Reflecting on the meanings of anthropocentric madness from a multispecies sensory imagination
In the book The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh argues that realist fiction is incapable of adequately imagining the transformations unleashed by the Anthropocene. This inadequacy stems largely from the centrality given to humans in this narrative model — the same centrality that is at the root of the Anthropocene crisis itself. In observing this “new geological era,” Ghosh highlights the emergence of voices that challenge not only human primacy, but also the erasure of collectivities that include non-human modes of existence. Starting from the notion of a relational and interspecies sensorium, this lecture investigates how contemporary literature and visual arts have responded to the limitations pointed out by Ghosh. It thus proposes to reflect on the idea of a multispecies sensorium as a possible aesthetic and epistemological horizon capable of challenging the hegemonic imagination of the Anthropocene. Based on readings of texts and works by indigenous and Afro-descendant writers and artists, I will seek to trace how certain forms of sensoriality — which traverse different ways of being and perceiving and imagining/creating — establish other ways of imagining the world, destabilising human supremacy and paving the way for counter-narratives to the Anthropocene paradigm.
Leila Lehnen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at Brown University (USA). She specialises in contemporary Brazilian and Latin American literature and culture, with research interests spanning environmental humanities, extractivism, countercolonial textual and visual practices, and indigenous literature and cultural productions. Her work critically analyses the role of literature and the arts in expanding democratic imaginaries, challenging authoritarian formations, and confronting the persistent legacies of coloniality. Her book, Citizenship and Crisis in Contemporary Brazilian Literature, examines how contemporary Brazilian literature represents and problematises different forms of citizenship. Her second book investigates the intersections between Brazilian literature and democratic life, examining how cultural texts articulate and reconfigure democratic imaginaries, especially with regard to environmental and indigenous rights. She has published academic texts on ecocriticism, indigenous literature, decoloniality, Afro-Brazilian literature, citizenship, and human rights in Brazilian and Latin American contexts.
Remaining with the problem: liquid trans*Amazonian possibilities
In light of the current global ecological and ontological crisis, this presentation argues that Uyra's (Emerson Pontes) performances position the trans* community as remaining with the Amazon, embodying a commitment to reimagine the possibilities of the present. In their performances, Uyra avoids the discourse of futurity in order to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway), rejecting the paralysis of both despair and naive optimism. This refusal is strategic. Uyra positions herself outside and beyond the binary opposition between queer non-futurity and hetero-reproductive futurism (Edelman) or between an inevitable dystopian future and a technotopia future that saves society, the world. Instead, Uyra (re)imagines a fluid, wet queer present as simultaneously imbued with Julio Esteban Muñoz's desire for new ways of being, doing, and relating, that is, cuir as a possibility. At the same time, the film does not ignore the material reality of loss. In the performances, Uyra recognises what destruction was, is, and will be (Halberstam, Pratt), flowing through the tension between possibility and loss, between these two poles, these contradictory forces. Through the interconnection/intercalation of human and beyond-human communities, trans* and Amazonian ecosystems, Uyra invites viewers to ‘remain with the problem,’ to ‘dwell in the dissolve’ (Alaimo), to re-imagine liquid possibilities in the now, not in a distant or abstract future.
Jeremy Lehnen is director of the Brazil Initiative at the Watson Institute and director of the Centre for Language Studies at Brown University. He served as interim director of the Gender and Sexuality Studies programme and interim associate director of the Pembroke Centre for Teaching and Research on Women, also at Brown University. He is currently executive editor of the Journal of Lusophone Studies. His book Neo-authoritarian Masculinity in Brazilian Crime Film was published by the University of Florida Press in 2022. He received his PhD in Latin American studies from the University of New Mexico and has taught at the University of New Mexico, Macalester College, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has published essays in the Luso-Brazilian Review, Journal of Lusophone Studies, and Mexican Studies, among other academic journals. His main research interests address issues of gender and sexuality, particularly the construction of masculinity in contemporary Latin American cinema, cultural production, and digital humanities..
Scientific Coordination
Margarida Rendeiro (CHAM)
Inês Barreiros (ICNOVA)
