Imagining Sustainable Futures: What Literature Can do for the Earth

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02/02/2024 Added

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CAS Inquire talk by Dr. Julia Frengs on Jan. 30, 2024.

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[00:00:00.480]Great to see you all.
[00:00:01.120]Thank you so much
[00:00:01.680]for being here this evening and being a part of our lecture series.
[00:00:05.560]This is the fourth featured talk
[00:00:07.920]in the College of Arts and Sciences Inquire lecture series.
[00:00:12.800]The organizing theme, as you may know, is
[00:00:16.160]Sustainable Futures,
[00:00:18.840]and in keeping with the culture
[00:00:20.600]and the identity of the College of Arts and Sciences
[00:00:24.760]and really embodied in this particular lecture program,
[00:00:28.200]this year's theme on Sustainable Futures has been explored
[00:00:32.440]through a diverse range of intellectual orientations
[00:00:36.600]and disciplinary perspectives, which have so far
[00:00:39.680]included geology,
[00:00:43.160]geography, philosophy and physics.
[00:00:46.160]This evening, we are turning to insights from the creative worlds
[00:00:49.800]of imaginative fiction and in the field of languages and literatures.
[00:00:55.080]And this evening, we're particularly
[00:00:57.680]pleased to be joined by Professor Julia Frengs, professor of French
[00:01:02.520]in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, with a talk entitled
[00:01:06.160]Imagining Sustainable Futures What Literature Can Do for the Earth.
[00:01:11.360]Dr. Frengs has her Ph.D.
[00:01:14.040]in modern French studies from the University of Maryland
[00:01:16.840]and prior to joining UNL in 2016, she served as an ESL
[00:01:20.960]instructor at the Intercultural Communications College in Hawaii
[00:01:24.560]and a lecturer of French at the University of Hawaii Manoa.
[00:01:28.080]She was also a teaching fellow in French
[00:01:30.880]and the Humanities at Quest University in Canada.
[00:01:34.760]And next year will be a distinguished faculty member of the Air Force Academy,
[00:01:39.200]and she promises to come back and I'm going to hold her to that.
[00:01:43.320]But Dr.
[00:01:43.920]Freng's research explores the literature of francophone
[00:01:46.920]female authors from current and former French colonies.
[00:01:51.360]She's interested in women's writings, representations of the body,
[00:01:55.120]indigenous, emancipatory discourse and environmental engagement
[00:01:59.920]in the literatures of New Caledonia and French Polynesia.
[00:02:04.400]She is a multi authored scholar with a book
[00:02:09.760]that's entitled Corporeal Archipelagos
[00:02:13.200]Righting the Body in Francophone Oceania and Women's Literature,
[00:02:16.680]and the author of numerous articles and book chapters,
[00:02:20.240]along with a co-edited special edition of Women in French Study.
[00:02:23.800]So we're really particularly pleased to have her with us this evening.
[00:02:28.280]So please join me in welcoming Dr.
[00:02:30.040]Julia Frengs to the podium. Julia
[00:02:43.920]Thank you, Dean
[00:02:44.440]Button, and thank you to the Inquire series
[00:02:47.440]for coming up with this topic that I'm so passionate about.
[00:02:51.560]I'm going to be reading my paper tonight.
[00:02:53.360]That's what we do in my field, and I have a lot of quotes.
[00:02:57.240]So how else do you demonstrate what literature can do without
[00:03:01.600]using literature?
[00:03:03.440]So I'm going to start with an excerpt from a poem.
[00:03:07.240]Sorry, everybody. Well, I'll just read it.
[00:03:08.720]I'll start reading it and then you can see it if it comes up.
[00:03:11.200]So tell them about the water, how
[00:03:14.320]we have seen it rising flooding across our cemeteries,
[00:03:17.680]gushing over the sea walls and crashing against our homes.
[00:03:21.680]Tell them what it's like to see the entire ocean level with the land.
[00:03:26.920]Tell them we are afraid.
[00:03:28.800]Tell them we don't know of the politics
[00:03:31.800]or the science, but tell them we see what is on our own backyard.
[00:03:37.120]In 2015, at the COP 21 Paris
[00:03:39.920]Climate conference, Marshallese poet Cathy Jet no kidding.
[00:03:44.320]Or recited her poem Tell Them against the backdrop of an imitation of the Eiffel
[00:03:48.960]Eiffel Tower, built from the small wooden chairs of the time the tower was built.
[00:03:53.520]General Kitchener is perhaps the best known poet to address
[00:03:56.520]climate catastrophe and to imagine global climate futures.
[00:04:00.240]And as an Islander, perhaps the most appropriate figure to help
[00:04:03.320]articulate the rapidly changing realities of island living
[00:04:07.280]while rising sea levels, record storms, extended droughts, nuclear
[00:04:10.960]colonialism and ocean intoxication threaten the lives of the entire planet.
[00:04:15.360]Pacific, Caribbean and Indian Ocean.
[00:04:17.280]Island communities feel these threats at a more urgent level as they are
[00:04:21.040]witness to the consequences of climate change on a daily basis.
[00:04:25.120]These communities need not imagine or anticipate climate disasters.
[00:04:29.200]They are living them.
[00:04:30.640]Yet, while they may be the most severely impacted, the voices of island
[00:04:34.080]peoples are rarely considered in discussions
[00:04:36.200]of climate change mitigation and the global North.
[00:04:39.760]Tonight, I'm going
[00:04:40.320]to talk about fictional and poetic literary engagement by island writers
[00:04:43.760]of French expression, principally from the Pacific and Indian Oceans.
[00:04:47.800]The questions we'll ask Focus on literature's role in navigated
[00:04:51.080]complicated planetary climate challenges on specific local levels.
[00:04:55.960]For example, what kind of imaginative fiction do
[00:04:58.480]in the face of extreme weather and climate catastrophe?
[00:05:01.480]What is the role of narrative fiction and drawing attention to the attention to
[00:05:05.600]and facilitating creative solutions to challenges such as climate change,
[00:05:09.120]hydro colonialism and resource extraction?
[00:05:12.360]How can writers and poets from these areas often seen as remote
[00:05:16.240]influence American and European audiences when it comes
[00:05:19.040]to questions of environmental justice and climate change mitigation,
[00:05:22.920]as Journal Kitchener's column indicates, an abstraction of weather changes
[00:05:27.240]on a global scale, like in scientific and political discussions,
[00:05:31.560]does little compare to witnessing what is in one's own backyard.
[00:05:35.520]The poet demonstrates the political and scientific knowledge have encountered,
[00:05:39.680]to quote Elizabeth The Lowry A Rift in knowledge, Production and Circulation.
[00:05:44.720]Tonight, I want to look at examples of literature
[00:05:46.640]from the Pacific and Indian Oceans that I think
[00:05:48.480]can repair that rift and knowledge, production and circulation by rendering
[00:05:51.840]seemingly unrepresented events represented or visible.
[00:05:57.160]By doing so, literature motivates us to think creatively about how to construct
[00:06:00.960]sustainable futures.
[00:06:03.680]I'm going to start in Oceania or in the Pacific Ocean, where I've done
[00:06:06.760]most of my research on to Houston and New Caledonian writers.
[00:06:10.760]I'm assuming most of you have seen them Disney or Disney Pixar Film or whatever.
[00:06:15.440]At least I hope you have.
