemisin’s Broken Earth triology as embodying the metaphors and materiality inherent to geology and archives in this moment of the Anthropocene, and suggest that in so doing, the texts imagine a mode of care that extends beyond the parameters of preservation.

Bio

I come from land considered sacred by the Anishinabeg, Cree, Dakota, Dene, Métis, and Oji-Cree nations, on Treaty One territory. I acknowledge that I also live, work, and learn on the traditional territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee nations, and within lands protected by the “Dish With One Spoon” agreement. I am a SSHRC-funded PhD Student in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, with a focus on the Environmental Humanities. My dissertation thinks about geology and care in the Anthropocene, and considers how “dust” accumulates around and within narratives of imperial ruination.