coe192_deloughrey.mp3

Speaker1: [00:00:24] Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Cultures of Energy podcast. We're back in Houston, Texas, back in our studio and sinking back into normal life. You know what? Speaking of sinking, Jakarta is moving its capital. I wanted to mention that I thought that was something worth flagging on today's podcast. A country is actually having to build a new capital city because of human impacts. Subsidence, mostly groundwater pumping. The city is sinking at an extraordinary rate like 13 centimeters a year. Think of that.

Speaker2: [00:00:58] Houston's also sinking, but maybe not quite that fast.

Speaker1: [00:01:00] Well, the worst parts of Houston are sinking at about two centimeters a year, which is still like a lot of sinking.

Speaker2: [00:01:06] Well, Houston was listed among the top 10 sinking cities in the world. I saw some report. Yeah, it's in the top 10.

Speaker1: [00:01:12] Some of the areas that are sinking the fastest are the areas that are surprise, surprise seeing major flooding issues. So that's happening. But I don't think there's ever been a case that I can think of, of a country having to create a new capital city because of its former capital is flooded out. It's pretty extraordinary at a cost of billions and billions of dollars to do that and also the destruction of rainforest territory in Borneo. So what do you think about that? It's like talking about the shortsightedness of climate change. It's like, Yeah, let's not really deal with like groundwater pumping here. Instead, let's let's treat this as a disposable city, right? And then just like build a whole new city someplace else higher. I could see this being a model that humans may follow elsewhere,

Speaker2: [00:01:52] But they're they're going to take over. They're going to make the capital a city that already exists. They're not going to build a city from scratch.

Speaker1: [00:01:58] They are going to build a city from scratch in an undeveloped rainforest like Brasilia. Yeah, something like that. Brazil. Yeah, yeah. Which is insane at so many levels. But you know, particularly maybe when we're thinking about cases like, yeah, Houston or Miami or New Orleans, I mean Miami, there's no place to go because all of Florida will be underwater. Not long after Miami is. So there's not really a place to move Miami to.

Speaker2: [00:02:21] Even you can move it to Oklahoma.

Speaker1: [00:02:23] You can move to Oklahoma. Yeah, that would be kind of a different trail of tears, but certainly it's like part of the settler colonial imaginary. Let's move it to where there's no cities. Tennessee, no city is there. And we're sorry people from Tennessee. I'm sure you have cities, but you get where I'm coming. I think they do have cities. Yes. In happier news, Greta Thunberg arrived on our shores after a 15 day long boat ride, which seemed to be a pretty hairy ride. From the videos I saw it was it was choppy and she was in that boat at the time we were in Iceland, and it seemed like she was in that boat a really long time.

Speaker2: [00:02:54] She was in it for a long time and she got he didn't. They didn't sink. They didn't like Jakarta and Houston. Greta did not

Speaker1: [00:03:01] Sink. I think Greta is unsinkable and in honor of Greta Simone, had a few things she wanted.

Speaker2: [00:03:06] Well, yes, and I was. I consumed the little Greta book, and Dominic doesn't really want me to read anything from the book.

Speaker1: [00:03:14] No, I didn't say, I don't want you to read the whole book because you had like you had like 10 different sections

Speaker2: [00:03:20] And a lot of quotes in here that I like. And I agree that her message is straightforward, but I think she hits a lot of great notes. So this is this is a little tiny book that fits in your back pocket, pocket, pocket.

Speaker1: [00:03:32] What's your pocket?

Speaker2: [00:03:34] It's called Greta Thunberg, and it says this is the title of it. No one is too small to make a difference. I thought it'd be better if it was said no one is too small to make a big difference, but that's just me wanting to have a kind of a little parallel operation there. There you go. And I also have to say that the title kind of reminded me of that. Dr. Seuss the the little whos that are on the speck of dust. Do you remember that story? Oh, yeah, we're like the littlest there. Who's right?

Speaker1: [00:04:00] Horton hears a who I believe is talking about it.

Speaker2: [00:04:02] So they're on there. They're on the speck of dust and the other animals try and steal it away from Horton, the elephant and then the smallest who has to shout from the the the rafters. And anyway, so it's sort of like a little the small, the small person making a difference. So I don't know. I mean, I like her stuff, so I won't read that one, but I will read which one will I read? Oh, decisions, decisions you're

Speaker1: [00:04:25] Creating, you're creating really good sound effects by flipping the pages right in front of the mics. Everyone can hear you like turning the pages back and forth. Well, well done, right? Some nineteen forties radio style sound effects you're putting in there. 70. How?

Speaker2: [00:04:37] Ok, well, here. Here's a good one, she says. You've run out of excuses and we're running out of time, which is good. This I like to, she says. Adults keep saying quote. We owe it to the young people to give them hope and quote. But I don't want your hope. I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day and then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire because it is.

Speaker1: [00:05:10] Yeah, that's a good one. I like that one

Speaker2: [00:05:12] That is very good. And this one. Some people say that we are fighting for our future, but that is not true. We are not fighting for our future. Where if? Fighting for everyone's future. Good point, Greta. Here's another. This is a good one for the for the inner Marxist. We live in a strange world where we think we can buy or build our way out of a crisis that has been created by buying and building

Speaker1: [00:05:38] Things here here. Right? Yep, 100 percent.

Speaker2: [00:05:42] She says We must do the seemingly impossible and this one's my favorite. This one's my favorite. Ok, you don't seem to understand that hope is something you have to earn.

Speaker1: [00:05:55] How good.

Speaker2: [00:05:57] I think it's a good one. Yeah, no, that's good. The idea of earning hope that, you know, we've got no right to be hopeful if we're not taking action. Yeah, we've got no no right to sort of talk about the potential rosy future if we're not acting upon creating that future now.

Speaker1: [00:06:13] I mean, one of the one of the the eye-opening things that happened in the whole Iceland media fracas of the past few weeks was when people would send us hate mail and then you would scroll down and find there were these pictures of Greta Thunberg as like a demon child with red glowing eyes. And you're talking about that? Yeah, no, I'm just saying like this. There's a whole iconography that the kind of populist, authoritarian or Christian right wing uses about her that is just so disturbing and wrong at so many levels because, you know, she's just like, she's a kid, a really brave kid, you know, who's doing something really terrific. And the one you didn't read that I kind of like is where she says, You know why? Why are we going to school when, like the science that is the product of this school system? No one's taking seriously, right? I mean, I like that too.

