Colouring Cape Breton “Celtic” : Topographies of Culture and Identity in Cape Breton Island

This article rethinks the relationship between cultural identity and landscape by way of a post-constructivist, “multicultural political ecological” examination of Cape Breton Island’s Celtic Colours International Festival. The author reads the festival as an intervention on several levels: as part of a set of contests and contrasts by which Cape Bretoners articulate their identities and heritages; as a medium by which Celticity is defined and shaped as a transnational cultural discourse; as one arm of a strategy by which island entrepreneurs are repositioning Cape Breton as central within global tourist flows; and as a means by which a relatively cold northern landscape is made attractive through a discursive linkage with the pleasing imagery of autumn foliage in scenic mountain and highland topography. In the process, what was once the most industrialized region of the Atlantic Provinces can now boast an expressive harmony between “nature” and “culture”.Cet article repense la relation entre identité culturelle et paysage au moyen de l’examen postconstructiviste, « multiculturel, politique et écologique », du festival international « Couleurs celtiques » de Cap Breton. L’auteur considère le festival comme une intervention à plusieurs niveaux : en tant que partie d’un ensemble de contrastes et de contestations au moyen desquels les habitants de Cap Breton articulent leurs identités et leur patrimoine ; en tant que medium au moyen duquel la « celticité » est formée et formulée en discours culturel transnational ; en tant qu’élément d’une stratégie des entrepreneurs insulaires destinée à donner à Cap Breton une place centrale dans les flux mondiaux du tourisme ; et en tant que lien discursif, consistant à rendre attractif un paysage nordique relativement froid au moyen de l’agréable imagerie des feuilles d’automne et d’un relief évocateur des Highlands. En cours de route, celle qui fut un jour la plus industrialisée des Provinces atlantiques peut aujourd’hui se targuer d’exprimer l’harmonie entre la « nature » et la « culture »

Stories and Rituals in the Interstices between Utopias and Apocalypses

We walked along the beach, shrouded in fog, with only the sound of the waves lapping gently against the shore giving us a sense of direction. We walked slowly: I, unable to see any shapes or fonns in the dense mist, held your hand tightly; you sensed the way forward, each step a mystery into an abyss, each step an eternity, where all things swirled half-remembered and all memories shimmered with the safety of their concealment

Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times

A spectre is haunting humanity: the spectre of a reality that will outwit and, in the end, bury us. “The Anthropocene,” or The Human Era, is an attempt to name our geological fate – that we will one day disappear into the layer-cake of Earth’s geology – while highlighting humanity in the starring role of today’s Earthly drama. In Shadowing the Anthropocene, Adrian Ivakhiv proposes an ecological realism that takes as its starting point humanity’s eventual demise. The only question for a realist today, he suggests, is what to do now and what quality of compost to leave behind with our burial. The book engages with the challenges of the Anthropocene and with a series of philosophical efforts to address them, including those of Slavoj Žižek and Charles Taylor, Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, and William Connolly and Jane Bennett. Along the way, there are volcanic eruptions and revolutions, ant cities and dog parks, data clouds and space junk, pagan gods and sacrificial altars, dark flow, souls (of things), and jazz. Ivakhiv draws from centuries old process-relational thinking that hearkens back to Daoist and Buddhist sages, but gains incisive re-invigoration in the philosophies of Charles Sanders Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. He translates those insights into practices of “engaged Anthropocenic bodymindfulness” – aesthetic, ethical, and ecological practices for living in the shadow of the Anthropocene

The Anthrobiogeomorphic Machine: Stalking the Zone of Cinema

This article proposes an ecophilosophy of the cinema. It builds on Martin Heidegger’s articulation of art as ‘world-disclosing,’ and on a Whiteheadian and Deleuzian understanding of the universe as a lively and eventful place in which subjects and objects are persistently coming into being, jointly constituted in the process of their becoming. Accordingly, it proposes that cinema be considered a machine that produces or discloses worlds. These worlds are, at once, anthropomorphic, geomorphic, and biomorphic, with each of these registers mapping onto the ‘three ecologies,’ in Felix Guattari’s terms, that make up the relational ontology of the world: the social, the material, and the mental or perceptual. Through an analysis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), I suggest that cinema ‘stalks’ the world, and that our appreciation of its potentials should similarly involve a kind of ‘stalking’ of its effects in the material, social, and perceptual dimensions of the world from which cinema emerges and to which it returns