As the discourse of ecological crisis intensifies, the heat of the compost pile becomes a fertile loam for reflecting on global precarity that knows no species distinction. The practice of composting is bound up in the reclamation of waste, the power of decay, and the promise of more-than-human futures forged in new kinship relationships with agencies both great and small. Haraway labels this a process of becoming-with, and she is not alone in looking to soil to ponder the impact of these material imbrications. Jennifer Patterson and Astrida Neimanis draw on Haraway’s work explicitly in order to theorize the relationship between feminism and the environmental humanities through compost. Similarly, Sebastian Abrahamsson and Filippo Bertoni articulate a compost politics that is defined by “a messy, yet constantly productive and on-going coexistence” (125). Similarly, Dana Phillips and Heather Sullivan, in their introduction to the ISLE special issue on material ecocriticism (2012), emphasize the way that “messy matter” helps to identify human beings as “‘actors’ operating within material processes that include multitudes of other ‘actors,’ the majority of which are not human or, for that matter, conscious” (447, 446). Sullivan later turns to dirt theory to empower “a close-up and human-scale view of the environment, yet one that is inevitably interconnected with broader views, too” (515). In The Literature of Waste: Material Ecopoetics and Ethical Matter (2015), Susan Signe Morrison articulates a compost aesthetics that “acknowledges the poignancy of materiality” as a means to “transform[ ] disgust into compassion” (13).

This panel will build on the existing scholarly conversation surrounding compost as a tool for cultural analysis to explore the ways that the image and logic of compost are deployed in narrative contexts to articulate new forms of relationality. To promote discussion on this topic, each panelist will limit their remarks to 12-15 minutes. As an additional heuristic to sketch the possible applications that this model of the composthuman may have for these investigations, each paper will focus on a different portion of Haraway’s proclamation that “we are compost, not posthuman.”

Emphasizing the “we are” portion of that statement, Garth Sabo will begin by establishing the terms and impetus for this discussion more broadly. He will read Haraway’s experimental fiction of the Children of Compost alongside contemporary community compost initiatives to posit the ways that compost is grounded in expressions of collective identity. He further traces Haraway’s depiction of a responsible future through her articulation of new forms of kinship in order to establish the ways that “we” originates in shared material conditions.

Building from this foundation, Miriam Gonzales will offer the first of two readings of “compost.” Her paper develops feminist reading practice that attends to systems that support the process of composting, rather than to the resulting substance. A composthuman mode of ecofeminism recognizes the impossibility of knowing the precise mechanics of producing ecofeminist knowledge while simultaneously acknowledging the importance of creating conditions in the first place that allow a rich, varied, and lively form of feminism to develop and thrive.

Chris Hall emphasizes the ongoingness of mutually implicated life revealed through compost in order to emphasize that the human is always already involved in a multispecies muddle—there has never been an actually existing category of the human from which we can become “post.” He addresses Haraway’s notion of worlding as a literary practice and turns to Virginia Woolf’s novel Flush to celebrate the troubled, unfinished worldings that composthumanism makes legible, in which the ongoing being and becoming of human and nonhuman are rendered inextricable from one another. In the process, laws, bodies, and power are thrown into question.

Leah Norris will conclude the panel by taking up Haraway’s disavowal of the posthuman. Norris suggests that compost replaces the posthuman in Haraway’s thining precisely because it performs its compositions “someplace and not noplace” rather than relying on a flawed fantasy of escape from material conditions. She offers a reading of Mina Loy’s Insel that reads the disintegration of egocentrism as a deeply composthuman concern. Through Loy’s depiction, the transhumanist fantasy of extracting the subject from all material conditions fails to challenge humanism’s flawed constructions.

With these panelists’ contributions in mind, the panel title “Figuring Composthumanism” is meant to resonate in three ways. To “figure” means to grapple with the puzzle of Haraway’s objection to posthuman, and her preference for compost, as a corrective to anthropocentricism. “Figuring” is also meant in the mathematic sense, as a reflection of the scarcity of material resources and the quantitative work that informs all ecological projects that acknowledge the limitations of the finite. This panel also seeks to present representative figures that illustrate the challenges and promises that inhere in the specific view of human possibility that finds its expression in compost.