Cultural epistemological perspectives

Sarah Bezan shares with us her epistemological perspectives of the culture of emergency and crisis in this next blog in the series based on the IGDC/YESI Webinar event ‘Emergencies, wellbeing and social justice in the Anthropocene’

Sarah Bezan’s work examines the entangled social and ecological dimensions of species loss and revival in contemporary settler colonial literature and digital cultures. Here, Sarah discusses epistemological perspectives specifically in relation to the culture of emergency and crisis.

What do we mean by ‘Emergency’

The original meaning of the word ‘Emergency’ in Latin was defined as “that which arises or comes to light.” By the mid 17th century and into the 19th century ‘emergency’ also came to be associated with a watery quality. It was defined as “the rising of a submerged body above the surface of the water”. Today, according to the latest edition of the Oxford English dictionary, it is defined as “an arising sudden or unexpected occurrence”.

When it comes to how we define environmental emergency, I think all of us are grappling with how far reaching global phenomena like climate change, rising sea levels, mass extinctions and other environmental crises challenge the ways we understand and respond to emergencies.

I’m particularly interested in how we might become more attuned to the ways in which emergency is expected rather than unexpected. This is because, as the colonial and anti colonial thinkers like Kyle Powys Whyte, Malcolm Ferdinand and Juno Salazar Parreñas have shown us, emergency is an occurrence foretold.

Many Indigenous peoples across the globe have experienced how extractive colonialism has activated a state of environmental emergency and crisis that has lasted for centuries.

Creative practices generate cultural attention

As a scholar of environmental art and literature my work focuses on how creative practices can generate modes of cultural attention to the lasting legacies of extractive colonialism. 

An example of this is a recent film by Ayasha Guerin, who is a black studies scholar and environmental historian at the University of British Columbia Canada. Guerin describes her film ‘Submerged’ as an audio visual workbook. Drawing from archival photographs, along with maritime drawings with sound graphs and handheld camera footage, Guerin traces histories of black and indigenous whalers and their displacement from shoreline regions. ‘Submerged’ is a deliberately unfinished product of an ever evolving practice of unsettling the colonial past.

Guerin focuses our attention on submergence rather than emergence. For Guerin submergence is defined as being submerged and/or unseen from the perspective of land. Moving away from the epistemological ground of land and the aqueous unknown of the sea allows Guerin to focus on non-human perspectives, which are often neglected in our thinking about eco-crisis. This focus on submergence also returns us to the watery or aqueous understanding of emergence that emerged in the 17th to 19th centuries.

This allows us to connect the future of the environment with its colonial and maritime histories. For instance, we might ask: how did the colonial whaling industries of the 18th and 19th centuries impact on whales who were removed from their watery depths to become oil for street lamps or rendered into bars of soap for the masses? Indeed, how is emergency felt by a whale who moves through the sea and who has strong social ties to the members of its dwindling pod?

Today, as a result of warming sea temperatures, ocean acidification, noise pollution, loss of habitat and over hunting whales and other cetaceans species are under increasing threat.

Emergence as Submergence 

So, as we consider the meaning of environmental emergency I would urge you to think about emergence as submergence. What would it mean to submerge ourselves in the perspectives of other human and non human animals at risk? In what ways and to what extent do non-human species respond to environmental crises?

How is emergency itself rooted in long standing ancestral conditions of nature trauma and extraction as a result of centuries of colonialism? And lastly, how might these perspectives generate empathy and compassion across the species divide in ways that inform sustainable practices or theoretical framing of environmental emergencies for the 21st century?

Check out the full version of Sarah’s talk:

About the author

Her work examines the entangled social and ecological dimensions of species loss and revival in contemporary settler colonial literature and digital cultures.

She is co-editor of the recently published volume Animal Remains with Routledge’s Perspectives on the Nonhuman in Literature and Culture series along with two forthcoming special issues on “Coastal Posthumanities” for the journal Anthropocenes and “Sex and Nature” for the journal Environmental Humanities. Her first book, Dead Darwin: Necro-Ecologies in Neo-Victorian Culture, is forthcoming with Manchester University Press.