Speaker2: [00:06:59] Ok, well, that's one of the ones that I had underlined but didn't read. But I will read it because say, some people say that I should study to become a client scientist so that I

Speaker1: [00:07:06] Can be a client.

Speaker2: [00:07:07] Scientists, a climate scientist. Do I say a climate scientist?

Speaker1: [00:07:11] You said something.

Speaker2: [00:07:12] Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist.

Speaker1: [00:07:16] Well spoken,

Speaker2: [00:07:18] Well enunciated so that I can quote solve the climate crisis. But the climate crisis has already been solved. Thank you very much. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is wake up and change. And why should I be studying for a future that soon will be no more when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future?

Speaker1: [00:07:42] Love it. Yeah, no, that's great.

Speaker2: [00:07:43] She's bold. I mean, I know it's, you know, straightforward, but

Speaker1: [00:07:46] And the amazing thing is because it was kind of the first anniversary of her first, you know, just recent initiative, I think. And I was like, Wow, it's only been a year. It seems like it seems like longer. And she's inspired so many kids. I mean, I'd say, particularly in Europe, but increasingly elsewhere in the world too. And the movement that she's a part of the Fridays for the Future and the Extinction Rebellion in sunrise and all the movements, I mean, I think that are being led by young people are probably, yeah, they're the best sign that, you know, we actually are going to get the political traction and will to change things. Because if you can get that many kids organized, I think that you're on to you're on the you're on the right side of history, right?

Speaker2: [00:08:28] Yes. She says I was fortunate to be born in a time and place where everyone told us to dream big. I could become whatever I wanted to. I could live wherever I wanted to. People like me had everything we needed and more things our grandparents could not even dream of. We had everything we could ever wish for. And yet now we may have nothing.

Speaker1: [00:08:48] Hmm. Yeah. So welcome. Welcome to you

Speaker2: [00:08:51] And for narrating everyone. But I'm really I'm really into grandma, and

Speaker1: [00:08:54] We should be celebrating her time here in the U.S. and that she went through that incredibly arduous voyage over here to in which, like her bathroom was a bucket, as I understand it, like she went through all of that just to come and give give a talk to probably a group of like un people who may or may not really be in a situation to actually do anything right.

Speaker2: [00:09:16] She's going to hope she's she has a bunch of media and she's going to be meet with a bunch of youth activists, all kinds of people. I was looking at her itinerary.

Speaker1: [00:09:23] No, that's great. And I think it'll probably help kick start the youth climate activist movement here to even more. I mean, give it a kind of big boost in the arm, which is great. So thank you, Greta, for that.

Speaker2: [00:09:33] And hopefully the other great thing about Greta can we add to it is that she also is in, in her own way, a kind of an advocate for disability rights, too. Yeah, because of her condition, because she's out, she has Asperger's syndrome, right? And so, you know, in a way, even though her primary message is about climate emergency, I think she's also become an important figure in the disability world, too. Perhaps I'm not sure about that. I'm just guessing.

Speaker1: [00:10:03] I think I think so. I think that's part of it, for sure. Absolutely. Anyway, so folks, on today's podcast, we have a great treat for you. We have Elizabeth Delury on the podcast, who is at UCLA and the English department and has a new book out. Called Allegories of the Anthropocene from Duke University Press, and I think it's a it's a really interesting book, it's one that people who listen to this podcast would enjoy. And Liz is a delight to speak with. I just wanted to mention one thing that in the show, notes were putting the open acts the link to the open access version of the book. But if I were you, I would consider also purchasing a copy because the proceeds are going to support raises, which is a terrific that is the acronym for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services here in Texas. And they do terrific work with endangered vulnerable communities, especially along the border. So we've participated in fundraisers for them in the past too. So definitely, although free is great. And you know, if you can't afford it, I think you should avail yourself of that opportunity because this knowledge is knowledge you need to have. But if you have the funds, please consider purchasing a copy of the book because it's going to a good cause.

Speaker2: [00:11:18] Well, thank you for doing that. I think that was a that's a brilliant move. Yeah, I wish we had done that with our books. Maybe we can still do it. I guess we could just take the whatever yeah proceeds and just send them over to races or some other organization.

Speaker1: [00:11:32] Newsflash for people who have never published an academic book before, what you receive in terms of payment for these books is pretty small. Well, and so you might as well take whatever you know a couple of hundred dollars you might get from writing such a book and then just like, donate it to a good cause. Right? I mean, why bother to pretend as though that $200 is going to make a whole world of difference to you otherwise could help somebody else out who's even in greater need. That's that's one to grow on from the Cultures of Energy podcast.

Speaker2: [00:12:01] Yeah, but for those for those academic writers out there who actually cash in a bit on their book like Arjona, Potter probably make some pretty nice royalties.

Speaker1: [00:12:10] We're going to have to get Argin on the podcast urgent and talk to him about his royalties

Speaker2: [00:12:14] And then donate that shit like send it over the fear of small numbers. Royalties that could be could be some big numbers anyhow. It all, it all helps. It all helps.

Speaker1: [00:12:24] Yeah, I just I don't know. I mean, I wonder how many copies of an academic book you'd have to sell to relief, pick up a paycheck, which you felt, which felt like a paycheck? I don't know.

Speaker2: [00:12:33] Oh yeah, paycheck now.

Speaker1: [00:12:34] Yeah, no, I just don't think it's out there. I mean, yes, maybe for a small and I bet you a lot of the people are making that money are like the Jared Diamond types who are writing popular social science.

Speaker2: [00:12:45] And yeah, well, there are people who write for a living and actually make a living

Speaker1: [00:12:50] Writing, Yeah,

Speaker2: [00:12:51] We've even talked to some of them on this podcast.

Speaker1: [00:12:53] Who are these people? Where do they come from?

Speaker2: [00:12:55] Most of us have to have day jobs.

Speaker1: [00:12:57] Where do they get off? Just kidding. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so Liz Delury on the podcast today and Simone, anything else you want to talk about? Are you happy to be home? Are you happy to be back in your your nest again? You know, for a long

Speaker2: [00:13:11] For the next two weeks? No. Well, not really. Because it's just stressful thinking about having to get everything out of here.

