Hope & Uncertainty: How We Talk about Ecological Catastrophe

We’re delighted to announce the 2024 version of the now-annual Environmental Humanities colloquium “Hope & Uncertainty: How We Talk about Ecological Catastrophe,” running on the afternoon of September 19, 2024.

This year’s colloquium features an international community of scholars working at the intersection of literary studies, science, and environmental humanisms for an urgent shared project: developing effective methods for communicating about ecological and climate crisis in ways that think beyond catastrophic doom narratives.

Please join us for a keynote, several short talks and plenty of time for discussion and making connections across fields at and beyond the University of Toronto. Light refreshments will be provided—please bring your own container, utensils, and mug to help minimize waste!

To attend any or all of the events (including hybrid attendance options for Prof. Maurer’s keynote address and/or Panel 1), please complete this brief form.

Agenda

12:00-2:00. Keynote Address (in person, with hybrid option)

• “The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists,” by Professor Anaïs Maurer (French & Comparative Literature, Rutgers University)

2:30-3:30. Panel 1. Pacific Nuclear Ecologies (in person, with hybrid option)

• “Co-Conjuration: Practicing Decolonial Nuclear Criticism,” by Professor Lisa Yoneyama (East Asian Studies and Women & Gender Studies, UTSG)
• “Writing the Nuclear Free Pacific in Fiji,” by Professor Rebecca Hogue (English, UTSG)
• “Wood and Water,” by Professor Melissa Gniadek (English & Drama, UTM)

4:00-6:00. Panel 2. Narrative & Ecology (in person). Five 10-minute talks, followed by an hour of discussion and Q&A

• “Entangled Extractions and Textured Landscapes in Surire (2015),” by Isidora Cortés-Monroy Gazitúa (Spanish & Portuguese, UTSG)
•  “Internal Ecologies: Gut Health in Medicine and Popular Fiction, 1870s-1930s,” by Dr Louise Benson James (English, Ghent University)
•  “Serious, Hopeful, Boring: Storying Climate Justice in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future,” by Dr Ciarán Kavanagh (English, Ghent University)
•  “Fluid Forms: Reading Waters in Rita Wong’s undercurrent,” by Marina Klimenko (English, UTSG)
•  “Of mice and mirrors: Affective ecologies in Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom (2020),” by Dr Shannon Lambert (English, Ghent University)

After the colloquium, those who are interested can gather for a drink and more conversation at the Victory Café, 440 Bloor Street West 

“Hope & Uncertainty” was made possible thanks to generous financial, logistical and promotional support from the Departments of English (UTSG) and English & Drama (UTM), the School of the Environment, the Jackman Humanities Institute, and the Environmental Humanities International Doctoral Cluster (EH-IDC).
 
Abstracts

KEYNOTE:
“The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists,” by Professor Anaïs Maurer (French & Comparative Literature, Rutgers University)

Bombarded with the equivalent of one Hiroshima bomb a day for half a century, Pacific people have long been subjected to man-made cataclysm. Well before climate change became a global concern, nuclear testing brought about untimely death, widespread diseases, forced migration, and irreparable destruction to the shores of Oceania. In this talk, Anaïs Maurer analyzes the Pacific literature that incriminates the environmental racism behind radioactive skies and rising seas. Analyzing an extensive multilingual archive of decolonial Pacific art in Indigenous and colonial languages, ranging from poetry to songs and paintings, she shows how Pacific nuclear survivors’ stories reveal an alternative vision of the apocalypse: instead of promoting individualism and survivalism, they advocate mutual assistance, cultural resilience, South-South transnational solidarities, and Indigenous women’s leadership. Drawing upon their experience resisting both nuclear colonialism and carbon imperialism, Pacific storytellers offer compelling narratives to nurture the land and each other in times of global environmental collapse.

PANEL 1: PACIFIC NUCLEAR ECOLOGIES
“Co-Conjuration: Practicing Decolonial Nuclear Criticisms,” by Professor Lisa Yoneyama (East Asian Studies and Women & Gender Studies, UTSG)

I will speak briefly from the article I recently published in a special issue of “Nuclear Ghosts” in the Apocalyptica journal. In it I explored what I call the cultural practice of co-conjuration. Co-conjuring practices alert us to the entangled relations between apparently distinct nuclear catastrophes —for example, among radiogenic harm suffered by Indigenous communities, the wartime use of atom bombs, and the meltdown of nuclear reactors. By calling forth ghosts, memories, affects, and visions of justice associated with nuclear-specific loss and pain in the longue durée of colonialism, militarized empires, and extractive settler capitalism, co-conjuring has the potential to produce relational sensibilities that can move us beyond the co¬lonial partitioning of nuclear knowledge. The presentation will focus on Village of Widows (1999), a documentary film by the Canadian film maker Peter Blow to consider what must be wagered when we attempt to produce relational knowledge by connecting incommensurable histories and experiences across disparate times and spaces.

“Writing the Nuclear Free Pacific in Fiji,” by Professor Rebecca Hogue (English, UTSG)

By the 1980s, the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement had become one of the largest Indigenous-led multi-national grassroots organizations in the world. But how did it start and what were its values? This presentation examines the role of women writing to a regional public in the South Pacific during the formation of the nuclear free campaigns in newly independent Fiji.

“Wood and Water,” by Professor Melissa Gniadek (English & Drama, UTM)

This brief talk explores the need to think about the arboreal and the oceanic worlds together, from the perspective of a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature invested in Oceanic and Archipelagic frameworks. Many recent conversations about nineteenth-century energies and ecologies in Americanist contexts have focused on petrocultures, but “arborcultures” are just as critical. After all, whaling and other forms of global extraction that fueled imperialism and settler colonialism were only possible because of the wood used to build ships. At the same time, trees remain central to discourses of hope, renewal, and connection to place that bridge past and present around the globe. Using examples ranging from the work of nineteenth-century writers like Herman Melville, Lydia Maria Child, and William Apess to contemporary novels and poetry, this talk will look toward the Pacific and gesture toward the need to think about land and oceans together (something that seems self-evident in certain scholarly circles but perhaps still necessary to point out in others).