[00:06:16.560]It's a beautiful film, and Disney Pixar actually did a great job
[00:06:20.480]at including Hawaiian or Indigenous Pacific Voices.
[00:06:23.960]For the characters in the film, we follow the story of Moana, whose name
[00:06:28.240]means Ocean in most Polynesian languages, and to Houston.
[00:06:32.160]It can also mean the deepest, darkest part of the ocean.
[00:06:35.600]What I loved about this film is that it includes quite a few fairly accurate
[00:06:39.480]Polynesian legends.
[00:06:41.200]Most importantly, it
[00:06:42.320]highlights the importance of storytelling and of maritime voyaging.
[00:06:46.240]The Polynesian people came to be because of a complex navigational system
[00:06:49.920]that used the stars,
[00:06:50.960]the wind and the shape of ocean waves to travel thousands of nautical miles
[00:06:55.040]and populate what we now know as the Polynesian Triangle,
[00:06:59.080]an ancient
[00:07:00.000]ancient Oceania and seafaring traditions, the technique for calculating distance
[00:07:04.360]traveled between islands was to triangulate
[00:07:06.760]the speed of the island departure and destination.
[00:07:09.320]With that of a third reference island
[00:07:11.600]using the celestial sky as a map for the world below.
[00:07:15.640]This triangulation, a way of navigating the Pacific Ocean,
[00:07:18.920]was a way of negotiating one's position in time and space.
[00:07:22.920]The Polynesian people thus have a tremendous respect for the ocean.
[00:07:27.000]While I've already admitted that I love, love, loved Moana and I'm
[00:07:30.960]currently trying to brainwash my child into loving it as much as I do.
[00:07:35.000]To no avail. She prefers Paw Patrol.
[00:07:37.720]There are some problematic representations that do happen in this film.
[00:07:42.840]Firstly, Maui is depicted as a big oaf.
[00:07:45.840]The Disney character really resembles in no way the Pan Polynesian demigod who,
[00:07:50.160]in myths and legends, is depicted as a strong, handsome adolescent bordering
[00:07:54.400]on adult.
[00:07:56.080]Maui's female counterpart, Sheena, is completely
[00:07:59.000]omitted as omitted from the narrative, which is astounding as she is
[00:08:02.200]some of the most important roles in Pan Polynesian legends.
[00:08:05.920]The film depicts the indigenous people as happy natives
[00:08:09.120]with coconuts, a dangerous, inaccurate and frankly, racist trope that has existed
[00:08:13.240]for centuries.
[00:08:14.800]In the film, Moana and Maui encounter a band of pirates named the Okamura.
[00:08:19.200]They are depicted as coconuts.
[00:08:21.000]They're mean, relentless, and they bear nothing in resemblance
[00:08:23.720]to the actual Cecco Mora, a legendary store.
[00:08:26.320]Short statured people of the Solomon Islands.
[00:08:29.560]Finally, Disney romanticizes the primitive idea of oceanian peoples
[00:08:33.960]and thereby whitewashes how those peoples colonized and continue to be subjected
[00:08:38.520]to neo colonial, capitalistic, oppressive practices.
[00:08:42.440]Moana paints an accurate picture of a romanticized Oceania and people
[00:08:46.400]perpetuating idyllic myths and hiding the truth of the past
[00:08:49.400]two centuries of European colonization.
[00:08:52.480]One of these truths is the 30 years of nuclear testing
[00:08:55.560]that took place
[00:08:56.200]in the French occupied Polynesia in the last half of the 20th century,
[00:09:00.000]which resulted in aerial and aquatic toxicity,
[00:09:02.640]the pollution of the air and water in French occupied Polynesia,
[00:09:06.960]or what I'll be calling Maui week from now on.
[00:09:10.320]We're still seeing repercussions from this period
[00:09:14.520]between 1966 and 1996.
[00:09:17.200]France detonated 193 nuclear tests
[00:09:20.280]in only showering the archipelago with radioactive toxins.
[00:09:25.240]A recent study has concluded that approximately 110,000 people
[00:09:28.720]in that way were affected by the radioactive fallout.
[00:09:31.760]Almost the entire entire population of the time.
[00:09:35.200]The radiation between two and ten times higher than previous estimates contributed
[00:09:39.520]to the contamination of the Milana and the rainwater
[00:09:42.560]that served as drinking water for much of the population.
[00:09:46.200]What we literary engagements with this toxic period in their history
[00:09:50.000]attests to the continued socioeconomic and health related
[00:09:53.000]repercussions of the nuclear testing period.
[00:09:56.320]Maori authors demonstrate that the archipelago has been irreversibly
[00:09:59.920]impacted by nuclear colonialism or environmental violence.
[00:10:04.560]As the editors of the collection Indigenous
[00:10:07.560]Pacific Islander eco literature explain.
[00:10:10.680]We do not pronounce climate change without speaking the histories of nuclear
[00:10:14.760]testing in our ocean
[00:10:15.960]or remembering the impacts of nationalization and militarization.
[00:10:19.880]We do not speak about climate change outside of histories of disease,
[00:10:23.240]epidemics, land, dispossession, occupation, or how change has been
[00:10:27.120]defined through projects of colonialism in our islands.
[00:10:30.840]We document and define the frontline of climate change.
[00:10:33.480]But it isn't a line. It's an ocean.
[00:10:35.520]It's a sea of islands, bodies of water and land.
[00:10:38.520]Your body. Our body.
[00:10:41.440]In 1963, the French
[00:10:43.280]government began the project of building the center of experiments at some Pacific,
[00:10:47.280]the center of Pacific Experimentation, or CTP in the archipelago.
[00:10:53.040]The city was an insidious form of environmental
[00:10:56.400]encroachment and destruction of the land and ocean.
[00:11:00.800]The French government insisted that this testing site,
[00:11:03.320]which took over the atolls of water
[00:11:06.480]and fungus far and you can kind of see as circled them
[00:11:11.080]that this would be benevolent, it would provide an economic livelihood
[00:11:15.040]to the way people and that it would bring an influx of tourism to the archipelago.
[00:11:20.080]While the Maori independence movement protested, it was constantly hindered
[00:11:23.920]by the fact that the nuclear testing site revenue to the Territory
[00:11:27.200]enabled thousands of islanders and economic livelihood.
[00:11:32.080]The fulfillment of the promise of economic
[00:11:34.480]prosperity came at a great cost to the thousands of cases of cancer
[00:11:38.840]due to radioactive substances dispersed throughout the biosphere were discovered.
[00:11:43.360]Houses, hotels and resorts, destroyed land and displaced local inhabitants.
[00:11:47.400]And the change in the social makeup of the
[00:11:49.000]existing society had a devastating human toll on the indigenous population.
[00:11:54.520]Many Maori writers
[00:11:55.800]have addressed the nuclear testing period in the works,
[00:11:58.800]including Chantelle Spitz and her 1991 novel, The Kasi,
[00:12:03.520]which is available in translation as the island of Shattered Dreams.
[00:12:07.160]Which I recommend as a starting point
[00:12:09.040]if you're interested in reading about this period.
[00:12:12.240]Today, I will discuss a more recent novel published in 2010.
[00:12:16.280]Woman Season Gypsy Before the Rainy Season
[00:12:19.280]by writer Riley Shores.
[00:12:22.240]In this novel, Shadows brings attention to the physical consequences
[00:12:25.640]of nuclear testing and the toxicity of the water sources.
