Published Online:December 2024
Product Name:The IUP Journal of English Studies
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJES101224
Author Name:Ayan Mondal
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Arts and Humanities
Download Format:PDF
Pages:101-111
The self-sanctioned primal agency of humans in the discourse of sustainability is rooted in a hubris that often neglects the needs of non-human species and ecosystems. This anthropocentric outlook perpetuates power imbalances leading to an erasure of diverse cultural practices and worldviews that offer valuable insights into a sustainable way of living. To recapture sustainability in its true essence, it is essential to severe the dominion of humans over nature and to recognize the interconnectedness of all living beings and ecosystems. Against this background, the paper attempts a reading of Yuvan Aves’s Intertidal: A Coast and Marsh Diary (2023) by engaging with Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘naturecultures,’ which dethrones the agency of the human in the nature-culture dualism. Through an exploration of the text, the paper invites us to see beyond the binaries of sea and coast, mindscape and landscape, human and nonhuman, self and the other, and live in deep animism amid all of life, while simultaneously fostering an active engagement of young naturalists and facilitators, and a radical remixing of the arts, humanities, and the social and natural sciences to create an enduring habitat.
In Brenda Iijima and Janice Lee’s novel A Roundtable, Unanimous Dreamers Chime In, the co-authors ask, “What is home if there are no walls?” (Sweeney 2023).