Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

Flight Behavior Draft Zero Mind Map, Human Exceptionalism generally…

- - - - Bewilderment is stuck mourning an old world, but both Flight Behavior and Hummingbird Salamander conclude with a (cautiously) optimistic evocation of a world reborn.
    - - Dellarobia and butterflies literally in contact. Butterflies keeping Dellarobia aloft? Allegory for entanglement of humans and nonhumans (principal appeal). On level of plot, butterflies bring both "threat and chance" to Dellarobia, threatening her old way of life but giving her the chance to develop a new one.
      - Allegorically, the Butterfly Venus digital artwork draws on the cultural heritage of its source material, Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Botticelli's artwork is often interpreted as a hymn to love or to sexual reproduction; in other words, it celebrates the creation of something new. Kingsolver's digital ekphrasis, I argue, also celebrates the creation of something new: In place of love or sexual reproduction, the image allegorizes the creation of a multispecies community, where human and butterfly work together to resist the logic of human exceptionalism and its material consequences, climate change and biodiversity loss.
      - Another level of allegory: When the Butterfly Venus goes viral, another new thing is created: Dellarobia is transformed from a person of local and regional interest into a person of national and even international curiosity. The televised interview and the photograph catalyze Dellarobia's personal transformation.
        
        Dellarobia's initial reaction to the image, digesting her near-nudity, thanks to digital editing techniques, symbolizes Dellarobia's fear of exposure to the outside world. First, it was to her family; then, only local, to her church; now, in the aftermath of the interview, it is national and even international.
      - [In terms of intermedial theory,] Kingsolver's choice of an ekphrasis that adapts and reworks a canonical artwork, transforming it both in medial terms and in terms of its content, while still alluding to the artwork that inspired it, is an adaptation in the sense that Bruhn and Hart (2020) define it. Kingsolver portrays a nascent multispecies community--Dellarobia and the butterflies--adapting from one medium, television, to another, digital artwork. Through its transformation and subsequent virality, it reaches many, many more people than Dellarobia or the news story could. In this way, the multispecies community narrative adapts to a new medial environment to survive and, in this case, thrive.
      - Try to read two "iconic" images against each other: one a vision of interspecies harmony, the other has nonhumans as background.
    - - Knitted Monach Potholder Borderline Ekphrasis
        
        Has no explicit connection with biodiversity loss, nor with multispecies community. Dellarobia reads it in personal terms, at first, as a great Christmas gift for her son. The potholder also triggers imaginative imagery: Dellarobia imagines the woman who made it. Dellarobia's own feelings, of entrapment and helplessness, are externalized onto the imagined Chinese woman.
        
        However, the conclusion of the borderline ekphrasis enacts in miniature what will occur at a more significant point, later in the novel: female solidarity through needlework, despite cultural difference.
        
        Provides a concrete, vivid example of how the deterritorialization of place effects Dellarobia: the butterfly is made in China, but is shipped across the United States, overseen by a company with its headquarters somewhere unknown, far away. The complex entanglement of global and local is dramatized through the knitted potholder.
      - Kingsolver links the metaphorical potential of textile craftwork--the transformatoin of 'raw' yarn into a finished textile--with a caterpillar's biological metamorphosis into a butterfly. This counters the logic of the narrative of human exceptionalism, undermining a dichotomy between intentional tool-use (culture) and intention-less biological processes.
      - In Flight Behavior, the England-based WOMYN Knit the Earth group travels to the Turnbow farm, camping there and knitting butterflies to raise awareness of their plight. While the knitting women are members of a transtemporal feminist community (cf. Sutter forthcoming), they are also members of a multispecies community, resisting the narrative of human exceptionalism and its consequences, climate change and biodiversity loss.
        
        They perform their membership in a multispecies community by demonstrating the intensity of their commitment to the cause: They camp on the mountain, despite torrential rain, they post lots of pictures of their work, garnering attention and support from across the world, and the butterflies they knit are time-, skill-, and knowledge-intensive objects.
        
