Issue Details: First known date: 2023... 2023 Moving Beyond a Strange Spectatorship : Stories of Nonhuman Road Trauma in Australia
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'What can nonhuman road trauma, more commonly referred to as ‘roadkill’, teach us about ecological crises and human culpability? Incidents of nonhuman road trauma could be described as strange encounters, revealing the shared trauma of the nonhumans and humans involved while simultaneously highlighting the supposed inevitability of such events. I argue that the choice to check the rearview mirror – to exhibit attentiveness and care in self-reflection – is an act of radical correspondence with the more-than-human. Such correspondence functions as a kind of non-spoken letter to both nonhumans and other human drivers; a letter calling for acts of care and attentiveness that acknowledge the nonhuman experience, mourn losses, and possibly instigate radical change when it comes to how nonhuman road trauma is thought about now and hopefully avoided in future. In her work on the ‘Anthropocene noir’, Deborah Bird Rose speaks of ‘the Anthropocene parallel’ in which humans are spectators of the suffering of nonhumans, and also spectators of a suffering that is our own. Written as both an essay and a personal log of my own experiences with nonhuman road trauma, this work draws on Rose’s idea in an attempt to reconcile the concept of what I term a ‘strange spectatorship’, in which humans observe, are implicated in, and turn away from the phenomenon of nonhuman road trauma and what such trauma reveals about human-nonhuman relations, particularly for settler-colonial Australians. Reflecting on anecdotal experiences as well as the representation of roadkill in Australian literature, I explore the strangeness perceived in how settler-colonial Australians are both actors and spectators in nonhuman road trauma. I grapple with the idea of such trauma as a means of better understanding the settler-colonial impact on Australian natural environments, and the consequences for both humans and nonhumans if we do not better address the ethical and ecological consequences of our modern road infrastructure.' (Publication abstract) 

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    y separately published work icon Swamphen : A Journal of Cultural Ecology Strange Letters no. 9 2023 26491309 2023 periodical issue

    'This special issue of the Swamphen Journal was born from the Strange Letters Symposium held in 2021 when we were in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic; a period of life gone strange in which we were forced to adopt new modes of meeting, communicating and being together-apart. In the Western tradition, people have often turned to letter writing as a means of connection with distant others but this symposium asked us to reimagine the letter for the strange times that we have found ourselves in (for some these strange times began with colonisation). To challenge the letter writing tradition, interrogating the communicative capacity of the more-than-human, seems strangely fitting when the nonhuman is so clearly asking us to listen.' (Publication summary)

    2023
Last amended 6 Jul 2023 07:30:31
Moving Beyond a Strange Spectatorship : Stories of Nonhuman Road Trauma in Australiasmall AustLit logo Swamphen : A Journal of Cultural Ecology
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