What Can Play: The Potential of Non-Human Players

What can post-humanism teach us about game design? This paper questions the line drawn between what species and matter can play and what cannot play. Combining works by scholars of feminist post-humanism, new materialism, and game studies, primarily Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, and T.L. Taylor, it proposes that play is a form of communication not only between animals and humans but also between plants and cyborgs, insects and atoms. Beginning by interrogating the borders of the human that have been built on ableist and racist discourses, this paper moves towards considering the human as interspecies and outlines that we must reassess the ways in which a multiplicity of species experience the intra-action that constitutes “play.” With a brief look into the history of defining play in both game studies and animal studies and their small crossover, play is reconfigured into an outlook or an approach rather than a set of rules. It is a drive that all species and matter experience, including insects, bacteria, and metal. This moves us beyond considering solely the materiality of our bodies at play by reconsidering the objects of play as our co-players, as matter with agential force. I argue that we need to reconsider the videogame player as an interspecies being, an assemblage of human and non-human bodies. The de-anthropocentricization of the popular notions of player agency allows for a multiplicity of reactions not created in the linear cause and effect course, the belief in ultimate player control within procedural systems, which dominates game studies. This paper concludes by submitting possibilities of what considering the non-human through a feminist and anti-ableist lens can offer game designers, players, and critics, such as considering the material platform’s impact on play, reforming the individualistic agency of players, and designing for the Other(s).

Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping: Sylvie’s Fundamental Mentorship through New Western Historicism and Ecofeminist Criticism

In the novel Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson discusses main character, Sylvie’s, relationship with nature in a way that revises what many New Western historians view as the Old West’s destructive ideology toward nature. Sylvie lives in opposition to what is seen as the aggressive mannerisms of Old Western males, individuals who have attempted to conquer both women and nature through their disregard for the female histories of the Old West as well as through their degradation of the faultless Western land. An effort that brings together both of these ideas, a concept that connects the maltreatment of women as well as of nature throughout history, ecofeminist philosophies are, in turn, relevant to a discussion of Robinson’s Sylvie and her New Western principles. Both viewpoints express a historical overlap of women and nature; therefore, Sylvie’s actions, which contradict the conquering mentalities of the Old West, also align with fundamental ecofeminist principles. Her actions throughout the novel possess an understanding and admiration of nature’s character as well as a voice that disagrees with the mistreatment that it receives.

The Poetics of Settler Fatalism: Responses to Ecocide from within the Anthropocene

It is impossible to think today, without thinking of the Anthropocene. As biospheres are pushed ever-closer towards exhaustion, collapse, and/or radically inhospitable transmutations, there is a simultaneous explosion of work striving to represent and understand this epoch. However, the Anthropocene should not be thought in isolation from other social, political, and ecological processes. In this paper, I investigate the Anthropocene’s intersection with settler colonialism. Of particular interest to this paper are the metaphorical and narrative accounts about wastelanded spaces; that is, how meaning is ascribed to the local manifests of the Anthropocene as they are birthed on colonized territories. I ask what sort of futurities or recuperations are imagined as extant within the Anthropocene; in particular, whether possibilities for anti-colonial futures are imagined as existing within or emerging from wastelanded spaces. I investigate Richard-Yves Sitoski’s (settler) brownfields. In this intensely located book of poetry—which Sitoski describes as a “poetic ‘autogeography” of Owen Sound”—identifying the presence of what I call settler fatalism in the face of the Anthropocene and its attendant brownfields. I suggest this fatalism is brought about by a melancholic attachment to the processes of wastelanding that are endemic to settler colonization. The final section of this paper contrasts the settler fatalism of Sitoski with the still ambivalent, though more generative poetry of Liz Howard (Ashinaabek). I suggest that Howard’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent approaches the Anthropocene not as a terminal epoch, but as what Donna Haraway calls “a boundary event”.

