- Oct 2024
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engl252fa24.commons.gc.cuny.edu engl252fa24.commons.gc.cuny.edu
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Mutu as an artist and public figure and Butler as a social theorist and author offer alternative perspectives that often go overlooked in feminist and environmentalist circles.
They visualize different alternative worlds but are overshadowed by society.
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Obvious critiques of rigid hierarchy can be found across their work as their imaginings call for alternative visions of ecological relationality (60) that exceed the hierarchical myopia and politics of exclusion that have plagued environmental discourse–particularly in America–for the past century.
Because they shape a future different based on society structures and challenges it would artificially be use to develop a concept around those dysfunctional society it as a way to raise awareness.
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As Lauren and her companions undergo cultural mutations, their respective genders and racial identifications shift.
In the novel Lauren says that traveling with one male while two females puts them in a vulnerable state of being attacked by outsiders which is why she went and disguised herself as a male for safety.
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Lauren articulates these beliefs as silly and dangerous.
From Lauren point of view she has a certain belief from others the way this world works and these ideas that been created that makes men and women work and think different when it comes to gender roles.
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This not only becomes crucial to Lauren’s survival but also vital to her development of a critical ecological ethics and to her envisioning of a truly “new” ordering of the world.
In the novel the protagonist is an intelligent character and visualize how the world would look like by her own creativity and imagination.
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“sharply unequal distribution of the earth’s resources.”
Some groups have access to resources while others don't. It differentiate ways they would shape the world due to their surroundings and the problems they go through.
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Butler’s dystopia is created by continuing current trends, such as global warming or radicalizing Christian fundamentalism, to their logical extremes, without sudden transitions as no definitive cataclysm is ever experienced.”
Butler doesn't create like a new strategy to express the main issue of Parable of the Sower but shares culture traditions that she knows of and go with it and connect it to the novel like events that were happening at the time of the making of the novel and uses her surroundings to visualize new form of ways that lead to the characters to go through what they experience in the novel. Like christianity is a cultural religions and she uses what she knows about it in the novel adding her own culture and her observations to form this dystopian fictional world.
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On the one hand, Mayer’s rhetorical move can be read as a necessary move that seeks to include a more diverse set of voices in environmental literary studies
Novels that have to do with explaining a social issues by including voices that have different paradigms and live a life different from others when they go through social events that make us rethink about certain issues that are unheard or not even consider it to act and stop something that is obviously harmful to life.
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Octavia Butler and Wangechi Mutu effectively trouble ecology as they lead us away from the limitations of traditional environmental studies while offering transgressive visions that center black female subjectivity, challenge the (dis)connections between human and nonhuman entities, and initiate alternative notions of environmental/ecological ethics.
connects diversity with the trouble ecology and challenges disconnections between human and non-living things and from there on alternative ecological ethics begins.
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Both Wynter and Bennett signal that a “new” environmental politics cannot come as a result of liberal reform or black inclusivity within extant mainstream political discourse but only after understandings of relational human subjectivity are deeply scrutinized and restructured.
Even if the main solution is to come out with a new political idea it won't achieve the purpose because coming with laws won't always be beneficial if they don't know the backstory of the causes and have to go through deep visualization in order to understand.
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There are dangers in an approach that seeks to lessen the distinctness between “humanity” and “the rest of matter.”
Doesn't matter good or bad some ideas will be it will always bring some sort of complicated outcomes that can result with solving one thing and then activating another issue.
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A Political Ecology of Things, Bennett ponders “whether environmentalism remains the best way to frame the problems, whether it is the most persuasive rubric for challenging the American equation of prosperity with wanton consumption, or for inducing more generally, the political will to create more sustainable political economies in or adjacent to global capitalism.”
If environmentalism should remain the way it is to find solutions for these issues or have more laws will eventually be passed to help and do something to sustain the global economy.
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If anything, by uncritically relying on traditional approaches to environmental rehabilitation and conservation via legislative reform, for example, many environmentalist activists and scholars reinforce the very system they claim to be fighting.