[00:12:30.200]So almost ten years after the final test in the archipelago,
[00:12:33.320]during a politically turbulent period in Tahiti,
[00:12:36.880]the novel is a complicated set of intertwined histories
[00:12:40.000]of three separate principal characters, with the female character
[00:12:43.040]dominating the text,
[00:12:45.120]Chaz's female
[00:12:46.280]characters and most of her works are ravaged by breast cancers.
[00:12:50.080]In the middle of this novel, the principal female character who
[00:12:54.840]watches a documentary on cancers in Tahiti, she comments to her boyfriend.
[00:12:59.000]We have 500 cases of cancer per year.
[00:13:01.920]One out of five women has breast cancer and not a single oncologist.
[00:13:05.280]In Tahiti, an entire population is dying and France keeps saying
[00:13:09.400]they have the only inoffensive bomb in the world.
[00:13:12.880]The character explicitly critiques France's inaction in providing
[00:13:16.440]care to its population and France's refusal to acknowledge
[00:13:20.000]the devastation nuclear colonialism caused in the archipelago.
[00:13:24.240]Indeed, although in 2010, France passed a law
[00:13:27.280]authorizing reparations to be made to victims of radiation from nuclear testing,
[00:13:31.680]it was not until 2016 that then French President Francois Hollande
[00:13:36.440]vocalized the acknowledgment of the environmental and corporeal impact.
[00:13:40.400]Nuclear testing had on the islands and their inhabitants.
[00:13:45.320]By the end of his novel,
[00:13:47.080]following the death of her grandmother and anticipating that of her mother,
[00:13:50.640]the female narrator questions Who won't die of cancer in our islands?
[00:13:55.880]Resigned to the idea that this is the fate of our country's citizens.
[00:13:59.800]While the blame rests on nuclear colonialism, she does not view
[00:14:02.840]France as a sole, responsible actor moving forward.
[00:14:06.760]She cites one of our
[00:14:09.120]two Haitian writers, which is actually the author herself.
[00:14:12.320]I think that in the coming years, intellectuals and artists
[00:14:15.000]will have to take part in this time.
[00:14:17.080]In contrast to the independence fight, we will not have the luxury
[00:14:20.120]of fighting colonizers.
[00:14:21.640]It is ourselves that we have to fight.
[00:14:24.480]The author has the presence to recognize that the battle to save
[00:14:27.240]the country rests in the hands of the oceanian people themselves.
[00:14:31.160]Specifically in the hands of intellectuals and artists.
[00:14:34.360]Essence Essentially for us, and arguably for all the writers
[00:14:37.680]I'm discussing tonight,
[00:14:39.200]imaginative writing and artistic creations are forms of activism that confront
[00:14:43.200]what Rob Nixon has called violence, bringing attention to the incremental
[00:14:48.240]and exponential long gains of populations often ignored in an age of climate crisis
[00:14:54.880]and slow violence and the environmentalism with the poor.
[00:14:57.760]Nixon suggests that it is up to writer activists to make slow violence
[00:15:01.960]or the effects
[00:15:02.600]of contamination of pollution that slowly destroy vulnerable populations
[00:15:07.160]visible to the wider public by tapping into the power of the human imagination.
[00:15:12.120]Writer activists, he says, can give imaginative, imaginative definition
[00:15:16.680]to catastrophes that often remain impotent, imperceptible to the senses.
[00:15:21.320]Catastrophes that unfold across a time span that exceeds
[00:15:24.400]the instance of observation or even the life of the human observer.
[00:15:29.520]The stories and poetry we're discussing, discussing tonight do just that.
[00:15:33.400]They make what is difficult to comprehend on a global scale,
[00:15:37.680]much more understandable to our brains.
[00:15:39.960]We need this information to be scaled to a level that we can wrap our minds around.
[00:15:44.720]Elizabeth Lowry has argued that island,
[00:15:47.160]that the island is perfect for thinking for global climate challenges
[00:15:51.040]because of its scalability and its susceptibility to radical change.
[00:15:55.480]She writes, If we have learned anything from globalization
[00:15:58.040]studies, it is that a planetary scale needs to be placed
[00:16:00.880]in a dialectical relation with the local to render their narratives meaningful.
[00:16:07.040]I'd like to turn now
[00:16:08.320]to one of the other archipelagos I focus on in my research galaxy.
[00:16:12.680]New Caledonia, located close to Australia and New Zealand.
[00:16:17.040]You might have heard of it in the news in the past few years, as Tesla has invested
[00:16:21.480]in one of the largest nickel mining plants in this nickel rich archipelago.
[00:16:26.240]Nickel was discovered on the main island soon after.
[00:16:29.200]It was colonized by the French in 1853.
[00:16:32.320]Over the past nearly two centuries, several different nickel
[00:16:35.560]booms attracted European investors who settled this place?
[00:16:38.960]The indigenous people, and progressively turned
[00:16:42.240]the connect people into a minority group on their native lands.
[00:16:45.640]The nickel mining industry
[00:16:46.800]has affected the air quality of the capital city of Noumea
[00:16:50.000]and is known to degrade natural ecosystems, forests and the lagoon.
[00:16:54.960]The mining industry insists on its commitment to fostering
[00:16:57.760]biodiversity and reducing its energy and climate footprint.
[00:17:01.200]At the same time, scientists continue to find examples of the toxic dust
[00:17:05.400]the mines and refineries perpetually release into the air.
[00:17:09.440]There have also
[00:17:09.920]been numerous spills into rivers that have caused
[00:17:13.000]water safety crises and these impacts.
[00:17:16.400]These crises impact the rural connectivity to be on a more urgent level
[00:17:19.840]than they do to largely European populated Noumea.
[00:17:22.800]But they impact everyone regardless of their social roles.
[00:17:27.240]Several of the Kanak and Caledonian writers
[00:17:29.560]I work on include scathing
[00:17:30.800]critiques of the mining industry, of the environmental injustices
[00:17:34.080]in which it has engaged and about its impact
[00:17:37.640]on the ancestral land.
[00:17:40.320]Danny Pearl Harbor is a writer currently living in France.
[00:17:45.240]I find his poetry particularly moving because he somehow combines
[00:17:48.960]a celebration of his land
[00:17:50.560]with a blistering condemnation of the nickel mining industry,
[00:17:54.840]the capitalistic society of overconsumption that has accompanied
[00:17:58.160]it, and the contributors, the contributions the industry industry
[00:18:02.200]has made to climate change.
[00:18:04.280]The collection,
[00:18:05.520]Holger or the Taro Garden, published in 2010, includes some of the most
[00:18:11.080]beautiful descriptions of his native land, situated alongside these critiques.
[00:18:16.520]One of his most poignant poems is titled Swept
[00:18:20.000]by N Pagan History and Please forgive my translation.
[00:18:23.400]This is a really hard poem to translate, so it contains a severe condemnation
[00:18:29.000]of the effects of neo colonialism, including the erasure of Kanak history
[00:18:33.760]and explicit references to the pollution he has seen destroy his land.
[00:18:38.040]The poem begins with on a turquoise stand of toxic resin.
[00:18:42.160]The enormous wave of our pagan morals got stuck, washed up, roughed up.
[00:18:47.520]The poet implies that the values of this consumer society,
[00:18:50.680]without respect for the earth, like waves disappear when they encounter
[00:18:53.920]the land, are washed up on a toxic, polluted beach.
[00:18:58.600]Recalling the familial relationship between Earth and man
[00:19:01.800]that is the foundation of the Connect belief system, Okawa warns his readers.
