Extinction studies in humanities disciplines have often focused on the scholarship of witness (van Dooren, Flight Ways, 2016; van Dooren, Rose, and Chrulew, Extinction Studies, 2017). Such accounts of witness are shaped by genre conventions (Heise, Imagining Extinction, 2016). More recently—in the context of a 2019 UN sponsored global biodiversity report that concluded that massive species extinctions threaten a sustainable human future—new work has focused on varieties of human response (Sweet, Extinction and the Human, 2021).
The proposed panel diversifies such investigations of the human response to species extinction, reversing the gaze of the scholarship of witness to engage with the question of human exceptionalism. Adrienne Ghaly explores potential adaptations of Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling.” Alison Glassie explores the fusion of drama and myth. Timothy Sweet juxtaposes scientific and literary narrative in relation to Amitav Ghosh’s provocation concerning the efficacy of realist narrative. After these three 15-minute presentations, Presider John Barnard will begin the discussion by posing a general question before inviting audience response.
Ghaly’s paper explores accounts of steep worldwide declines in flying insect biomass as peripheral apprehensions of changes in the everyday environment, what Brooke Jarvis has termed a "loose suspicion of wrongness" arising from "unfamiliarly empty" backyards, waterways, and beams from streetlights. She argues that such expressions of partially formed perceptions of disturbances in the texture of nonhuman life are best understood through Raymond Williams's heuristic of "structures of feeling." William’s separation of the physical and natural from the social, a legacy of Marxist historical and cultural analysis more broadly, plagues the uses of structures of feeling in contemporary thought as always oriented towards human sociality. Yet such uneasy feelings of change in the nonhuman world can help us attend to experiences of mass slow violence to fauna across long periods of time. Ghaly develops Williams's theoretical model not only by foregrounding changes in physical feelings, but also by redrawing his relationship between a structure of feeling and its ultimate reification. Structures of feeling offer access to mass biodiversity loss beyond the shared logics in visual cultural imaginaries of extinction that link 'seeing' or 'witnessing' extinctions with affective registers of grief and loss.
Glassie’s paper examines the Carlyle Brown’s play Finding Fish (2016), whose near-future Maine setting the exemplifies the “post-aquacalyptic” mode (marine biologist Daniel Pauly). The play renders the climate crisis and fishing down food webs into locally-specific dramatic form. Characters Peter and Fiona Morgan operate a sailing trawler called The Dead Zone and have an uncanny sixth sense about finding fish. Fiona is a selkie—a seal-human shapeshifter. If a human steals the skin, the selkie, usually a woman, is forced ashore into marriage or servitude. As a figure who embodies human matters of consent and sexual coercion and ecological matters like interspecies cooperation and competition for prey—seal bounties persisted in Maine until the 1950’s—Fiona interrogates “the social and cultural contracts of a marine life” (Ní Chonghaile). The tension between her physical presence on stage and her audible silence foregrounds matters of gender equity in fisheries global and local while registering the vast realms of ecological knowledge outside human ken. The drama’s potential to represent marine extinction thus shows that feminism and fisheries aren’t as far apart as we might think.
Sweet’s paper draws on key moments from a century and a half of narratives concerning Neanderthal extinction to contextualize a recent thematic shift in some scientific narratives from confidence in human persistence to concern for human extinction. Literary accounts (Wells, Golding, Kurtén, Auel, Robinson) follow the paleo-archaeology of their day to develop various moral assessments of Neanderthal extinction, some seeing it as a boon and others as a tragic loss—but all present Neanderthals as “endlings,” the last survivors of their species, who must give way to the exceptional human species. No literary narrative to date has engaged with the climate scenario developed by paleoanthropologist Clive Finlayson, who argues that Neanderthal extinction and human persistence was a matter of chance during Ice Age climate fluctuations. That is, Finlayson’s narrative is unique in enabling us to imagine humans also as “endlings.” Given Amitav Ghosh’s (2016) provocation concerning the novel’s imaginative failure in the face of global warming, the question remains whether a climate-driven account of Neanderthal extinction—with its implicit critique of human exceptionalism—is amenable to novelistic narration.