By Mary Woodbury

This month we head to Beijing, China, as we talk with Cynthia Zhang, a Ph.D. student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the University of Southern California, about her newest novel After the Dragons (Stelliform Press, 2021).

ABOUT THE BOOK

Dragons were fire and terror to the Western world, but in the East they brought life-giving rain… Now, no longer hailed as gods and struggling in the overheated pollution of Beijing, only the Eastern dragons survive. As drought plagues the aquatic creatures, a mysterious disease – shaolong, or “burnt lung” – afflicts the city’s human inhabitants.

Jaded college student Xiang Kaifei scours Beijing streets for abandoned dragons, distracting himself from his diagnosis. Elijah Ahmed, a biracial American medical researcher, is drawn to Beijing by the memory of his grandmother and her death by shaolong. Interest in Beijing’s dragons leads Kai and Eli into an unlikely partnership. With the resources of Kai’s dragon rescue and Eli’s immunology research, can the pair find a cure for shaolong and safety for the dragons? Eli and Kai must confront old ghosts and hard truths if there is any hope for themselves or the dragons they love.

After the Dragons is a tender story, for readers interested in the effects of climate change on environments and people, but who don’t want a grim, hopeless read. Beautiful and challenging, focused on hope and care, this novel navigates the nuances of changing culture in a changing world.

Zhang’s portrayal of Beijing is rich with intimate details and subtle commentary on climate change, while the delightfully distinct dragons are seamlessly integrated. Despite being a slim novel, Zhang’s introspective fantasy has enormous heart and astonishing depth.

—Krista Hutley for Booklist

This is a slim, beautiful jewel-box of a novel. It is vividly atmospheric and feels real as if tiny flocks of dragons might sit on telephone lines in modern-day Beijing. It explores falling in love in the wake of grief and the ways in which we try to exert control over our lives. Its quiet intimacy will break your heart and give you hope – and also dragons. Perfect, beautifully drawn dragons. It’s a lovely debut and I look forward to seeing what Cynthia Zhang does next. 

—Mary Robinette Kowal, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of The Calculating Stars

The cover art for After the Dragons is by Wang Xulin, with typography and design by Yu-Lobbenberg Rachel.

A CHAT WITH THE AUTHOR

I love discovering new publishers and people whose voices are active in the field of what I like to think of as “rewilding our stories.” I follow Stelliform Press, the publisher of After the Dragons, on Twitter. That’s how I have become so taken by what they’re publishing and their environmental ethics. Can you tell us what it’s like to publish with Stelliform?

As someone who has only published one book, I obviously can’t speak much about the industry, but I personally really enjoyed publishing with Stelliform! While small presses don’t necessarily have the same brand recognition as a bigger press, I think if you’re looking for an intimate, hands-on process when publishing, it’s definitely a route you should consider.

I found Stelliform through social media as well, and I was really impressed with the individual support they give to their authors – at that point, I think they’d only put out two novellas and were in the process of putting out a third, so I was drawn to the idea of being part of this growing community of writers. Selena, my editor, has been very generous in terms of communication and support. As someone who previously felt a little disconnected from the wider writing community (ah, grad school), I’ve really appreciated that.

Like you, I was also drawn to Stelliform by their strong sense of ethics – my books (at least the copies I received) were published on recycled paper, and I really appreciate that all the book launches I’ve attended open with land acknowledgements and links to resources for people to learn more. In the grand scheme of things, these might seem like small changes when billionaires are taking joy rides to space every other week, but as socially conscious writers and activists, I think it’s still important to do what we can when we can.

I listened to an interview with you and Lovis Geier, vlogger at Ecofictology, and that drew me in more because I have often talked with her about books we love, and she’s definitely over the moon about After the Dragons! Can you let the readers know what’s going on in the book?

Definitely! So, After the Dragons is broadly about the relationship between two characters: Eli, who’s mixed-race Chinese and visiting Beijing for a summer research program, and Kai, a college student who spends his time taking care of Beijing’s abandoned dragons. They’re connected by a number of factors, with the primary one being shaolong, a respiratory disease caused by exposure to high levels of pollution. Eli’s grandmother died of the disease and his visit to Beijing is, in many ways, an attempt to understand her love for the city that killed her. When he learns that Kai also has shaolong, Eli is determined to do something to help. However, as a kid who grew up gay and highly self-sufficient, Kai bristles at the idea of outside help and only gives in when Eli comes up with a plan that also helps Kai’s dragons. Despite their differences, these two characters forge a friendship that gradually becomes something more.

Overall, there aren’t any big, dramatic moments in After the Dragons – no one discovers a miracle cure for shaolong or fights a corrupt government official, even if they really want to. Eli and Kai enact change, but they don’t solve the world’s problems or even Beijing’s. But as two young people trying to make a positive difference in a precarious world, I think Eli and Kai are characters who very much reflect the dilemma of living in the era of climate change.

One of the things you talked about with Lovis was the difference between Western and Eastern dragon myths. What is it about Chinese dragon mythology that attracted you?

When discussing Eastern versus Western dragons, two of the major distinctions people often ring up are that a) Eastern dragons are more commonly associated with water, not fire, meaning that b) they’re generally seen as a lot more benevolent. I was drawn to dragons partially because of the stark contrast in depiction between European and East Asian myths, but also because of the way that contrast echoes a lot of the ways people talk about Asian countries, China especially. You know how it goes: it’s communism versus capitalism, totalitarianism versus democracy, collectivism versus individualism, etc.

