Configurations最新文献

{"title":"Under the Literary Microscope: Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel ed. by Sina Farzin, Susan M. Gaines, and Roslynn D. Haynes (review)","authors":"J. Labinger","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0012","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"233 - 235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49589608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Bestiary of the Anthropocene: Hybrid Plants, Animals, Minerals, Fungi, and Other Specimens ed. by Nicolas Nova (review)","authors":"H. Rogers, Hiram Harmon Rogers","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"ing of concepts like intelligence. In his study of computer game play, for instance, D. Fox Harrell found that choosing an “African-inspired” identity “automatically” generated a “less intelligent” avatar (p. 111). Hence, those who, in Benjamin’s words, “insist on digging deeper into the genome” for scientific solutions to individual difference or to social problems simply cannot avoid wading into a kind of techno-racialized eugenics (p. 117). The problem with the New Jim Code, as Benjamin observes, is that its many innovations fail to provide any alternatives to existing social pathologies. Instead, technofixes of all varieties turn out to be rooted in centuries-old racist and misogynistic patterns and norms. And yet, Benjamin’s book is not pessimistic. Rather, in her final chapters (4 and 5), the author turns to digital retooling efforts that are in fact abolitionist in orientation and that can help us reimagine justice. In so doing, she differentiates between the “technological benevolence” that reifies race and class divisions (the kind that absorbs most of her book) and pioneering applications such as Appolition. Founded by the Black trans tech developer Kortney Ziegler, Appolition allows users to contribute small amounts of change toward sizeable donations for bail relief. The crowdfunded venture has been so successful that Appolition was included in Fast Company’s list of the 10 most innovative companies in 2018. Benjamin contrasts Appolition, “a technology with an emancipatory ethos, a tool of solidarity that directs resources into getting people literally free,” with the growing, nefarious field of “techno-corrections,” with its apps like Promise that track individuals using GPS and that expand the scope and reach of carceral practice (p. 163). In the last pages of the book, Benjamin describes a host of largely grassroots applications, what she calls “abolitionist toolmaking,” that empower marginalized and vulnerable people by demystifying technology and mobilizing collective action and reforms. In Race After Technology, Benjamin warns readers of the totalizing influence of big tech: “We are talking about a redefinition of human identity, autonomy, core constitutional rights, and democratic principles more broadly” (p. 31). To the extent that this sweeping statement may be true, the book would, to my mind, have benefitted from a more sustained critique of the avowedly humanitarian goals driving technological design, as well as a more robust analysis of the ways recent innovations complicate (as opposed to simply reproduce) human categories that have never fully been agreed upon. Nonetheless, Race After Technology is a thoughtful, engaging examination of the digital landscape, useful to scholars and accessible to a general audience.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"238 - 241"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45924172","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Interspecies Ethics and the Limits of Epistemic Authority in Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves","authors":"Emily York","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0003","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Karen Joy Fowler's 2013 novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves explores the intimate violence of Cold War-era state-supported research on chimpanzees and its connection to contemporary corporate and globalized research and consumption practices that make animals killable. It does so through the story arc of a woman named Rosemary and a chimpanzee named Fern who were raised together as part of a science experiment in the 1950s. Yet the central character of the story is plural: Rosemary/Fern and Fern/Rosemary. By depicting an interspecies subjectivity that reconfigures the terms of the experimental apparatus that produced them, the novel imagines the possibilities and limits of becoming-with, drawing attention to the multivocal and embodied traces of this becoming, the distributed agency of multispecies knowledge production, and the limits of speaking for the nonhuman animal.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"104 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49590446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice by Harlan Weaver (review)","authors":"Nathaniel Otjen","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Despite decades of labor in the environmental humanities and adjacent fields, scholaractivists working among the convergences of human groups and other species continue to find themselves explaining why the pursuit of social justice and animal wellbeing are united in common cause. Offering one of the most compelling recent analyses that demonstrates why equity for marginalized people and animals must be pursued together, Harlan Weaver’s Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice joins a growing collection of monographs that attend to the necessary and urgent interdisciplinary work of multispecies justice. Embracing the anti-normative and disruptive politics of queer theory to critique the normativities produced through the so-called “pit bull” breed, dog rescues, and canine cultures of the United States, Weaver challenges what he calls the “episteme