Speaker1: [00:13:17] We just unpacked the suitcases and what'll happen.

Speaker2: [00:13:20] They have to be repacked in a very coordinated way because how do you prepare for a year away with all kinds of strange, really different weather? I mean, it's going to be summer in Australia. It's going to be fucking cold in Berlin. It's going to be a very interesting packing job. I feel like I have to get like I have to make a list and really think through it.

Speaker1: [00:13:41] I would just imagine you're a backpacker, but one who's who's dragging a couple of heavy suitcases down here for a whole year. Just visualize that like all the freedom of the open road, but also all the comforts of dragging heavy luggage around with you.

Speaker2: [00:13:54] Well, it certainly motivates me to break down to like two pairs of shoes, that's for sure. Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:14:00] I mean, when pair of like fiery desert shoes and one pair of warm winter boots.

Speaker2: [00:14:06] Yeah.

Speaker1: [00:14:09] Anyway, all right. Take us out of here.

Speaker2: [00:14:10] Ok, go Elizabeth. Hey, there are cultures of energy listeners, we're glad to have you with us, and we're extra glad to have Liz Dalu agree with us on the line at UCLA in the English department.

Speaker3: [00:14:43] Hi, Liz.

Speaker2: [00:14:44] Hi there. Hi. We're really glad to have you on the line to talk about your excellent new book and my lovely co-host. Thank you. Dominic Boyer will start us off with a very profound and engaging question.

Speaker4: [00:14:56] Oh boy! Set the bar high, why don't you?

Speaker2: [00:14:59] I can tell

Speaker4: [00:15:00] Liz it's so great to speak with you. Your work has been very important in the field of environmental humanities for many years, and especially this latest book, which we've just heard heard so many great things about. We thought we had to invite you on the podcast to talk about it. It's called allegories of the Anthropocene. And I guess just to dive right into that, you argue here that it's important that we provincials the Anthropocene, much as you know, postcolonial studies, provincial ized other universalized discourses of Europe. And I just wanted to maybe ask you to start there and tell us a little bit about your interest in provincialism, the Anthropocene.

Speaker3: [00:15:41] Thanks. Thanks, both of you guys for hosting me. This has been a real honor to be part of The Conversation, just aging on the podcast. I guess I'll start just by saying that my training is in women's studies and postcolonial studies and indigenous studies. So taking those very interdisciplinary frameworks and then trying to understand the larger discourse of the Anthropocene, it seemed to me that there are a number of distinctions. One is that the Anthropocene scholarship was making all kinds of claims for the age of man was speaking in these kinds of universals. And I thought, Wait a minute, I think we've had this conversation before, and it's not an accident that one of the major figures who internalize these impersonal discourses is also one of our major theorists of the Anthropocene. So for me, it was kind of a shock to go from being trained with a lot of civil term studies historians, including to Chakrabarti and then seeing it come full circle to go from the parochialism now to the universal. So I wanted to insert a number of artists, voices, theorists that were thinking from indigenous perspectives from the global south and thinking about ways in which this experience, rupture and modernity had actually been experienced for centuries. If you consider the history of Empire.

Speaker2: [00:16:56] I mean, I think one of the really important points you make along those lines is that the true lack of engagement or lack of serious and comprehensive engagement with post-colonial and indigenous and indigenous perspectives as well has shaped this Anthropocene discourse in particular ways. It's, if you will, it's deeper analyzed it, but it's also kind of contorted it or morphed it in ways that are in very real ways, not accurately portraying the histories of indigenous dispossession from land, from territory, from cultural forms, et cetera. Yes, but also not recognising the kind of post-colonial traumas that that we can look to historically as well. So I think that this is a super important point that indigenous scholars like Kyle post-White have been making, but it's important to see it here, too, that there's a kind of a continuous ness to these these dispositions, actual dispossession and disaster that have been brought about by Empire that when we don't engage that scholarship, we the ground, we are allowed to sort of blind ourselves from that.

Speaker3: [00:18:00] Absolutely. Absolutely. And you can't I mean, in some ways, even the scientific evidence of climate change, which is the measurement of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere, came from the nuclear testing in the Pacific. So there was a concern about all the weapons that they're detonating in the Marshall Islands of all the carbon that was getting into the atmosphere. And this is an artificial carbon. They call it bomb carbon. And this is when the public outcry against that led to the scientific measuring of carbon in the atmosphere. And that itself, so in some ways, is a direct, even scientific link between histories of empire and our understanding of climate change. So it's both the kind of epistemological implications of that. It's material implications of that. But it's also an engagement with a discourse that in the broader Anthropocene discourse is making claims about this rupture between the human and nature. But that also presumes that you assume there was a rupture to begin with, right? So you already have to have a binary model of thinking to have the human on one side of nature on the other. And so I think a lot of the indigenous and post-colonial discourse has already been theorizing that out and especially feminist discourse as well. So it's to try to bring those voices back into the conversation to say, Well, no one who is the we? Right? Number two, why are we suddenly speaking of age of man rather than age of human? And where is the global south in this larger conversation?

Speaker2: [00:19:20] I mean, you begin the book with a poem by Cathy O'Neil Kitchener as I've read her name, but I've actually never said it out loud. So this is good. I used one of her poems that she co-authored with a Greenlandic woman that's called Rise, yeah,

Speaker3: [00:19:36] And we're just going,

Speaker2: [00:19:37] Yeah, and there's actually if people are interested, there's a video of them reading it together on the on the Greenland ice sheet, and it's spectacularly powerful and beautiful. The one you're using is called Tell Them, and I'll just read it this little piece really quickly. Tell them about the water, how we have seen it, rising flooding across our cemeteries, gushing over sea walls and crashing against our homes. Tell them what it's like to see the entire ocean level with the land. So this is a beautiful piece as well. Tell us why you wanted to engage Neil Kitchener and other indigenous poets and thinkers and essayists in this book.

