Photography for Earthly Symbiosis

Photography is one of the major ways in which modern urban humans relate to nature and nature is mediated to us. Landscape photography, in particular, is one of the major ways in which modern urban humans relate to the land and the land is mediated to us. I define landscape photography as the creative, photographic inscription of the visual appreciation for the surfaces of the land in the aesthetic modes of the sublime, the picturesque and the beautiful. American and Australian landscape photography has lived under the sign of the sublime and the picturesque for some time. Landscape photography in tourism, conservation and culture has played an important role in forming and maintaining national identity. It has played, and still plays, an important, but undervalued and misunderstood, role that is not aware of the cultural politics of pictures that underpins them. What role it will play in developing environmental sustainability in Australia is another question. Representing the natural environment as an aesthetic object does not promote environmental sustainability

Book Review: Introduction to the Environmental Humanities

Rod Giblett is the author of 30 books of fiction and faction (‘non-fiction’), including recently a book of detective stories, Swamp Deaths: Collected Cold Cases and Other Marshy Mysteries (Europe Books, 2022). Forthcoming in 2023 is Middlemarsh: The Hopkins River, Kindred Wetlands and Remarkable People in Western Victoria, Australia. He is currently writing a book of novel polyphonic parafables entitled Black Waters Live: Or, the Fertile Serpent. He is the founder of wetland cultural studies, psychoanalytic ecology and conservation counter-theology. He is Honorary Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities in the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University, Australia

Cities and Wetlands

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. From New Orleans to New York, from London to Paris to Venice, many of the world’s great cities were built on wetlands and swamps. Cities and Wetlands is the first book to explore the literary and cultural histories of these cities and their relationships to their environments and buried histories. Developing a ground-breaking new mode of psychoanalytic ecology and surveying a wide range of major cities in North America and Europe, ecocritic and activist Rod Giblett shows how the wetland origins of these cities haunt their later literature and culture and might prompt us to reconsider the relationship between human culture and the environment. Cities covered include: Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Hamburg, London, New Orleans, New York, Paris, St. Petersburg, Toronto, Venice and Washington

The version that wanted to be written

The unification of Germany in 1990 set in train a number of dramatic changes in Germany’s political, social and cultural landscape which gave rise to a series of hotly debated memory contests centred on the newly unified nation’s approach to its common Nazi past. As an important medium of cultural memory, literature played a significant part in the controversy and novels dealing with the Nazi past enjoyed widespread popularity and influence in the 20 years following 1990. But what ""version"" of the Nazi past did the authors of these novels choose to tell? Using the perpetrator/victim dichotomy around which much of the debate crystallised, this book seeks to answer this question via a close textual analysis of works by Bernhard Schlink, Ulla Hahn, Tanja Dückers, and Marcel Beyer. In particular, this book analyses these novels as historiographic metafiction, a significantly under-explored angle which raises important questions concerning our ability to know the “truth” about the past and destabilises the basis on which we judge guilt or innocence. In providing a deeper understanding of the approach of fiction authors to the Nazi past in the post-1990 period, this book aims to enrich our understanding of its legacy in contemporary German society today

Nature is Ordinary Too: Raymond Williams as the Founder of Ecocultural Studies

In a recent article in Cultural Studies, Jennifer Daryl Slack called for the jettisoning of ecocultural studies as an add-on to Cultural Studies and the revitalizing of Cultural Studies with the eco as integral to it. One way I propose of doing so in this article is to revalue and re-establish the beginnings of Cultural Studies, and of ecocultural studies, in the work of Raymond Williams in which both were integral to the other. I call Williams both a founder of Cultural Studies and the founder of ecocriticism and ecocultural studies, though of course he did not use these terms, nor make these distinctions between them, but that is the point. Williams is exemplary in this respect in that he just got on and did the eco and this is no more the case than in his development of the concept of livelihood sadly missing from the glossaries of Cultural Studies\u27 terms. This article traces the development of the concepts of culture, nature, landscape and livelihood in Williams\u27 work. It argues that livelihood deconstructs the culture/nature binary and decolonizes the commodification and aestheticization of land as landscape. It reinstitutes nature as ordinary, as the stuff of work and everyday life. Nature, like culture for Williams, is ordinary too

New Orleans: A disaster waiting to happen?

New Orleans is one of a number of infamous swamp cities—cities built in swamps, near them or on land “reclaimed” from them, such as London, Paris, Venice, Boston, Chicago, Washington, Petersburg, and Perth. New Orleans seemed to be winning the battle against the swamps until Hurricane Katrina of 2005, or at least participating in an uneasy truce between its unviable location and the forces of the weather to the point that the former was forgotten until the latter intruded as a stark reminder of its history and geography. Around the name “Katrina” a whole series of events and images congregate, including those of photographer Robert Polidori in his monumental book, After the Flood. Katrina, and the exacerbating factors of global warming and drained wetlands, and their impacts, especially on the city of New Orleans (both its infrastructure and residents), point to the cultural construction and production of the disaster. This suite of occurrences is a salutary instance of the difficulties of trying to maintain a hard and fast divide between nature and culture (Hirst and Woolley 23; Giblett, Body 16–17) and the need to think and live them together (Giblett, People and Places). A hurricane is in some sense a natural event, but in the age of global warming it is also a cultural occurrence; a flood produced by a river breaking its banks is a natural event, but a flood caused by breeched levees and drained wetlands is a cultural occurrence; people dying is a natural event, but people dying by drowning in a large and iconic American city created by drainage of wetlands is a cultural disaster of urban planning and relief logistics; and a city set in a swamp is natural and cultural, with the cultural usually antithetical to the natural. “Katrina” is a salutary instance of the cultural and natural operating together in and as “one single catastrophe” of history, as Benjamin (392) put it, and of geography I would add in the will to fill, drain, or reclaim wetlands. Rather than a series of catastrophes proceeding one after the other through history, Benjamin\u27s (392) “Angel of History” sees one single catastrophe of history. This single catastrophe, however, occurs not only in time, in history, but also in space, in a place, in geography. The “Angel of Geography” sees one single catastrophe of geography of wetlands dredged, filled, and reclaimed, cities set in them and cities being re-reclaimed by them in storms and floods. In the case of “Katrina,” the catastrophe of history and geography is tied up with the creation, destruction, and recreation of New Orleans in its swampy location on the Mississippi delta

"Die geschriebene Version wollte geschrieben werden, die vielen anderen wollten es nicht": The portrayal of Nazi perpetrators in German novels since 1990 and the role of historiographic metafiction

This thesis examines the way in which Nazi perpetrators have been portrayed in German novels since 1990 by means of a close textual analysis of four novels from this period: "Der Vorleser" by Bernhard Schlink, "Unscharfe Bilder" by Ulla Hahn, "Himmelskörper" by Tanja Dückers, and "Flughunde" by Marcel Beyer. Through an analysis of these texts, the thesis aims to answer the following questions: 1. Is there a discernible tendency in the way in which the literature of the post-1990 period portrays Germans involved in the Third Reich? Are they predominantly portrayed as perpetrators, victims, or some combination of the two? 2. Is this portrayal a significant departure from the way in which they were previously depicted in German literature? 3. Does the portrayal of Germans of the Nazi period as perpetrators or victims in literature of the post-1990 period mirror the memory contests played out in the public discourse of that period? 4. Are there any differences in the ways in which authors of different generations approach the perpetrator/victim dichotomy in their writing? The thesis also considers the impact a reading of the texts as historiographic metafiction has on the portrayals of Germans as perpetrators/victims in the novels