of rational man,” “like race” logics that compare animal abuse to human suffering in ways that erase or minimize human mistreatment, and “zero sum” logics that erase species harm by prioritizing human suffering over the hardships faced by other species. Instead, Weaver proposes modes of getting along together premised on embodiment, affect, and intimacy that he names “queer affiliations,” an alternative to the “innately hopeful or promising” (p. 130), and often hetero and homonormative, constructions of “family” and “kinship.” Published in the University of Washington Press’s feminist technoscience series, Bad Dog will interest feminist science studies scholars, queer and trans* theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics, along with academics who practice within and adjacent to fields such as women’s and gender studies, critical race studies, American studies, multispecies studies, animal studies, disability studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies. Drawing upon intersectional thought established by women of color feminisms and the boundary-disrupting work of feminist and queer theory, the monograph brings together ethnography, autoethnography, and discourse analysis to tell more equitable stories from the multispecies contact zones where people and dogs meet. Bad Dog is “a book with legs,” to borrow Eileen Myles’s memorable phrase.1 An impressive array of original concepts and terms animates the monograph’s four chapters, providing scholars with new lenses to examine multispecies worlds. Perhaps the most important idea to emerge from Weaver’s book is “interspecies intersectionality,” a powerful analytic for studying “the confluence of race, gender, sexuality, and species” (p. 15). Beginning from the observation that “relationships between humans and nonhuman animals not only reflect but in fact actively shape experiences of race, gender, species, breed, sexuality, and nation” (pp. 7–8), interspecies intersectionality","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"105 - 107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43429293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Dispassionate Dissections and Their Emotional Rewards: Reading William Harvey and Richard Blackmore","authors":"L. Peh","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay argues that the deep, almost rapturous piousness that the physician William Harvey and the poet Richard Blackmore exhibit in their works is built upon their conviction that the fluids that spurt from bodies in pain do so in accordance with nature's orderly rhythms. The wonder that Harvey and Blackmore feel at the beauty of a divinely ordered world, that is, cannot exist without their adoption of an indifferent attitude towards injury and death. By attending to the emotions that indifference enables or magnifies, I interpret indifference as an affective stance that prepares one to experience other forms of feeling instead of a standalone and all-encompassing state of being.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"25 - 46"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42374318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Weird and the Meta in Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts","authors":"Marco Malvezzi Caracciolo, G. Ulstein","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0000","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Originating in the works of early twentieth-century authors such as H. P. Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood, weird fiction is experiencing a renaissance in contemporary literature. Several scholars have presented this literary mode as uniquely suited to speak to the anxieties generated by the current ecological crisis. In this essay, we examine Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts (2019) as part of a wave of recent works that mark a sharp departure from the immersive strategies with which weird fiction is typically associated. We argue that this encounter between the weird and the \"meta\" is particularly effective in bringing out the strange entanglement of human societies and the nonhuman world in times of climate crisis, serving as a powerful model for future iterations of the weird.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"1 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44309415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Protoplasmic Imagination: Ernst Haeckel and H. P. Lovecraft","authors":"Ulf Houe","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0002","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay traces an imaginative history of protoplasm in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a material that still exists today, though, with the advent of DNA and cellular biology, in a somewhat different form. For the biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) and the short story writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), protoplasm was the key to the specific nature of evolved life. Not only was it the material that, in the living organism, was given shape, but it was also the place where the hereditary information of what shape to give was passed on from one generation to the next, making evolution possible in the first place. For Haeckel, it was the missing piece in the puzzle that Darwin had almost completed, and with it the whole mystery and wonder of life was within explanatory reach. For Lovecraft, on the other hand, it was the very essence of the shapeless, primitive, and fundamentally menacing quality of life that civilization had to keep at bay. Though protoplasm plays a very different role in modern science than it did then, its imaginative legacy lives on in a whole range of fiction genres nowadays, and Haeckel's and Lovecraft's both very different and very similar conceptions provide a starting point for exploring a conception of biological life that is far from dead.