Some of the emphasis on these binaries is obviously kind of essentialist and Orientalist, but I’ve always been struck by the ways in which the history of modern China has revolved around the attempt to balance Westernization with tradition. It’s the question a lot of non-Western countries, especially formerly colonized ones, have had to grapple with: how do we reap the benefits of modernization (guns, industrialization, new political systems) without losing our sense of who we are? In After the Dragons, the rumors of huolong – Eastern dragons that have developed the ability to breathe fire – are very much a metaphor for this ideal of a perfect East-West synthesis, one that would combine the best of both sides without any of the downfalls. That hasn’t quite worked out in reality; economic development in China has led to massive environmental issues and a vast wealth gap, but the ideal of perfect balance is one that haunts the novel.

That’s the broad, theoretical answer. In terms of specifics, I like how there’s such a close connection between dragons and humans in Chinese mythology – the legendary first emperor of China, the Yellow Emperor, could turn into a dragon in some myths, and there are a lot of other stories about dragon emperors who rule the seas or heavens. While these dragons are overall benevolent, they’re not perfect – like Greek gods, their human qualities include very human flaws. As someone who’s interested in animal welfare, I’ve always been struck by the way our stories about animals don’t always match our treatment of those animals. Americans love dogs, but that doesn’t stop people from overbreeding and abandoning them once they become inconvenient. When creating the dragons for this book, I wanted to capture that sense of contrast, the ways in which the myth of dragons might not necessarily translate into our treatment of them in actuality.

In the story, there are animals and people who seem to be marginalized. These are always my favorite stories because I think a lot of readers gravitate toward characters who are not status quo nor fit some idea of how we need to be. Can you describe Kai and Eli in terms of who they are and how you created them?

In writing both Eli and Kai, I was acutely aware that I was writing slightly outside of my personal experience. Even as I share Chinese heritage with these characters, there are a lot of elements of their experiences that I don’t have access to – I don’t live in China as a gay man the way Kai does, and I’m neither mixed-race nor Blasian the way Eli is. Without reducing these characters to one element of their identity, I was very much aware of the ways in which I would never fully understand some of their lived experiences. That’s something Eli and Kai also have to learn to navigate in their interactions with each other, especially since they’re both stubborn young men with strong ideas of right and wrong. They get better, but I think listening to each other is something we all have to work at from time to time.

In terms of marginality, I see both Eli and Kai as characters who are drawn towards each other because they’re outsiders, people who don’t quite fit in. As a Chinese-American, I’m struck by the way people in the US often talk about China, and the ways in which that discussion tends to conflate the Chinese government with the Chinese people. For all that nationalism and the CCP wants those two categories to be inseparable – the Chinese government represents its people perfectly, and no true Chinese person has any reason to criticize it, nope, none at all – gaps between them continue to exist. Ethnic and religious minorities live in China! Queer people live in China! And for those who don’t have the money or opportunity to emigrate, pushing for change can be incredibly risky. Activists still exist, of course, but living in the PRC means people have to get very creative about how they live. In terms of LGBT+ rights specifically, support is rising, especially among young people, but it’s still not an ideal situation – there’s a lot of societal pressure, especially with regards to familial obligation and Confucian ideals. With Kai, I wanted to explore what it might mean to be incorrectly “Chinese” in China – to be someone who loves his mother dearly, but who also knows that being fully himself might disappoint her. Kai knows his country is flawed, but he can’t escape it; even if he had the money and means to leave, growing up and living in China has inexorably shaped who he is.

In writing Eli, I noticed that a lot of discussion of mixed-race kids (at least Asian-American ones) in popular culture focuses on the idea of passing – of being neither American nor Asian enough depending on where you are. That’s an important issue, of course, but I was really struck by the way “American” is often taken to mean “white American.” What would happen to a character for whom passing is never quite an option? There’s a fair amount of anti-Blackness in many non-Black immigrant communities, Chinese communities included, but there’s also a history of Afro-Asian solidarity that runs counter to it. Because I’m not Black, I didn’t feel fully qualified to talk about some of the issues Eli would face in terms of that element of his identity – which is why we don’t really see Eli’s dad in the novel (but it’s also because I find father-son relationships tricky to write). At the same time, one of my best friends is Barbadian-Japanese-Norwegian, and with Eli’s character, I wanted to open more space for mixed-race kids like them. Even though Asian-American is inherently a broad term, we tend to have a narrow idea of what Asian-Americans look like. With Eli, I wanted to nudge the boundaries of what “Asian” or “Asian-American” means – to imagine what the term could mean in all its plurality and coalition-building potential.

The worldbuilding is magnificent. It’s a futurized – or maybe more accurately – a different version of Beijing. It’s also polluted and too hot, and “burnt lung,” or “shaolong,” is a disease that’s killing people and dragons. Were you thinking of climate change when you began to write the book, or do you think it just became an obvious force later because it’s all around us?

I haven’t been back to China since 2016, but I hear that the air quality in Beijing is getting better – which, if so, is very encouraging news! But when I was a child and visiting family in China, Beijing was notorious for its pollution. When I was initially pulling together the threads for After the Dragons, it felt quite natural that pollution would be a major theme in the novel. And if the water and air are heavily polluted, how will that affect dragons as a species that’s strongly tied to water and nature in Chinese mythology? So I suppose the answer to your question is that climate change was probably always a core element of this book, just as it’s become a core problem of contemporary life.

Even as climate change is now perhaps more visible than ever, I think it’s been a part of our world for a long time. Silent Spring was published in the 1960s and in the 19th century, we were already seeing species like bison and passenger pigeons being hunted to extinction or near-extinction. Recent weather events like the California fires and the Texas storms have brought renewed attention to the inescapability of climate change, but I think it’s also important to remember that many people in the Global South and in rural communities have never had the luxury of ignoring climate change. The signs have been there for a very long time – it’s just a matter of whether the people in power are willing to do something about it. And if the politicians and corporations aren’t going to look out for our best interests (as they so often aren’t), then it’s all the more important that ordinary people use what resources they have to support each other and push for change.

