The goal of this panel is to explore non-conventional and anti-anthropocentric ways to re-map the world as we know it through poetry and poetics. The panelists look at nonhuman-focused poems on threefold geographical scales: intranational, intracontinental, and transnational. We, together, seek to answer these questions: how do writers undermine or dismantle human-centered boundaries by invoking nonhuman mapmakers in their works? How do such attempts to prioritize nonhuman activities in geographical formations change our conception of the world as it has been contextualized in the historical, political, chronological accounts? Most importantly, by debunking humans as authoritative figures in cartographic narrative during the processes of literary creation and criticism, how can we, then, continue to investigate the human condition through the poetic, ecological, and multispecies modes of worlding?

Worlding, to make or build a world, remains a main objective in the practice of geocriticism, a method of literary analysis or theory that incorporates the study of geographical space. The seminal article “Mapping Literature: Towards a Geography of Fiction” by Barbara Piatti et al. proposes interdisciplinary and quantitative approaches to literary mapping, in which fictional settings are drawn and animated by a digital, interactive, and database-supported cartographic mechanism. Robert Tally’s Spatiality, adhering to qualitative methods, offers an overview of the spatial turn in literary analyses from cultural, historical, and philosophical vantage points. A majority of the previous scholarship in literary geography and cartography, whether they be quantitative or qualitative approaches, attends to the genre of narrative, especially fiction. Further, the literary cartographers, the subjects who map space in literary works, are oftentimes recognized as, if not presumed to be, human. It is the goal of this panel, therefore, to widen the scope of scholarship on literary cartography and geography by turning our critical attention to the genre and theories of poetry beyond human boundaries.

Following Rebecca Mills’ illuminating article “The Elegiac Tradition and the Imagined Geography of the Sea and the Shore” that applies geocriticism to the study of poetry, this panel topic has its conceptual roots in Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature: How to Bring Sciences into Democracy (1999); Donna Haraway’s theories of “natureculture” in The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003) and “alter-worlding” in When Species Meet (2008); and Bertrand Westphal’s Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (2011), among others. These studies are distinctive in challenging both the ideological and physical boundaries between humans and nonhumans and remain relevant to the panelists’ collective aim to delineate space uncircumscribed by anthropocentric world-building through examining nonhuman-focused literary works.

Announcing the overarching theme to re-map the world via turning to the nonhuman in literature, I will begin the session by offering two brief anecdotes about my past encounters with birds—American Robin and Dark-eyed Junco—at the University of Washington in Seattle. First, I will present that robins’ annual migration to the student housing area on campus and their vocalization of such territorialization of human space show how nonhuman song makers transgress manmade boundaries. Second, I will share my experience of having a junco pay repeated visits in my office around the same time for four consecutive days. The junco flew in the office through an open window, perched on the top bookshelf, and half-hopped/glided onto the farthest end of my desk. Junco’s silent and yet adamant presence in, supposedly, my space demonstrates an individual act of nonhuman world-building breaching manmade infrastructure. The anecdotes pronounce interspecies encounters and co-existence that defy the anthropocentric tradition of mapping a real, tangible space and initiate a conversation on the nonhuman cartographers who chart their worlds, singularly or collectively, beyond urban-rural, intracontinental, and international borders.

Carly Rubin will, then, continue the conversation by proposing a poetics of waste. Viewing waste as out of time, out of place, and out of context, Rubin will examine how writers subversively and productively use dirt, dust, and garbage to navigate, undermine, and dismantle boundaries. Reading A. R. Ammons’ lyric-epic Garbage, Sharon Olds’s Odes, Hari Alluri’s The Flayed City, and Ada Limón’s Bright Dead Things, Rubin explores topics of aging, pilgrimage, identity, migration, and immigration, as they interact with the generative power of the nonhuman waste, which suggests new, unconventional forms of movement between places, times, and ways of being. Rubin’s nomadic tracing of waste on an intranational, urban-rural, and nonlinear scale exhibits an ecopoetics against human-centered hierarchical orderings.

Enlarging the scale of re-mapping anthropocentric boundaries, Gordana Crnković reads East European literature, especially the songs of plants, against the European dominant ideologies that see a sustaining division between the West and East of the continent despite the fall of the Berlin Wall. Crnković suggests this further internalized border should result in two distinct attitudes toward the nonhuman world of animals and plants, the world that disregards and re-maps such temporary and imagined human constructions. Examining literary works from Hungary, (former) Czechoslovakia, and the Baltics, Crnković proposes a poetics inclusive of (the human becomings of) the nonhuman that re-draws the historical and still present divisions of Europe and re-maps human political boundaries on an intracontinental level.

The formal part of the session ends with Andrea Quaid’s paper. Quaid invokes creative and interdisciplinary modes of geopolitical mapping and emphasizes the interdependence between human and nonhuman lifeforms in the process of poetic world-making, by drawing the four geo-literary mappings from the works of Mel Chen, Elaine Gan, Jennifer Scappetone, and Anna Lowenhaupft. Quaid applies a transnational-ecocritical approach of mapping against traditionally-marked borders by following the global journeys of nonhuman goods such as lead, rice, copper, and matsutake mushrooms.

Together, these papers will demonstrate a significant step toward uncovering non-conventional, anti-anthropocentric geographical space through the lens of poetic nonhuman world-makers across manmade physical and ideological boundaries. In particular, the papers will pronounce the critical urgency to revamp the world as we know it via addressing human and nonhuman co-inhabitation and co-creation in literary studies.