112: Reimagining narratives of death and extinction with Dr. Sarah Bezan

In this episode, Hita speaks with Dr. Sarah Bezan who is a scholar of environmental humanities currently employed as a Lecturer in Literature and the Environment at the Radical Humanities Laboratory at University College Cork in Ireland. Previously she was a post-doctoral Research Associate at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity in The University of York in the United Kingdom. In this conversation, they chat about how participating in a paleo dig and uncovering a Mosasaur skeleton sparked in her a curiosity that led to her current engagement with making sense of extinction. They speak about artistic representations of extinct animals such as Harri Kallio’s representations of the dodo bird on an island in Mauritius or Mark Dion’s Ichthyosaur installation, and how they manipulate imaginaries surrounding the temporal and spatial boundaries of the extinct species. In describing these imaginaries, they discuss the idea of animal atopias, a term she coined to refer to those placeless places surrounding extinction, where the animal exists not on a spatially defined space but a constructed one, evoking a nostalgia for what once was. They discuss about Sarah’s experiences on the Galapagos Islands where she studied the taxidermic specimen of Lonesome George, the last representative of the Pinta island tortoises and her observation that the extinct body is essentially an exploded one raising questions about what it means to be the last representative of a species and the responsibility that death places upon such individuals. They reflect upon how practices of taxidermy and museum curatorship are essentially performative, designed to evoke a specific emotion or knowledge, rendering them hyper visible, while subsuming others. They discuss de-extinction projects such as the Jurassic World like attempts at reviving the woolly mammoth or even theoretical ideas of re-creating Neanderthals as proposed by George Church are all ways in which we attempt to revive prehistoric fantasies of the human – a fantasy nevertheless that is separate from the idea of the modern human. The conversation concludes with some reflections on interdisciplinary research and the responsibility that early career scholars are placed with when attempting to straddle multiple schools of thought.

Sarah’s personal website: https://www.sarahbezan.com/

Some of the references we cite during the conversation are listed below:

1. “Dodo Birds and the Anthropogenic Wonderlands of Harri Kallio.” Parallax, 25, no. 4, 2019: 427-445. (*To be reprinted as a foreword to Harri Kallio, The Dodo and Mauritius Island: Imaginary Encounters, 2nd Edition. Stockport, UK: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2023).
2. “The Endling Taxidermy of Lonesome George: Iconographies of Extinction at the End of the Line.” Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, vol. 27, no. 2, 2019, pp. 211-238. Co-Edited by Sarah Bezan and Susan McHugh.
3. “A Darwinism of the Muck and Mire: Decomposing Eco- and Zoopoetics in Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s decomp.” In Texts, Animals, Environments: Zoopoetics and Ecopoetics. Ed. Roland Borgards, Catrin Gersdof, Frederike Middelhoff, and Sebastian Schönbeck. Freiburg: Rombach Verlag “Cultural Animal Studies Series,” 2019, 241-253.
4. Animal Remains. Co-edited by Sarah Bezan and Robert McKay. Routledge Perspectives on the Non-Human in Literature and Culture Series. London: Routledge, 2022.
5. “Taxidermic Forms and Fictions.” A special issue of Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, 27, no. 2, 2019, pp. 131-138. Co-Edited by Sarah Bezan and Susan McHugh, Johns Hopkins University Press.
6. Heise, Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
7. Jørgensen, Dolly. “Endling, the Power of the Last in an Extinction-Prone World.” Environmental Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2017): 119–38.