{"title":"There is Buffalo Ecocide: A Meditation upon Homecoming in Buffalo Country","authors":"J. Hatley","doi":"10.5130/csr.v25i1.6417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v25i1.6417","url":null,"abstract":"A Meditation upon Homecoming in Buffalo Country.","PeriodicalId":51871,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies Review","volume":"28 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76174499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Inundation, Extinction and Lacustrine Lives","authors":"Rick De Vos","doi":"10.5130/csr.v25i1.6394","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v25i1.6394","url":null,"abstract":"In 1972 Lake Pedder in south-west Tasmania was submerged under 15 metres of water as a result of the Tasmanian State Government’s Middle Gordon Hydro-electric Power Scheme. The lake was subsumed into a much larger artificial impoundment formed by three rockfill dams, making it the largest freshwater lake in Australia. The Tasmanian government transferred the name Lake Pedder to the new impoundment. Three species endemic to the original Lake Pedder were recorded as extinct as a consequence of the lake’s flooding. The Lake Pedder planarian, a species of carnivorous flatworm, the Lake Pedder earthworm, and the Pedder galaxias, a small freshwater fish, disappeared from the lake area after the inundation of this unique habitat, the site of a number of ecologically valuable faunal communities. The divergent fates of these animals, their status as lost species and their significance as creatures both meaningful and meaning-making, marks out an extinction matrix suggesting that the absence of specific animals and specific experiences and ways of life matter more than others, that specific deaths can be more readily incorporated into stories of loss and restoration, and that the perceived malleability of habitats invariably involves death inscribed as sacrifice or justifiable casualties. This paper seeks to retrieve some of the perspectives and experiences forgotten or written over in the lake’s stories of flooding and redemption. ","PeriodicalId":51871,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies Review","volume":"396 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85020196","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exceeding the Limits of Reconciliation: ‘Decolonial Aesthetic Activism’ in the Artwork of Canadian Artist Meryl McMaster","authors":"Allyson Green","doi":"10.5130/csr.v25i1.6155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v25i1.6155","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper I consider whether, and if so how artistic creative uncertainty can facilitate processes of imagining new relationships between Indigenous peoples and settlers. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s model of reconciliation seems to promise improved Indigenous/settler relationships, yet many Indigenous scholars and allies question the efficacy of it as an approach to expedite relationship-building. For that reason, Indigenous critics like David Garneau suggest that alternate methods be deployed such as ‘decolonial aesthetic activism’ in order to build relationships that exceed the limits of reconciliation. Within this model, ambiguous, discordant, and indigestible artworks operate as one method by which we/settlers can become aware of how we are implicated in the structures of settler colonialism. I apply Garneau’s theory by conducting a close reading of the performative self-portraits by Meryl McMaster. My analysis reveals that art can put forward critiques of settler colonialism that unsettle assumptions, thereby creating new spaces for us to imagine worlds otherwise. Accordingly, I argue that McMaster’s art does have the potential to exceed the limits of reconciliation and conclude that critical engagement with her photographs is an important first step in the process that is decolonization, a process that exceeds the limits of reconciliation.","PeriodicalId":51871,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies Review","volume":"11 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88404194","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Exhibiting Extinction: Martha and the Monument, Two Modes of Remembering Nature","authors":"Kelly Enright","doi":"10.5130/csr.v25i1.6404","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v25i1.6404","url":null,"abstract":"Whether stuffed remains in a museum case, inscribed tombstone, or stone wall perched on a cliff, memorials to extinct animals are timestamps representing human-animal relationships at particular moments in time. This essay analyzes the rhetoric and imagery of historical extinctions as seen in these memorials to understand the ways people struggled to understand the loss. Through examination of memorials to extinct species in U.S. museums, parks, and zoos my research has revealed a continuous struggle to identify the personhood of animals, define human-animal interactions, and locate human responsibility for environmental change. \u0000 \u0000While each memorial mimics remembrance practices used for humans and human events, they differ in their acknowledgement of the individuality and the agency of its extinction which, in turn, often denies agency to the animal. Steeped as they are in Romantic-era notions of wildness, these memorials can be read as parables of environmentalism, but in their conceptualization of the animal, they instruct us in the varieties of human-animal interactions and representations within the environmental movement at different times and places, making them more complex spaces than their simplicity suggests. While memorials present only a slice of the story, the memories they create and reinforce become part of the cultural ways of dealing with extinction that is often more popular and more poignant than historical narratives documenting their declines. At its core, my research adds to the literature on constructions of Nature in American culture by connecting 19th-century declension narratives with 20th-century extinctions, and problematizes the American ideology of abundance.","PeriodicalId":51871,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies Review","volume":"272 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76554034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Multispecies Collective Planting Trees: Tending to Life and Making Meaning Outside of the Conservation Heroic","authors":"L. McLauchlan","doi":"10.5130/csr.v25i1.6415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v25i1.6415","url":null,"abstract":"To what extent do our narratives support the work of ecological care? While working in anti-extinction conservation requires paying careful attention to the realities of precarity and ambiguity, this is not necessarily reflected in our public narratives of such work. Instead, as is typified in Jean Giono’s 1953 short story ‘The man who planted trees’, many conservation narratives are pitched in heroic modes, framing conservation labour as working to secure an obvious ‘good’ in perpetuity. In this paper, I think with practicing Buddhist and volunteer tree planter, Errol Greaves, and his work organising and working with dedicated humans helping to regenerate native forest on Te Ahumairangi Hill at the edge of Wellington City. Aiming to create a flourishing native habitat to support the endangered kākā (Nestor meridionalis), Errol’s work is largely in line with mainstream anti-extinction conservation goals in Aoteaora/New Zealand. However, his labour is framed by distinctly non-heroic narratives emphasising cooperation, ambiguity and precarity—emphases more closely related to the comedic, a mode of narration which Joseph Meeker identifies as better allowing for both ecological accommodation and responsiveness. In this paper, I consider the resources offered by various relational ontologies and non-heroic narratives for both responding well to ecological realities and sustaining work for a flourishing world, particularly in our current times of radically apparent precarity.","PeriodicalId":51871,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies Review","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89614684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}