        However, Kingsolver does not naively portray the alliance between the Turnbow women and WOMYN Knit the Earth. As always, class and geographical difference threatens to undermine the multispecies community. Ultimately, the four women are able to maintain the their (unspoken) alliance, despite a near-miss encounter with Appalachian Othering.
        
        Conclusion: Ultimately, the borderline ekphrasis and the stenographic, many to one ekphrasis of photographs posted online reminds, like the other ekphrases, of the ambiguity of the deterritorialization of place, the twinned "threat and chance" (Mayer 2016) that it brings. On the one hand, without the new media that broadcast both Dellarobia's story and the WOMYN's photographs, forming this multispecies community would be impossible. On the other hand, their interaction is a meeting point of different cultures from different places, and that is not risk-free. The same media that alerted the WOMYN of the butterflies' plight in the first place could also have inculcated them with stereotypes about Appalachia and Appalachians.
    - - The manner in which the media tells Dellarobia's story, ignoring the butterflies to focus on Dellarobia, is literally what the eco-ekphrasis depicts: butterflies in the background.
        
        Explores novel's presentation of TV media: not part of multispecies community because they ignore climate change and biodiversity loss. Nonhumans only valued as aesthetic or economic objects, not in their own right.
      - Also gives reader information about Dellarobia's character: she sees herself in a precarious position (in part because she has no family of her own). She feels at the mercy of what Cub's family and her neighbors think of her.
      - Also a moment where she feels manipulated and misunderstood; a variation of what she identifies with Billy Ray Hatch.
    - - This ekphrasis dramatizes how one aspect of the deterritorialization of place, tribalism (?) threatens another aspect, the affordance to create multispecies communities. Lack of respect and empatht endangers ability to work together.
    - - One consequence: a heightened awareness of a geographic and economic divide. Rural, poor, uneducated Appalachia contrasted with affluent, educated cities. A type of Othering.
        
        Dellarobia very aware of prejudice against 'hillbillies.' This prejudice is transmitted through television: her experience watching a program that "archly twists comedy and news" demonstrates that this is all too real.
        
        She imagines herself, her family, and her neighbors through the eyes of others, as lesser-than hillbillies. Novel frequently reminds reader of this with pictorial models of television, such as reality TV shows.
        
        "The yuppies watched smart-mouth comedians who mocked people living in double-wides who listened to country music. The very word Tennessee made those audiences burst into laughter, she'd heard it" (228).
        
        This geographic and economic divide threatens multispecies communities. For example, threat present when Hester confused about purpose of knitted butterflies. Also present in exchanges between Dellarobia, graduate students, Ovid, and Juliet.
        
        Pictorial model: Hillbilly Channel and Redneck Survivor
      - One consequence: Increased mobility spurs increased exchange of information, catalyzing creation of multispecies communities to contest climate change and biodiversity loss.
        
        Butterflies come to town and, in turn, lots of different groups of humans come to town: Scientists, tourists, three types of activists.
        
        Theme: Climate change and biodiveristy loss cannot be untangled. Both linked to the deterritorialization of place.
        
        TV Interview broadcasted nationally and then distributed internationally online. Without deterritorializing new media, multispecies community could not be formed.
        
        Multispecies Community: Dellarobia earnest question, "Who does a species belong to?"
        is answered indirectly by the novel itself. Its depiction of a multispecies community suggests that the answer is 'no one.' That is, the butterflies ought not to be seen as property, valued solely through their utility to humans, but rather as needing and wanting creatures in their own right.
      - Deterritorialization of Place: Place loses its prominence in meaning-making practices such as communal and personal identity formation. Television and other new media play a significant role in this process.
        
        Brief ekphrasis of photographs of flood in Michoacán, Mexico helps visualize the consequences of climate change and the deterritorialization of place: disasters, habitat loss, and consequent biodiversity loss.