Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

Engaging Linda Hogan's People of the Whale (2009) and Brian Jungen's Cetology (2002) in an Ecopoetic Conversation: When Contemporary Indigenous Artists Voice New Totemic Hydrographies

Résumé

Deep sea environments defy human understanding as they mostly remain alien milieus one can only start to fathom through accommodating apparatus. Yet, secular Indigenous cosmologies have succeeded in conveying a sense of what living underwater encompasses as they tap into the many possibilities that shapeshifting offers. Indeed, traditional legends from the Northwest First Nations report otherworldly encounters sealing covenants between the clan's ancestors and fantastic creatures emerging from the ocean; meanwhile, enduring totemic rituals open the door to the punctual superimposition of human and other-than-human essences. Chickasaw writer Linda Hogan and Dunne-Za visual artist Brian Jungen achieve such a combination of ontologies as they do not settle with portraying whales but strive to disclose a bodily experience of what becoming-whale feels like. Both novel and artpiece act as interfaces, putting two estranged realities into correspondence: our land-based knowledge of space and the weightless suspended realm of water. Besides, far from illustrating a fixated romanticized image of nature while refuting Manicheist visions of good versus evil, they subtly problematize the universe's paradoxical stance between natural and human agencies regarding a necessarily measured exploitation of resources. This communication aims to engage Hogan's fiction and Jungen's monumental installation in an ecopoetic conversation to question the entanglement of our contradictory perceptions and expectations concerning our relationship with the ocean and our use of its wildlife.

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hal-04961974 , version 1 (22-02-2025)

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Caroline Durand-Rous. Engaging Linda Hogan's People of the Whale (2009) and Brian Jungen's Cetology (2002) in an Ecopoetic Conversation: When Contemporary Indigenous Artists Voice New Totemic Hydrographies. Sea More Blue / 10th EASLCE Symposium / Interdisciplinary Approaches to Blue Ecopoetics, Université de Perpignan - Laboratoire CRESEM, Jun 2024, Perpignan, France. ⟨hal-04961974⟩
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