The Experts below are selected from a list of 297 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Suzanne Bost - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Diabetes, Culture, and Food: Posthumanist Nutrition in the Gloria Anzaldúa Archive
Rethinking Chicana o Literature through Food, 2020Co-Authors: Suzanne BostAbstract:It might seem odd to talk about eating in the context of posthumanism since our food cultures seem to revolve around sustaining the human (often at the expense of the Nonhuman World surrounding us). Posthumanism evokes cyborgs, indeterminacy, and decentered cultures. Food evokes nourishment, home, and cultural tradition, and this seems to be especially the case in Chicano/a representations. In novels like Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1994) and Denise Chavez’s The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), and films like Tortilla Soup (2001) and Like Water for Chocolate (1993), food is a sign of Mexican cultural memory, authenticity, and the passing down of tradition through female labor. But in thinking about Gloria Anzaldua’s relationship to food after the onset of diabetes, I need a term that conveys boundary-crossings more radical than the cultural and national ones we usually associate with her work. Posthumanism is a term that stretches from post-structuralism through animal studies, ecocriticsm, and feminist science studies, and its definition seems to be continually evolving. When I invoke posthumanism, I also mean to invoke that range of sources as well as the fluidity and uncertainty surrounding the term. Most fundamentally, for understanding the work of Anzaldua, we need a Worldview that is no longer centered around the human or those epistemologies that privilege human reason and human transcendence over the Nonhuman World (which includes animals, “nature,” and supposedly inert matter).
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Chapter 1 Diabetes, Culture, and Food: Posthumanist Nutrition in the Gloria Anzaldúa Archive
2020Co-Authors: Suzanne BostAbstract:It might seem odd to talk about eating in the context of posthumanism since our food cultures seem to revolve around sustaining the human (often at the expense of the Nonhuman World surrounding us). Posthumanism evokes cyborgs, indeterminacy, and decentered cultures. Food evokes nourishment, home, and cultural tradition, and this seems to be especially the case in Chicano/a representations. In novels like Ana Castillo’s So Far from God (1994) and Denise Chavez’s The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), and films like Tortilla Soup (2001) and Like Water for Chocolate (1993), food is a sign of Mexican cultural memory, authenticity, and the passing down of tradition through female labor. But in thinking about Gloria Anzaldua’s relationship to food after the onset of diabetes, I need a term that conveys boundary-crossings more radical than the cultural and national ones we usually associate with her work. Posthumanism is a term that stretches from post-structuralism through animal studies, ecocriticsm, and feminist science studies, and its definition seems to be continually evolving. When I invoke posthumanism, I also mean to invoke that range of sources as well as the fluidity and uncertainty surrounding the term. Most fundamentally, for understanding the work of Anzaldua, we need a Worldview that is no longer centered around the human or those epistemologies that privilege human reason and human transcendence over the Nonhuman World (which includes animals, “nature,” and supposedly inert matter). Anzaldua’s early representations seem to use food as an index of cultural identity. Her poem “Nopalitos,” from Borderlands/La Frontera,
Linda Williams - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Modernity and the Other Body: The Human Contract with Mute Animality
The Future of Flesh, 2020Co-Authors: Linda WilliamsAbstract:This essay explores the ways in which deep genealogies in Western thought continue to inform contemporary concepts of postmodernity and the posthuman. While such genealogies seem to me to have a longue duree that exceeds the limits of modernity, for the purposes of this essay I would like to draw attention to the way medieval ontological dualism continues to shape our understanding of the Nonhuman World. Moreover, since from the sixteenth-and seventeenth centuries theological dualism was facilitated by scientific instrumentalism, early modern enquiry provided techniques that remain identifiable in contemporary figurations of posthuman flesh. Categories such as the posthuman, or for that matter the postmodern, it seems to me at least, are neither past human or humanism, or past modernity.
