Contact zones: Multispecies scholarship through Imperial Eyes

Abstract

The contact zone is described as the space of imperial encounter. Against a backdrop of work that has used Mary Louise Pratt's concept of the contact zone to examine culture-making, and destabilize normative understandings of division, distinction, and bordering, the paper interrogates the value of utilizing the concept in multispecies contexts. To do so, the paper considers the relationship between the contact zone and the concept of encounter, noting how they overlap and depart as approaches to questioning embodied difference, colonial histories, and immanent potential. Turning to the BBC documentary series Blue Planet II, the paper uses the concept of the contact zone and discourse analysis to examine its dominant ideas, frontiers of difference, and the means through which alternative geographies are both foreclosed and enabled. It demonstrates how the concept of the contact zone can draw attention to the ocean as the documentary's site of production, where different forms of knowledge, technology, people, elements, and non-human life grapple with each other in conditions of uneven power. In moving between narrative and oceanic contact zones, the paper raises questions about practices of knowledge-making, uneven structures of power, and decipherability, to demonstrate what can be gained from staying with the postcolonial framing of the contact zone as a critical tool of analysis in multispecies scholarship.

Animal geographies II: Killing and caring (in times of crisis)

“…This call is being answered. Recent work explicitly engages the political, through gender (Doubleday and Adams, 2019; Must and Hovorka, 2019; Patchin, 2020), justice (Brown et al, 2019; Pitas and Shcheglovitova, 2019), capital (Barua, 2019; Klein, 2019; Satizábal and Dressler, 2019), biopolitics (Margulies, 2019a; Wakefield, 2019; Wrigley, 2018) and the ongoing consequences of colonialism (Bluwstein, 2018; Isaacs and Otruba, 2019; Margulies, 2019a; Pratt, 2019; Wilson, 2019). Second, as in other fields of geography, relational approaches are being widely applied in animal geographies.…”

“…Researchers engage relationality as an explicit conceptual and/or methodological approach, advancing thinking in the discipline (e.g. Gandy, 2019; Miller, 2018; Robertson and Ljubicic, 2019; Srinivasan, 2019; Wilson, 2019), and also as a broader empirical focus, through, for example, studies of the composition and functioning of cities, landscapes and oceans (e.g. Fredriksen, 2019; Satizábal and Dressler, 2019; Serrano-Montes et al, 2019; Tănăsescu, 2019; Wood, 2019).…”

Of Great Apes and Magpies: Initiations into Animal Behaviour

“…Such encounters would not happen today as mass tourism became the norm over the years. The transition from a wild place to a tourist attraction eventually reestablished some of the asymmetry of power between animals and humans, between former colonials and western imperialisms [ 26 , 27 ], because tourists and even volunteers, paying high fees for the privilege to be with orang-utans [ 28 ] expected and even insisted on interacting with orang-utans. By this insistence and monetary contract, rehabilitant orang-utans were transformed into attractive products for the travel industry.…”

“…Clearly, the orang-utan years had provided an entry point to animals and nature in general or indeed to a multi-species “contact zone” [ 25 , 27 ] that, once entered, cannot ever be left behind or unimagined. No doubt, these experiences may have altered my thinking and in ways that had not been consciously processed.…”

Democracy, Biodiversity and More than Human Justice Imperatives: Institutional Responses to Crisis

“…Unlike a previous emphasis on protecting "ecosystem services that underpin our economy" (European Commission 2011), the EU's newer biodiversity strategy acknowledges the importance of formulating the question of risk through a more distinctly multispecies lens. Nature here is interpreted less as a "service" (implying a use value and normative status of no independent significance) and more as a community comprised of "companion species" who encounter one another in spaces traditionally marked by coercion, exploitation and neglect (i.e., contact zones) (Wilson 2008). 2 With a clear shift in focus towards planetary "co-presence", the realization is that protecting biodiversity means acknowledging the role of multispecies agents in finding "solutions" to "looming existential threats" (United Nations International Day for Biological Diversity 2020).…”