Pedagogies of the Anthropocene: Constructing and Disrupting the Human and the Natural Through Public Display

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

In this panel we explore the ways in which humans “teach” each other about the natural world - through public display, theatrical or physical embodiment, moments of play, and reenacted narrative. Early scholars of public display, from Clifford Geertz to Mikhail Bakhtin, identified the spectacle’s liminal inbetweenness and potential subversiveness, understanding the festival as a place of intervention in daily relationships and experiences. More recently, ecofeminists such as Jane Bennett have identified the agency and power of the nonhuman. The combination of such scholarship invites us to reinterrogate public festivals, protests, and parades as fundamentally shaped by the natural, even as they create a human space of play and spectacle. In this context, how then do we understand public festivals that purport to reinforce dominant narratives of human/nature opposition? How does the historically dominant economic or materialist understanding of the natural world fit within ecocritical or posthumanist frameworks? How can we reimagine public spaces by giving agency to the natural and the nonhuman?

Our three papers consider the ways in which spectacle acts as a pedagogical tool – a tool of consensus, a tool of disruption, and at time as a tool with ambiguous and conflicting meaning. We provide both historic and contemporary examples of consensus creation and narrative disruption, beginning in the nineteenth century and ending in the contemporary era. Michaela Rife writes on parades in nineteenth century Colorado mining towns, articulating how mining companies eased resident fears about toxicity and risk through public festival. Sarah Stanford-McIntyre describes mid-twentieth century oil industry rallies, focusing on the mix of science jargon, sex, and cowboy pageantry used to reinforce a mechanistic, modernist understanding of oil and nature. Shannon Davies Mancus examines the Climate Warriors, a group of Pacific Island eco activists who harness primitivist imaginaries to raise awareness about climate change.

As we confront constant indications that large-scale natural processes such as climate, geology, and global ecology have been fundamentally altered by human action, it becomes more important than ever to articulate the ways in which top-down narratives of natural exploitation and non-human inanimacy are constructed, reinforced, and internalized. Even more importantly, is it crucial that we better understand ways in which people made expendable within such regimes, as well as animals and nonhuman nature, constantly disrupt such narratives through both activist pedagogies and their very existence.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Helen Davis, Miami University

Individual Presentations

• King Coal and Queen Silver: Resource Extraction and Spectacular Pedagogy in Late Nineteenth-Century Colorado - Michaela Rife, University of Toronto, Canada

• United Against Nature: Oil Pageantry as Modernist Teaching Tool - Sarah Stanford-Mcintyre, University of Wyoming

• Digital Natives: Climate Change and Tactical Performance of Colonial Imaginaries - Shannon Davies Mancus, Colorado School of Mines

Comment

• Helen Davis, Miami University