‘Declarations of Interdependence’: Aesthetic Responses to Contamination in Contemporary Canadian Literature and Art
Résumé
This talk finds its cue in the question that opens Adam Dickinson’s 2018 collection of poems Anatomic: how does the outside inscribe the inside? The COVID-19 pandemy hastened the realization that the human activities responsible for the spectacular effects of global warming also had invisible repercussions on viruses and bacteria forced out of their natural habitats to colonize new territories, including human organisms. Sounding the alert against contamination, and its corollary, pollution, public discourse frequently falls back on a warlike rhetoric spouting defense mechanisms and immunity protocols galore. The works I intend to discuss opt for a different course, a diplomacy that foregrounds interdependencies and makes it possible to query the limitations of Anthropocene narratives (Simon 2020). I will be pursuing this line of investigation relying on the philosophical essays of Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment (2000), Michel Serres, Malfeasance: Appropriation through Pollution (2010) and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s concept of “feral ecologies” (2021).