Keynote Lecture III “Arboreal Revelation”
Caroline Edwards
Keynote Lecture “Arboreal Revelation”
This talk will outline my developing research into what I call arboreal revelation: a new way of thinking about human subjectivity and its inhuman possibilities. I will outline the elemental aesthetics of literary and cultural texts that privilege the nonhuman perspectives of trees, and other arboreal and mycological partners. These works, I argue, help us grasp a new way of thinking about human-arboreal relations outside of species boundaries and their restrictions. Arboreal revelation requires a radical perspectival shift that moves us into the multi-temporalities of nonhuman time, with their own woody, parenchymatous longue durée. This arboreal deep time gestures towards a sylvan realm of nonhuman futurity – this includes humans, reconstituted as inhuman agents within a post-anthropocentric ecosystem. If we are to adapt and survive what Rob Nixon called the “slow violence” of ecocatastrophe, we need to attune our elemental understanding of woods, trees, and the fungal and microbial worlds within which they are entangled.
|
Yo Mama (2003) by Wangechi Mutu. |
Caroline Edwards (Birkbeck, University of London)
Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature & Culture at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research focuses on utopian possibility as it intersects with questions of aesthetic form, genre, temporality, political subjectivity, and post/inhuman agency. Caroline is author of Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2019), co-editor of China Miéville: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015) and Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015) and editor of The Cambridge Companion to British Utopian Literature and Culture After 1945 (forthcoming). Caroline is currently writing her second monograph, Hopeful Inhumanism: The Elemental Aesthetics of Ecocatastrophe and edits C21: Journal of 21st-Century Writings for the British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies. Her research has been featured in the New Statesman, the Times Higher Education, the Guardian, SFX Magazine, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 3, BBC One South East, the Barbican Centre, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Whitechapel Gallery, and in a dedicated exhibition at the Museum of London. |