The novel is genre-busting. Part eco-fiction, part romance, part science fiction, part fantasy. I often think that tales that cross genre boundaries are more interesting because the world today seems weirder than ever and there is not always a neat little genre that could possibly include it all. Or maybe, it was always that way and as an adult, I think more in terms of metadata than single classifications. What are your thoughts on where literature is headed as we combine more genres together like this?

This is going to sound like a bit of a cop-out answer, but despite writing primarily speculative fiction, I don’t actually think a lot about genre when I’m working. Usually, I set out with one or two concepts I want to explore – what if these characters did X, or lived in a world where X was real? – and then the rest of the story evolves from there, accruing bits of pieces from various genres as it goes online.

Overall, I see genre as a descriptive tool, not a prescriptive one. It’s sort of like the term “sandwich:” some things are undeniably sandwiches – grilled cheeses, PB&Js, a Reuben – but there are also a lot of liminal spaces. Is a hot dog a sandwich? Is a burrito? What about a sushi burrito, or sushi itself? This is a very silly example that people online love to debate (is a Pop-Tart a sandwich?), but I think it’s indicative of how all genre terms are kind of provisional and ever-evolving.

I definitely think that in recent years, as the world gets stranger, we’re seeing an influx of work that blends traditional genre boundaries, especially when it comes to so-called literary fiction. So many things that used to be sci-fi – virtual reality, robot housekeepers, etc. – are becoming parts of our reality in the form of Roombas and smarthomes and VR headsets. At the same time, as our understanding of science becomes more advanced, we see just how strange the world really is. Just think of how fantastical things like quantum entanglement or wormholes sound to people who know nothing about physics! If we’re getting more traditionally literary authors dabbling in speculative fiction (whether or not they want to use that term), I think it speaks to an ever-changing sense of what terms like “reality” and “literary” mean more broadly.

I totally agree about genres! Thanks so much, Cynthia. I found your book and answers fascinating!

This article is part of our Wild Authors series. It was originally published on Dragonfly.eco.

______________________________

Mary Woodbury, a graduate of Purdue University, runs Dragonfly.eco, a site that explores ecology in literature, including works about climate change. She writes fiction under pen name Clara Hume. Her novel Back to the Garden has been discussed in Dissent Magazine, Ethnobiology for the Future: Linking Cultural and Ecological Diversity (University of Arizona Press), and Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change (Routledge). Mary lives in Nova Scotia and enjoys hiking, writing, and reading.

———-

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

Powered by WPeMatico

By Amy Brady

This month, I have for you an interview with Roy Scranton, the award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, the monograph Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and the novel War Porn. Roy, who is also an associate professor of English at Notre Dame, has published in more magazines and newspapers than I can count. In the interview below, we discuss one of his most recent projects, the “climate crisis” issue of the Massachusetts Review, which he co-edited with Noy Holland. 

The issue contains original work from such luminaries as Shailja Patel, Omar El Akkad, Rick Bass, Alex Kuo, Laura Dassow Walls, CAConrad, Maryam Haidari, Lisa Olstein, Amitav Ghosh, Sarah E. Vaughn, Eugene Lim, Rob Nixon, Gina Apostol, and many others. It also includes a previously unpublished essay by Barry Lopez.

In your introduction to the Massachusetts Review Climate Issue, you write: “Our dilemma: that we must see without sight, imagine without vision, hope without hope, and somehow persist even as we are consumed with grief and terror.” Would you expand on what you mean by this?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this line from Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”

What this speaks to for me is the apophatic quality of our relation to the future, the fact that we do not know, cannot know what will happen, and indeed have only an obscure sense of what is happening now, in our own time, and yet are nevertheless compelled to act out of our ignorance. We can’t know if we’ve found our mission, if it’s the right one, or whether any particular act will lead to its fulfillment or betrayal. History is too grimly ironic to comfort the complacent or offer cheer to the zealous. And this is just the human condition, under quote-unquote normal circumstances of contingency and uncertainty.

Our situation today is even more precarious: the stakes are the greatest imaginable, on par with nuclear annihilation, while our obscurity is deepened and compounded by the utter novelty of our predicament. It’s all too easy to forget, even or maybe especially for those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about climate change, that we are in totally uncharted territory. I often go back to The Great Acceleration, by historians J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, who articulate the point well:

The entire life experience of almost everyone living now has taken place within the eccentric historical moment of the Great Acceleration, during what is certainly the most anomalous and unrepresentative period in the 200,000-year-long history of relations between our species and the biosphere. That should make us all skeptical of expectations that any particular current trends will last for long.” (my italics)

And they’re not even talking about climate change, but rather the human techno-social matrix that has emerged globally over the past eighty years. Climate change is even more of a wild card, a fact which is often obscured by too-credulous reliance on speculative computer models. Notwithstanding the tremendous richness and complexity of contemporary earth systems research, scientists don’t really know what’s happening, or what will happen, in any but the broadest and crudest sense. This is in part because of various challenges when it comes to data collection, in part because our knowledge of similar climatological transitions in the paleoclimate record remains fairly coarse, and in part because there is simply no analogy for the high-speed, high-volume transfer of subterranean carbon into the atmosphere we’ve witnessed in recent decades.

On that point, it’s worth noting again the often noted fact that more than half of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have occurred since the IPCC was founded, in 1988 – which is to say, after world leaders knew about the threat carbon emissions and climate change pose.

