This Will Not Be Generative

by Dixa Ramírez-D'Oleo

This Will Not Be Generative attends to the semiotics of ecological writings via Caribbean literary studies and black critical theory. Closely reading texts by Donna Haraway, Monique Allewaert, and Lisa Wells, it exposes how the language of tentacles and tendrils, an assumptive 'we,' and redemptive sympathy or 'care' disguises extraction from black people and blackness. This often speculative rhetoric, abetted by fantasies of white communion with indigenous groups, contrasts with the horror semiotics of the films Get Out (2017) and Midsommar (2019), which unmask the antagonistic relationship between white survival 'at the end of the world' and blackness as compost.

76 pages, Paperback

Published May 25, 2023

Reviews

[winnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

finally, a book-length critique of trending positivist ecology writings. it brings together carefully crafted arguments and incisive critique of Donna Haraway, though some of the book also touches on Monique Allewaert's Ariel's Ecology. the kind of intersection we need more of between Black and Caribbean studies.

[Matthew Molinaro]

"This writing remains staunchly anthropocentric even as it slyly seeks to slip out of the category. How else to understand the grammar of being in Wells’s “to be a field of poppies” or of Haraway’s symbiosis that always includes some facet of non-black human agency? Speculative fabulation costumes narratives of whiteness’s survival in the garb of an obviously exclusionary “we,” as well as in the language of “care,” “love,” “curiosity,” and “politeness.”"

can only aspire to be as haunting and world-shattering as ramírez-d'oleo's merciless critiques of white ecofascism, my goodness!

[Ada · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sharp critique of the universalizing "we" of white Anthropocene discourses, that somehow rendered itself immune from criticism through its "generativity" politics. I'll think twice before citing Haraway again.

[Aya Nassar]

I found this very thought- provoking and it will be pushing me to revise some of the ways I tend to use language of generative-ity and relation from now on.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Withering. Environmental Humanities found dead.