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seventeenth century concepts of the Nonhuman World a nascent romanticism
Green Letters, 2017Co-Authors: Linda WilliamsAbstract:This paper revisits the historiography of romanticism, and challenges the view that the advent of a modern ecological vision was more or less coeval with romantic responses to industrialised modernity from the mid-eighteenth century. The paper privileges a longue duree of the legacy of romantic thought, identifying a nascent romanticism in seventeenth-century ecocritical thought engaged in a dialectical response to the era of early modern enlightenment rather than in a revaluation of the impact of subsequent developments in industrialised modernity. It investigates aspects of the seventeenth-century thought that anticipated romantic views of the non-human World in an era of significant climatic change, especially in philosophical concepts such as ontological monism and vitalism, and in a heightened empathy for the Nonhuman World evident in seventeenth-century essays, poetry and art.
Philip Cafaro - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Thoreau, Leopold, and Carson: Toward an Environmental Virtue Ethics
Environmental Ethics, 2001Co-Authors: Philip CafaroAbstract:3 I argue for an environmental virtue ethics which specifies human excellence and flourishing in relation to nature. I consider Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson as environmental virtue ethicists, and show that these writers share certain ethical positions that any environmental virtue ethics worthy of the name must embrace. These positions include putting economic life in its proper, subordinate place within human life as a whole; cultivating scientific knowledge, while appreciating its limits; extending moral considerability to the Nonhuman World; and supporting wilderness protection. I argue that Thoreau, Leopold, and Carson themselves exemplify the potential for cultivating excellence in engagement with wild nature: their lives are among our most powerful arguments for its preservation.
Raymond Anthony - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Building a Sustainable Future for Animal Agriculture: An Environmental Virtue Ethic of Care Approach within the Philosophy of Technology
Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics, 2012Co-Authors: Raymond AnthonyAbstract:Agricultural technologies are non-neutral and ethical challenges are posed by these technologies themselves. The technologies we use or endorse are embedded with values and norms and reflect the shape of our moral character. They can literally make us better or worse consumers and/or people. Looking back, when the World's developed nations welcomed and steadily embraced industrialization as the dominant paradigm for agriculture a half century or so ago, they inadvertently championed a philosophy of technology that promotes an insular human-centricism, despite its laudable intent to ensure food security and advance human flourishing. The dominant philosophy of technology has also seeded particular ethical consequences that plague the well-being of human beings, the planet, and farmed animals. After revisiting some fundamental questions regarding the complex ways in which technology as agent shapes our lives and choices and relegates food and farmed constituents into technological artifacts or commodities, I argue that we should accord an environmental virtue ethic of care-understood as caretaking-a central place in developing a more conscientious philosophy of technology that aims at sustainability, fairness, and humaneness in animal agriculture. While technology shapes society, it also is socially shaped and an environmental virtue ethic of care (EVEC) as an alternative design philosophy has the tools to help us take a much overdue inventory of ourselves and our relationships with the Nonhuman World. It can help us to expose the ways in which technology hinders critical reflection of its capacity to alter communities and values, to come to terms with why we may be, in general, disengaged from critical ethical analysis of contemporary agriculture and to consider the moral shape and trajectory and the sustainability of our food production systems going into the future. I end by outlining particular virtues associated with the ethic of care discussed here and consider some likely implications for consumers and industry technocrats as they relate to farming animals.
Michelle Levy - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Virginia Woolf’s Shorter Fictional Explorations of the External World: “closely united … immensely divided”
Trespassing Boundaries, 2020Co-Authors: Michelle LevyAbstract:While received notions of Virginia Woolf as a writer primarily if not exclusively concerned with mapping the contours of the internal World have been steadily eroded in recent years, the reception of Woolf as a writer of interiority has been so entrenched that James Mepham, in his 1992 survey of Woolf criticism, writes, “until recently […] the consensus view was that Woolf was not interested in the external World” (25). While Alex Zwerdling’s Virginia Woolf and the Real World (1986) initiated a major reconsideration of Woolf’s fiction, offering her “account of [the] complex relationship between the interior life and the life of society,” much remained to be said about her exploration of the Nonhuman World (3). And though Douglas Mao, in a book that derives its title from one of Woolf’s short stories, Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production, focuses our attention on centrality of the object to Woolf and other modernists, this is by no means exhaustive of Woolf’s fictional encounters with the external World, which range far beyond the inanimate object to include all of nature.1 This essay aims to redirect our attention to how Woolf used short fictional forms to achieve her most sustained exploration of the human relation to the external World, as she found the genre at once sufficiently capacious and circumscribed to accommodate the Nonhuman presence in narrative.