Abstract
This chapter sketches central premises of new materialist approaches, focusing on the agential and affective force of matter. It argues for an approach that takes the methodological consequences of new materialism seriously for literary analysis. Against the theoretical and methodological backdrop of new materialism, the chapter offers a close reading of The Dragonfly Sea by Kenyan author Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, examining how the novel models nonhuman agencies and configures flat ontologies, which stress relations rather than hierarchies. Rather than provide a content-based reading of the novel’s politics of representation, the essay engages critically with the poetic and material forms underlying the making of Owuor’s more-than-human worlds. Zooming in on the sea as vibrant matter, it is argued that the novel’s form and materiality creatively respond to the political, economic, and ecological challenges of the Anthropocene and make possible the imagination of multispecies forms of community. Specifically, the chapter illustrates that material-semiotic agencies are literature’s means to evoke the agencies of the nonhuman and to attune readers to the new roles that humans assume in the Anthropocene.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Though the Anthropocene is indeed “a world-historical phenomenon that has arrived” (Trexler 2015, 4), its concrete effects are unequally distributed across the world. Universalising notions of this new geological epoch are of little help, not least for they inevitably diffuse responsibility and sustain rather than overcome extant global injustices. See Oppermann and Iovino, who stress in a different context: “While pointing out humanity’s dysfunctional relationship to the Earth’s ecosystems, such statements underwrite an anthropocentric arrogance, which also conceals profound differences in the degree of responsibility attributable to distinct subsets of humanity” (2016, 10).
- 2.
In parts 2 and 3 I draw on ideas developed in Neumann (2019).
- 3.
Following Jean-Luc Nancy, Raffoul and Pettigrew stress: “The representation of the world, in effect, implies a vantage point, a position that is outside of the world, from where the world may be able to be seen and represented. Such a representation reduces and, thus, neutralizes the world. […] [I]t supposes […] a subject-of-the-world representing the world in front of itself as an object” (2007, 4).
- 4.
Referred to as DS from here on.
- 5.
DeLoughrey’s (2015, 367) notion of “an adaptive, interspecies hermeneutics” is pertinent in this context.
References
Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Barad, Karen. (2007) 2012. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bartosch, Roman. 2019. Literature, Pedagogy, and Climate Change: Text Models for a Transcultural Ecology. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Baucom, Ian. 2014. “History 4°: Postcolonial Method and Anthropocene Time.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 1 (1): 123–142.
Bennett, Jane. (2009) 2010. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.
Blum, Hester. 2014. “Melville and Oceanic Studies.” In The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville, edited by Robert S. Levine, 22–36. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Borsò, Vittoria. 2014. “On the Threshold between Visibility and Sayability: The Event of Visuality in the Materiality of the Image.” In Between Urban Topographies and Political Spaces. Threshold Experiences, edited by Alexis Nuselovici, Mauro Ponzi, and Fabio Vighi, 129–142. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Bose, Sugata. 2006. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Buell, Lawrence. 2001. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge: The Belknap Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 197–222.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2012. “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change.” New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 43 (1): 1–18.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2014. “Baucom’s Critique: A Brief Response.” Cambridge Journal of Post-colonial Literary Inquiry 1 (2): 245–251.
Clark, Timothy. 2015. Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 2015. “The Sea Above.” In Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Air, Water, and Fire, edited by Jeffrey J. Cohen and Lowell Duckert, 105–133. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Cohen, Margaret. 2010. The Novel and the Sea. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Crutzen, Paul J., and Eugene F. Stoermer. 2000. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” Global Change Newsletter 41: 17–18.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. 2011. “Island Writing, Creole Cultures.” In Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, Vol. II, edited by Ato Quayson, 802–832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. 2015. “Ordinary Futures: Interspecies Worldings in the Anthropocene.” In Global Ecologies & the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, edited by Elisabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan, 352–372. London and New York: Routledge.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. 2019. “Toward a Critical Ocean Studies for the Anthropocene.” English Language Notes 57 (1): 21–36.
DeLoughrey, Elisabeth, Jill Didur, and Anthony Carrigan, eds. 2015. Global Ecologies & the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches. London and New York: Routledge.
Earle, Sylvia A. 2009. The World is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s are One. Washington, DC: National Geographic.
Frenzel, Sonja, and Birgit Neumann. 2017. “Introduction: Environments in Anglophone Literatures.” In Environments, Ecocriticism and Ethics in Anglophone Literatures, edited by Sonja Frenzel and Birgit Neumann, 9–33. Heidelberg: Winter.
Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Gilroy, Paul. (1993) 1994. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso.
Gilroy, Paul. 2018. “‘Where Every Breeze Speaks of Courage and Liberty’: Offshore Humanism and Marine Xenology; or, Racism and the Problem of Critique at Sea Level.” Antipode 50 (1): 3–22.
Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Gordon, Peter. 2019. “‘The Dragonfly Sea’ by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor.” Asian Review of Books. June 10, 2019. https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/the-dragonfly-sea-by-yvonne-adhiambo-owuor/.
