Wildness without Wilderness

The Poiesis of Energy and Instability

The Environmental Humanities in the Benelux at the EASLCE/BASCE 7th Biennial Conference in Brussels, 27 to 30 October 2016

While it is not (yet) possible to identify a specific national or regional environmental humanities approach, or a shared research agenda, we can discern some shared fields of interest. The Benelux have always been invested in transnational, postcolonial approaches in the humanities on the one  hand, and in post-humanism, new materialism, and bio-art on the other. Adding to this, there is an  increasing interest in (artistic) practice as a form of thinking and doing research that allows for  fruitful ‘contamination’ between these domains. Two panels discuss the insights produced by predominantly young and upcoming scholars and writers in these fields.

This panel series has been realized with the kind support of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA).

Panel I | Wild Matter and Waste: Thinking Pollution through the Arts. Thursday, 27 October 2016, 13.30-15.30

Chair: Isabel Hoving (Leiden University)

• Anoesjka Minnaard (Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Netherlands): “The Complicity Paradox”;
• Agnieska Anna Wolodzko, (Leiden University): “Waste Multiplicity – On Microbiopolitics Of Our Guts”;
• Sonja van der Arend, (no affiliation) – title: T.B.A.
• Anna Volkmar (Leiden University): “The Trouble with Nuclear Wilderness: Ecopoietic Reworkings of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in Landscape Photography”;
• Ruby de Vos, (UvA): “Writing Through the Body: The Permeability of The Environmental Illness Memoir”.

Panel II | The Transnational View: Narrating Postcolonial Environments. Saturday, 29 October 2016, 16.30-18.30

Chair: Ben de Bruyn (Maastricht University)

• Sarah Buekens (University of Gent): “J-M. G. Le Clézio: une trajectoire écologique du chaos urbain à l’harmonie naturelle”;
• Eline Tabak (Utrecht University): “‘Bent and Blind in the Wilderness’: Ecological Narrative and the Poetics of Space in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn and The Way to Rainy Mountain”;
• Kristine Steenbergh (VU): “‘My New-Found Land’: Poetry, Colonialism and the Anthropocene in Winterson’s The Stone Gods”;
• Susanne Ferwerda (Utrecht University): “Layers of Stone, Layers of Stories: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods and the Wildness of Multiple Stories for the Anthropocene”.