ENGL 4010: Storytelling Earth and Body (SP23)

Storytelling
Earth and body
New media writing
Illustration by Daniel Liévano for Emergence Magazine

ingold
“Someone who knows well is able to tell. They
can tell not only in the sense of being able to
recount stories of the world, but also in the sense
of having a finely tuned perceptual awareness
of their surroundings” (162).

We tell because we can tell. We have all probably
Rivers
said at some point, “I can tell that you’re upset,”
or, more environmentally, “I can tell that it’s about
to rain.” Telling in this instance is a practice of
discerning, noticing or sensing. To tell is to be
tuned in to what is going on.

Rivers
We have also all promised, “I will tell you about it
later,” or even enticed, “do I have a story to tell to
you.” Telling here is to describe.

Rivers
It is equally important to note that in poker a tell
is an unconscious physical gesture that gives
one away to others. To have a tell is to physically
disclose something about your state of mind or at
least the quality of your hand.

Rivers
Tells and telling attune and articulate us to one
another and to the world at large, and they do so
even before we have even begun to tell.

Rivers
We tell here so that others might tell elsewhere.

Vasudevan et al.
How can storytelling, as an alternate mode of
theorization, help us resituate contemporary
planetary crises within longer histories and plural
understandings of our relations with earth?

Vasudevan et al.
Anticolonial feminist storytelling alters the
spatiotemporal scales through which
planetary crises are understood by centering
the relationship between body and land.

Vasudevan et al.
Storytelling is how people make sense of the
world and our place in it, an iterative process of
interpreting reality through observation and the
exchange of ideas.

Vasudevan et al.
storytelling embraces the complexities and contradictions of
lived experience, generating grammars at once prosaic and
revelatory, textured by everyday realities even as they
speculate about “the nature of life.” […] “stories, unlike data,
contain the affective legacy of our experiences. They are a felt
knowledge that accumulates and becomes a force that
empowers stories that are otherwise separate to become a
focus, a potential for movement.”

Vasudevan et al.
In the context of planetary apocalypse, storytelling can
reanimate scholarship as an anticolonial practice
grounded in wonder (McKittrick 2021). Stories express and
enable certain forms of relations (and/or domination), which in
turn generate our subjectivities, behaviors, and knowledges. We
turn to storytelling to reimagine our collective sense of self
through profound interconnection with one another and our
nonhuman relations.

The
Franklin expedition

Mystery of a Victorian-era wreck in Arctic waters. BBC News, 2021

Audio from “The Inuit and the
Franklin Expedition” by Craig Baird,
Canadian History Ehx.
Illustration of Inuit people outside
of explorer Francis Leopold
McClintock's (1819-1907) igloo.
McClintock was looking for the
remains of Sir John Franklin
(1786-1847) and his 1845 expedition
crew to the North American Arctic.
Reproduction of a print from the 19th
century.

Vasudevan et al.
These generative offerings provide paths forward in
the moment of planetary crises in which we are living;
we must dismantle the dominant story and proliferate
stories that tell otherwise if we are to survive and
thrive.

Vasudevan et al.
Weaving stories through the grammars and practices
offered by these anticolonial feminist genealogies, we
must animate our imaginations to lead us out of the Manas-Human
toward homo narrans, the storytelling human
(Alagraa 2018); we must embrace the expansive
relationalities that make us already more than human.

Storytelling
Earth and body
New media writing
Illustration by Daniel Liévano for Emergence Magazine