There is like this type of connection that our social structures connects with the damages that is affecting the ecosystem
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Delinking geography and power is a significant step toward reconfiguring our earth ethics, particularly as environmental studies frameworks have traditionally been informed by colonial European notions of “the political.
Breaking the connection between geography and power is a way of understanding the main concept about the earth itself.
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Through narrative and visual culture, Butler and Mutu delink geography and power and put all space into play in order to keep critical attention on black female subjectivity and resistive notions of ecological relationality.
From what I understand this sentence break down the ideas that Butler and Mutu delink geography and power to put the main focus on black female emotions and connecting these characters to have a connection with the ecosystem. Like Lauren she can feel the pain of others and the ecosystem feels the pain that people are doing through ruins of landscape and extinction of endanger species.
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Octavia Butler’s harrowing and seemingly apocalyptic depiction of the future centers the instability of the racial, spatial, and gendered organization of our present world
Parable in the Sower does contain some other challenges this characters go through not just the aftermath of the ecological turned into ruins, but as well this idea of racial groups and reviving historical events that have an impact in certain races and how society is structured through gender organization and gender roles.
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These disruptions allow both Butler and Mutu to aesthetically reconstitute the (un)limits of humanity and construct alternative conceptions of ecological ethics within our present world and beyond it.
These authors disrupt this ideal of environmental studies to aesthetically reshape humanity beyond its potential through alternative ideas and concepts of the ecological ethics through the present world and gathering some observations and using creativity to visualize an alternative world through this type of observations they believe can have a major impact inn the near future.
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- Sep 2024
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engl252fa24.commons.gc.cuny.edu engl252fa24.commons.gc.cuny.edu
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They each call on us, in their own way, to remember that there is no alternative to continuing to struggle, if we hope to cancel the apocalypse.
It all comes to the decision of people and whether or not they want to collaborate and accept the changes for a prosper future than the ones writers write and a change in the political system since they have the authority to change and make laws that will lead their community to a better future. All of this novels mentioned in this article they aren't just there to scare people of a terrifying future, but to make us realize the time we are living in and this is not a fixed future and it can change if people are willing to change and act now before it's too late.
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What this article does register, I hope, is a general crisis in the way we represent and talk about the future on all scales, from the scale of local community to the entirety of Planet Earth, both in our science and in our science fiction.
The way constructed stories are made to represent and express the future in all kinds in the genre of science and science fiction to project about the Planet Earth.
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“assume that differences in our actions now will lead to real and somewhat predictable consequences later on—which means that what we do now matters.”
They can predict what the future could look like based on the observations they make and the way people are living today and that will reflect on the future that is waiting us.
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That utopian vision is matched immediately by the anti-utopian realization that in fact this is the only type of problem our political institutions know how to solve.
It's somewhat less complex to visualize an alternative world where all of the bad things can be handle by the hands of human.
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However, the shock of the sublime in the Anthropocene has a somewhat different affect than the one Romantic poetry activates: rather than seeing ourselves as divine, or a necessary and organic part of a holistic tapestry of life, cultural production in the Anthropocene tends to figure the human as a cancerous deviation from a unifying natural order—the nightmare kings of a horrid empire of plastic trash and toxic poisons.
Instead of thinking human as something good to the ecosystem in the term of romantic poetry it just makes human look as something bad that is only there put in the ecosystem to harm and damage. Ruin every single thing that the earth has produced.
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In this sense the Anthropocene is worse than a view from nowhere; it is a view from the standpoint of human extinction.
A strange observation to think about Anthropocene in which we are currently living today seems to have a dark meaning behind it based on this sentence that simply explains that its an era that it is easy to understand what this era is and its the era when humanity go extinct.
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the Anthropocene and all its attendant ecological crises—climate change, mass extinction, ocean acidification, all the rest—is the “proof” that we as a species are not in fact insignificant but are instead the most important superhistorical force currently on the planet.
Human are the most important specie in the planet and they can reshape the planet with the knowledge people gain throughout centuries and leaving a mark of an era that change the world and the way of living.
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This is intended as a broad overview of the field rather than as a deep critical dive into any particular work; the ambition of this piece is to use science fiction as a tool to help us better read and understand the modalities of the Anthropocene itself.