Speaker3: [00:20:17] I'm glad you asked that because the poetry frames the book, I start with one of her poems in the beginning, and then I end with the poem at the end because I use her to bookend the project. Because number one, she's incredibly inspiring. And I think one of the things that I address in the book is to look at this discourse of decay of decline. It's a kind of declension this moment of thinking about apocalypse and of the planet in the state of ruin. And I think one of the things that General Kirschner does is is she creates these performance pieces that are collaborative, like the one that you've mentioned with various video artists as well. They're historical. They're engaged with the history of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, for instance, but they also offer a different discourse of the Anthropocene. And in my work, I separate out the kind of discourse of climate justice between Anthropocene discourse. And I think what she's doing, and I recommend anyone listening to this to go to our website because she has all kinds of performance pieces posted up there. And one of the powerful ones that she's done is that the U.N. Climate Summit in New York, where she she gives an address to her infant daughter and she received a standing ovation.

Speaker3: [00:21:30] It's an incredibly powerful piece, very moving. It catalyzed all kinds of support. And the way she framed it was actually to think about it as a kind of letter to her daughter. But we are not going to succumb to this and we're going to rise up and fight, and we have all these different measures. And she concludes it with her husband and her daughter, infant daughter, coming out onto the platform. And so there are ways in which that that piece itself and the work that she does thinks in intergenerational ways, which is not a discourse that you hear so much in terms of the Anthropocene. It thinks about the private experience, the ontological experience, the material experience of watching sea levels rise right, and then also the material experience of activism, of movement, of transnational collaboration in this process. So I find it very inspiring. And I think also the use of the material that she uses is also quite key in terms of thinking about the relationships of care. Right. And that's how I conclude the book is to think about as much as we have these different kinds of critiques of history and modernity, et cetera. One of the ways in which we can expand our possibilities for the present in the future is through these logics of care.

Speaker4: [00:22:41] I wanted to ask you, Liz, if you could talk a little bit about allegory. What attracted you to allegory as a route into this process of reframing Anthropocene understandings, and particularly how allegory might connect to what you're calling rupture as an analytic?

Speaker3: [00:22:58] Mm hmm. I have a love hate relationship with allegory. So the key word I use in the in the book is ambivalence. Ambivalence over the term Anthropocene. I have ambivalence over the concept of allegory and its uses. And that really comes from my postcolonial training, where I was trained in the nineties during a lot of the debates over Frederic Jamieson's argument that Third World narratives were all about allegory. And so all kinds of criticism came out against his argument about kind of homogenizing the so-called Third World using totality, et cetera, et cetera. But one of the things that struck me is you can see in general, Kushner's poetry or in any of the Anthropocene discourse is that allegory was absolutely fundamental, which is to say that in order to stage other worlds, which is to say that's a future worlds past worlds, alternative universes allegory is the mode. And so for me, trained in literary studies, I really wanted to think through how narrative works and how certain kinds of narrative tropes are apparent in a way, whether we're speaking scientifically about the past or whether we're speaking in terms of metaphor. So in some ways, we can't get outside of allegory or language itself as allegorical and the way that we try to represent experience draws necessarily on allegory. So the primary allegory of the book is the island is the world right? And so we think about how the island has served as a morality tale, whether we think of, let's say, the extinction of the dodo and malicious, right? So we think about these bounded.

Speaker3: [00:24:29] Territories and the bounded territory that is the most apparent to us now is the Earth in terms of its limits, so its limits of resources and limits of space, et cetera, et cetera. So the island then becomes secured in this world. And one of the challenges is that that allegory stages these other worlds so we can understand our current context, and that can be a positive sense. It also means that that allegorical tale is generally are pedagogical, which is to say they teach you something. They stage a history that is somewhat familiar to you, but it's a little bit unfamiliar so you can think about science fiction. For instance, this modeling of other planets is a very allegorical act. So it's something familiar, but also just familiar. So I wanted to have that kind of tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar. But allegory can also have conservative modes as well. So it's to say that it can be liberatory, but it also can be limited as well to reassert a certain kind of universal history, just as it can be used to kind of break up those bounds.

Speaker4: [00:25:28] Right? I mean, it's very beautifully put, and I was just I was attracted to to what you wrote in chapter one where you're talking about the public mass quality of allegory, which you've just talked about and also this idea that it's kind of anchored in particular histories and historical places and contexts. And so its meanings require some deciphering and some kind of translation sometimes. And I think that's a really interesting thing to think about in the context of the universalized discourse of the Anthropocene. But what I wanted, I guess, is a follow on to say is you're talking about different islands and different island allegories and different parts of the world. Do you find there, too, that there's something in the anchorage and the island experience that is communicable across those different contexts? Or do we really need to look at every island kind of as an

Speaker3: [00:26:16] Island, if you will? Right, right. Well, it's interesting because it's interesting to move to go to the island at a moment when a lot of scholarship is turning to archipelago's right. And I think ultimately my earlier work had argued for that, that we can't think about islands as isolated. We have to think about them in relation. And one of the important things is to not see is just a landmass, but also to see it as an ocean, as an ocean or a sea of islands right as whole is so poetically written. So I think in that sense that that I've always been reliant on this idea of the relation of islands. And I think this is coming out of the work of Admiralty Sawant and Carl Braithwaite and a whole body of Caribbean writers, as well as a pedophile who is from Tonga and based in Fiji. And it's to argue that, yes, we can have a sense of maybe smallness as a discourse or community or the kind of local localising scale community. But we also have to see that in the telescoping relationship to other islands and also to the world. So I guess my answer is really a both and that we have to have both the sense of boldness, but also the sense of infinity, which is something that Derek Walcott, the St Lucia poet, writes of about the idea that you can see the horizon from the shore of the island. So you're both in the space of groundedness, but you're also in a space in engagement with the world.

Speaker2: [00:27:34] I wanted to stick with allegory a little bit further to Les, and you write that allegory has been important for you too, because it allows for the staging of these worlds and these parallels to be made kind of representational parallels regarding distinctions between the present that we occupy and this dystopian future that we imagine. And I, as an anthropologist was drawn back to this is, you know, paging back in time to around the time that you were referring to Jamison is James Clifford's essay on ethnographic allegory. So this was really important in the discipline of anthropology. And his big claim was that ethnographic text written by anthropologists about others, right, are inescapably allegorical. And if we accept that, if we recognize that it changes the way that they that they can both be written, that we can write ethnography and that they can be read. And even perhaps more controversially, he says that ethnographic writing as allegory is really a Western allegory. It means that ethnographic writing is really explaining us through others in these allegorical terms, and he uses Benyamin like, like you do in the book and thinks through the idea of sort of redeeming the vanishing things that persist, which Benyamin says one is one of the strongest impulses in allegory. So I wanted to ask you thinking through this Clifford proposition that that ethnographic writing or the telling of stories about people who are not who are not ourselves, who live in a different place can be taken as a kind of Western allegory. And whether we can map that onto the Anthropocene as a kind of western allegorical story about environmental destruction and catastrophic, climatological features.

