XXXI AIA Conference

Rende, Cosenza, 13-16 September 2023

Associazione Italiana di Anglistica

Call for proposals for panel

Convenors: R. Ciocca (Università di Napoli L’Orientale) and Marta Cariello (Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli) 

In Making Kin in the Chthulucene: Reproducing Multispecies Justice (2018), Donna Haraway engaged in the thorny question of survival for a planet already fast travelling towards its demographic and environmental collapse. She addressed the question from a critical post-human and post-anthropocentric stance, affirming the need to reintroduce the practice of caring for the earth at every scale, and to fight against the current mass extinction of species, from the complex perspective of both ‘the Born and the Disappeared’. She meant, by this, not to disjoint the (apparently opposed) necessities of guaranteeing reproductive justice and safety for peoples subjected to genocides, forced sterilizations, missing generations, and at the same time of finding ways to reverse the general population growth. Since the intersection between reproduction justice and environmental concerns is intimately connected to the human capacity to reverse spoliative policies of natural resources and habitats, in a pro-active sense, the feminist philosopher posed the personal and theoretical question of how to lighten our species footprint by creating innovative and enduring relationships without necessarily ‘making more babies’.

Taking the cue from this need to engage scary demographic perspectives, we’d like to explore narrations in which the idea of survival is connected to new forms of ‘becoming-with’, of ‘symbiotic assemblages’, or, also, of making kin, making new families as something other/more than entities tied by genealogy or biological bonds, together with the possibilities of lateral, transversal and exogenous adoption practices. We are especially interested in inviting submissions tackling the role of these alter-families and alter-communities in coping with forced migrancy, ethnic or racial cleansing and climate change induced crises. Proposals are welcome from a number of different genre languages which include, but are not limited to, novels, poetry, drama, personal essays, memoirs, film, tv series, and other storytelling practices.

Some References

Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall ,(eds.) Posthuman Ecologies. Complexity and Process after Deleuze, New York, London, Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.

Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Adele E. Clarke and Donna Haraway (eds), Making Kin Not Population, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018.

Lidia Curti (a cura di) Femminismi futuri. Teorie/Poetiche/Fabulazioni. Roma, Iacobelli, 2019.

María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Donna J. Haraway, The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm, 2003.

Marco Malvestio, Raccontare la fine del mondo: Fantascienza e Antropocene. Milano, Nottetempo, 2021.

Rob Nixon, Slow violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 2011.

Sara Upstone and Peter Ely (eds.), Community in Contemporary British Fiction. From Blair to Brexit London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.

Deadline for proposals: 15 June 2023

Send abstracts and bio to: rciocca@unior.it and marta.cariello@unicampania.it