So here we are. Climate activism and progressive climate politics have failed and continue to fail. The US political situation is schizophrenically sliding toward further crises, while the global situation is unstable and deteriorating. Each new year offers another sequence of climate-related disasters, another series of political catastrophes, another round of slow violence against the poor, and we may choose our sorrows from an ever-growing banquet of grief. Yet as Fanon reminds us, we go on, even in our obscurity. We go on, even in our despair. We go on, even in our pessimism and hopelessness and rage, fulfilling or betraying our mission.

To crib a line from King Lear, “The worst is not, so long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’”

How to go on – what is the mission? – that remains the question.

In addition to essays and other works, this issue contains several works of poetry. What role might poetry in particular play in our collective thinking about climate change?

There is an argument one hears today that the roots of our predicament lie in extractive Western rationality, that the original sin of modernity lies in the malignant collusion of science, empire, and white supremacy, and thus salvation can be found by turning to indigenous epistemologies or neo-animist thought. This argument sometimes takes form as slapdash anti-scientific primitivism, but in more sophisticated hands it emerges as a robust, thoughtful, deeply historicist articulation of the inextricably entwined genealogies of racial capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, Baconian rationality, and progressivist optimism – as we can see in the work of Sylvia Wynter, Achille Mbembe, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and Amitav Ghosh (who has a piece in this issue).

But whatever the analytic power of such genealogical critique, which is significant, in practical terms it comes up against the granular technological and conceptual affordances of the lifeworld “we moderns” inhabit, with our screens and our drugs and our cars, perhaps the most important of which (and yet one of the least examined) is universal compulsory literacy. As argued by anthropologist Jack Goody, historian Walter Ong, classicist Eric Havelock, philosopher David Abram, and poet Anne Carson, among others, learning to read alienates us from our environment, deforms our evolved sensory-cognitive matrix, and transforms how humans experience spatial, ontological, and temporal relations. Alphabetic literacy may be particularly crippling, but I’m not sure that enough work has been done in comparative literacy studies to make any strong claims about that. In any case, there can be no question, as Walter Mignolo, David Wallace Adams, Chinua Achebe, and others have shown, that enforced literacy in the colonial world, for instance in the American Indian Residential Schools, was one of the most disruptive and destructive forms of cultural genocide unleashed by European conquest. As Caliban says to Miranda and Prospero in The Tempest, “You taught me language; and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse.”
 
The danger this understanding poses lies in the wish that it might be otherwise: the primitivist hope that we could “go back” to a pre-industrial, pre-agricultural, pre-literate mode of life. Without foreclosing the possibility that some future humans may, in the ruins of our present, develop post-literate, post-civilizational cultures, which I find a rather cheerful alternative to extinction, it must be recognized that there is no clear path we can take from here to there, no way to truly “decolonize” ourselves without in actual fact destroying the human world we live in, because doing so is not a matter of changing our ideas or even our “narrative,” but totally dismantling how those ideas are embedded in practices, institutions, habits, structures, and material relations. As Tuck and Yang famously argue, “Decolonization is not a metaphor.” We would literally need to burn it all down and start over. But while such apocalyptic violence may appeal to some, on the right and the left, I’ve seen what it looks like when a society gets wrecked – in Baghdad, circa 2003-2004 – and I would not wish that future on anyone.
 
But here’s where poetry comes in, with all respect to the poets from whom I’ve learned so much: from Sappho to Chatterton to Amiri Baraka, from Sharon Mesmer to Lisa Robertson to Tan Lin. Poetry is a return to the fount of language: a return to the oral, the mythic, the inchoate: a return to the undifferentiated stream, the unconceptualized relation, the primordial matrix of being grounding both the human and the nonhuman, both ontology and alterity. In my view, which admittedly may be idiosyncratic, all poetry is “nature poetry” insofar as all poetry recapitulates the emergence of relational being in speech prior to the appearance of anything we might begin to conceive as a subject, and indeed recapitulates the traumatic, ecstatic emergence of subjectivity as such in relation to the world and the word, physis and logos, again and again and again, always anew. And thus poetry – poiesis, or making, if you’ll grant me the Greek – is the ever-renewing spring of what Hannah Arendt identified as natality, or our capacity to begin again, to create new meaning.
 
Of course, the Massachusetts Review published poetry every issue, and it was a pleasure working with the journal’s regular poetry editors, Franny Choi and Nathan McClain, in bringing together the work of poets from around the world, including Khairani Barokka, CA Conrad, Jeanine Hall Gailey, Johannes Goransson, Jennifer Schomburg Kanke, Soheil Najm, Lisa Olstein, Alexis Orgera, Shailja Patel, Craig Santos Perez, Vanessa Place, Derek Sheffield, and Joseph Earl Thomas.

The issue contains a never-before-published 1996 lecture by the late Barry Lopez, author of Horizon and other works of deeply affecting nature writing. What themes are present in this piece, and how do they speak to the issue as a whole?

We were phenomenally lucky to be able to publish this piece, which came to us via my colleague Laura Dassow Walls, the eminent Thoreau scholar who is currently working on a biography of Lopez. Laura has her own essay in the issue, sketching out moments in Lopez’s intellectual development, particularly his time as an undergraduate at Notre Dame in the 1960s and his encounter with Trappist monk Thomas Merton. What’s most striking to me about the work Laura does in her essay is in showing how little influence Thoreau and what we think of as the canon of American nature writing had on Barry, how in fact his striving toward the “horizon” was a spiritual striving, shaped significantly by the teaching of theologian John S. Dunne. Laura Walls describes Dunne as “a sort of Catholic Transcendentalist, someone who urged on his students the need for a sympathetic entering into the lives of others, what [he] called ‘passing over.’”

