In his paper, “Narrative Form as Environmental Theory: Climate Precarity in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Will Kanyusik considers how Hurston identifies confronting “the unforeseeable” as a necessary part of the precarious environments of her protagonists’ daily lives. Critical theory has begun to examine precarity as a central feature of human life under late capitalism and in an increasingly unstable climate, but Hurston’s novel confronts precarity as a reality that has always existed for African-Americans. Kanyusik reads Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as a text that anticipates the genre of climate fiction, presenting a model for responding to precarity through literature grounded in modes of understanding specific to the communities both imagined and created by the Harlem Renaissance.
“Strange Weather: or, the Brontës and Wutherwach” asks: how did the Brontës watch the weather? In this paper, Krista Lysack considers the Brontës’ peculiar affective ontology when it comes to their writing about regional weather: their ‘wutherwach’ (a term adapted from Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay”), that is, an attention to and feeling for weather that anticipates contemporary theories of the weird (Fisher), the spectral and hauntological (Coverley), and of vibrant matter and form (Bennett). Their wutherwach whorls and torques literary forms, rendering them never singular, never static. Lysack wonders how the haunted qualities of wutherwach anticipate our own moment of extreme climate; no longer immutable or reliably seasonal, our own strange atmospheres and storms are weirdly anticipated by Brontë weather.
Robert Metaxatos’s paper, “Forensic Activism in Contemporary Environmental Literature,” begins by posing the question: is evidence in literary analysis tantamount to evidence of eco-crime? This paper argues that how we collect evidence is an unresolved problem in ecocritical methodology. In making this argument, Metaxatos shifts the scholarly focus on literary “forms” of environmental degradation toward the literary “forum,” a public venue to present evidence that is contemporary in the strict sense: neither only history nor aesthetics. Such a shift is borne out by two recent novels that have been invoked by scholars as evidence of eco-crime but not in their capacity to problematize evidence itself—Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010)—doing so not only by “witnessing” but also by “sensing” the environment. If literary critique coopts the surveillant gaze of the detective (Felski), Metaxatos argues that literature can recover forensics as an activism (Weizman) that reorients the articulation of evidence in our field.
Finally, in “Unruly Seeds: Multispecies Lines of Flight in the Caribbean Diaspora,” Kuhelika Ghosh explores Caribbean women’s stories of seed guardianship and sovereignty through literary texts, visual culture, and (agri)cultural labor practices. As a response to global food justice movements fighting for farmers’ rights over their seed systems in the Caribbean, this paper tracks stories of unruly seeds that traverse borders and escape the captivity and corporatization of capitalism through multispecies lines of flight in Dominican writer Melania Luisa Marte’s poetry collection Plantains and Our Becoming and Montserratian British artist Veronica Ryan’s “Drift Seeds” installation from her Along a Spectrum. By centering the drifting and wandering of seeds and their more-than-human carriers across national borders, Ghosh attends to Caribbean women's revolutionary acts of seed sovereignty and food justice often hidden within everyday domestic objects associated with locomotion such as blankets and suitcases.
These four papers suggest how current eco-formal literary practices can be nuanced by including modes of noticing the contingent and the occluded, the felt and the scattered: Hurston’s “the unforeseeable” (Kanyusik); the atmospheres of the Brontës’ “affective ontology” (Lysack); narration’s links to “sensing the environment” (Metaxatos); the wandering seeds found “hidden within everyday domestic objects” (Ghosh). This panel shows how, by taking a critical notice of such varieties of felt form, we can usefully veer ecocriticism toward what might be called a diverse ecology of attention.