{"id":11325,"date":"2020-12-18T11:29:21","date_gmt":"2020-12-18T16:29:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=11325"},"modified":"2021-06-14T07:11:27","modified_gmt":"2021-06-14T12:11:27","slug":"books-of-the-decade-in-ecocultural-theory-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2020\/12\/18\/books-of-the-decade-in-ecocultural-theory-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Books of the decade in ecocultural theory"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How best to characterize the past decade in books? This list focuses on three themes: attempts to grapple with the nature of the climate and extinction crises, the “ontological” and “decolonial” “turns” in cultural and environmental theory, and efforts to map out the “multispecies entanglements” that characterize our world and the acute challenges we face.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The original version of the list below was expanded (on December 21) from 30 to 45 based on crowd-sourced suggestions of what was missing<\/em> and belated reckonings that I had missed some key works. It is not meant to be exhaustive; it is more of a mapping of relevant areas represented by selected titles. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ten years ago, I posted an article on this blog<\/a> with the exact same title as this one. It was enjoyable, at the time, to create a list of ten books I found both most personally influential and most significant in the intersectional study of ecology and culture. The list resonated fairly widely, attracting one of the highest number of visits on the blog to that point. (The blog looked different back then; you can see that in a screen shot here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reviewing that list today, I can reaffirm the significance of each of its “top ten,” even if my ordering might be different in retrospect. Arturo Escobar’s Territories of Difference <\/em>(second on that list) strikes me as the most forward-looking in terms of how it anticipated the most important stream of ecocultural thinking over the past ten years (the decolonial, though that term covers a great deal of complexity, which I will touch on below). Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway<\/em> (#4) is, of the ten, the book that has appeared on the greatest number of reading lists and graduate theses since then, in the areas that I read and advise in. And while the book I listed in first place, William Connolly’s Neuropolitics<\/em>, has perhaps not aged as well as some of Connolly’s other books (so much has been written about “neuropolitics” since then), its intervention at the time of its writing was substantial and the author’s ongoing productivity merits great respect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s not as easy to write a similar list today, in part because of the dynamics of the “present moment”: this year, in particular, with its global pandemic, its racial-justice convulsions, and its political insanity (here in the United States) has left me with a certain abyssal feeling of the loss of bearings. Can anyone today feel confident that they know what’s going on and what the future holds? (Other than that things will get much worse before they get any better.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That may be another way of saying: welcome to the world of the shaken, the throttled, the disjointed, unmasked (Covid aside), and violated. Postmodernism, at least in its more theological forms, had gestured toward<\/a> this kind of sentiment a few decades ago, but that became a passing, and mostly forgettable, fad. Today, it may be decolonialism that gestures<\/a> in a similar direction, at the risk perhaps of becoming tomorrow’s passed fad. (I hope not.) The more important point is that no one should any longer harbor the illusion that academe holds the keys to much of anything. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That said, intellectual thought, especially that produced at the confluence of ecological and cultural concerns, remains intensely relevant and helpful for showing a way out of our present societal, even civilizational, morass. That’s what I intend to capture with the list below. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How, then, to characterize the past decade? In the territory covered by the term “ecocultural theory” — in which I include the “environmental humanities” and the numerous fields inhabited by ecocritical<\/a> approaches to recognizing the scope and scale of our ecological situation, but also the fields that aim to understand how human cultural practices intersect with and mutually affect the “more than human” world of ecological systems and biological relations (anthropology, geography, some kinds of philosophy) — this decade has been shaped by three main threads of thinking and creative practice: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Attempts to grasp the world-encompassing totality of the climate and extinction<\/a> crises<\/strong>: This includes debates over the naming of the “Anthropocene<\/a>,” the place of capitalism<\/a> and neoliberalism within it, and articulations of the “deep time<\/a>” of human<\/a> relations with the geological<\/a>, earthly, and chthonic<\/a> beyond<\/em> that preceded us and will outlast us. Here we find efforts to scope out what it means to live at, or even after<\/a>, the “end of the world” (note how the phrase repeats itself in the book list below), in a time of epistemic<\/a> violence, great derangement<\/a>, species loss<\/a>, deaths of civilization<\/a> and even of the “posthuman<\/a>,” and all the loss, grief, mourning<\/a>, rage, and other emotions<\/a> conjured up at the intersections of geology, history, and the colonial<\/a> and capitalist petrocultures<\/a>, militarisms<\/a>, and technofutures<\/a> that collectively mark the world today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Debates over the ontological nature of the multiplicity of the human, and the need to decolonize our understandings of that multiplicity<\/strong>: Sparked in part by the previous decade’s calls<\/a> for an “ontological turn<\/a>,” and connected intimately to the decolonial<\/a> thread in all its forms — Indigenous<\/a>, anti-racist, Black, women of color, global South<\/a>, transnational<\/a>, et al. — that has come to define so much of the current moment, these debates have involved the recognition of differences that are not merely “cultural,” but are now taken to be something more like differences of “world” or reality itself. They are differences of “world-making<\/a>” and of the “cosmopolitics<\/a>” by which multiple worlds<\/a> clash and intersect, not merely as subjects (agents) and objects (victims) of the present global conjuncture, but as co-agents of deeper historical entanglements<\/a> with ecology, materiality, biology, and cosmology in its political, affective, and imaginal<\/a> contours. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Finally, on the more hopeful side are the richly empirical and ethnographic efforts to map out the “multispecies<\/a>” “entanglements<\/a>” of the cultural and natural, material and discursive<\/strong>, as they connect, disconnect, and reconnect<\/strong> in myriad ways<\/strong>: Many of these efforts have engaged with the so-called “new materialist<\/a>” turn in its speculative, relational, object-oriented, animist, enactive\/affective, and other forms, while others have intersected with the “posthuman<\/a>” turn in both its “more-than-human<\/a>” and “transhuman<\/a>” varieties. Others are simply part of the long tradition by which artists<\/a> and philosophers continually rediscover the sheer delight<\/a> of life in its biological, animated (and animist) exuberance. The animal<\/a>, viral<\/a>, fungal, microbial, vegetal<\/a>, bodily<\/a>, crystalline, watery<\/a>, oceanic<\/a>, elemental<\/a>, and darkly<\/a> and brightly<\/a> ecological — all of these and more provoke creative engagements that continue to challenge our thinking about what constitutes the world and our many possible placings within it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That covers a lot of terrain (arguably, a decade’s worth if not more). The following list of books present key moments and reference points within these three intersecting streams. It’s a very personal list, a snapshot or meteorological reading of my own thinking around the world’s shifting ecocultural coordinates, and I beg forgiveness in advance for leaving out so many other books that deserve to be read and discussed. I welcome reminders of what’s missing, or votes of support, in the comments below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n