Speculations on the Mediterranean Borderscape: Le Baiser de Lampedusa

Authors of academic research on globalization often employ watery metaphors -fluidity, circulation, flows - in attempt to analyze the unlimitedness of movements of capital, commodities, ideas, and people. The frictionless sea has thus come to be the metaphor of circulation par excellence. Yet, in the last two decades, the hardening of migration policies all over Europe and beyond EU borders, which has aimed at strengthening a water-barrier between Europe and its “southern beyond”, compels for a consideration of the maritime space, the Mediterranean Sea, as b/order space(s). Through a geo-literary analysis of the novel Le Baiser de Lampedusa (2011) by Mounir Charfi, I will focus my attention on the ways in which the Mediterranean Sea is rendered, modeled and reflected as a b/order space in and through literary representation. The author through the close association of the ordinary and the fantastic, and employing a narrative mode that undermines realism, creates an alternative description of the Mediterranean borderscape in which basic assumptions of referentiality do not hold anymore. In fact, throughout the narrative, the notion of the Mediterranean sea is challenged and its visual appearance becomes blurred and disappears. As a consequence of its disappearance, continents shift and geographic regions are subverted. What emerges is first that the understanding of the Mediterrannean Sea as a b/order is put into question, and secondly, that geopolitical delimitations are not only arbitrary but also flexible. Therefore, the following article deals with the realm of counterfactual geography in border fiction.

Decolonizing the Cosmopolitan Geospatial Imaginary of the Anthropocene: Beyond Collapsed and Exclusionary Politics of Climate Change

This paper extends Tariq Jazeel’s argument on cosmopolitanism to the Anthropocene. Jazeel argues that cosmopolitanism should be thought of geospatially, as a geographic analysis reveals that cosmopolitanism cannot escape its own historically Western spatial imaginary, ultimately collapsing difference and universalizing humanity (77). In reaction against suggestions that cosmopolitanism is a more ethical and socially responsible approach to changing environments, I maintain instead that the Anthropocene already operates within a cosmopolitan geospatial imaginary, which not only collapses blame and responsibility in the face of global environmental crises but also silences and erases the historical contexts of exploitation and extraction that follow within north-south lines of coloniality. Therefore, a decolonization of the cosmopolitan geospatial imaginary of the Anthropocene requires, in order to situate continued coloniality in environmental geopolitics and international relations, looking at the frameworks of both the nation-state and cosmopolitanism. The sections follow a critique of this proposed dialectic working within systems of exclusionary politics of the nation-state and the collapsing politics of cosmopolitanism.

“A Meat Locker in Hebron”: Meat Eating, Occupation, and Cruelty in To the End of the Land

In this paper, I explore the connections between meat-eating, cruelty, and the Israeli/Palestinian crisis in Israeli author David Grossman's 2008 novel To the End of the Land (translated from the Hebrew in 2010 by Jessica Cohen). Using the radical vegetarian-feminist theories of Carol J. Adams, I argue that in the novel, Grossman reveals how the Israeli nation-state's treatment of the occupied Palestinian people is part and parcel of the same ideological construct that allows its citizens to consume the flesh of dead animals; if a nation can eat meat, it can dehumanize and oppress its unwanted others. In particular, I look at a pivotal moment in the novel, where the protagonist Ora's son's military unit leaves an elderly Palestinian man chained up and suffering in a Hebron meat locker; I locate this event as the most important physical space in a novel preoccupied with space, land, and physicality. I also look at another example of a Jewish author grappling with the cruelty of eating meat, the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer's short story "The Slaughterer." Finally, I interrogate the idea, put forward by Todd Hasak-Lowy, that Grossman is less concerned with the sufferings of the Palestinian people than he is the sufferings of the stoic Israeli, forced to make compromising moral choices.