This “passing over,” it seems to me, is at the very heart of Lopez’s work: an effort to reach across the horizon of being toward sympathetic interrelation, while remaining assiduously, painfully open to the impress of the world upon oneself, and painfully alert of the perpetual risk of moral error. For me this too is a kind of poetry, a poiesis, precisely through its effort to complicate, dissolve, and reach across the boundaries that separate us. The question here is less whether one writes in lines and stanzas or in paragraphs, but rather how one uses language to restage the drama of our undeniable oneness with the world in tension with its inescapable individuation. This dynamic is what I think of his magnum opus Horizon as being “about,” if that’s the right word, but it subsists throughout, and emerges powerfully in the 1996 Three Rivers lecture we published in this issue.

In that lecture, Lopez begins by questioning and complicating the city-nature binary we tend to operate within, to make the point that what we should seek in turning to the nonhuman isn’t actually “nature,” which in fact is all around us even in the densest urban environment, not least since we too are natural beings, but precisely an encounter with nonhuman alterity that affords the opportunity to re-experience being in scales that escape and transcend human value, whether through eons of rock or the transient, swirling coalescence of a flock of pigeons.

As Lopez writes, in speaking of himself and fellow so-called “nature writers”:

All of us are concerned with the fate of human society and have examined that question in the context of natural landscapes in order to get at pervasive truths. It is my conceit, I suppose, that what each of us is doing is bringing to bear a kind of inner landscape of ideas, trying those ideas out, consciously or unconsciously, on an outer or exterior landscape of weather and landforms, of migrating birds and stalking polar bears, of silent desert playas and wild orchids. In bringing the interior landscape of the individual mind together with the shared, exterior landscape of the physical earth, it is possible to create a useful and enduring pattern of factual or emotional truth – what we call a story.  

You could say this is merely anthropocentric projection, but in doing so you’d be missing the most vital element, which is opening one’s inner landscape to the outside, submitting to the impress and projection of the other, and humbling oneself before the world, which is only possible through being willing to undertake the kind of communion he discusses (and which indeed he not only dramatizes but occasions in his work).

Today, in a world of frightening, ungrounding change, amidst an all-too-silent planet-wide extinction, such openness means being open to grief, terror, anger, impotent regret, and even despair. I can’t help but think of Leopold: “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” We do indeed live in a world of wounds – catastrophic wounds – mortal wounds – but we are not alone. And that is just what this special issue of Massachusetts Review hopes to demonstrate: that even in our grief, even in our error, even in our pessimism and sorrow and division, we are going through this together. Being open to that, and to the potential for collective meaning that poetry and fiction create, can be just as painful as the grief it seeks to assuage, yet in sharing this pain we might begin to find a way to live through it.

“Why does tragedy exist?,” writes Anne Carson. “Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.” 

Let’s turn from grief to pessimism. In a recent talk on “the virtues of pessimism,” you write that “focusing on a future that could be rather than on the actual history that got us where we are” fosters “a dangerous complacency.” Would you elaborate on what you mean here?

In one respect, this goes back to my previous point about apophatic futurism, or the idea that we are committed existentially to a future we not only don’t know, but we cannot know. We act necessarily with incomplete knowledge of our situation, and in total ignorance of the consequences of our actions – and yet we act on the world, and indeed cannot escape acting this side of death – withdrawal, silence, and forgetting are not the opposite of actions but actions themselves, which cannot help but affect reality – even suicide, as anyone who’s had a friend or family member do it can tell you, is an action with consequences.

The question then is what, in our obscurity, should inform our decisions? Is the mere possibility of an event sufficient to make it worthy of attention, and if so, what kind of possibility, under what conditions, and what kind of attention? Take for instance the idea of rapid and systemic decarbonization of the global economy, which is certainly imaginable and could even conceivably be planned, but which is so unlikely in the framework of contemporary national and international politics that it should be grouped with the kinds of dreams we categorize as utopian, like the end of war, poverty, or hunger. If mere possibility is insufficient for convincing us to take such a desideratum seriously as a factor in our decision making, as I believe is the case here, then we need some kind of evaluative mechanism for considering the likely probability of different possible future events, which in the old days they called judgment, or wisdom. This is, I take it, the core value of historical, cultural, and philosophical reflection, or what we call “the humanities”: abstracting general principles of action and ethics from the accumulated salvage of the past. So my point is more or less the banal one that we should be making our decisions based on likely outcomes, arrived at by careful consideration of historical evidence, rather than by clinging desperately to the outcomes we’d prefer without regard for their actual likelihood.

On the other hand, sometimes mere possibility is enough to warrant significant attention: the possibility of nuclear war, for instance, or the chance that rapid permafrost melt could trigger catastrophic methane release. While the latter event is currently considered unlikely by many leading scientists, and indeed often denounced with an insistence bordering on the pathological, there is enough evidence to suggest that it cannot be ranked as wholly impossible. Since the possible consequences of such an event, however unlikely, include the extinction of the human species, any responsible consideration demands we take it into account. This point is made very well by the philosopher Hans Jonas, who called for a “heuristics of fear.” As Jonas writes in his opus The Ethic of Responsibility:

Even at its best… an extrapolation from presently available data will always, in certainty and completeness of prediction, fall short of the causal pregnancy of our technological deeds. Consequently, an imaginative “heuristics of fear,” replacing the former projections of hope, must tell us what is possibly at stake and what we must beware of. The magnitude of those stakes, taken together with the insufficiency of our predictive knowledge, leads to the pragmatic rule to give the prophecy of doom priority over the prophecy of bliss.

In your talk, you bring this up in a wider context of philosophy and the fact that climate change “is hard to talk about.” Would you expand on this as well?  How would “the virtues of pessimism” change climate discourse?