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Troub•le. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hau’ofa, Epeli. 2008. We are the Ocean. Selected Works. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heise, Ursula K. 2016. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: The Chicago University Press.
Helmreich, Stefan. 2009. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.
Herzogenrath, Bernd. 2015. “Media/Matter: An Introduction.” In Media/Matter. The Materiality of Media, Matter as Medium, edited by Bernd Herzogenrath, 1–18. New York and London: Bloomsbury.
Hofmeyr, Isabel. 2010. “Universalizing the Indian Ocean.” PMLA 125 (3): 721–729.
Hofmeyr, Isabel. 2013. Gandhi’s Printing Press. Experiments in Slow Reading. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Iovino, Serenella. 2012. “Material Ecocriticism. Matter, Text, and Posthuman Ethics.” In Literature, Ecology, Ethics. Recent Trends in Ecocriticism, edited by Timo Müller and Michael Sauter, 51–68. Heidelberg: Winter.
Liebermann, Yvonne, and Birgit Neumann. 2020, “Archives for the Anthropocene: Planetary Memory in Contemporary Global South Literature.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 31 (2): 145–164.
Krämer, Sybille, Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, and Rainer Totzke, eds. 2012. Schriftbildlichkeit: Wahrnehmbarkeit, Materialität und Operativität von Notationen. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter.
Macfarlane, Robert. 2016. “Generation Anthropocene: How Humans Have Altered the Planet forever.” The Guardian. April 1, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Neumann, Birgit. 2019. “Narrative Forms in the Age of the Anthropocene – Negotiating Human-Nonhuman Relations in Global South Novels.” In Narratives in Culture, edited by Astrid Erll and Roy Sommer, 91–108. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Oppermann, Serpil, and Serenella Iovino. 2016. “Introduction: The Environmental Humanities and the Challenges of the Anthropocene.” In Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene, edited by Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino, 1–21. London: Rowman and Littlefield.
Ortiz Robles, Mario. 2010. The Novel as Event. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Owuor, Yvonne Adhiambo. 2019. The Dragonfly Sea. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Pálsson, Gísli, Palsson, Gisli, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Sverker Sörlin, John Marks, Bernard Avril, Carole Crumley, Heide Hackmann, Poul Holm, John Ingram, Alan Kirman, Mercedes Pardo Buendía, and Rifka Weehuizen. 2013. “Reconceptualizing the ‘Anthropos’ in the Anthropocene: Integrating the Social Sciences and Humanities in Global Environments Change Research.” Environmental Science & Policy 28: 3–13.
Pearson, Michael. 2015. “Introduction: Maritime History and the Indian Ocean World.” In Trade, Circulation and Flow in the Indian Ocean World, edited by Michael Pearson, 1–14. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Plumwood, Val. 1993. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London and New York: Routledge.
Pressman, Jessica. 2018. “Jonathan Safran's Foer's Tree of Codes: Memorial, Fetish, Bookishness.” ASAP/Journal 3 (1): 97–120.
Raffoul, Francois, and David Pettigrew. 2007. “Translators’ Introduction.” In The Creation of the World or Globalization, by Jean-Luc Nancy, 1–27. New York: SUNY Press.
Rigby, Kate. 2012. “Ecocriticism.” In Introducing Criticism at the Twenty-First Century, edited by Julian Wolfreys, 135–144. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Samuelson, Meg, and Charne Lavery. 2019. “The Oceanic South.” English Language Notes 57 (1): 37–50.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. (2003) 2004. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press.
Trexler, Adam. 2015. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Vermeulen, Pieter. 2017. “Future Readers – Narrating the Human in the Anthropocene.” Textual Practice 31 (5): 867–885.
Vermeulen, Pieter. 2018. “Beauty That Must Die: Station Eleven, Climate Change Fiction, and the Life of Form.” Studies in the Novel 50 (1): 9–25.
Vernet, Thomas. 2015. “East African Travelers and Traders in the Indian Ocean: Swahili Ships, Swahili Mobilities ca. 1500–1800.” In Trade, Circulation and Flow in the Indian Ocean World, edited by Michael Pearson, 167–202. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Vink, Markus. 2007. “Indian Ocean Studies and the ‘New Thalassology’” Journal of Global History 2: 41–62.
Wenzel, Jennifer. 2014. “Planet vs. Globe.” English Language Notes 52 (1): 19–30.
Wenzel, Jennifer. 2018. “Past’s Futures, Future’s Past: Memory Studies and the Anthropocene: A Roundtable.” Memory Studies 11 (4): 502–504.
Yusoff, Kathryn. 2015. “Geological Subjects: Nonhuman Origins, Geomorphic Aesthetics, and the Art of Becoming Inhuman.” Cultural Geographies 22 (3): 383–407.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Neumann, B. (2021). Nonhuman Agencies in and of Literature: Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea. In: Liebermann, Y., Rahn, J., Burger, B. (eds) Nonhuman Agencies in the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79442-2_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79442-2_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-79441-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-79442-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)