Course Environments: Extinct, Envisioned, Evolving (E3)

’I can’t breathe!’ (Eric Garner)
“Environment.” The strangeness of this innocent seeming term becomes even clearer when we translate it into Spanish: ambience. In the language of the conquistadors, the living world is cast as nothing more than mood lighting.
Jason Hickel, Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, p. 79
 
If the body has been ‘re-emerging as a site of renewed critical and literary or cinematic potential’ (Duncan and Cumpsty 587), so has the environments in which bodies move, breathe, live and perish. In the final words of Eric Garner, uttered as he was asphyxiating in the chokehold administered by an officer of the NYPD on suspicion for selling illicit cigarettes, we live in a world in which the sense of an ‘atmospheric terror’ (Hugo 87) is everywhere, literally as well as figuratively. This is the case in the streets of New York where Garner breathed his last breath, in the markets of Milan, Wuhan or São Paulo laid bare by the pandemic, in the Australian wildfires in which an estimated 3 billion animals were displaced or died, in rising global temperatures, and the by now routine existence of category 5 hurricanes. This is reflected, and reflected upon, in contemporary literature, film, television, computer games, comics, theatre, visual arts and other forms of cultural expressions. Here, we are treated to various forms of environments, and the environmental, that offer visions of the present and the future that are as depressing as they are repressive but also deeply entangled. As foreground and background, self and environment, collapse, it is for better or worse becoming increasingly difficult to navigate as a body, a mind, and a species set apart from ‘the environment’. Examples of this are legion, ranging from The Handmaid’s Tale (novel 1985, series 2017 -) on to Dune (novel 1965, film 1984 and 2021), in novels like Rita Indiana’s Tentacle (2018) and Richard Powers’ The Overstory (2018), in documentaries like Leviathan (2012), in indies like Atlantics (2019) and Gaia (2021), or large scale feature films like Don’t Look Up (2021), in the photography of Fabrice Monteiro and Edward Burtynsky, in graphic novels like Here (2014) and Trees (2014-2020), or in the exhibitions like the Anthropocene Project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2013).
E3 invites papers that reflect on ‘the environment’ and ‘environmentalism’ broadly conceived, as of ‘the environmental’ as such as being in flux: expanding and contracting, flourishing and dying, real and imagined, diverting and entangled, atrophied and full of promise. The spatial conceptualization of ambience offers one such approach. The ambient part of the atmosphere enhances parts of our sensory attention that usually slumber in the background of our perceptive apparatus. Ambience, the noun form of the concept, is often dealing with concrete, physical architectural settings (Thibaud 2017), while its adjective form, ambient, relates to aspects of musical styles or genres. ‘Ambient’ has been described as  a  qualitative aspect of space  that is  inattentive, a background character with subliminal affect (Schmidt 2013). Another perspective is offered by crisis, the etymology of which potentially points to breakdown and collapse, but also to a fork in the road, to new paths chosen and shifting forms of being. For alongside shifting geographical environments that seem to be in constant crisis, from the aggressive politics of deforestation carried out in Brazil to unintentional mega-droughts of the American Southwest and the rapid melting of the Arctic, in the totalizing move towards a ‘planetary mine’ (Arboleda 2020) of constant and omnipresent extraction, political environments are souring, too. We see this in the polarization of political environments from Brazil to the US, Russia to the Ukraine, Italy and Afghanistan, Sweden and India where are flourishing at an alarming rate. In addition, economic environments in their present forms are endangered, too, whether it is in the Brexit-induced turmoil of Britain, in the energy crisis playing out between Russia and Europe, as in the fears of a global recession. Finally, digital environments have become so all-encompassing as to be almost impossible to disentangle from physical environments, just as the hidden energy costs of supposedly virtual global space in actual fact transfigure and disfigure local environments through the infrastructure of server farms and heat expenditure, as of course in adding significantly to emissions thus also affecting the planetary environment as such. The environment, the material, and the planetary, can no longer be effaced, ignored, forgotten. 

E3 invites reflections on ’environments’ and ‘the environmental’ of the past, the present and the future, and from broad disciplinary perspectives. Whether it is that of New York’s pop art scene of the 1960ies, of the atonal environments of Béla Bartók and the early twentieth century, or the dark of black metal theory of the early 21st century, the history of London smog from the middle of the nineteenth century up to and beyond the Great Smog of 1952, of Walter Benjamin’s ‘arcades’ of Paris or Mike Davis’ ‘city of quartz’ in LA, of the ‘dark ecology’ of Timothy Morton, or the idea of a planet suffering from the 6th great mass extinction, participants are invited to think about their work in relation to environments extinct, envisioned and evolving.

Paper proposals (abstracts) of 200-300 words should be sent to the organizers Rune Graulund (graulund@sdu.dk), Devika Sharma (sharma@hum.ku.dk) and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen (birgittestougaard@cc.au.dk) by February 23, 2023. 

This graduate seminar is co-organized by graduate schools in literature, art, and cultural studies at the University of Southern Denmark, the University of Copenhagen, and Aarhus University

Bibliography
Arboleda, Martín. 2020. Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. London: Verso.
Duncan, Rebecca and Rebekah Cumpsty. 2020. ‘The Body in Postcolonial Fiction after the Millennium’ in Interventions Vol 22, No. 5. 587-605.`
Jason Hickel. 2020. Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World. London: Windmill. 
Hugo, Esthie Hugo. 2022. ‘A Violence “Just below the Skin”: Atmospheric Terror and Racial Ecologies from the African Anthropocene’ in Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene, Johan Höglund, Rune Graulund, Justin D. Edwards (eds.), University of Minnesota Press
Schmidt, Ulrik. 2013. Det Ambiente: Sansning, Medialisering, Omgivelse. Aarhus, Denmark: Aarhus University Press. 
 
Thibaud, Jean-Paul. 2011. “The Sensory Fabric of Urban Ambiances.” Senses and Society 6, no. 2: 203–15. 

Aim:

The PhD students will be offered the opportunity to present a work in progress and will get substantial feed back from junior and senior colleagues. In reading sessions and workshops they will be able to discuss their work and current approaches to the topic and they will meet future colleagues from different Danish and Scandinavian universities.

Literature:

TBA

Target group:

PhD students at all stages.

Form:

Lectures by international scholars in the field.
Reading sessions chaired by leading scholars.
Sessions with presentations by PhD students.
Workshops.

Lecturers:

Timothy Morton, professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University, Texas
Marie Koldkær Højlund, Associate Professor, Aarhus University, Denmark

Venue:

The Sandbjerg Estate

Course dates:

• 24 April 2023 10:00 - 18:00
• 25 April 2023 09:00 - 18:00
• 26 April 2023 09:00 - 18:00
• 27 April 2023 09:00 - 18:00
• 28 April 2023 09:00 - 13:00