Unlovely Seeds: Human/Nature/Wilderness in Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Winona; or, The Foster-Sisters

In 1872, Isabella Valancy Crawford answered a call printed in George-Édouard Desbarats’s weekly story paper the Hearthstone seeking: “narratives, novels, sketches penned by vigorous Canadian hands, welling out from fresh and fertile Canadian brains, thrilling with the adventures by sea and land, of Canadian heroes” (Early and Peterman 25). Crawford’s winning submission to the Hearthstone's call, Winona; or, The Foster-Sisters, reaps the materials for its narrative from “inexhaustible fields” of both “fact and fancy” of a burgeoning Canadian national imagination (25). This paper is interested in exploring the specifically Canadian anxieties expressed by the novel, as this paper examines the manner in which the displaced occupants of the novel’s Howard lodge act as uncanny avatars of the natural world and of a wilderness as they resist (or, are denied) a place in the domestic space established by the “national family” (167). In this paper, I argue that Crawford’s Winona, with its attention to both domestic and natural spaces, provides a productive site through which to interrogate the vexed relationship of a newly Confederated country with its own “native materials” (Johnson 7; Early and Peterman 10).

Zahra: a Shattered Body and Voice from Lebanon

This article examines the gradual disintegration of Zahra, a girl from Lebanon. It studies the role of mothers in patriarchal societies and the impact of their conservative education on their daughters’ emotional and psychological growths. Raised to believe in her inferiority due to her femaleness, Zahra constantly tries to live up to the social expectations for the female gender. Each subsequent trial ends in failure. When the civil war breaks out in Lebanon, the resulting societal chaos temporarily relieves Zahra from the duties of her gender. Only this break is shortly lived as Zahra is killed.

Betwixt and Between: How Male and Female Audiences Engaged with the "Magnetic Girl" to Complicate Fin-de-Siècle Gender Roles

Lulu Hurst was a young Gilded Age-era performer known for her demonstrations of uncanny physical strength. For the most part, Hurst’s performance involved challenging an audience member to wrest objects from her grasp. For a member of Hurst's predominantly male audience, matching her strength to his own was a means by which to prove his masculinity to his peers. The notion of masculinity being on trial was particularly significant in the late nineteenth century--a time when women were beginning to gain social power. Elaine Showalter famously describes this period as being characterized by a "battle within the sexes" as well as between them (9). As such, I argue that Hurst’s “demonstrations of strength” are best understood within the context of what Marvin Carlson terms "resistant performance"--that is, a performance that subverts the status quo by exposing its underlying assumptions. Drawing on Victor Turner’s work on ritual and liminality, I argue that when the individual male agent separates himself from his peers in order to challenge Hurst, his gender identity temporarily becomes destabilized. However, while Hurst may have disrupted the status quo by troubling gender binaries, her performance also served to reify existing social hierarchies. This paradox is both a marker of resistant performance and of social change. For the postmodern reader, Hurst's performance is significant in that her demonstrations reveal the implications of resistant performance during a unique period of cultural transition in which gender identity was called into question.

Dystopian and Utopian Homecomings in Shimmer Chinodya’s Harvest of Thorns and Olley Maruma’s Coming Home

The two novels chosen for this paper represent divergent versions of homecoming. Most interestingly, Harvest of Thorns (1989), a victim of scathing attack by cultural nationalists for its suggestively anti-establishmentarian title, and Coming Home (2006), are novels written at different times and feature two different characters whose versions of homecoming do not agree with their particular ‘callings’. The central character in Harvest of Thorns is an ex-guerrilla of the Second Chimurenga (war of liberation that ushered in Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980) who is depicted by the author as having failed to integrate into the ‘home’ he was fighting for. This dystopian depiction of the ‘home’ to which the central character, Benjamin, comes back after the war does not agree with the clichéd rhetoric of nationalist narrative that sees the birth of the new nation in 1980 as the pinnacle of nationalist achievement. On the contrary, Coming Home was written by a euphoric homecoming author and intellectual; his narrator is also ‘coming home’ (and celebrates all the associated nationalist utopias of that period) at a period leading towards 1980. Why would Coming Home be written in 2007 at a time when the majority of Zimbabweans were exiting home? These divergent views beg for closer analysis of the texts especially focusing on how Harvest of Thorns shatters nationalist narration while Coming Home desperately reconstructs it.