Speaker3: [00:29:22] Mm-hmm. That's great. You know, Jim Clifford's work has been hugely influenced through online and in fact, back in the days and. The 90s, when I was in grad school, some of the most important work was coming out. He was writing in relationship to Diaspora, to migration and of course his engagement with the Pacific was a huge influence. So I really delve into the whole anthropological history in the last chapter on the island of the world. And I go into his whole concept of ethnographic allegory because what I was seeing is that there was a rise of climate change films that were focused on the Pacific islands, particularly on Tuvalu, Tokelau and Kiribati, right around the right, around nine 11. And I think it's significant that they come in at this moment where the West is feeling this moment of apocalypse. So a lot of white Western filmmakers head to Tuvalu and do these what essentially are ethnographic allegories and is this mourning for a lost culture? I use some of a result work in terms of the kind of warning for a culture that we've killed, right? That's the frame that he uses for horror, that his critique and I use Clifford's work in that relationship because I think that these films, oddly enough, are kind of repeating that same impulse that we saw in nineteen nineties.

Speaker3: [00:30:39] And so my question was, why is there this kind of rise of this kind of mourning for a lost nature? And so these films depict Pacific Islanders as as one with nature as harvesting, you know, living off the land. And so they create these kind of mourning stories of how we've lost that connection to land. And so they figure the sea level rise is happening in Tuvalu as a way of seeing the sea level rise around the world. And so the island then becomes a figure of the world and there's a mourning and then the native figure quote-unquote is depicted as nature, right? And so one of the things that I call the salvage environmentalism, so it's rehearsing the same kinds of narratives that you saw critiqued in anthropology in relationship to and now an environmental critique. Right? And of course, what they do is they they separate out the Indigenous Islander from modernity. And so they go to the more rural areas they and they show any kind of westernization or capitalism or or any kind of signs of modernity as a contamination of the purity of nature. And these are well-worn tropes and anthropologists that this is a long story, particularly written representations of Pacific Islanders.

Speaker3: [00:31:45] So I find Clifford's work really helpful in actually reading a whole new generation of filmmakers that are actually repeating these same tropes, but they're doing it in the name of the Anthropocene. And so that, I think, is quite interesting. And so I call this kind of salvage environmentalism. And I found I ended up in this kind of bizarre critique that I didn't expect it to go this way. So on the one hand, that there's the obvious critiques of a nostalgia for a vanished nature, right? And we know what that trope is. But then I thought I saw some of those narratives also replicated at a performance that was hosted on my campus at UCLA. And I thought, OK, so we have this representation of the Indigenous Islander as kind of the morning figure of the loss of nature and our and the white Westerners relationship, a broken relationship to nature, not human nature. But then I thought, this is very much part of a Cold War discourse. This is very this feeling of apocalypse whose narratives of apocalypse are very much tied to a particular North American white settler narrative. And it may be that those narratives are actually what we know. They're appealing because these films won a lot of awards.

Speaker3: [00:32:52] And we know that they also raise funds. And so I thought, there's something kind of interesting here. So we have to think not just in terms of the repetition of certain kinds of narratives at moments of crisis, but also how they appeal to different audiences. And so maybe we as scholars, as indigenous peoples, as people who want to think through difference and contacts, cultural context may also want to realize that there are audiences out there that may want to think more in terms of the universal right. So. So it kind of that stuck with me a bit, and it was a kind of kept me up at night thinking, OK, I'm a post-colonial is how can I make this argument that it's OK to have these universal narratives? But it made me realize that we have to think at the level, both not just at representation, but also reception. And so I think that's also what Al Gore does because it's all about kind of teaching. I think one of the things that allegory taught me is that I needed to think more theoretically at the level of audience, what kind of audience is going to listen, what kinds of narratives are they going to find appealing and to think about the diversity of audiences?

Speaker2: [00:33:52] Yeah, that's right.

Speaker4: [00:33:53] I really enjoyed the the structuring of the book, and I liked the way that each chapter pursued a different kind of constellation of the Anthropocene. So in chapter one, you're writing on soil and Chapter two on radiation and Chapter three on waste, and then chapters four and five on ocean and island. And I wanted to ask if you could talk us a little bit through that selection of thematics and whether there was anything you kind of wanted to write about but didn't have time or didn't have space to do that, that would have also been in that same vein.

Speaker3: [00:34:25] It's funny you ask that. I think we all have to kind of cut off. Our limbs, when we're you know that we're pressing to go to, we have to go to press or we need to come up for a promotion, right, and things just have to be bounded. So I think I realized that in some ways this work is part of a trilogy because I never finished my first book in some sense. So the first book, which was also a comparative look at Caribbean and Pacific islands, particularly literature. But the history of the representation of the island and part one was on the ocean and part two is on the land. And then this one kind of brought this in same kinds of conversations. But now in relationship to the Anthropocene. And then, as I did the writing and research for this, I became more and more engaged with histories of Cold War discourse, histories of nuclear radiation, which were all living with right. So everyone on the planet is born after nineteen fifty four after the Bravo test out in the Marshall Islands is carrying radioactive iodine and strontium in their bodies because it permeated the whole atmosphere and got into our whole ecosystem. So part of the project that I began as I was finishing up the second book started to morph into this larger project. Now that I'm thinking about in terms of the histories of the Cold War and the ways in which our bodies carry them, but also the kind of claims that Cold War narratives make about space. And I think that we saw some of the largest territorial schism happened number one with the U.N.

