Talks | Dr Caroline Edwards: Recent Episodes
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I’ve just returned from a mini lecture tour in Germany! It was an honour to be invited to share my work on the current elemental aesthetics book project with colleagues and students at the University of Konstanz and TU Dresden, at the invitation of Prof. Timo Müller (Professor of American Studies at the University of Konstanz) and Jun.-Prof. Dr. Moritz Ingwersen (Chair of North American Literature with a Focus on Future Studies at TU Dresden).
The lecture was titled “The weird eroticism of elemental aesthetics” and considers the weird eroticism that arises from human-elemental encounters in contemporary literature and artworks. In response to the climate emergency, artists, filmmakers, and writers are increasingly exploring the perspectives of nonhuman actors and agents such as fungi, plant life, trees, rocks, and water. In my ongoing research into elemental aesthetics, I’ve been struck by the frequency with which sexuality and eroticism is invoked to convey the simultaneous disgust and fascination with nonhuman agency. I draw on a few exemplary examples of this weird eroticism, including queer xyloid sexuality in the arboreal collage artworks of Kenyan American artist Wangechi Mutu, lithic eroticism in the Icelandic ecohorror TV series Katla (Netflix, 2021), human-fungal procreation in British writer Aliya Whiteley’s dystopian novella The Beauty (2014), libidinal entanglements with mushrooms in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gothic horror novel Mexican Gothic (2020), and the weird species boundary-crossing of Mother Trees in British composer Joe Acheson’s Sonic Woodland acoustic installations at the Kew Gardens botanical estate at Wakehurst, West Sussex in England.
How are we to read such artworks? Why might these artists, directors, and writers be invoking our disgust? These works, I argue, embrace the fecund, the abject, and the decomposing possibilities of mushrooms, woods, and organic matter in a rich, ambivalent imagery of inhumanism. Human protagonists are threatened with death and transmutation into forms of nutrient-rich afterlife that nourish plants (human composting) via the elemental aesthetics of symbolic redemption, and unambiguously utopian possibility. I conclude that a cultural analysis that is attuned to the utopian impulse of such artworks can help us navigate the tyranny of human exceptionalism we must overcome at a time of ecocatastrophe and mass extinction.
The second lecture was delivered on Monday 13 November 2023 as part of the TU Dresden undergraduate programme in a module on Nature and Technology in American Literature. You can watch a recording of this lecture below, or over on my YouTube channel.
Although this lecture draws on my current book manuscript, which is a work in progress, I have published and forthcoming publications on this material. The case studies exploring human-lithic eroticism are discussed in my article “Becoming-lithic: elemental utopian possibility in the contemporary ecocatastrophe”, which was published in Textual Practice, Vol. 37, No. 9 (2023), pp. 1364-1387 (the article is open access, so you can download or read it online). And the material on xyloid sexuality is written up in an article titled “Xyloid Sexuality: Dismantling the Human in Wangechi Mutu’s Arboreal Collages,” forthcoming with Cultural Politics in 2024. My thanks to Wangechi Mutu for granting permission for me to use images of her artworks for this piece of research.
The Black Fantastic: Ekow Eshun in Conversation
with Ekow Eshun and Dr Caroline Edwards
Friday 24th February 2023, 6-8pm, Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1H 0PD
How are contemporary Black artists reimagining fantastic genres and motifs to address racism and social injustice? How do elements of folklore, science fiction, spiritual traditions, ceremonial pageantry and Afrofuturism inform multimedia Black art today? What can we learn from their powerful visions of futurity?
We are thrilled to be joined by Ekow Eshun for a special session on the Black Fantastic. Eshun’s recent exhibition “In the Black Fantastic,” which ran from June to September 2022 at the Hayward Gallery, brought together contemporary artists from the African diaspora, whose work draws on science fiction, myth and Afrofuturism. Featuring artists such as Nick Cave, Sedrick Chisom, Ellen Gallagher, Wangechi Mutu, Chris Ofili, Lina Iris Viktor and Kara Walker, “In the Black Fantastic” was the UK’s first exhibition dedicated to the work of Black artists working in the realm of the fantastical – including mythology, folklore, spiritual traditions, science fiction and Afrofuturism – to explore racial injustices and identity.
Eshun will reflect on his experiences curating this acclaimed exhibition and discuss how Black artists are exploring the fantastic across a variety of media.
Ekow Eshun is a Ghanaian-British writer, editor and curator. He has been the editor of numerous magazines, including Tank, Arena and Mined. He was Artistic and Executive Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2005-10), during which time visitors rose by 38%. He holds an honorary doctorate from London Metropolitan University and is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, overseeing London’s most significant public art programme. He writes frequently for the Guardian, Independent on Sunday, The Face and the Observer. He is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4 arts shows Saturday Review and Front Row. Eshun’s Orwell Prize-nominated memoir, Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in England and Africa (2005) explores issues of race and identity. In 2016, he curated a group exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, London exploring the identity of the black dandy, Made You Look: Dandyism and Black Masculinity. In 2017, he edited the publication Africa Modern: Creating the Contemporary Art of a Continent, which marked the opening of Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. He is also Chairman of Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group, and Creative Director of the arts space Calvert 22 Foundation, for which he has instigated an award-winning online magazine, The Calvert Journal.
A transcript of this interview will be published in Foundation (Spring 2023).