[00:19:06.760]The earth, the sea, the sky, our mother and veritable cosmic family.
[00:19:11.280]Before the industrial poisons spreading common crime, swallows and digests
[00:19:15.600]the planet where vengeance is being plotted.
[00:19:19.320]The poet worries about a neocolonial, imperialistic attitude
[00:19:22.800]that ignores the suffocation of the oceans and the beaches of Oceania
[00:19:26.800]and environmental violence that transforms the island
[00:19:29.400]into an island of lies of profit, which is another line
[00:19:32.560]from a different poem in the same collection.
[00:19:36.000]The last lines of the poem are not hopeful,
[00:19:38.560]as are some of the other poems of the collection, but rather apocalyptic.
[00:19:42.920]On a turquoise sand of fuming resident of Fisher, Pigeon
[00:19:45.960]history will delude itself.
[00:19:47.360]Next, what seems to warn the reader that the way humans have been treating
[00:19:52.040]the Earth is not only unsustainable, but that we have made human existence
[00:19:55.680]dangerous to ourselves.
[00:19:58.080]O'Hara's
[00:19:58.600]poetry is similar to Cathy Kidder's work.
[00:20:02.000]Remember I cited her at the beginning of the talk
[00:20:05.920]in that it primarily uses the present or the present progressive tenses.
[00:20:10.280]So in other words,
[00:20:11.240]the poets describe what they currently see or what is currently happening.
[00:20:15.320]Here is where grammar can come into play and help
[00:20:18.440]urgency with regard to climate change.
[00:20:21.480]The poets, for the most part, are not to use the future tense to speak
[00:20:26.000]about or predict what will or could happen in the relatively near future.
[00:20:30.240]But what seems too many too far in the future.
[00:20:33.520]The goal date for a 50% reduction in greenhouse emissions in the US
[00:20:37.960]is set at 2030.
[00:20:40.080]For most people, this seems like much too far of a future
[00:20:42.960]worry to be concerned with what we've been dealing, to be concerned with
[00:20:46.960]when we've been dealing with the now years long pandemic.
[00:20:50.120]And we've seen inflation rise exponentially over the last year
[00:20:53.400]and now prices seem to be staying high and people are just really worried
[00:20:56.400]about how you're going to get food on the table.
[00:20:59.400]So what
[00:21:00.640]does is the future tense in the last dance of the poem?
[00:21:03.720]But as you can see, poem is primarily in the present.
[00:21:08.280]The poets I've mentioned today and their island communities
[00:21:11.320]are not facing a future problem.
[00:21:13.720]They're facing and now problem.
[00:21:15.920]Indeed, as Elizabeth the Lowry remarks,
[00:21:19.280]turning to Indigenous and post-colonial island writers and artists,
[00:21:23.200]we can see the catastrophic ruptures to social and ecological systems
[00:21:27.000]have already been experienced through the violent processes of empire.
[00:21:31.120]In other words, the apocalypse has already happened.
[00:21:34.800]Island writers provide a more urgent perspective on climate change,
[00:21:38.720]and they can communicate its threats in a way that renders
[00:21:41.200]the unimaginable imaginable.
[00:21:45.440]Finally have recently
[00:21:46.720]begun examining literature from the Indian Ocean.
[00:21:49.720]So now we're going to go travel from the Pacific Ocean to the Indian Ocean.
[00:21:54.480]Mauritius is an independent island
[00:21:56.800]country located close to the French Department of LA Union.
[00:22:00.920]It's a region of intense literary, creative city.
[00:22:04.920]Mauritius was uninhabited when it was discovered by Portuguese explorers in 1507.
[00:22:11.040]The island and the surrounding islands of
[00:22:13.880]La Liga and the Chagos Archipelago underwent several changes of colonial
[00:22:18.320]hands from the Dutch in the 17th century to the French in the 18th
[00:22:21.560]to British control from 1810 until then versus became
[00:22:25.280]independent in 1968.
[00:22:28.560]Throughout the centuries, the Dutch, the French and the British
[00:22:31.280]brought enslaved Africans to the islands to work on sugar and tobacco plantations.
[00:22:36.080]Following the abolition of slavery in 1833, British planters
[00:22:39.720]brought indentured servants servants from India to work the sugar cane fields,
[00:22:44.400]contributing to what is now an incredibly diverse demographic makeup.
[00:22:49.000]The 1960s in Mauritius, like in much of the world, was a turbulent decade.
[00:22:53.720]It was during this decade that the archipelago became a site
[00:22:56.280]for a contemporary Western military presence
[00:22:58.480]that would forever impact the island's socially, economically and ecologically
[00:23:03.720]ferocious have long been pursuing independence.
[00:23:06.840]To achieve this goal,
[00:23:09.200]the Morrison Government agreed to cede
[00:23:11.400]the nearby struggles islands to the British, who would then lease them
[00:23:15.440]to the United States for a strategically located military base.
[00:23:19.680]In so doing, approximately 2000 Douglas Islanders
[00:23:23.400]who did not speak Mauritian, Creole, French or English were expelled
[00:23:27.640]from Chagas archipelago and were forcibly moved to Mauritius or the Seychelles.
[00:23:32.800]Between the years of 1965 and 1973,
[00:23:37.480]there was a great piece about this in The Atlantic in the summer of 2022.
[00:23:41.120]If you want to look it up
[00:23:44.120]so you don't see the shadows
[00:23:47.000]or the Silence of the Shadows, a novel written by Mauritian officer Shahnaz Papel
[00:23:52.080]first published 2005 and republished in 2018
[00:23:55.960]and translated into English in 2019,
[00:23:59.200]focuses explicitly on the human impact of the military's sick,
[00:24:02.960]hide or colonial appropriation of island territory and the shackles
[00:24:07.760]really quickly.
[00:24:09.040]Colonialism is a relatively new term
[00:24:11.800]coined by Isabel Hofmeyr in 2019,
[00:24:15.840]and Hofmeyr is a specialist in South
[00:24:18.160]and in the Indian Ocean literature.
[00:24:20.960]She suggests that the meanings of hydro
[00:24:23.640]hydro colonialism could include colonization
[00:24:26.920]by way of water, various forms of maritime imperialism,
[00:24:31.720]colonization of water, occupation of land with water resources, the declaration of
[00:24:36.360]territorial waters, and the militarization and geo politicization of oceans.
[00:24:41.080]And three a colony on or in water.
[00:24:44.320]I think all of these definitions
[00:24:45.640]apply to the struggles and morass of Mauritius situation.
[00:24:49.440]Patel's novel spans geographical, chronological and territorial boundaries.
[00:24:54.440]Excluding between the present day and several years of the 1960s
[00:24:57.920]and seventies in the lives of three chagossian refugees,
[00:25:01.560]in the struggles in Mauritius and in the waters in between.
[00:25:05.400]Through the three principal characters,
[00:25:07.280]Shelly Hammond and Daisy Faye are based on real people.
[00:25:11.200]The reader learns of the Chagossian people's forced deportation
[00:25:14.120]from their homeland.
[00:25:15.040]The hardships they endure forcibly exiled in an industrial and touristic Mauritius
[00:25:20.080]and their unwavering longing to return home, or for one of the characters,
[00:25:24.120]a longing to understand where home is as he is born aboard the ship while
[00:25:28.480]his mother was being deported from the shadows
[00:25:32.720]at Islands Coast office
[00:25:34.480]to the 2018 republication of Lost Travels recounts the drama
[00:25:38.840]of the illegal detachment of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in the 1960s
[00:25:43.400]and seventies to the more recent debates before the UN
[00:25:47.200]Assembly to reconstitute the archipelago as a part of the independent Mauritius.