Pessimism is a form of heresy in a country which insists with childish stubbornness that it deserves a happy ending. Even more than the market, even more than the flag, even more than their own eternal innocence, middle- and upper-class white Americans believe in optimism: the faith that things can get better, indeed that they will get better, and that the right combination of hard work, reason, and moral outrage can solve any problem – whether its Making America Great Again or Building Back Better, it’s the same fatuous bullshit. As W.E.B. DuBois wrote in his 1940 “autobiography of a race concept,” Dusk of Dawn, “The greatest and most immediate danger of white culture, perhaps least sensed, is its fear of the Truth, its childish belief in the efficacy of lies as a method of human uplift.” And since the United States has been a white supremacist culture for so long, this fear and belief – this cruel optimism – is baked into the ideological framework of major cultural institutions, largely through narratives of progress, the notion that we live in a meritocracy, and a mawkish tendency toward salvific moral fables (which I’ve critiqued elsewhere). As a consequence, pessimism tends to be derided and confused with nihilism, a “counsel of despair,” hopelessness, and fatalism.

But when we look closely at the histories of these conceptual schema, which we tend to naturalize as “dispositions” but which in fact are fairly modern phenomena, emerging only in the 18th century, we find that they are distinct and contrasting philosophical approaches to modern ideas of time, suffering, and progress. In the words of political philosopher Joshua Foa Dienstag,

The optimistic account of the human condition is both linear and progressive. Liberalism, socialism, and pragmatism may all be termed optimistic in the sense that they are all premised on the idea that the application of reason to human social and political conditions will ultimately result in the melioration of these conditions. Pessimism… denies this premise, or (more cautiously) finds no evidence for it and asks us to philosophize in its absence.

Progressivist optimism is deeply entwined with the histories of racialized expropriation, instrumentalized rationality, and imperial expansion that I talked about before, and indeed cannot be extricated from them: it is the moral and teleological axis that sustains the transformation of European Christian universalist metaphysics into secularized liberalism: a faith in the power of rational human free will to overcome “brute” matter. Pessimism, which emerges first out of the rigorous skepticism of Pierre Bayle and Voltaire, then develops through the anti-progressivist ethics of Thomas Malthus, Schopenhauer’s encounter with Buddhism, and Nietzsche’s attempts to synthesize the philosophical implications of Darwinian evolutionary theory – and can be seen more recently in the work of Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, and Achille Mbembe, to name just a few examples – is a fundamentally empirical rejection of such self-serving narratives.

When it comes to climate change, there are good empirical reasons for being pessimistic about our prospects: on top of the science, which seems to be consistently warning us that things are moving faster than predicted, we can point to more than forty years of total failure from climate change politics and communication; fossil fuel industry capture of ruling elites (indeed, the idea of capture may be redundant here); complacency among voters; genuine structural difficulties in narrating climate change as a salient threat; moralizing and divisive tone policing from overzealous activists; competition between states; a refusal to reckon with the real costs of decarbonizing the global economy; and the probability that as the planet’s transition to a warmer climate system speeds up, it will only exacerbate existing political challenges, increase political pressure to deal with short-term crises rather than long-term transformation, and motivate elites to shore up their fortresses of wealth and privilege, leading to what Daniel Aldana Cohen and others have called “eco-apartheid.”

Recognizing these challenges may lead some to despair. Fine. That’s better than a false or complacent optimism. And maybe despair is where some of us need to go in order to realize how profound the problem is, how deep we’re in it, and how immense are the stakes. But more importantly, I believe pessimism can, through its very negativity, open up new ways forward, new ways to think into our future, new possibilities for imagining what it means to live in the new world that fossil capitalism has unleashed.

Moreover, consciously choosing to consider the worst case helps us prepare for it, and if the worst doesn’t happen, so much the better. As Jonas put it, “The prophecy of doom is made to avert its coming, and it would be the height of injustice later to deride the ‘alarmists’ because ‘it did not turn out so bad after all.’ To have been wrong may be their merit.”

But if the worst does happen and we’re prepared, then we’ll be ready to act, rather than being paralyzed by our shock and disbelief, as so many liberal optimists were for so long after Trump’s election in 2016, for instance. Indeed, as I talked about earlier with Fanon, a pessimistic approach demands that one conceive of the future as a realm of action, even if that action must necessarily be taken in ignorance and obscurity, since one can in no sense depend on hope, a complacent optimism, or the arc of history to create a just world for us.          

What action is next for you, then, either as a writer or teacher?

I’ve got a cli-fi novel with my agent. It’s about a young woman who’s displaced by a hurricane, and how she survives and copes with her trauma. The manuscript is titled Pilgrim, and it’s more narrative than my other novels – it’s kind of an adventure story, but I also tried to squeeze in what philosophy I could. I think of it in the tradition of Camus, maybe, though I tried pitching it as Jane Eyre meets The Road Warrior. I’m also working on a book about eco-pessimism, climate change, and narrative, which goes more deeply into a lot of the things we’ve talked about here.

The writing is going slowly, though, because much of my time is taken up with trying to build institutional structures at Notre Dame, where I teach, to help address the climate crisis. I’ve started an Environmental Humanities Initiative, and am working with other folks at the Environmental Change Initiative, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, and the Keough School of Global Affairs to establish some kind of center on campus in the spirit of Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’. Despite being one of the leading Catholic universities in the country, if not the leading Catholic university, Notre Dame has been slow to respond to the ethical and intellectual mandate in Laudato Si’, and has so far rather shamefully shirked its responsibilities on the issue.

Institutional inertia is paralyzing, but there are motivated people across campus working to roll that boulder up the hill, and I’m glad to be working with them. Part of my effort, related to that, is developing a new, large, writing-intensive course on “Witnessing Climate Change,” which I hope will inculcate wave after wave of Notre Dame undergrads in heretical strains of ecological thought, ethical adaptation, action-oriented pessimism, and the techniques of creative nonfiction.

