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Full-Text Articles in Art and Design
Visualising Anthropocene Extinctions: Mapping Affect In The Works Of Naeemah Naeemaei, Linda Williams
Visualising Anthropocene Extinctions: Mapping Affect In The Works Of Naeemah Naeemaei, Linda Williams
Animal Studies Journal
While many writers have advocated the importance of narrative as a means of engaging with the problem of extinction, this paper considers what the qualities of visual aesthetics bring to this field. In addressing this question, the discussion turns to the problem of the ethical limits of art raised by Adorno and takes a theoretical turn away from posthumanism to consider how visual responses can redirect attention back to human agency. The focus of visual analysis is on five paintings by the contemporary Iranian artist Naeemeh Naeemaei. Neither exclusively Western nor overtly internationalist in their approach, these artworks refer to …
Alexis Wright’S Literary Testimony To Intersecting Traumas, Meera Atkinson
Alexis Wright’S Literary Testimony To Intersecting Traumas, Meera Atkinson
Animal Studies Journal
This article proffers a reading of Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), hailed as ‘the first truly planetary novel’ (Gleeson-White), arguing that Wright’s poetics of transgenerational trauma witnesses to intersected trans-species injustices and traumas. Exploring the way Wright testifies to entanglements of human-nonhuman trauma, I challenge entrenched humanist and speciesist preoccupations in trauma theory to address trauma transmissions with particular focus on trauma as a social and political force generated by patriarchal imperialism. In doing so, I show how Wright’s fiction serves as a form of advocacy for nonhuman sentient beings.