[00:25:53.200]In this post space, she mentions the attempted use
[00:25:56.040]in 2010 of ecological conservation maneuvers to designate the Chagos a marine
[00:26:02.160]protected area, making the archipelago a no take fishing zone.
[00:26:08.000]Patel points out the irony of
[00:26:09.600]this attempt when it was discovered that this designation
[00:26:13.040]was a delay tactic with the goal of blocking the Chagossians demand
[00:26:17.120]to return, presenting their reinstallation as a threat to the Marine Reserve.
[00:26:21.440]A giant irony because notably around this perimeter, nuclear submarines circulate
[00:26:27.320]well.
[00:26:27.520]She notes that the US and Great Britain were admittedly being disingenuous
[00:26:31.280]about the reasons behind the new designation.
[00:26:34.680]It is important to acknowledge the history of imperial powers
[00:26:37.680]that often engage in the erasure of entire minority
[00:26:40.880]populations inhabiting what those powers deemed terra nullius.
[00:26:45.400]And this is kind of similar to what the US and Canada have done
[00:26:48.680]to indigenous populations when determining the borders of national parks.
[00:26:53.200]The Chagossian people were portrayed as a threat to struggle island ecology
[00:26:57.680]while the military tried to portray themselves as protecting wildlife.
[00:27:02.200]What is even more ironic about the arguments the military
[00:27:04.760]makes regarding maintaining Diego Garcia as a protected site
[00:27:09.400]is the removal of the coconut palms, the Chagossians planted
[00:27:12.680]during the plantation period that have now been deemed suppressors of biodiversity,
[00:27:18.040]effectively the removal of the coconut palms
[00:27:20.440]further erases chagossian history with their land.
[00:27:23.720]It is noteworthy that the island of Aldabra in the Seychelles
[00:27:27.640]was originally selected as a location for US military base,
[00:27:32.720]but because of the existence there of rare and protected
[00:27:35.960]tortoise and seabirds species, it was rejected
[00:27:40.040]viewing the
[00:27:40.600]Chagossians not as a group of human beings,
[00:27:43.760]but rather a few Tarzan and men Fridays whose origins are obscure,
[00:27:48.000]which was an actual quote from a British sailor,
[00:27:52.280]allowed the British and the US to erase the existence
[00:27:54.800]of the human population that had inhabited that environment for two centuries.
[00:27:59.480]The human population did not get the protection the tortoises of the station
[00:28:03.520]did. I argue that Patel's novel is an attempt to situate the human
[00:28:08.120]population, the chagossian, as a part of the environment itself,
[00:28:13.120]but our bodies suffering under colonial rule and environmental violence
[00:28:18.040]at the end of was shallow, Shalev explains.
[00:28:24.080]They have risked everything and ignored everything.
[00:28:26.480]Even our cemeteries, even the tombs of our ancestors.
[00:28:30.760]The evocation of cemeteries and tombs
[00:28:32.720]draws attention to the link between body and earth.
[00:28:35.920]Bodies here are literally buried in the earth
[00:28:38.680]and to the violence of empire and the assessment of human history.
[00:28:42.920]This novel complicates the idea of protecting the environment
[00:28:46.600]and the question who or what is actually being protected.
[00:28:51.960]This novel may not discuss climate change per se day,
[00:28:55.000]but it does draw attention to the impact of hydro colonialism
[00:28:58.360]and environmental racism on island communities.
[00:29:02.000]As the editors of Pacific Islander literatures remind us,
[00:29:05.400]this types of stories are responses to the possibility of a future without islands.
[00:29:10.480]They are shaped out of explaining what existence is
[00:29:13.600]and what our terms of existence are as islanders.
[00:29:16.560]They name how histories of annihilation from colonial invasion to nuclear testing
[00:29:21.120]are directly linked to the structures of power
[00:29:23.200]that trivialize ignore and erase the impacts of climate change.
[00:29:27.120]Our response is to create
[00:29:29.720]these stories.
[00:29:30.840]True stories
[00:29:32.160]help those of us living in North America or Europe or China
[00:29:35.080]or India, or any of the major contributors to neo colonial globalization,
[00:29:39.040]industrialization, resource extraction, air and water pollution.
[00:29:42.840]Recognize the impact of what our countries are responsible for.
[00:29:46.840]And I don't think we should feel guilty about that, by the way.
[00:29:50.160]We should feel empowered to do something about it.
[00:29:54.200]So what can literature do for the Earth?
[00:29:57.920]I'd like to return to Moana to attempt
[00:30:00.840]to answer this question, Despite all the critiques I have of it.
[00:30:04.880]As I said earlier, I loved this film for its depictions of maritime
[00:30:09.280]navigational technologies and for its focus on storytelling.
[00:30:13.960]Moana. The film is not a brand new story.
[00:30:16.720]It's a compilation of many stories based on Pan Polynesian mythologies
[00:30:21.000]and genealogies handed down to the new generations over thousands of years.
[00:30:25.800]The character of Maui, with all his flaws, has his tattoos,
[00:30:31.160]has his stories tattooed all over his body.
[00:30:33.560]Like the time he he's near the sun.
[00:30:36.280]The fact that this Disney movie that came out in 2016 to recount stories
[00:30:40.720]that have been with the Polynesian people for centuries is a testament
[00:30:44.200]to the durability and the impact of stories of literature.
[00:30:49.040]The impact of a story can beat forever,
[00:30:51.760]and that impact is on us.
[00:30:54.120]The question I asked at the beginning of this talk
[00:30:56.240]should be more accurately what can literature
[00:30:59.360]do to us to think through sustainable futures?
[00:31:03.480]Literature isn't going to save the planet on its own,
[00:31:06.800]but it has a power that science just doesn't have.
[00:31:09.400]My apologies to the scientists in the room.
[00:31:12.240]Clearly, we need sciences.
[00:31:13.960]This is an and not an either or situation.
[00:31:18.000]Literature evokes our empathy.
[00:31:20.200]It connects us with communities other than our own and enables us
[00:31:24.000]to think differently and creatively and critically about possible solutions
[00:31:28.040]to complex problems.
[00:31:29.600]How can share?
[00:31:31.040]How we might elicit empathy and others, and how we might effectively
[00:31:35.560]persuade people to think about the impacts of their everyday choices?
[00:31:40.040]Since I think the words of creative writers and activists
[00:31:42.840]fighting for a sustainable future are more powerful than my own words,
[00:31:46.400]I'll finish the way I started with the words of Cathy Janell Kitchener
[00:31:50.640]in the afterword of the Pacific Islander eco Literatures book.
[00:31:53.800]I've been bringing up so much
[00:31:56.520]science reports, movements and negotiations.
[00:31:59.800]All of these have shorter memory than the sharp rock formation
[00:32:03.560]rising out of the reef.
[00:32:04.640]Or I turn back to poetry again and again, not for escape or for luxury,
[00:32:09.760]but to remind me that the emotions beneath the surface of the work are necessary,
[00:32:13.760]deeply necessary to sustain myself and our communities,
[00:32:17.840]that there is something beneath us all that extends beyond each of us
[00:32:20.720]that has survived and will continue to survive.