I’m not hopeful that any institution is going to save us, but I do believe we can carve out spaces and build structures that might actually help people, and I’m not without hope that we can embed ideas within institutions in ways that may turn out to offer ethically transformative possibilities. I realize that’s not as sexy as blowing up pipelines, but frankly I’ve seen enough dudes saying we need to blow shit up – and have seen enough real explosions – to last me a lifetime. In any case, the real work isn’t tearing the system down. Any teenager can start a fire, and the system is going to collapse on its own soon enough. The real work we need to do is to prepare for that collapse, work to mitigate human suffering, and plant seeds that might grow in the ruins.

This article is part of the Climate Art Interviews series. It was originally published in Amy Brady’s “Burning Worlds” newsletter. Subscribe to get Amy’s newsletter delivered straight to your inbox.

___________________________

Amy Brady is the Executive Director of Orion Magazine, and the former Editor-in-Chief of the Chicago Review of Books. She is also the co-editor of The World As We Knew It: Dispatches from a Changing Climate (Catapult) and author of Ice: An American Obsession (GP Putnam’s Sons). Every month she edits the newsletter “Burning Worlds,” which explores how artists and writers are thinking about climate change. Amy holds a PhD in English and is the recipient of a CLIR/Mellon Library of Congress Fellowship. Read more of her work at AmyBradyWrites.com at and follow her on Twitter at @ingredient_x.

———-

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

Powered by WPeMatico

By Claude Schryer

This essay is about art and activism in the context of my participation on February 16, 2022 in a panel titled “Art Uprising: Creative Dissent in the 21st Century” presented at Arts Ahead 2022 – Reawakenings: Art as a Catalyst, an annual student-run symposium that addresses the “biggest disruption of our lifetime,” organized by the Arts Management post-graduate cohort at Centennial College in Toronto.

“Reawakening through art” is a timely topic and I warmly applaud the organizers for their efforts and courage.

My participation on this panel is pursuant to having been a guest at Centennial College’s Art Policy, Equity and Activism class taught by Robin Sokoloski and Janis Monture in November 2021. The class was published as e86 of my podcast conscient. I am grateful for both opportunities to share and learn.

THE BIGGEST DISRUPTION OF OUR LIFETIME

The organizers of Reawakenings are about to graduate from an arts management program. Some of them are already working in the cultural sector, while others are looking for their first job. I wish them well, but I must admit that I am terrified about the world we have left for them. I think that an awakening (or reawakening) through art is a critical first step. However, being woke will not be enough, and nor will activism if it is framed as the incremental greening of our current way of life. What we need is radical, unprecedented, and transformative change at a massive scale.

Climate science tells us that in the coming years, this cohort will be leading an arts sector in constant emergency mode due to rapid and uncontrollable environmental degradation. Their challenge will be to ensure that the arts remain relevant and resilient in relation to addressing societal needs and crises, such as threats to shelter, food, and security, and to regeneration efforts. The upside is that the arts sector has the capacity to shift people’s hearts and minds, and will be central to a transformation agenda. We need to rise up, dissent, and disassemble.

ARTISTIC UPRISING

An uprising is an “act of resistance or rebellion.”

For me, an artistic uprising is an urgent but peaceful mobilization of the arts sector to address an imminent threat. For example, in March 2021, with other colleagues in Canada I co-founded SCALE – LeSAUT, a “national hub to develop strategy, align activities, and activate the leadership of Canada’s arts and culture sector in the climate emergency.” SCALE – LeSAUT hopes to see an uprising of the arts sector that is

driven by the conviction that inclusive, comprehensive, and far-reaching collaboration, both within and beyond the arts sector, will elevate artistic work towards the crucial transformational tipping points needed to fundamentally shift societal cultural norms from consumerism to stewardship, and from extraction to regeneration, in this critical decade of action.

A catalyst like SCALE – LeSAUT will help, but is not enough. We also need to learn how to decolonize and engage in reconcili-action, as proposed by Elwood Jimmy and Vanessa Andreotti in Towards Braiding. The book puts forward several modes of relational engagement with Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, scholars, and communities, including visits, gatherings, and consultations, with the goal of addressing the following compass questions:

• What are the conditions that make possible ethical and rigorous engagement across communities in historical dissonance that can help us move together towards improved relationships and yet-unimaginable wiser futures, as we face unprecedented global challenges?
• What are the guidelines and practices for ethical and respectful engagement with Indigenous senses and sensibilities (being, knowing, relationships, trauma, place, space, and time) that can help us to work together in holding space for the possibility of “braiding” work?
• How do we learn together to enliven these guidelines with (self-)compassion, generosity, humility, flexibility, and rigor, and without turning our back to (or burning out with) the complexities, paradoxes, difficulties, and pain of this process of healing?
• What kind of socially engaged and community anchored Indigenous-led arts-based program can support this process in the long term?
• What are the expectations in terms of responsibilities of the organization to the place/land and her traditional ancestral custodians from the perspective of the local Indigenous communities?

For an audio excerpt of Towards Braiding, I invite you to listen to e67 wanna be an ally. I also strongly recommend Vanessa Andreotti’s book Hospicing Modernity.

This type of fundamental rethink of our assumptions is the only form of artistic uprising that has the potential to be transformational. With all due respect, anything less is a waste of precious time and an assault to future generations.

CREATIVE DISSENT

Dissent is the “holding of opinions at variance with those previously, commonly, or officially held.”

To me, creative dissent is about finding aesthetically provocative ways of conveying new perspectives and potential solutions to complex issues, using imagination and invention. There are certainly many precedents in the history of art of works that present strong dissenting views with provocative aesthetics. The work of the great Indigenous performance artist Rebecca Belmore comes to mind.

