The unnaming of Aliass

Abstract

"Aliass" is a handle by which I have come to know (somewhat), love (a lot), and honor (I hope) the embodied mortal becomings of one special domestic donkey, a female mammal of the species Equus asinus and, significantly, a registered "American Spotted Ass." This companion helped carry a ridiculous burden of human longings and quandaries into a maze of hot, harrowing miles, across the US South from Mississippi to Virginia, in the summer of 2002--all the while carrying her own burdens and histories. Over ten years and then some, this journey has evolved into an ongoing "assthetic" and ontological adventure, where "Aliass" also stands for something harder to grasp than the body of a lovely little ass: protagonist, setting, and even narrative turn inside-out inside this "name-that-ain't," making room for unwritten tales and lacunae that abound inside/outside the tangled shapes and shadows of myriad lives that interweave in any environment. The Unnaming of Aliass responds to urgent calls from within environmental humanities for new kinds of multispecies stories, with radically altered sensibilities of who, where, and how humans make worlds with other species. As Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren elaborate, opening human sagas to diverse (even unthinkable) ways of living with others is a task that matters, if we hope to ground truer modes of "storying" of/in places where we find ourselves. How can we crack open worn-out modes of naming, narrative, and branding, so that all kinds of bodies might inscribe their tales, in their own specific ways and idioms, into the makings of time-places? "Untold" stories explore practical arts of living with Aliass and others (kin to Anna Tsing's "arts of living on a damaged planet"), wrangling in creative/critical ways with authority shot through with conflicted desires from the get-go. For all the thinking and writing, scheming and dreaming one human author might do, the whole ass story remains beyond the grasp of even the most dexterous tongue. So with the disclaimer that "Aliass" must stand for an impossible peace of ass (as Haraway and Stengers might say)--also a proclamation of love and respect for multispecies wor(l)ding--let the untelling (and the unnaming) begin