The bad environmentalism of ‘nature is healing’ memes

What can memes teach us about shifting popular-cultural understandings of nature? While a certain form of environmentalism with proclivities for dour, self-righteous, sentimental, or apocalyptic tones is often taken to be hegemonic, Nicole Seymour argues that a more irreverent ‘low environmental culture’ should not be occluded. Humor and irony can serve as emotional registers for environmental media that provide openings for the emergence of playful environmentalisms perhaps more amenable to a diverse audience. Such ‘bad environmentalism’ mobilizes humor by transgressing the emotional norms of piety within environmentalism. This article deepens the concept of bad environmentalism through an examination of the emergence of ‘nature is healing’ memes during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Implicitly critical of nefarious arguments that the death-dealing pandemic would provide a ‘pause for nature’ and thus that ‘humans were the real virus’, the formal and easily reproduced ‘nature is healing’ genre subverts conventional understandings of ‘the natural’ as well as the naturalization of social order and political economy. In particular, I extend Seymour’s argument – and pop cultural studies of the environment – by parsing five modes through which the ‘nature is healing’ genre plays ironically on differing understandings of the natural. These are the out-of-place in nature; nature out-of-place; drawing attention to a naturalized social order; naturalizing social transformation; and absurdity in the natural world. Close attention to different modes of humor provides insight into the ambivalence of affect within ecological and political movements; ‘bad affect’ can, after all, produce careful and critical aesthetics. Such research demonstrates the utility of a widened and potentially counterhegemonic repertoire of affective responses to environmental and political crisis.

The Fragmentary Condition of Aesthetics at the Turn of 21st Century

The ‘fragmentary condition’ relates to Jena Romanticism as the point of departure to discuss how the idea of the fragment moves from classical, literary studies to contemporary art and becomes part of a broader interpretation of the 20th century fin de siècle aesthetics. The article builds on Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s theoretical insights into Jena Romanticism in order to examine the unification of all genres separated from poetry to touch poetry, philosophy, rhetoric through the anecdotal and witty articulation, as well as ars combinatoria. For Romantics, the basic imperative was to educate, form their existence, that is, Bildung, in Hegelian terms, cultural education, formation, development. This literary foundation is defined by Jean-Luc Nancy as a fragmentary existence which he identifies with the fraction, fractal essence, inherent separation, disengaging. Nancy was intent on examining the emergence of various contemporary works expressing their essence in terms of breaks, incompleteness, and an autonomous role of the fragment. This classical conceptual foundation provides these key conceptual and methodological perspectives and allows for discussing the implications of the critical aesthetics of the fin de siècle for the practices of fraction, ex-peau-sition, spacing, and division in the contemporary research in art.

Book review: S. A. Chatterji, Filming Reality: The Independent Documentary Movement in India, K. P. Jayasankar & A. Monteiro, A Fly in the Curry: Independent Documentary Film in India and A. Sharma, Documentary Films in India: Critical Aesthetics at Work

S. A. Chatterji, Filming Reality: The Independent Documentary Movement in India. SAGE Publications, 2015, 320 pp., $59.99. K. P. Jayasankar & A. Monteiro, A Fly in the Curry: Independent Documentary Film in India. SAGE Publications, 2016, 276 pp., $54.99. A. Sharma, Documentary Films in India: Critical Aesthetics at Work. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, XIII, 276 pp., 41.59€.

Methods, Ethics, and Filmmaking

This short introduction explains how Part II, “Visual Images,” engages with existing debates in visual international politics through chapters addressing the aesthetic turn in international relations (Chapter 4), visual securitization (Chapter 5), and ethical witnessing (Chapter 6). To make these arguments, it uses a range of visual images—photographs, documentary films, feature films, online videos, and visual art—to discuss visuality/visibility, ideology/affect, and cultural governance/resistance. Using these examples, Part II examines how visual culture studies and visual IR have used the visibility strategy to deconstruct visual images in order to reveal their hidden ideology. It argues that while exploring important issues, this research agenda is also limited by its hermeneutic mode of analysis and by its narrow focus on Euro-American images of security, war, and atrocity. It seeks to push beyond this verbally-inflected mode of analysis to see not just what images mean, but what they can “do” in provoking affective communities of sense. Part II thus employs comparative analysis and critical aesthetics to juxtapose concepts, practices, and experiences from different times and places.

Beyond Imperial Aesthetics

Observing that the division between theory and empiricism remains inextricably linked to imperial modernity, manifest at the most basic level in the binary between "the West" and "Asia," the authors of this volume reexamine art and aesthetics to challenge these oppositions in order to reconceptualize politics and knowledge production in East Asia. Current understandings of fundamental ideas like race, nation, colonizer and the colonized, and the concept of Asia in the region are seeped with imperial aesthetics that originated from competing imperialisms operating in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Such aesthetics has sustained both colonial and local modes of perception in the formation of nation-states and expanded the reach of regulatory powers in East Asia since 1945. The twelve thought-provoking essays in thiscollectiontackle the problematics that arise at the nexus of aesthetics and politics in four areas: theoretical issues of aesthetics and politics in East Asia, aesthetics of affect and sexuality, the productive tension between critical aesthetics and political movements, and aesthetic critiques of sovereignty and neoliberalism in East Asia today. If the seemingly universal operation of capital and militarism in East Asia requires locally specific definitions of biopolitical concepts to function smoothly, this book critiques the circuit of power between the universalism of capital and particularism of nation and culture. Treating aesthetic experiences in art at large as the bases for going beyond imperial categories, the contributors present new modes of sensing, thinking, and living that have been unimaginable within the mainstream modality of Asian studies, a discipline that has reproduced the colonial regime of knowledge production.

Strange Brew: Art, Protest, and the Anti-Fracking Movement

This article examines how contemporary artists respond to the technique of hydraulic fracturing, more commonly known as “fracking.” Drawing on examples of political protest and social activism, with special focus on the ways that artistic interventions challenge energy corporations in galleries and museums, Smith analyzes how artists fuse concerns over the environment with critical aesthetics. By doing so, they explore the problematic relationships between fracking and climate change, waste, environmental degradation, pollution, and public health. In the wake of new data, research, and dissent, it is argued that contemporary art visualizes protest and continues to play a role in picturing the potentially harmful effects of fracking. Accordingly, Smith proposes that artists formulate innovative ways to confront an authoritative fuel industry and translate key issues into new modes of understanding.

The politics of walls: Barriers, flows, and the sublime

As Donald Trump’s presidential campaign showed, walls are a hot topic. While ‘globalisation’, with its free flow of capital and goods, characterised world politics after the end of the Cold War, the twenty-first century has witnessed a reassertion of cultural, legal, and physical barriers. It is common to criticise such post-Cold War walls, especially the US-Mexico Barrier and Israel’s West Bank Barrier, as ineffective and immoral. This article problematises such critical discourse by using unlikely juxtapositions (the Great Wall of China) and new conceptual frameworks (gaps, critical aesthetics) to explore: (1) how walls can be a rational security policy; (2) how they are not simply barriers, but can be complex sites of flows; and (3) how walls are not simply texts waiting to be decoded: they are also sites of non-narrative affective experience that can even excite the sublime. This critical juxtaposition of walls first explores what they can tell us about the politics of borders, identity, and foreign policy, and then considers how walls, as concrete visual artefacts, can be examples not simply of ideology, but also of affect. The article aims to understand walls in a different register as active embodiments of political debate – and of political resistance.