Speaker3: [00:35:49] Convention on the Law of the Sea. So you didn't have the sea parcels up into national territories and international territories until that convention started. So, so that means that seventy five percent of our planet became very territorial allies in the nineteen sixties. And that's also at the same time that the atmospheric test ban treaty in nineteen sixty two also determined that outer space was also understood as a global commons as well. So in some ways, that's also a territory was in outer space because the U.S. and Britain were planning and actually had started to send off nuclear weapons into the atmosphere. So the atmosphere is as a space then became territorial and militarized. So you have the militarism of the oceans, militarism of the atmosphere and then also of Antarctica. The British were planning to detonate nuclear weapons in Antarctica. So then you had the Antarctica treaty. So now the new project is really trying to think through what are the claims to these places that are both outer space, but also what Jacques Cousteau calls inner space, which is our oceans and thinking through militarism. Because I think that there's the Anthropocene has brought to light all kinds of different violences and histories. But I think the elephant in the room still remains militarism. I think especially for Americans. So part of the new the impetus for the new project is to dig into those military histories, but also see the ways in which artists and writers are responding to them and reconfiguring other claims of space.

Speaker2: [00:37:13] Well, I'm glad you brought up this militant militarization of the atmosphere because actually, just right before we got on the pod, we were talking about, you know, who's ranting about wanting to nuke hurricanes, right? Yeah.

Speaker3: [00:37:24] So yeah, which

Speaker4: [00:37:26] Which apparently is an old idea. I didn't realize that, but I was reading a little into it, and this was an actual serious discussion in the 60s.

Speaker3: [00:37:33] So yes, yeah. Joe Moscow actually has some great work on this, and it's part of the the peaceful uses of the Atom project that was in the nineteen sixties. So when there was a lot of protest and in fact, a lot of one of the things that also has been erased, I think, from public history in the US, at least, is it so much of the protest in the nineteen sixties was against militarism, but especially nuclear militarism? And so one of the ways the atomic energy responded, the commission responded to that was to come up with this idea of the Plowshares project, which is we'll just use nuclear weapons to bomb, make a bigger Panama Canal. We'll use it. In fact, one of the scientists I quote somewhere along the way had an idea that we should set off nuclear weapons at the poles, so we should to increase the temperature of the planet. I mean, this was a plan actually proposed. So you do see these completely bizarre nationalizations of nuclear weapons in the nineteen sixties. And I think even if you flip through life magazine of that time period, you'll see this really interesting kind of naturalisation of the nuclear weapon is a very American thing in both of its apocalyptic, but but also this kind of utopic potential of the power.

Speaker2: [00:38:42] I mean, since since we've turned to militarism, I want to bring in a point that you make, I think, in a couple of places, but definitely in the article called Toward a Critical Ocean Studies for the Anthropocene. You point out that the Pentagon, in addition to protecting all these energy interests like you know, in in the Gulf, for example, by having naval ships and other protections in order to shuttle oil back and forth. Mm hmm. That the Pentagon is the world's largest consumer of energy, institutional consumer of energy and the biggest institutional contributor to global carbon emissions. And yet it's exempted from all major international climate accords as well as. From domestic carbon emissions legislation as well, so that while we think about carbon emissions often normatively as sort of consumption of individual citizens and rather than military expansion, in fact, it's the Pentagon that we can point to as being the largest emitter now. I should have known this and it makes sense to me once I read it, but I had never thought about who the largest institutional emitter is, and I was really glad for you to bring that to our attention. How did you how did you find that fact? How did you come across this? Because I don't think I've seen it anyplace else. And yet it's really important.

Speaker3: [00:40:02] Yes, yes. And once you start researching it, you find all these agencies have been reporting on this. But oddly, and in fact, a lot of the structure for this book also came from just reports in the LA Times. Know I'm old school. I read the hard copy, you know, and sit down at the table and and go through all the bits of news and what I've been following or any time anything comes up in terms of militarism. You know, that's one of the things. So it was reported, but it's not something that's actually been picked up in any kind of discourse. And so it's something I bring up a lot of my teaching. Is that why do we have these nationalist frames? China does this right, the kind of spectre of China being the biggest emitter now and or India? And yet you don't have the conversation about what's happening in the U.S., and I think that also has to do. I mean, there's a body of what we're calling critical militarization studies. It's gaining some footage. But as a whole, you haven't had a kind of robust body of critical scholarship that is looking at militarization. And I think the more that we end up developing that, I think what's happened is that military histories, which are quite heroic individual men, right? But you haven't quite had the development of a robust discourse that's criticizing militarism. And my colleague here, Keith Camacho, he's at the forefront of developing that kind of conversation. And I think the more that we bring that in relationship to the environment, the broader body of conversations that we can have about it.

Speaker4: [00:41:24] Do you think that allegory has a critical potential to help us? I guess this goes back a bit to the the discussion of sci fi clarify that we had a while back, but do you see the potential for allegory to kind of open new horizons or to create the kind of better ethics of care that you talk about at the conclusion of the book? Or should we be thinking about these as as kind of symptomatic formations that kind of exist on the edges of modern ruptures and ruins? I guess the question is whether we can build better futures out of those ruins or whether, you know, we need another mechanism other than allegory to get us there.

Speaker3: [00:42:03] It's funny. It's it's hard to think once you get into allegory, it's hard to think your way out of it, right? Because, you know, because allegory is about staging other worlds, right? It is the forum for doing that. So a lot of the work I'm looking at now is looking at, you know, Caribbean Afrofuturism and thinking of indigenous futurism. And so there are ways that that my focus is turn now to more speculative fiction and speculative futures. And of course, they're all allegorical. I mean, if you take a look at any kind of sci fi framing, it's about staging of the world. So I guess in some ways it's interesting about your question is that it's almost the same. You could substitute the word allegory with imagination. Right? There is there ways that we can think. I mean, to me, in order to imagine other possibilities, we have to use allegory, right? And but I think it's helpful to know what the limitations are because allegory needs to have something already familiar in order for it to stage something different. And this is why, in my reading of science fiction lately, I've been thinking, Oh, it's actually kind of conservative as a genre, because it's not all that. I mean, and this is something that Carrie Hume taught me, as I wrote about in that chapter in the book On Oceanic Imaginaries, is that if you're going to narrate something that's radically different, you need to have some kind of signpost for your reader to follow you.

Speaker3: [00:43:21] And so what happens with Carrie Hume's short story? She's a Maori novelist and writer and poet is that? Her writing becomes so obscure and so experimental that I find that my students have a hard time following it. And so that, to me, is a kind of reminder that allegorical still needs as a form needs to adhere to certain kinds of familiar posts in order to get you to think through to the possibilities of something radically different. In that sense, it's still tied somehow to tradition. And so I think in some ways that can be both a positive, productive element. But it also can mean that it's repeating, let's say so much science fiction imagines a future without people of color. Right? And so oh, how? How imaginative can that be, right? So it's to say it's still going to carry the frameworks of the past and present into the future. And it's just to be aware of the limitations of that. So so we can think through some of the inherent sexism of a lot of science fiction and speculative future writing. So there are ways in which we can we can use it as a, I think, as a tool, and this is why I will always feel kind of ambivalent about the form.