From my own understanding when it comes to the term Anthropocene it is mostly overlooked and under discussed by people who don't seem to care or fully understand the concept of it and the causes of it. When the term is included in science fiction novel is not just to overcomplicate or confuse the audience, but see it as a useful tool to fabricate a story that relies on the term Anthropocene so that people who aren't aware of this concept and can understand all of the meanings that surrounds Anthropocene. In other words I think it's a gateway to gather more eyes into an issue that is not just only occurring in the novel, but in the real world and be aware that their voices matter to help and diminish an issue that will harm every single living biospheric species because it was not viewed by people.
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By now, I think, we critics understand science fiction’s social role as a site for attempting to predict, premediate, resist, and even control the future.
Science Fiction isn't always about terrifying the audience with frightening scenarios, but a tool that can be used to predict the mere future and hopefully change the future scenario with these story that may open the reader mind to understand what is actually happening in their surroundings and start acting now before they encounter somewhat a similar scenario like the ones they read in fiction science stories.
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rather than the view of the Earth from the standpoint of deep space, ours is a view of the present from the standpoint of deep time.
What gathers my attention from this quote has to be that all of this science fiction stories are not view from an outer space perspective and developing some hypothetical scenarios, but using point of view from the present and years priors and using all of that knowledge and evidence to fabricate a potential scenario for everyone to be understanding the invisible problems that are not their visible easily until you understand it through fictional stories not to make the audience feel tormented with this falsely scenarios but rather to do something about it.
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www.environmentandsociety.org www.environmentandsociety.org
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But I think the issues about naming relevant tothe Anthropocene, Plantationocene, or Capitalocene have to do with scale, rate/speed,synchronicity, and complexity.
The reason we have terms such as Anthropocene, plantationocene, capitalocene is because of its fast scale speed of complexity and how complex it is to handle to situation and diminish the harm that is doing to the earth and the ecosystem entirely and weird coincidence that happened without a reason such as catastrophes.
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oo much for a tiny slogan, I know! Still, try. Over a couple hundred years from now,maybe the human people of this planet can again be numbered two or three billion or so,while all along the way being part of increasing well being for diverse human beings and othercritters as means and not just ends.So, make kin, not babies! It matters how kin generate kin
Hathaway in this sentence expresses the idea that people should stop reproducing in a time period that seems uncertain of what the future would be like if people don't take ecological events and issues serious enough before it gets outta hand and she believes that maybe over a century from now the planet will be like the way it used to be in the past with approximately two or three billion people.
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My purpose is to make “kin” mean something other/more than entities tied by ancestryor genealogy.
Hathaway thinks that people should start making more kin which has something else to do rather than more entities tide to ancestry and etc. Kin from Hathaway perspective I think she is trying to say that people should find solutions to events that are not that impactful yet until it's too late and do something about that not only risk their lives, but also the upcoming generations that could end up paying the consequence of this current generations because they didn't act while it wasn't doing anything bad. I could be with climate change an impact that doesn't affect instantly but affect over the course of a long time. And other more catastrophe that are currently happening, but people don't see it as a big deal and take for granted.
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The Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities; what comes after will not be likewhat came before
In this text they don't see Anthropocene the end of the world, but rather an even that only impacts the current living things and other things that will differentiation with the upcoming generations and see this as an event. It seems like this type of era people are living without noticing that climate change and other harmful things that are currently happening and showing no effect will do something in the future and endanger every single living specie and it will just be a temporary moment after something is done to reduce it.
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he Chthulucene needs at least one slogan (of course, more than one); still shouting“Cyborgs for Earthly Survival,” “Run Fast, Bite Hard,” and “Shut Up and Train,” I propose“Make Kin Not Babies!”
Hathaway refers the Chthulucene as a time period of destruction because of the slogan Hathaway is using such as cyborgs and run fast, bite hard and "make kin not babies" which are terms that I would say has an apocalyptic sense because when I see this type of word the only thing I think about is violence and destruction and the end of humanity. It's like Hathaway is preparing for what the future awaits.
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