[00:32:23.800]Thank you.
[00:32:31.480]I want to just leave it on that page.
[00:32:59.360]I thank you so much for this talk, Julia.
[00:33:03.960]I invite the audience to ask questions and people listening online.
[00:33:09.080]I'm here to take your questions as well.
[00:33:10.760]So anyone who's ready with a question, please
[00:33:14.160]just raise your hand.
[00:33:19.840]Hi, Julia.
[00:33:20.280]Thank you for this wonderful presentation.
[00:33:24.000]I want to ask you now that you put at the forefront
[00:33:27.400]the importance of literature in teaching empathy through stories.
[00:33:31.360]What is the best way a public university can support
[00:33:34.560]this type of teaching to our undergrad students?
[00:33:38.000]Being?
[00:33:41.720]There are a lot of ways
[00:33:45.000]that I'll keep our classes open.
[00:33:52.680]Sorry.
[00:33:54.040]It's a great question.
[00:33:55.280]It's more complicated things, more.
[00:34:00.280]Julia, thank you very much.
[00:34:02.240]Excellent.
[00:34:02.920]And you made me think a lot
[00:34:03.840]about a lot of things about islands and literature, too.
[00:34:05.840]I was thinking with this poem is struck by In what a poem?
[00:34:09.640]Incredible.
[00:34:10.360]The very powerful in thinking about your interpretation of it.
[00:34:14.480]That the the apocalypse in the Bible is written in an island
[00:34:18.720]right in the most island to the mainland.
[00:34:22.280]Thinking about Islander literature was also thinking how our discourse
[00:34:26.080]of politicians and of the media tends to separate discourses.
[00:34:31.400]Empire is one thing. War is another issue.
[00:34:34.280]Climate change is another issue.
[00:34:36.040]Migration is another issue.
[00:34:37.800]And the way you were talking about literature, what you said about islands,
[00:34:40.880]making things relatable also makes them relational, right?
[00:34:45.280]Like like literature has the ability within academia to try to explain
[00:34:50.000]how all these things are connected,
[00:34:51.760]but we are boring and write long books about it.
[00:34:55.120]Literature has the ability to do that in a poem, right?
[00:34:57.760]I mean, I was thinking about MLK last talk
[00:35:00.920]that when he connects poverty in Latin America with Vietnam,
[00:35:04.640]with with imperialism, colonialism was that great work of literature.
[00:35:08.400]That last speech he he gives in.
[00:35:11.880]I feel like in your presentation,
[00:35:13.680]it seems like literature is one thing, but islands is another one, right?
[00:35:17.080]That in the way you're speaking about, islands that since islands have been key
[00:35:20.920]for Empire over so many centuries as a site of military free strength
[00:35:27.800]strategy.
[00:35:28.480]Right.
[00:35:28.960]But also as the site of experimentation for empires, islands
[00:35:32.680]kind of to kind of see the interconnection
[00:35:36.120]of all these things more clearly, more relatable.
[00:35:39.000]So all of that is brilliant.
[00:35:40.720]My question for you
[00:35:42.640]is that all this ability that you see in islands and literature to connect
[00:35:47.440]all these things that we see us have read it, all these things are terrible, right?
[00:35:53.320]In in moments of anxiety, I wonder if islands in literature
[00:35:58.600]only give us the awareness of all that world ending that is happening.
[00:36:04.720]Or if the other thing if they can give us to the
[00:36:08.520]Yeah the way to rebel against those bad things.
[00:36:11.360]Yeah I was actually thinking about this as
[00:36:13.320]I was preparing this talk and this just happens to be, you know, some of the
[00:36:18.640]some of the stuff that I've been working on more recently.
[00:36:21.000]But there are more hopeful
[00:36:24.320]pieces of literature.
[00:36:25.480]And I think that's actually what we need.
[00:36:30.080]We do we do need help, right?
[00:36:32.640]We can't read everything, all these apocalyptic stories, all the qualify
[00:36:36.440]and everything and think I'm in the world is the ending.
[00:36:39.560]There's nothing we can do about it.
[00:36:40.800]We need to feel hopeful so that we can feel empowered to do something about it.
[00:36:45.320]And I think that's kind of what happy Journal sitting here says at the end here.
[00:36:50.520]And that's why I wanted to
[00:36:53.840]include this
[00:36:56.720]excerpt from it.
[00:36:58.120]This is from and this is from her post piece of this
[00:37:03.840]collection.
[00:37:06.720]But I think, you know,
[00:37:07.840]what is hopeful is that there is this built, this need to survive
[00:37:12.320]and that there is this enduring quality of literature
[00:37:17.760]that kind of encourage us that it can survive.
[00:37:21.040]I think also what
[00:37:23.520]is hopeful is this Maui, right?
[00:37:26.280]That's
[00:37:28.920]this idea
[00:37:29.560]that Disney Pixar picks up on these stories that have been
[00:37:33.880]with the Polynesian people for centuries.
[00:37:36.920]Right.
[00:37:37.360]And does a movie about it in 2016. Right.
[00:37:40.360]So it's proof that this literature
[00:37:43.680]and maybe it was oral history, but that counts as literature to me,
[00:37:48.120]it's proof that it lasts a long time
[00:37:50.800]and that and that
[00:37:53.840]we are going to be able to survive.
[00:37:57.080]So, you know, I think that's what I see in it.
[00:38:01.760]And I, I think, yeah, we definitely need more hopeful literature.
[00:38:05.000]That's true.
[00:38:07.440]But I think one of the things that were talking about
[00:38:10.040]is this connection between Empire and islands and all this stuff.
[00:38:14.360]And if you've read Jason Moore's capital scene,
[00:38:18.320]is that how you pronounce it in English?
[00:38:21.360]IN Yeah, Capital of Sin.
[00:38:24.160]And he talks about how we shouldn't really be talking about the Anthropocene.
[00:38:27.240]We should be talking about capitalism and about how capitalism,
[00:38:31.400]the beginning of capitalism is really like the beginning of slavery, right?
[00:38:34.920]And how that is what contributed
[00:38:37.760]to all of the climate catastrophe that we're in today.
[00:38:42.960]So, yeah, I see that link in all of this.
[00:38:53.160]Okay.
[00:38:54.000]So obviously a lot of the islands that we talked about today speak French.
[00:38:59.600]You are a French professor.
[00:39:00.680]That makes sense. That's a great connection.
[00:39:02.720]But for those of us who may not have great French
[00:39:06.600]or speak indigenous languages, what media or literature would you recommend
[00:39:10.880]we connect with outside of the 2016 Moana movie?
[00:39:15.200]To learn more about these experiences like English language?
[00:39:20.200]Yeah, it's a great question.
[00:39:22.280]There's a ton of literature that's coming out of
[00:39:26.200]Australia, New Zealand, the Marshall Islands, Cathy Britnell,
[00:39:29.040]Kitchener, she writes her poetry and in English.
[00:39:34.200]So there there's a lot that Santos parents
[00:39:40.600]is a moral writer.
[00:39:42.560]He's from Guam and he he writes eco poetry.
[00:39:48.480]I'm trying to think of all the other examples
[00:39:50.920]I don't read very much in English, to be totally honest, but
[00:39:57.520]oh yeah, Island of Shudder.
[00:39:58.560]Yeah, that would be.
[00:39:59.400]Yeah. And it's translated.
