Panel cfp: More-than-human worlds in literature, cinema, the visual arts & performance

This panel investigates how various modes of the imaginary in literature, cinema, the visual arts & performance make a place for more-than-human worlds. The panel thus seeks to disrupt the conventional alignment of art and cinema histories, literary criticism and performance studies with the project of Humanism, exploring how poetics and other visual and embodied arts might contribute to a (posthumanist) interrogation of normative epistemic (Foucault, Wadiwel) and visual regimes (Rancière) which have commonly emphasized the discontinuity of human and nonhuman life. Ecology and evolutionary science tells us that all life is connected, and that no creature is separated from complex networks of symbiosis (Darwin, Bateson, Margulis). Worlds are always multispecies phenomena. Capitalocene world-making certainly draws from other life forms, exploiting and endangering animals and habitats in various ways (Malm, Moore). Growth economies extract profit from ecological devastation (Raworth, Hickle). Contemporary rates of species extinction are precipitously high, due to habitat loss and other human interventions in the natural world (Kolbert, Dawson). The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warns that humans are eroding the foundations of food security, health and quality of life (UN, 2019). Capitalocene industrial agriculture means 100+ billion livestock animals are slaughtered annually, and livestock now comprise more than 60% of the mass of Earth’s vertebrates. In these contexts, it is manifestly urgent to develop new imaginaries of more-than-human worlds and related political praxes. Attending to this urgency, this panel seeks to explore how cinema, literature, the visual arts and performance represent more-than-human worlds, how such representations might contest all-too-convention exclusions and exploitations of nonhumans, and how these counter-epistemic imaginaries might lead to new political praxes.

Abstract deadline: 1st June 2022

This panel will take place as part of the conference:

The (Im)possible Concepts of “World Literature” and "hi/story": Others and the Need to Change

The conference will be held at the University of Split, Croatia, from July 6-9, 2022

Keynote speakers:

Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside)

Jeong, Myeong Kyo (Yonsei University, Seoul)

Aleksandar Mijatović: (University of Rijeka) 

A retrospective of films will be screened from July 7-10, 2022, with screenings at the open-air cinema near Bačvice beach

Please submit abstracts of about 200 words and a brief biographical note (by June 1st) to: sryle@ffst.hr