Kolonizacja jako terraformowanie: klątwa Argonautów w epoce antropocenów (ćwiczenia z lektury)

Małgorzata Sugiera

doi:10.31261/PS_P.2023.32.09

Published: 2023-11-22

Vol. 32 No. 2 (2023)

Colonization as Terraforming: The Argonauts’ Curse in the Anthropocene (Reading Exercises)

Małgorzata Sugiera

Section: GEologos. In search of new alliances

https://doi.org/10.31261/PS_P.2023.32.09

Abstract

In response to Steve Mentz’s call from Break Up Anthropocene (2019) to multiply versions and perspectives of the latest era in the history of Earth, the article proposes a a possible story of colonization as terraforming, regarding its modern effects as the curse of the Argonauts. Two novels, namely, Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon (1862) and G.H. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), as well as Heiner Müller’s theatre text Verkommenes Ufer Medeamaterial Landschaft mit Argonauten (1982) provide a material for such an understanding of the process of colonization. The article makes use of the inspirations taken from Amitav Ghosh’s essays The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021), but based on historical facts of the nutmeg’s curse, it clearly juxtaposes a fictional curse of the Argonauts. As the proposed reading of Müller’s triptych shows, the literary fictions in the Anthropocene often provide materials for stories other than factions of mainstream historians, as they dig out what is still hidden by the relations based on the approved facts. It is also because of the fact that going beyond human measures they show disasters that are not allowed by the representation paradigm.

Keywords:

the Anthropocene , colonization as terraforming , the Argonauts’ curse

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Sugiera, M. (2023). Colonization as Terraforming: The Argonauts’ Curse in the Anthropocene (Reading Exercises). Postscriptum Polonistyczne, 32(2), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.31261/PS_P.2023.32.09

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Małgorzata Sugiera

malgorzata.sugiera@uj.edu.pl
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4953-2422

Affiliation:

Jagiellonian University Poland

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

MAŁGORZATA SUGIERA – Full Professor at the Department of Performativity Studies, Faculty of Polish Studies, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland. She is a head of the Department of Performativity Studies at the Jagiellonian University, a scholarship holder of among others Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, Andrew Mellon Foundation and IRC „Interweaving Performance Cultures” at Freie Universität in Berlin. Her research interests cover performativity theories and practices, decolonial studies and ecological speculative fictions.
She has published 12 single-authored books, among others, Sztuczne natury. Performanse technonauki i sztuki [Artificial natures. Performances of Technosciences and Arts] (with Mateusz Borowski, Kraków 2016). Recently she has also published edited volumes, such as Hakowanie antropocenu. Nowe koncepcje wspólnot więcej-niż-ludzkich w ekologicznych fabulacjach spekulatywnych [Hacking the Anthropocene. New Concepts of More-than-Human communities in Ecological Speculative Fabulations] (Kraków 2023) and Crisis and Communitas: Performative Concepts of Commonality in Arts and Politics (with Dorota Sajewska, London–New York 2023).

Vol. 32 No. 2 (2023)
Published: 2023-03-29

ISSN: 1898-1593

eISSN: 2353-9844

10.31261/PS_P

Publisher

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego | University of Silesia Press

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Colonization as Terraforming: The Argonauts’ Curse in the Anthropocene (Reading Exercises)

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