Working Group Reports 2024 From Sand to the Supernatural
This semester’s working groups saw fellows and team alike tackle topics that were both novel in their approach and theme and yet continued to create a symbiosis between the previous research undertaken at CAPAS. With Dune’s renewed cinema success, again shedding light on the most successful sci-fi series of all time, Frank Herbert’s narratives of geoengineering, colonialism, and resource extraction are almost prophetically (something the author himself was infinitely wary of) predicated by our moment of modernity: “Was it not presumptuous, he [Paul] wondered, to think he could make over an entire planet” (Dune Messiah 2023, 31).
“Arid” Apocalypse
While topics of the topoi of deserts and “arid” spaces, once again, become popular, the “Arid” Apocalypse group approached apocalypse, the Anthropocene, and general anxieties concerning the end of worlds through various literary and academic works. The importance of the group’s research wasn’t only underpinned by its relevance as a topic as yet ‘unexplored’ at CAPAS but by the ongoing lived experience of desertification of the countries from which the writers originate. Their initial aim, as a group, was to examine desert landscapes on the brink of depopulation and/or collapse from a diverse set of perspectives. This meant bringing in to question the very concept of landscape as both a colonial and fantastical geography that tends to the utopian. Looking beyond these texts to Thomas Cole’s apocalyptic paintings The Course of Empire (1833-36), the group set the tone for the apocalyptic temporalities, spaces, geographies, and viewership of deserts seen historically as areas of climate envy and voids, a terra nullius of empty expanses that isn’t at one with the flourishing life that litters the landscape. Unsurprisingly, this approach led the group to a posthuman postulation of deserts, and environment more generally speaking, as active agents.
With an incredibly broad list of inspiration, from Natalie Koch’s brilliant and bold 2023 Arid Empire: The Entangled Histories of Arizona and Arabia to the translation of the uncensored version of Jalal Al-e-Ahmad’s Occidentosis: a Plague from the West (1978), the group managed to magnify the importance of the desert space from an area of gender disruption, religious dichotomies, and geopolitical struggles, linking the past to the present with the current, ongoing, and ever-accelerating genocide of the Palestinian people. “Arid” Apocalypse, as such, suggest, rightly, that those living in arid areas of the earth equally have not only the right but the restitution to reclaim the apocalyptic narratives that these environments unfold.
Haunting & (Post-)Apocalypse
Hot off the heels of lead editor Jenny Stümer’s special issue on of journal Apocalyptica, the working group Haunting & (Post-)Apocalypse attempted to intensely explore the figure of the ghost, as well as the habitual haunting at the heart of said construct. While avoiding the temptation of taxonomy, grasping at the ghostly tends to give the grasper little to hold on to, the group approached ghosting and monstrosity as broad topics that nevertheless always tell the haunted something, even if it is that they are being haunted. Beyond the now standard texts by Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon, the group gathered these ideas of ghosts as social figures who demand a reaction or revelation, and asked who is the monster that troubles the binary division between the apocalypse and a supposedly distinct post-apocalypse. Looking at a large array of academic, literary, artistic renderings of ghosts and ghostly figures from Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s viciously visceral poetry which shifts the monstrous blame away from stillborn children to the contamination by military men of countless islands with nuclear toxicity, the necessary link between psychedelics, haunting, and apocalypse through decolonial and anticapitalist perspectives, and Gothic literature scholar Fred Botting’s perhaps oxymoronic Monstrocene. Behind all of which, the backdrop of a sense that academics and the general public alike are genuinely haunted by the ecological devastation of climate change offers up new and novel ways of being in the world via an ecoGothic that focuses on ecological injustices as opposed to sublime romanticism and capture. There is a power to ghosts, they are not easily exorcised, and neither should they be.
Looking beyond the monsters of the Anthropocene that reveal sameness and closed futurities, sitting with our ghosts gives us the opportunity to sit with the uncomfortable recognition that the horror of the Anthropocene is only horrific or uncanny for those of us in the West. How ghosts demand justice and how the ghost as both social and supernatural construct contend for important missivesm, is at the heart of haunting. While, elsewhere, at the forefront of climate change, ecological devastation is often an everyday experience.