I’ve been working on a new chapter about trees as part of my current book project, Hopeful Inhumanism: The Elemental Aesthetics of Ecocatastrophe. Titled “Arboreal Revelation,” the chapter will extend my analysis in earlier case studies on rocks (“Becoming-lithic”) and fungus (“Mycological Possibility”), which considers the elemental aesthetics of texts that dismantle humanist and anthropocentric […]
I’ve been teaching Pauline Hopkins’ lost race narrative, of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self (1902-3) on Birkbeck’s BA Science Fiction module over the past year and was delighted to have the chance to develop this work into a conference paper as part of a panel on “Speculative Fiction and the Modernist Racial Imaginary.” The […]
Featured image: “Soma Goddess” by Emily Balivet, 2015. used with permission. I was really pleased to be able to deliver my postponed keynote lecture at the “Idyll and Utopia” conference, organised by graduate students at Princeton University’s German Department on 8-9 October 2021. Although I was sadly unable to give the talk in person, […]
I was delighted to be able to deliver my keynote online for the rescheduled 10th anniversary conference of Current Research into Speculative Fiction (CRSF) on the theme of “Survival,” which took place on 1-2 July 2021. My keynote was titled “Hypnotic Inhumanism: The Welcome Descent into Decaying Worlds” and explored new material from my current […]
This lecture considered how the idea of Utopia helps us galvanise political literary readings within the context of an increasingly dystopian sense of global crisis. Despite the seemingly relentless, dystopian nature of these issues, I argue that contemporary writers are responding by using utopian registers in their fiction – anticipating alternative ways of imagining subjectivity, […]
18 March 2021, 2-3.30pm GMT Online via Zoom (booking required) I’ll be speaking about “Coastal Dystopias” as part of the Institute for Historical Research (IHR) series on “Coastal Connections.” Caroline will join Prof. Dr. Silja Klepp (Kiel), Dr Yi-Chia Chen (UColorado-Denver) and Prof. Dr. Teresa Sabol-Spezio (Independent Scholar, formerly at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society) to discuss how […]
I’m currently working on my new book project, Arcadian Revenge: Science Fiction in the Era of Ecocatastrophe, which considers “ecocatastrophe” narratives in literature, film, graphic fiction, contemporary art and music. Drawing on debates in eco-socialism and anti-humanism, as well as contemporary philosophies of environmental posthumanism and the new (feminist) materialisms, the book poses a provocative […]
I was delighted to be asked to chair a recent panel discussion for the British Academy on Dystopian Literature in Our Time. The panel brought together three important contemporary writers, Season Butler (author of Cygnet, 2019), Francesca Haig (author of The Fire Sermon trilogy, 2014-17) and Sophie Mackintosh (author of The Water Cure, 2018). Part […]
I was thrilled to be invited by the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies at the University of Limerick to give the opening keynote lecture for their conference “(Un)Fair Cities. Equity, Ideology and Utopia in Urban Texts” co-organised with the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS) (formerly the Helsinki Literature and the City Network) and also […]
I’ve been working on a new side project on automation and utopian visions of futurity – from Marxist revolutionary theory to theories of post- and anti-work. When the London Science Fiction Research Community (LSFRC) invited me to deliver one of the keynote talks for this year’s annual conference, on the topic of Productive Futures: The […]
The economics magazine STIR hosted a panel discussion on “Economic Science Fictions” to celebrate the launch of its Autumn 2018 issue on “Co-operating out of Crisis.” I was pleased to be ask to contribute with a short talk on “The Economics of Nowhere” which considered how the genre of the literary utopia is particularly well suited […]
In July 2018, I was delighted to be invited to deliver one of the keynote addresses at After Fantastika: An Interdisciplinary Conference, the fifth annual conference organised by Fantastika Journal. The theme of the 2018 conference was what comes ‘after’, with papers invited that explored the impact of temporal narratives within Fantastika and related genres.
My keynote was titled "All Aboard for Ararat: The Deliquescence of Clock-Time in Contemporary Apocalyptic Flood Fictions" and considered the productive timescales being suggested by a growing sub-genre of twenty-first-century apocalyptic literature: flood fictions. Flood fictions depict a range of apocalyptic floods, from tsunamis and deluges that are local, partial and/or provisional to planetary accounts of rising sea levels, global disaster, and pluvial shifts in meteorology. The significance of islands in these narratives suggests a formal relationship with the locus classicus of the Renaissance utopia; a genre grounded in pelagic crossings to the New World as European imperialism shaped new capitalist frontiers. The Renaissance island-utopia thus offered an exotic site for social experimentation that played on the idea of bodies, embodiment and sovereignty: rethinking the body politic by relocating society from the mainland to exotic island locations.
The reimagining of embodiment becomes an urgent question for our own times of rising sea levels and climate change; something that contemporary flood fictions interrogate through their depiction of transformed topography and the new island communities it creates. I examined the different temporal orders that such islands make possible in several twenty-first-century flood fictions to think through the ambiguities of apocalyptic end times. Novels such as Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), Stephen Baxter’s Flood (2008), Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From (2017) and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York: 2140 (2017) reveal a number of different temporal orders functioning outside of, alongside, and beyond the regulatory clock-time of industrial modernity. From the phylogenetic or ancestral time of memories of ancient floods to the watery intersubjectivity of gestational duration represented by pregnancy and new motherhood; from the diachronic timescale of planetary evolution in a new Hydrocene era of sea level rises to the archipelagic consciousness suggested by new island constellations, and the return of pre-industrial modes of agricultural subsistence: these texts depict islands as sites of utopian change that hint at different social worlds with their own temporalities beyond capitalist clock-time.
The research underpinning this keynote lecture is being published in an article with ASAP/Journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming in Vol. 4, No. 1 (January 2019).
Below are the PowerPoint slides which accompanied the plenary, or click here to download:
After Fantastika Keynote Slides, July 2018 from Caroline Edwards