[00:40:01.640]So it was written originally in French and it's translated in English
[00:40:05.360]and there are more novels being translated
[00:40:10.120]into English.
[00:40:11.160]Lucy discovers the Silence of the Shadows was translated in 2019
[00:40:14.920]by somebody you may all have met.
[00:40:16.960]Geoffrey Zuckerman.
[00:40:18.400]We brought him to campus a couple of years ago, so.
[00:40:21.560]Oh, yeah.
[00:40:22.000]I mean, being related more frequently.
[00:40:25.800]But yeah, I mean, there's a ton of English language.
[00:40:30.840]Carrie, who
[00:40:32.600]from New Zealand now,
[00:40:35.080]goes, Oh, Albert went, Albert went is amazing.
[00:40:39.120]Yeah.
[00:40:43.280]Thank you so much for your for this wonderful presentation.
[00:40:45.960]Very informative for me.
[00:40:47.280]I'm not
[00:40:50.600]I don't read a lot about the islands on the trip.
[00:40:54.000]I like islands so very interesting.
[00:40:58.120]But I want to touch upon on your interest on Juan.
[00:41:01.480]And we've been seeing recently
[00:41:06.120]an interest of Disney on the Global South, right.
[00:41:10.960]With Moana and then Coco and then Encanto and all these movies.
[00:41:14.600]And I just can make my peace with that because I, I,
[00:41:19.160]I can't like, I hate Coco deeply, but I just want to see your perspective on.
[00:41:25.160]Do you think these you said that they that they provide
[00:41:29.000]very problematic representation of of the lives of of the
[00:41:35.720]of the people of the island peoples.
[00:41:37.760]But I want to see I want to know what do you think?
[00:41:40.880]How do you see these kind of movies?
[00:41:43.040]Do you think they reinforce laws and contribute
[00:41:46.720]to the colonial project
[00:41:50.240]in terms of now?
[00:41:51.240]I mean, people don't read right, but they have access to these movies, right?
[00:41:57.520]So I want to know, what do you what do you think of how these movies
[00:42:00.760]either contribute to the to these discourses of
[00:42:04.800]of the island people being.
[00:42:07.880]Yeah, you know, yeah, yeah.
[00:42:10.800]Or do they maybe provided
[00:42:13.680]another insight of how we should
[00:42:17.600]understand. Yeah.
[00:42:19.280]This community.
[00:42:21.640]Yeah I think both I think they provide images of
[00:42:24.120]like really problematic stereotypes at the same time.
[00:42:28.880]All those tattoos on Maui's body are actual
[00:42:33.440]like Polynesian tattoos
[00:42:37.360]that you can find on Polynesian people, and they're representative
[00:42:43.160]of actual legends of the Polynesian people.
[00:42:49.680]The whole the focus on the maritime
[00:42:51.720]voyaging and using the canoe and everything, like that's a real thing.
[00:42:55.880]And that navigational technology was so sophisticated, right,
[00:42:59.720]for thousands of years ago. It's it's amazing.
[00:43:02.520]So I think that brings those things to light and I think that's a good thing.
[00:43:06.560]I know that the Hawaiian people were pretty happy for the most part
[00:43:10.800]with the representation, with having used indigenous voices.
[00:43:14.600]They were not super happy with all of the representations.
[00:43:18.560]But, you know, for the most part, I think they were pretty happy.
[00:43:21.120]There was a huge debacle in Tahiti when it came out in French because in
[00:43:27.120]in the English version they use
[00:43:30.040]Hawaiian or someone people
[00:43:32.720]to to do the voices, but they used French
[00:43:35.760]with French accents to do the to the the voiceover
[00:43:40.480]and for the viana is what it's called in in French.
[00:43:45.480]And that was like a huge problem because they didn't use the Haitian voices.
[00:43:48.960]And there are Polynesian people
[00:43:50.880]that speak French that could have done those voiceovers.
[00:43:53.800]So that was a big debacle.
[00:43:55.320]So I mean, both is the short answer to
[00:44:01.280]how. Thank you so much for that presentation.
[00:44:04.640]Julia, you know how much I mean to these same topics.
[00:44:07.640]So I really appreciate to hear perspectives
[00:44:10.720]from from the Pacific Islands where I'm not that much experience yet.
[00:44:15.200]Right.
[00:44:15.920]And, and I was thinking maybe, maybe
[00:44:19.040]I don't know if I have questions or comments
[00:44:21.000]because I feel like I'm so passionate about this.
[00:44:23.120]I had to say something, right?
[00:44:24.560]And then I was thinking how important it is.
[00:44:27.520]Also that consideration of the ocean into these discussions, right?
[00:44:31.680]Rather than just not only placing the island in the center
[00:44:34.840]of the conversation about how the islanders negotiation,
[00:44:38.520]negotiating with the waters and the ocean, because I feel like
[00:44:42.520]from continental perspectives, every time that we are engaging
[00:44:46.040]into ecological discussions, right from indigenous perspectives
[00:44:50.160]and in in in the United States, obviously we refer to that connection with BLM.
[00:44:55.360]Right.
[00:44:56.080]And when we talk about that connection with the land.
[00:44:58.840]Sometimes I feel like in these discourses, the ocean is always something
[00:45:02.800]that is there and maybe to go on a cruise, right?
[00:45:07.680]And because we are missing that, there is also military
[00:45:10.760]presence in the ocean, that the ocean can also be divided in borders.
[00:45:14.200]Right.
[00:45:14.640]That is not that visible.
[00:45:16.360]Right, as we see arbitrary. Yes. Yes.
[00:45:19.560]And I feel like that is something that is very important for
[00:45:24.840]for us to consider how ecological problems
[00:45:28.360]and issues are affecting us inland because of what is happening in the ocean.
[00:45:32.680]And then so that's thing I was thinking from your presentation.
[00:45:36.720]Another thing is that that quote from Elizabeth Dolores,
[00:45:42.320]it was so
[00:45:44.080]important for me when I'm reading Caribbean literature because
[00:45:49.680]Melanie Perez Ortiz is also talking about these.
[00:45:53.080]And what I see important is that in this Islander literature,
[00:45:56.560]we are seeing things that have already happened.
[00:45:59.760]When we talk about the apocalypse, we we seems to be talking about something
[00:46:04.400]that is going to be now and that is going to affect us, everybody, Right.
[00:46:08.280]But in this sense, we know that the apocalypse happened
[00:46:11.280]to the indigenous communities, to racialized communities.
[00:46:14.120]They already left the end of the world.
[00:46:16.600]Right.
[00:46:17.240]And I was thinking, because I'm interested in the Caribbean,
[00:46:20.440]I don't know if you have any suggestion for me, if you know, because I know that
[00:46:23.920]you also studied the French Caribbean
[00:46:25.640]and is there any literature in the French Caribbean having these same
[00:46:31.600]discussions in literature or
[00:46:33.760]something that we can see also at the end of the world
[00:46:36.800]from the indigenous people in the Caribbean?
[00:46:39.200]Thank you. Yeah,
[00:46:42.240]that's a good question.
[00:46:44.720]I would I think she's a Latino
[00:46:46.680]who's from Guadeloupe, writes a lot about
[00:46:50.560]how the Caribbean people kind of
[00:46:54.960]measure time based off of hurricanes
[00:46:58.760]and how we have
[00:47:02.120]she really she includes hurricanes in almost all of her novels.
[00:47:08.000]So she wrote
[00:47:11.680]a detective novel
[00:47:13.320]called The Path from the Sea and the Perfume of Mermaids.
