Imagining the Anthropocene with the Wadden Sea

This contribution explores the potential of the Wadden Sea for the imagination of the Anthropocene. The concept of the Anthropocene represents a challenge to the cultural imagination, as it draws together deep, geological time, recent and current events, and long futures; the geographical and generational implications of justice; and the profound entanglement of human progress with ecological decline. We argue that the cultural landscape of the Wadden Sea is a space in which these paradoxes and connections are made visible and material. Literary and artistic works engaged with the Wadden Sea display a critical awareness of Anthropocene entanglements: in our analysis, we explore visual and textual representations of the Wadden Sea and show how it serves as a site for the imagination of the past and future of our planet.

Epistemic practices in Bio Art

This paper addresses three aspects of Bio Art: iconography, artificial life, and wetware. The development of models for innovation require hybrid practices which generate knowledge through epistemic experimental practices. The intersection of art and the biological sciences contain both scientific data as well as the visualization of its cultural imagination. In the Bio Art Lab at the School of Visual Arts, artists use the tools of science to make art.

Layer after layer: Aerial roots and routes of translation

When the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in South London were opened to the general public in the 1840s, they were presented as a ‘world text’: a collection of flora from all over the world, with the spectacular tropical (read: colonial) specimens taking centre stage as indexes of Britain’s imperial supremacy. However, the one exotic plant species that preoccupied the British cultural imagination more than any other remained conspicuously absent from the collection: the banyan tree, whose non-transferability left a significant gap in the ‘text’ of the garden, thereby effectively puncturing the illusion of comprehensive global command that underpins the biopolitical designs of what Richard Grove has aptly dubbed ‘green imperialism’. This article demonstrates how, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the banyan tree became an object of fascination and admiration for British scientists, painters, writers and photographers precisely because of its obstinate non-availability to colonial control and visual or even conceptual representability.

Learning to Love

As an emotional ethic, caritas was taught. This chapter explores the education of children and youth in caritas through acts of care and affection by those within their community. It highlights how youth was understood as a period of imperfect knowing, excusing passionate excess in young people as they learned to develop a personal conscience—an independent self—within a society that placed significant emphasis on community relationships. Teenage romance was a particularly important opportunity for teenagers to explore how caritas was to operate as moral feeling, and this chapter notes how the growing significance of romantic love in the cultural imagination provided young people with an occasion to refigure their self in relation to the group. Yet, if some young people used this as an opportunity to contest social boundaries, evidence suggests that many young people learned their lessons in love too well, on occasion failing to notice the nuances that moderated the discipline of caritas.

Between Passion and Compassion: The Story of the Stone and Its Modern Reincarnations

This study reconsiders The Story of the Stone as a literary exemplum of the “Buddhist conquest of China.” The kind of Buddhism that Stone embodies in its fictional form and makes indelible on the Chinese cultural imagination simultaneously indulges in and wavers from the Mahāyāna teachings of the nonduality of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa. The dialectics of truth and falsehood, love and emptiness, passion and compassion, which Stone dramatizes and problematizes, continues to stir the creative impulses of artists in revolutionary and post-revolutionary China. This study features three of Stone’s modern reincarnations. Tale of the Crimson Silk, a story by the amorous poet-monk Su Manshu (1884–1918), recasts at once the idea of Buddhist monkhood and that of “free love” in early Republican China. In Lust, Caution, a spy story by the celebrated writer Eileen Chang (1920–1995), a revolutionary heroine is compelled to weigh the emptiness/truth of carnal desire against the truth/emptiness of patriotic commitment. Decades later, love and illusion dwell again at the epicenter of a fallen empire in the director Chen Kaige’s (b. 1952) 2017 film, The Legend of the Demon Cat, in which an illustrious poet sings testimony to the (un)witting (com)passion of a femme fatale.