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"47 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46954004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition by Antoine Traisnel (review)","authors":"Kara M. Mitchell","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0005","url":null,"abstract":"in her sixties” (p. 43) or “cow-colored pit bull-type dog we [rescue staff and volunteers] guesstimated to be about three years old” (p. 128). While the move to describe people and dogs in a similar fashion underscores the need for equitable relations and should be applauded, such descriptions, when used repeatedly, tend to flatten the complexity, messiness, and mutability of identity, and run against the very arguments of the book. A better approach could involve taking more space to tell the stories of individuals through their own words, or, in the case of canine informants, to describe their lives using the best information available and in ways that center their perspectives. The monograph could have also situated multispecies justice within the existing body of research constituting this field and elaborated on such work within the contexts of dog rescues and cultures. Weaver correctly attributes the concept to Haraway, his graduate mentor, in a footnote buried within the introduction and then briefly revisits the term in the final pages of the book where he invents the phrase “multispecies transformative justice” (p. 184). At no point, however, is the larger body of work associated with multispecies justice—or with multispecies studies and multispecies ethnography, for that matter—mentioned or engaged, even though Bad Dog participates in these areas of thought. Despite constituting part of the title, the field of multispecies justice is conspicuously absent from the rest of the book. Engaging the work of David Naguib Pellow, David Schlosberg, Kyle Whyte, Ursula Heise, Sunaura Taylor, Thom van Dooren, and Danielle Celermajer —to name a few—would have not only placed Bad Dog in conversation with the growing field, but also explicitly placed multispecies research that remains hesitant to focus on race, sexuality, ability, class, and gender in conversation with feminist and queer theory that continues to overlook the roles of other species. Indeed, the absence of multispecies literature points to an institutional gulf separating multispecies research from the social justice–oriented scholarship that guides the book. Bad Dog insists that the pursuit of equitable, multispecies worlds requires departing from the confines of disciplinarity to instead coinhabit the mutual, multi-sited, multispecies spaces that dogs and people make together every single day. In doing so, Weaver’s book exemplifies the participatory, public-facing scholarship needed to assemble more accountable modes of thinking and relating.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"107 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45900636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now by Vincent Ialenti (review)","authors":"Eileen A O'Shaughnessy","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0006","url":null,"abstract":"(p. 193). Such an ethics remains rooted in a respect for the “unbridgeable distance between living beings” (p. 195), one that we can see, Traisnel insightfully notes, in the ethology of Uexküll. Traisnel’s theory of capture and his interest in genre provoke two important questions that future work must consider. While Traisnel tracks the afterlives of capture in the present-day factory farming industry, one wonders about how this theory of capture might apply to the proliferation of pets at the turn of the century (many of whom were and are literally “captive,” as it were, in houses); at the end of the nineteenth century, the pet industry began to burgeon into existence and thereby dramatically reconfigured human relationships with animals. How, then, does capture—“from capere, meaning to seize with one’s hands,” as Traisnel reminds us (p. 18)—apply to these domesticated creatures raised by hand, as it were? Traisnel’s book also provokes questions about the genre of poetry, most especially when one arrives at the conclusion and reads the haunting epigraph from Dickinson: “I held it so tight that I lost it / Said the Child of the Butterfly / Of Many a vaster Capture / That is the Elegy —.” If Hawthorne’s “poetic” speculations resist a paradigm of capture, then how did poems in the nineteenth century resist and perhaps participate in this same paradigm? Future answers to these questions must rely on the help of Traisnel’s remarkable new book.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"110 - 112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43311018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Epidemic Frontlines: The Slow Science of Observation","authors":"B. Ghosh","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0028","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay focuses on the “epidemic notes” of frontline healthcare workers as a form of qualitative observation that can potentiate public intelligence about emerging infectious disease crises. As one coterie of healthcare workers, registered nurses who write about frontline experiences can immerse nonexperts in an epidemic sensorium, and productively involve them in evolving medical advisories and health policies. I draw on print and oral history archives of registered nurses at the frontlines of the typhoid and yellow fever (1898–1901), influenza (1918–1919), and HIV/AIDS (1981–present) pandemics to analyze epidemic notes as an incremental, situated, and provisional knowledge-making in the face of radical uncertainty.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"389 - 403"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49613454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}