[00:47:20.280]I don't think it's been translated yet, and that is
[00:47:22.800]probably a horribly mangled translation.
[00:47:24.720]But yeah, she almost
[00:47:28.480]all of the events are kind of like structured
[00:47:31.480]around this hurricane.
[00:47:34.800]So. So I think that's an example.
[00:47:37.000]Exactly.
[00:47:37.680]Saul So his novels are really focused on this storm was all right.
[00:47:43.880]Patrick Summers from Martinique
[00:47:47.640]and Derek Walcott, you know,
[00:47:49.480]it's from the Caribbean of
[00:47:52.520]Yeah, I'll have to think about that too.
[00:47:54.880]About I don't forget
[00:47:57.680]I can't think of like a perfect example of a apocalyptic
[00:48:01.160]fiction, but Malcolm Ferdinand's
[00:48:04.960]decolonial ecologies would be.
[00:48:08.480]Oh, Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:48:12.080]It's a theoretical text, but it's helpful.
[00:48:15.640]Kind of an understanding.
[00:48:18.760]The idea of ecology in the Caribbean.
[00:48:24.680]Hi. Thank you for the presentation.
[00:48:26.560]I do have a question that sort of pushes back
[00:48:30.320]against what Louis just said,
[00:48:33.560]but it is because I cannot help.
[00:48:35.520]I am very interested in dystopias.
[00:48:37.920]Right.
[00:48:38.160]And dystopias are unavoidably
[00:48:42.200]into place quite by, as you called it lately.
[00:48:46.560]And I wonder, because I feel that negative aspects
[00:48:51.560]of push back against the effect of distance which makes
[00:48:56.120]the reader from the global north so safe in their environment.
[00:49:00.320]And I think of this picture that this summer in the
[00:49:04.840]these valley in was in Arizona, that they took a selfie
[00:49:08.480]with these thermal meter marking a record temperature.
[00:49:13.520]And then there was a common saying this seems
[00:49:16.880]as if it was the dinosaurs taking a selfie with a meteorite.
[00:49:21.200]And I was wondering if how
[00:49:23.600]can positive affects break that distance?
[00:49:27.360]Because as a reader from the global North,
[00:49:31.480]it feels it makes me breathe, it helps me breathe,
[00:49:34.160]It helps me think that there is time when there really isn't.
[00:49:37.440]Right.
[00:49:37.800]As you were saying earlier, these people are already living apocalypse.
[00:49:42.360]So should we have that ambivalence that. Yes.
[00:49:47.600]Yeah.
[00:49:48.160]You know, I do agree with you,
[00:49:52.560]this literature that kind of like this,
[00:49:55.160]the apocalypse is now literature helps me feel motivated.
[00:50:00.640]It doesn't make me feel discouraged,
[00:50:04.800]to be honest.
[00:50:05.400]It makes me kind of mad and it makes me really focused
[00:50:09.920]on what I can do, my own little part, you know?
[00:50:13.680]So I agree with you that I think the negative
[00:50:17.040]does really push us to act.
[00:50:20.520]I think maybe the idea of the positive
[00:50:23.840]is this the idea of that poetry is beautiful, right?
[00:50:27.600]It's X letter, it's esthetically beautiful and having something
[00:50:32.600]esthetically beautiful that moves us enough to want to do something
[00:50:39.840]is the positive part, I guess that I'm reading in it.
[00:50:43.040]But I think that most
[00:50:46.800]most people want to know what they can do and and
[00:50:49.840]and that there's that there is still time, but they need to have that urgency that.
[00:50:54.480]Okay, well, maybe not as much time as we thought.
[00:50:59.000]I don't know if anybody has seen this, but last week
[00:51:01.560]the Marshall Islands where Cathy, Janell Kitchener is from,
[00:51:06.560]did you see this YouTube the while it was on the news?
[00:51:09.200]So there was a military base that got a tidal wave
[00:51:12.840]just like comes in and like destroys the military base.
[00:51:16.920]These waves are just insane. Right?
[00:51:18.640]So it is happening now and
[00:51:21.800]and we have evidence that it's happening now.
[00:51:26.920]Yeah.
[00:51:27.760]So I think
[00:51:29.960]I think that literature can.
[00:51:32.000]But even the negative part where we're saying like it's happening
[00:51:35.760]now, we've got a lot of work that works for some people.
[00:51:39.080]But I do think that the positive aspects, right, like we have time, we can do it.
[00:51:44.800]We can do it is important for others, you know,
[00:51:50.520]your talk is clearly inspired a lot of people to do some more reading.
[00:51:54.120]So one of your online listeners
[00:51:57.640]asked, you know, for all of us in the audience with too many books
[00:52:00.680]already waiting for us, which book or author that you've mentioned
[00:52:04.280]would you recommend we begin with, and especially if you could
[00:52:07.880]choose something in English?
[00:52:10.320]Yeah, I would say
[00:52:12.240]the Island of Shattered Dreams that I mentioned earlier.
[00:52:16.000]This is the first novel by a maori writer.
[00:52:21.040]It was published in
[00:52:21.760]1991 in French and it was translated in 27.
[00:52:26.080]So the translator, it's a blurry, but the translator is Jean Anderson.
[00:52:31.680]And this is
[00:52:33.880]this is kind of like the foundational
[00:52:35.600]text of literature and
[00:52:39.840]so that that would be in English, that would be where I would start,
[00:52:44.400]that it gives the best kind of history slash
[00:52:48.920]poetry and esthetically pleasing
[00:52:53.080]overview of what happened
[00:52:55.600]in this plot.
[00:52:56.720]But it's not translated.
[00:52:58.480]I got to work on it.
[00:53:03.600]I we are coming to the end of our time, so I'm going to ask,
[00:53:06.320]make one little comment and then ask you to respond.
[00:53:09.640]I just loved your observation that it doesn't have to be the scientists
[00:53:13.960]or the poets.
[00:53:15.400]It can be both.
[00:53:16.280]And and I just so appreciate your participation in this,
[00:53:21.640]like in this series and everyone's participation.
[00:53:24.040]I see many of the former speakers here because I think it demonstrates
[00:53:27.520]how important it is to have the full range of representatives, you know,
[00:53:32.560]speaking to these issues and how how much we learn from all of them together.
[00:53:37.080]And I'm just asking you to respond to that in any way you see appropriate.
[00:53:40.880]And thank you so much for your talk to them.
[00:53:43.280]Thank you so much, Jane.
[00:53:45.040]That's a great question.
[00:53:45.760]Yes, I agree.
[00:53:46.680]We all kind of need to work together. And
[00:53:50.480]what's really exciting is there are a lot of initiatives
[00:53:53.400]here on campus that are trying to do this, like this series
[00:53:58.360]and the Climate Resilience Collaborative
[00:54:03.000]that has been working on a planning grant for ground challenges grant
[00:54:08.400]that really wants to bring together voices from across
[00:54:12.440]not just the university, but the community.
[00:54:15.720]It's not just academic that have a say, it's
[00:54:18.760]community members and everybody has a stake in this.
[00:54:23.080]And I think that's why it is possible for so many different voices.
[00:54:29.360]It is important and essential for all the different voices to contribute to that.
[00:54:34.800]Right, Because we all a stake in this.
[00:54:38.920]Thank you,

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Imagining Sustainable Futures: What Literature Can do for the Earth

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