Another great example of creative dissent is the British Columbia-based theatre company The Only Animal and their Artist Brigade, a “leaderless, national movement whose goal is to bring imagination, vision, and the heart of artists into the telling of the climate story in order to mobilize a society paralyzed by climate anxiety and grief.” I admire the work of artistic director Kendra Fanconi (also see e76) and the Artist Brigade because it engages in cross-sector partnerships with environmental organizations, activists, scientists, journalists, and scholars, and includes voices of dissent on a range of issues, framed by strong ethical and moral values that ensure lasting impact and credibility with the public.

I’m also a fan of Dr. Danielle Boutet’s thought about art. Here is an excerpt from my conversation with her in é60 (in French, translation below):

I hear a lot of people calling for artists to intervene and artists also saying that something must be done, etc. I think that art is not a good vehicle for activism. I’m really sorry for all the people who are interested in this. I don’t want to shock anyone, but sometimes it can risk falling into propaganda or ideology or a kind of facility that I am sorry about, in the sense that I think art can do so much more than that and go so much deeper than that. Art can help humans to evolve. It is at this level that I think that we can really have action, but I think that we have always had this action, and it is a question of doing it over and over and over again.

DISASSEMBLY OF OPPRESSIVE STRUCTURES

An oppressive structure is one that “maintains a hierarchy that allows the privileges associated with the dominant group and the disadvantages associated with the oppressed, targeted, or marginalized group to endure and adapt over time.”

Does art have the capacity to address structural or systemic oppression, and how would we know if it did? One challenge for the arts sector is the lack of tools to measure the impact of artistic practice on social policy and systematic inequities. Fortunately, this is beginning to change as various standards and methodologies are being developed to evaluate how art affects public policy (such as the Green Resilience project below).

Here is an example of how an artwork affected an environmental issue from e05 of my podcast with arts researcher Beth Carruthers, who speaks about the impact of Witness Project (condensed from our interview) :

The Uts’am Witness Project was a collaboration with the Squamish nation. It centered around aggressive, clear-cut logging of an intact old-growth forest in unceded Squamish territory in British Columbia, some of it sacred land. This was a 10-year socially engaged art project with many activities and workshops where people were invited to camp for a weekend in the area where the logging was taking place. At this location, they would experience Squamish tradition and ceremony and become part of the process. Over 10 years, 5,000 to 10,000 people participated. They were invited to be formally involved by becoming witnesses through ceremony. It was the strength of these witnesses that, in the end, stopped the forest company from logging. Much of the area has now been set aside as a wild spirit place. The Squamish nation is sustainably logging a section of it and using the land as part of a revival of their cultural traditions.

Another example is from episode e82 washable paint, an unedited, 20-minute soundscape recording of a climate emergency rally on Friday, November 12, 2021, in Vancouver.

My wife Sabrina and I decided to attend a protest in solidarity with the Fridays for Future movement. My intention was to record the soundscape of the protest for my podcast (singing, chanting, speeches, marching, etc). However, what we witnessed was the Vancouver Police arresting a group of young people who were doing an artwork with washable red paint onto the windows of the federal Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change building to protest climate change. The protest leaders requested the release of the arrested persons and decided to remain with them in solidarity instead of continuing with the march towards the banking sector of downtown Vancouver and CBC Vancouver. The protest was then redirected towards the municipal courthouse where detained persons were being held.

Beth Carruther’s Witness is a slow-moving form of art activism and decolonization thorough a process of solidarity. Washable Paint is a fast-moving form of art activism that emphasizes the urgency of the climate crisis through civil disobedience. Both are actively engaged in social change. Both address “hierarchies of privileges associated with the domination of one group over another,” which brings me to…

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

I would like to end with another story. A personal one, in the spirit of “walking one’s talk.”

I participated in an arts sector consultation hosted by the Green Resilience project on January 30, 2022, about linkages between climate change, income security, and community resilience. This is important cross-sectoral research. I was impressed by a statement (used with permission) by consultant Chesline Pierre-Paul, one of the guest speakers at the event, made during a chat exchange about some of the underlying causes of social inequities:

Asking who within the art sector gets to opt out of this conversation is telling of the economy of privileges that keep us socialized within white supremacy even as we present ourselves as part of the solution.

Chesline’s statement reminded me that one of the challenges in art practice in Canada today is acknowledging that one of the root causes of exploitation and oppression is the culture of white supremacy. This topic tends to be uncomfortable for the white majority to address but its recognition is key to moving forward with a new vision.

I was shaken, but also uplifted by Chesline’s statement, and I came to the following answers to her questions:

• Have I opted out of the conversation? No. I’m gradually re-educating and decolonizing myself. However, I am aware of the risk of complacency and the force of habit.
• Am I part of an economy of privileges? Yes. I was born into privilege and bear the responsibility of countering the effects of white socialization. I need to check my assumptions at every moment and be willing to give things up, as suggested in the “Wanna be an Ally” poem.
• Do I present myself as part of the solution? Yes. But I’m aware of the dangers of falling into white savior mode and unconsciously causing more harm than good.

(Top image: From conscient podcast e82 washable paint, November 12, 2021, Vancouver)

___________________________

Claude Schryer is a franco-ontarian sound and media artist, arts administrator, and facilitator who holds a MM in composition from McGill University. From 2000 to 2020, he worked in management at Canada Council for the Arts. He produces the bilingual conscient podcast and was a founding member of the coordination circle of the Sectoral Climate Art Leadership for the Emergency (SCALE-LeSAUT) from March 2021 to March 2022. He is currently working through the exercises in Hospicing Modernity.

———-

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

Powered by WPeMatico