Dr Cheryl Lousley: Disposable Bodies, Disposable Ecologies: Mourning, Memory, and the Extractive Industries in Contemporary Canadian Fiction
This talk discusses how the extractive industries that have long been central to Canadian regional and national economies are refracted through practices of mourning and memorializing in the fiction of several contemporary Canadian writers, including Sheldon Currie, Alistair MacLeod, Lisa Moore, Anne Michaels, and Michael Winter. Their varied works depict fishing, mining, and energy economies practiced as extractive industries in a double sense: economic value is extracted from a region, accumulating instead in financial centres rather than the sites of work, and resource extraction is continued until the point of exhaustion, leaving diminished ecologies and communities in its wake. I discuss how these fictional works offer aesthetic practices for seeing, remembering, and responding to the slow violence foundational to the modernity we inhabit—a violence not contained to localized pasts but ongoing as global climate change.
Dr. Cheryl Lousley is a Visiting Research Fellow with the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.