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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

The Trouble with Landscape: Reappraisals of the Eyesore in Recent Canadian Writing and Visual Art

Claire Omhovère

Résumé

Canada’s promotion of its image as a natural haven has intensified in recent years, especially in circumstances when the public sphere has grown wary of the environmental impact of extractivism without being ready to renounce its benefits. In this context the preservation of the wild has become a promotional mantra, and greenwashing a widespread strategy to guarantee jobs without alienating communities of voters. Lumber companies operate behind thin curtains of trees that disrobe unsightly clearcuts from the view of motorists in British Columbia. A similar strategy has been adopted with strip mining in the Athabasca region should the site of extraction be close to the highway. Most of the time, however, the exploitation of natural resources occurs in places that are so remote from Canada’s urban centers that the sites of extraction can only be reached by plane, which means that industrial operations can take place on a large scale with few immediate, visible effects, except for the Indigenous populations living in the same area (see Boschman & Trono 2019). This talk aims to query the distrust of landscape that has been asserting itself along with rising concern for the degradation of natural environments, particularly in countries that have historically come to depend on the exploitation of staple resources colonial economies induced (Barney in Wilson et al, 2017: 90). Relying on examples predominantly drawn from the petrofiction, poetry and visual art that came out of the Harper decade, I propose to reflect on the three visual regimes – the unsightly, the unseen and the invisibilized – that trouble the aesthetic appreciation of the natural environment as landsc(r)ape (Boetskes 2017). The final aim of this talk is to observe how these visual regimes direct the gaze to the mutual dependency between colonial and environmental exploitation, thereby putting a strain on the moralizing discourse of a sentimental ecology cut off from a concrete, material engagement with place, no matter how disquieting its effects.
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Dates et versions

hal-04311483 , version 1 (28-11-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04311483 , version 1

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Claire Omhovère. The Trouble with Landscape: Reappraisals of the Eyesore in Recent Canadian Writing and Visual Art. EACLALS Triennial Conference: “Imagining Environmental Justice in a Postcolonial World”, Christine Lorre, Jun 2023, Paris Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, France. ⟨hal-04311483⟩

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