Speaker4: [00:44:27] Yeah. I've heard and Kate Jemison right about that kind of that propensity of sci fi to imagine colorless i.e. white futures all the time. And yes, and so it's it's really interesting. I think there's a really interesting, lively debate within science fiction about that. It's kind of interesting to see the self-criticism appearing and new kinds of experimentations. And likewise, you know, same with us. We've been very interested in in indigenous and in Afrofuturism recently and kind of their propensity to to imagine truly alternative futures, which seems to be the the real demand and the message of the Anthropocene is like, we need something really different than what we been doing, right, you know? So like, how do we maximize that difference but also create a world that's, you know, peaceful, humane, you know, multi species carrying all sorts of things?

Speaker3: [00:45:13] Exactly. I think the exciting part of what I'm reading in terms of some models of indigenous futurity is that especially Maori writers who are making a claim that space itself is not empty. And to me, that's one of the major reasons for me. Thinking through this new book is to think about how certain kinds of emptying of space, which is what the colonial narrative does, right? It goes into the Caribbean and says, Oh, this is terra nullius, no one's here. So therefore it's ours. And so that is a kind of emptying of space, and then it makes other kinds of empty space in order to make territorial claims. And I think this is the same that's happening in terms of outer space or the oceans and what Carrie Hume and other writers have been doing. That's quite interesting is to say that these are spaces that are already occupied by cosmological forces or by an intuitive ho who was the goddess of the transition between life and afterlife. And so you're never going to have a sense of an empty space. Space is already embodied, its ontological. It's it's alive. And so I think that's some of the excitement that I'm seeing in that I'm finding in some of the works that I'm turning to now.

Speaker2: [00:46:26] Mm hmm. I wanted to think a little bit, Liz, about this concept that you introduce or mention called the cultural geologic. And in the context that you mention it, it's a kind of it's a parochialism move again, as we've been talking about to become specific sort of trans particular but specific at the same time, the cultural geologic. And I'm also reminded just in the last couple of comments that Dominic made and that you just made about the conversation we had with Kathryn yourself about a billion black Anthropocene. Her recent book and the kind of White Man's Geology. And so I wanted to think through the kind of cultural, geologic and how, on the one hand, that might be responding to this white man's geology that's been constituted through science and, you know, sort of the ratification of these practices, et cetera, you can imagine, but also to think through maybe a critique or a pushback against the cultural geologic as perhaps risking how to put this solidifying culture in some way to kind of reinvent that unchanging ness that's been so problematic in the culture concept for anthropology, but in the social sciences and humanities, more general, is there a risk in the cultural geologic being mapped in a way such that, you know, those cultures I'm doing my scare quotes? Those culture that have this are then at risk of being ratified and sort of limited in terms of the scope of the chargeability or mutability of cultural forms.

Speaker3: [00:48:02] Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, that's a great question. Katherine and I have in conversation for years over the Anthropocene, and I've been hugely influenced by her thought and our conversations, and especially her early critique about the construction of the Anthropocene, right? And who was man in this in this dialogue? So I see I mean, I see your question going multiple ways. On the one hand, we have, I guess we'd have the conversation. The Anthropocene that assumes a universal white male subject is the kind of geologic conversation, right? And then I'm doing a critique of that mode of conversation, especially between geologists who are not thinking about culture. So then the next layer is we want to bring the conversation on culture and because then we can realize this conversation, right? And so then we can think about cultural difference. We can think about who is actually doing the carbon emitting or we can think about who's on the front lines of actually, there's a long conversation in Ireland studies about Ireland vulnerability and and precarity. And then there's also simultaneous critique about not kind of creating this lack of agency in the part of Ireland. So you have that layer, and I guess your question is to think through once we get into the cultural if we want to bring in the cultural, which is to bring in the parochial and different and context of history, do we end up? Your question is about whether we'll be reaffirming the culture all over again in terms of making it an unchanging non dynamics concept. Is that right?

Speaker2: [00:49:25] Right. Especially because the geologic. Is so associated with stones and stratigraphy and and, you know, deep time and unchanging or at least changing very, very slowly, right? And yes, so I think that's one of the challenges is the juxtaposition of culture and geology as its kind of as its normatively understood.

Speaker3: [00:49:47] Yes. And I think so. I'd add two things into that. One is that that's a conversation that I really tried to come to terms within the island as a world chapter where I was looking at those films that create this kind of nostalgic concept of culture writ large as indigenous culture, as the dying native figure, the vanishing native narrative. And so I think that would absolutely be an example of that. And that's certainly something that's coming across in these documentaries because they play on those particular tropes that are well-established in anthropology and ethnographic film. But then on the other layer, I think one of the other parts that we'd want to bring into the conversation is Beth Kelly's work on ontological or her term as Jill ontologies. And I adopt that in terms of see ontologies or ocean ontologies to actually think about not just the Earth being this shifting force, but also the ocean, right? So I think that her adding her into the layer to that allows us to think about the ontological is something that's always, always experienced and reconfigured, right? So I think that allows us to move beyond the kind of culture with a Capital C ratification and then start thinking both in terms of human bodies, but also non-human bodies in relationship, but also the kind of fungibility between the human body and place, right? Whether we're talking about oceanic place or a geological place, I think once we bring in the ontological, I think that allows us to speak at multiple scales.

Speaker4: [00:51:10] This is back to the toward of critical ocean studies article. I really like your your phrase aqua nullius. Yeah, I don't. I mean, I don't know whether you coined it or not, but it's brilliant and, you know, is a great way to extend, you know, brushing across the grain of a pretty terra logical fascination. I think maybe understandable as Earth, mostly Earth, Earth living as they call them.

