1st Edition
Engaging Donna Haraway Lives in the Natureculture Web
Engaging Donna Haraway: Lives in the Natureculture Web explores the impact of major theorist, Donna Haraway, in such diverse areas as feminisms, Marxism, new materialism, science studies, posthumanism, animal studies, ecocriticism, digital media, and life narrative.
The book shows how Haraway’s decades-long career as a major theoretical voice and provocateur of thinking about new and complex connections across technology, species, and disciplines has generated bold experiments in writing from the perspective and senses of non-human species, in photographic self-portraiture of bodily life, in animating the lives of scientists, in radical genealogy, in playful teaching methods and much more. Focusing on the ways in which Haraway’s oeuvre have affected and will continue to challenge life narrative theory and practice, the chapters in this book present cross-disciplinary perspectives which are both personal and critical. As scholars, students and activists inspired by Haraway’s work, these essays together ask all of us to think about where we place ourselves in an age of environmental crisis and how to live in a ‘natureculture web’ which is as fragile as it is beautiful.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.
Introduction
1. Situating Donna Haraway in the Life-Narrative Web
Cynthia Huff
2. Revisiting Catland in 2019: Situating Denizens of the Chthulucene
and
The Writer of The Companion-Species Manifesto Emails her Dog-People
Donna Haraway
Haraway and Cyborgs
3. Life and the Technological: Cyborgs, Companions and the Chthulucene
Kate O’Riordan
4. Modest_Witness in the Wire: Haraway, Predictive Algorithims, and Online Profiling
Joel Haefner
5. More Than Props: Metaphor – A Biological Imperative
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
6. Bound in the Spiral Dance: Haraway, Starhawk, and Writing Lives in Feminist Community
Joan Haran
Haraway and Animals
7. From the Autobiographical Pact to the Zoetrophic Pack
Cynthia Huff
8. "The Jollies": A Biographical Artwork about Primatologist Alison Jolly
Rachel Mayeri
9. Survival Writing: Autobiography versus Primatology in the Conservation Diaries of Alison Jolly
Margaretta Jolly
Haraway and Genre
10. Genetic Prosopography and Caste: Natureculture in Contemporary India
Pramod K. Nayar
11. Linea Nigra: Posthuman M/Others
Francesca Ferrando, Gisella Sorrentino, and Elena Cappanera
12. Composite Lives: Making-With Our Multispecies Kin (Imagine!)
Stephen Abblitt
13. Registering the Self and the Registers of Self: Toward an Ethics of Collaborative Autobiography
Parvathy Das and Vinod Balakrishnan
Teaching and Being Taught by Haraway
14. Haraway’s Material-Semiotic Knot: A Learning-Teaching Response for Creative-Critical Times
Alexis Harley
15. Soils for Making Kin: Compost, Saudade, Com-Bios
Katie King
First, Last, Always Haraway
16. It Matters What Stories Tell Stories; It Matters Whose Stories Tell Stories
Donna Haraway
Biography
Cynthia Huff, an English Studies Professor Emerita at Illinois State University, has co-authored with Joel Haefner, "His Master’s Voice: Animalographies, Life Writing, and the Posthuman" and authored "Framing Canine Memoirs" and "'Forward!’: National Identity, Animalographies, and the Ethics of Representation in the Posthuman Imaginary." She has also published extensively on diaries, Victorian literature, and women’s life writing.
Margaretta Jolly is Professor of Cultural Studies and directs the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research at the University of Sussex. Her work has focused on auto/biography, letter writing and oral history, particularly in relation to women’s movements. She published Thank you, Madagascar: The Conservation Diaries of Alison Jolly, her late mother’s last book, in 2015.
