Event overview
The MA Ecology, Culture & Society is delighted to invite you to a thought-provoking lecture by Dr Aidan Tynan (Cardiff) on ecocriticsm and ecofascism. All welcome!
What Alexander Reid Ross has called ‘the fascist creep’ – that is, the tendency of far-right and ultranationalist movements to draw left-wing ideas of solidarity and mass liberation into their ideological fold – has emerged as a troubling hallmark of contemporary politics. But the ‘original’ fascist creep might be said to have begun in the late-nineteenth century with the establishment of ecology in the sciences and subsequent attempts to provide a biological or organic foundation for state power by naturalising politics and politicising nature. The degree of importance environmentalism actually played for National Socialism or Mussolini’s Fascist Party has been a matter of intense historical debate for many decades. Given today’s resurgences and returns of fascist phenomena across social and cultural life, including the appearance of self-described ‘ecofascist’ white supremacists, how should ecological theorising in the humanities and social sciences proceed? Do we need to agree with Andreas Malm’s scathing critique of the likes of Bruno Latour, Jason. W. Moore and Donna Harraway in favour of more conventional accounts of the nature/society dualism? In this talk, I attempt to engage these questions by looking at the history of literary ecocriticism, its politics and its conflicted relationship to theory, while attempting to sketch an antifascist ecocritical practice.
Aidan Tynan is Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University. His research cuts across ecocriticism and the environmental humanties, modern and contemporary literature, Deleuze and Guattari studies, critical theory and continental philosophy. He also has research interests in the religious turn in contemporary theory and politics, economic criticism, and the far-right. He is the author of The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics (Edinburgh Univrrdsity Press, 2020) and Deleuze’s Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 2 Nov 2023 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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