Speaker2: [00:51:31] Oh, we're sort of terrestrial, terrestrial or mostly terrestrial, even if,

Speaker4: [00:51:35] You know, unwillingly amphibious, unwillingly, just occasionally aquatic, maybe. And I'm also interested in what you're talking about as the capacity of of hydro criticism to kind of take on power as both hydro and terrestrial as well, too. Is this I mean, do you think that and I feel like this is something that's been running through your work for years and years. It's not just about the most recent work that's interest in oceans. And do you think that this what some people have called blue humanities, you know, this kind of focus on trying to take a critical perspective that's deeply informed by engagement with oceans? Do you do you think this is kind of one of the most important ways forward in terms of a general critical approach to the Anthropocene, which I do think is not solely terrestrial, but it's pretty terrestrial

Speaker3: [00:52:23] In terms of its prosaic? Yeah, I mean, necessarily right. I mean, we are, you know, even those who are speaking about the ocean a lot of times it's from a coastal view, right? So so yeah, so I have multiple responses. This one is that there has been the rise. As you know, I think as we've all noticed in the past five to 10 years of various kinds of humanities and the rebranding of environmental humanities and the medical humanities and public humanities, et cetera, et cetera. And there are reasons for this, and I think there are good reasons for this to turn to give the number one to kind of bring back the humanities as an important field of thinking. And I think that's one of the contributions I hope my book makes is is to say in these conversations about these geologists, we need to have the humanities as as a as a participant, because the skills that we bring into reading, reading representation are important in these conversations about the in these moments of crisis. But the other concern that I have is a concern I've had in George Haley, and I have written about this in relationship to postcolonial studies is that when you turn to something as large as the environment, right, as an abstract concept of the environment or the Anthropocene or the ocean.

Speaker3: [00:53:27] This is when universal start to come in. And so one of the things that the work that I've been doing for a number of years is to think through how can you have these kind of universal discourses of the ocean? So, for instance, Paul Gilroy's work in his work on the Black Atlantic is hugely influential to my thought. But for him, the movement of figures, mostly men across the Atlantic, is a surface level. And I think Stacey Alaimo, Phil Steinberg, a whole group of other people have been doing a lot of work to get us into the depths. But I also want to highlight the fact that the ocean is not is not universally experienced, right? And so too much of what's happening in the blue. Humanities actually is not engaging with slavery. It's not engaging with, for instance, Pacific navigation histories, which are so important for Pacific studies, so important for even sovereignty movements, right? And Hawaii and Tahiti. And and even you think about genealogical histories of Maori being tied, many, many, not all, to a founding canoe. And so walk of it. Understood to embody the people and the relationship to the ocean.

Speaker3: [00:54:30] So I think what I'm trying to do in that work also is to localize the ocean is to understand it as a space that's experienced radically differently in relationship to history to culture. But I also don't want us. I think so much of that work is, and I guess understandably so, is focused on a lot of 19th century understandings of the ocean. But 19th century is also the rise of the American Navy, right? And so you do have a shift from British militarism of the seas to them, the American militarism of the seas. And so what I don't want us to miss in this. This is why I talk about the military exercises in the Pacific is that in some ways, again, like militarism in general, it seems to be kind of hidden in plain sight. So it's there, it's ubiquitous, but it's not necessarily something that we're really engaging with. So I want us to think about both the ways in which the ocean offers other ontological modes of being. But I also want us to think about it in terms of historical modes of being and cultural modes of being right to have the kind of complexity of discourse that we have a land in relationship to the ocean.

Speaker2: [00:55:33] So Liz, I was a kind of a closing question. We wanted to open up and ask you to talk a little bit about your next project that you're working on that is titled Outer Spaces, imagining the ends of the Earth, where you take up these what you call extraterritorial or outer spaces that get wound up into these ecological features as they're imagined and you focus on the atmosphere, the ocean and the poles. So can you tell us about that project and how you selected these extra territorial spaces as the object of

Speaker3: [00:56:04] Inquiry for you? Well, that one is going to be such a huge project. I've been particularly I had a sabbatical this year and I was able to start to think about it and then start to read some of the work that's coming out on the atmosphere. There's been a lot of there's been a kind of atmospheric turn in recent years, just as there's been an oceanic turn. So in some ways, I think I'm catching up with a lot of conversations that are happening, especially in anthropology. But as always, I let the artists and the writers kind of lead my way into it. So what do you hear? Mara, who's a naughty novelist and he's probably best known for the Whale Rider, which became a film? He has some really interesting short stories where he reimagines Moby Dick as an iceberg coming up from Antarctica and about a contingent that's going to harvest the last drinking water on the planet. And so part of his understanding of Antarctica itself, unlike the blank space narratives and there's been a lot of great feminist work on Antarctica being this kind of great white masculine space, right? And he has done this really interesting work in terms of imagining it as ontological Maui, right? And it's already and it's animated, right? And so he both places it in the history of Moby-Dick, but he also gives it a cosmological framing in terms of mounting mythologies. So, so it's taking pieces from various writers and trying to think, OK, well, what would it mean if we actually thought about this? That's part of a larger question about indigenous spirituality.

Speaker3: [00:57:30] I'm also doing some work with some filmmakers and writers from the Caribbean who are imagining Caribbean space missions. And so there's been a number from Puerto Rico and from Martinique and other areas that are thinking about Puerto Ricans on the Moon or the first Martinique and in space powered by the voice of Amy says there's poetry, right? And so there are ways in which these moves are actually trying to read territorial space, but they're making very different claims about space. So that's a big part of the project. And then the other section is going to go into the history of Underwater Sea Lab. So I'm looking at Jacques Cousteau underwater. He had a shelf and a number one, two and three. The U.S. had sea lab, and they also had another one called tech type and interesting. They had artists involved in terms of thinking, not just the kind of isolation of human beings in these contained places in what Christo called inner space, meaning the oceans. And obviously that figure in outer space. But also you had some artists involved in terms of what would be the best way to incorporate light. How would you how is very concerned with the kind of aesthetic and psychological contours of the experience of these largely white men in these spaces? So I'm starting to dig through the archive in there in terms of thinking what those histories are, but then also what the contemporary responses are in both literature and arts.

Speaker4: [00:58:52] Analyst Thank you so much for being with us. Your work is I can tell you this from having heard it from many of our listeners is deeply cherished by the audience of this podcast. So it's a real treat to have you on and to talk about this fabulous new book and also to talk about the projects to come. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us.

Speaker3: [00:59:11] Thank you both. It's been such an honor.

Speaker2: [00:59:13] Yeah, thank you, Les. It's great to talk.