In light of these converging threads of inquiry, this panel seeks to examine how inheritance operates in more-than-human contexts to address questions of continuity, survivability, and temporality. How do things like seeds, swarms, and toxic half-lives alter narratives of heritability? How might memories of past environmental disasters move through generations? How might space become the recipient of inheritance? And, finally, how does the figure of the ghost challenge linear models of information transfer and generational change by forging kinship between bodes and spaces? In the papers that follow, our panelists reframe inheritance through swarming, haunting, and kin-making to imagine environmental lineages that offer expansive theories of dwelling and relation.
We will begin this panel by briefly introducing the panelists and their work. There will be three panelists in total, presenting for fifteen minutes each. Molly MacVeagh will then pose questions to the panelists and moderate questions from the audience in the remaining twenty five minutes of the panel to ensure that we have an open, lively, and engaging discussion.
In “Containers of Life and Information: Bartram’s Seeds and Swarms,” Sheila M. Byers asks how instances of non-human communication, conveyance, and organization offer alternate theories of information transfer across generations and populations. Drawing on the botanical writings of eighteenth-century naturalist William Bartram and records of his family’s seed business, Byers draws surprising connections between the swarm and the seed as modes of trans-temporal communication in order to imagine inheritance otherwise-- as materially pervasive, enigmatic, and phenomenological.
Min Ji Choi’s talk, “You are now hearing recordings of a ghost,” considers conception of ghosts as “souls-bound-to-the-land” in the context of the recent theoretical turn to haunting in the environmental humanities. These ghosts, known respectively as jibakryŏng and jibakurei in Korean and Japanese, dwell in rivers and dragged unfortunate travelers below the water, or watch over their descendants as protective guardians. Like these ghosts, Choi argues, certain events are embedded into the grounds upon which they happen. Drawing from Spirited Away (2001), The Wailing (2016), El Reino de Este Mundo (1949), and Ghost Tape No. 10, Choi leverages the concept of “time out of joint” to make a case for haunting as a mode of environmental inheritance.
Finally, Haley Eazor in “‘Ghosts of Kin’: Crip Time, Kinship and Spectral Hauntings in Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary” considers the way the lingering presence of past environmental disasters serves as a means to reconsider the kinship between bodies and spaces from a disability studies perspective. In The Emissary’s dystopian Japan, both land and water are polluted by recent disasters reminiscent of Fukushima. The old are unable to die, while the young age and die prematurely, becoming more and more fragile each day. By inverting care relationships, Eazor argues, Tawada’s novel challenges hereditary notions of ghosts of kin and formulates a nonlinear understanding of the body--one where past, present, and future converge in the body of Mumei, a boy experiencing premature aging.In this reorientation of the body in non-progressive time, Tawada offers an account of the urgency of centering disabled bodies when discussing environmental hauntings past and present.
These papers ask us to expand our understandings of who or what can be the recipient of inheritance, to think of haunting or dwelling as forms of inheritance, and to look to vital phenomena as modes of ecological relationality and kinship.
If needed, Krithika Vachali will act as an alternate presider.