Critical Poetics and Ecology
🗓️ Thursday, 25 June — 3:10pm
- 4:10pm
(60 mins)
Presenters
Image
Abstract
This roundtable is a space to discuss contemporary critical poetics—textual and visual—as a site of ecological thought. How do textual and visual poetics think and rethink ecology? Is it possible to discover organising principles mediating questions of ecology in contemporary artistic process, style, form, material or otherwise? Do we yet possess the language that we need for speaking about these poetics? What, if anything, is stopping us from scaling critical poetics into emancipatory praxes in an ecological context?
The positioning of this roundtable draws together postcolonial and anti-racist theorists of ecology, poetry, and language, namely Mel Y. Chen, Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter and Aimé Césaire. For Mel Y. Chen the ‘alchemical magic of language… animate humans, animals, and the things in between’. Sylvia Wynter and Aimé Césaire both mediate a similar critical inquiry into the history of the natural sciences through a question of language, focussing a critique of narrative and poetic struggle by interrogating the role of stories and language in colonial formations and extractive paradigms in industrial and social relations of production. In step with Édouard Glissant, such "poetics" expose and elaborate on what is required to redress the intersecting imbalances of power behind climate catastrophe.
Following a critical framing statement, the roundtable unfolds in an overlap between these thinkers. Contributors are invited to bring an example from contemporary artistic practice or research for collective close-reading, in either text, image, or descriptive format. Each participant will receive a glossary of key terms to inform the discussion. Together, we will seek to compose a descriptive space capable of thinking and scaling a critical poetics of ecology. The roundtable builds on existing research in Critical Poetics and Ecology, which has so far engaged curator Samia Henni and poets Padraig Regan, James Goodwin and frank r jagoe.
The positioning of this roundtable draws together postcolonial and anti-racist theorists of ecology, poetry, and language, namely Mel Y. Chen, Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter and Aimé Césaire. For Mel Y. Chen the ‘alchemical magic of language… animate humans, animals, and the things in between’. Sylvia Wynter and Aimé Césaire both mediate a similar critical inquiry into the history of the natural sciences through a question of language, focussing a critique of narrative and poetic struggle by interrogating the role of stories and language in colonial formations and extractive paradigms in industrial and social relations of production. In step with Édouard Glissant, such "poetics" expose and elaborate on what is required to redress the intersecting imbalances of power behind climate catastrophe.
Following a critical framing statement, the roundtable unfolds in an overlap between these thinkers. Contributors are invited to bring an example from contemporary artistic practice or research for collective close-reading, in either text, image, or descriptive format. Each participant will receive a glossary of key terms to inform the discussion. Together, we will seek to compose a descriptive space capable of thinking and scaling a critical poetics of ecology. The roundtable builds on existing research in Critical Poetics and Ecology, which has so far engaged curator Samia Henni and poets Padraig Regan, James Goodwin and frank r jagoe.
Biography
Dr Penn Newell is Lecturer in Creative and Critical Writing at Birkbeck University, London specialising in critical ecologies, creative-critical writing and critical race studies. Their writing has featured or is forthcoming in Textual Practice, Cultural Politics and Social Text, whilst their poetry has featured in The Poetry Review, Under the Radar, London Magazine, and elsewhere.
