Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of
/Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl
Herbarium, /edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota.
Like all Open Humanities Press books, /Ecological Rewriting/ is
available open access (it can be downloaded for free):
https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ecological-rewriting/
<https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ecological-rewriting/>
*Book description *
/Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl
Herbarium/is the first book in the Combinatorial Books: Gathering
Flowers
<http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquid-books/>series.
Supported by the COPIM <https://www.copim.ac.uk/>project, it is the
creation of a collective of researchers, students and technologists from
the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Led by Gabriela Méndez
Cota, this group of nine (re)writers annotate and remix /The Chernobyl
Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness/ by the philosopher
Michael Marder and the artist Anaïs Tondeur (originally published in
OHP’s Critical Climate Change series) to produce what is a new book in
its own right – albeit one that comments upon and engages with the
original.
In the Mexican context, experiments with art, writing and technology
have a history that is tied less to academic publishing or avant-garde
scholarship and more to community-building and grassroots organising. It
is important, then, that in creating /Ecological Rewriting/the
collective led by Méndez Cota//are inspired by locally influential
Cristina Rivera Garza’s theorization of re-writing as dis-appropriation,
rather than appropriation of another’s work. Alongside philosophical
concepts such as Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘literary communism’, Rivera Garza’s
ethical poetics is here turned into the proposition that the reuse of
open access materials does not need to be understood as appropriation or
reappropriation of ‘knowledge’. Instead, it can be conceived as a
creative exercise in ‘unworking’ or ‘disappropriating’ academic
authorship which responds to /The Chernobyl Herbarium’s/ invitation to
think through (vegetal) exposure and fragility. Thus, the authors
challenge property and propriety by creating singular, fragmentary
accounts of Mexico’s relation with Chernobyl. In the process they
explore ways of bearing witness to environmental devastation in its
human and non-human scales, including the little-known history of
nuclear power and the anti-nuclear movement in Mexico – which they
intersect with an experimental history of plant biodiversity. The
resulting book constitutes both a practical reflection on plant-thinking
and a disruptive intervention into the conventions of academic writing.
/Ecological Rewriting: Situated Engagements with The Chernobyl
Herbarium/ exists as an online version
(https://doi.org/10.21428/9ca7392d.07cdfb82
<https://doi.org/10.21428/9ca7392d.07cdfb82>) and as a print version
(forthcoming). The online version is an experimental publication with
links to the original sections of /The Chernobyl Herbarium/ that the
writers responded to, so that the reader can follow an associative trail
between the two publications.
*
*
*Authors *
Gabriela Méndez Cota, Etelvina Bernal Méndez, Sandra Hernández Reyes,
Sandra Loyola Guízar, Fernanda Rodríguez González, Yareni Monteón López,
Deni Garciamoreno Becerril, Nidia Rosales Moreno, Xóchitl Arteaga
Villamil, Carolina Cuevas Parra
*
*
*Editor Bio
*
Gabriela Méndez Cota is a lecturer and researcher in the Department of
Philosophy at Universidad Iberoamericana, Ciudad de México. Inspired by
deconstruction, psychoanalysis and technoscience feminism, her research
explores the subjective and ethical dimensions of
technological/political controversies in specific contexts. Her books
include /Disrupting Maize: Food, Biotechnology and Nationalism in
Contemporary Mexico/ (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). Among other places,
her work has appeared in /New Formations/, /Media Theory/, /Women’s
Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, /and the /Routledge Handbook of
Ecocultural Identities/ (2020). With Rafico Ruiz, she co-edits the open
access journal of culture and theory, Culture Machine
(culturemachine.net) <http://culturemachine.net/>. Between 2019 and 2021
she led a practice-based educational initiative on
critical/feminist/intersectional perspectives of open access, which
included a collaboration with the COPIM project led by the Centre for
Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University, UK, and resulted in a
collective rewriting of /The Chernobyl Herbarium/ (Open Humanities
Press, 2015).
*Series *
/Ecological Re-writing//is published as part of the /Combinatorial
Books: Gathering Flowers series, edited by Janneke Adema, Simon Bowie,
Gary Hall and Rebekka Kiesewetter:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquid-books/
<http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/liquid-books/>
--
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University:
http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures
https://postdigitalcultures.org/about/
Website:http://www.garyhall.info
Mastodon: @garyhall@hcommons.social
Director of Open Humanities Press:http://www.openhumanitiespress.org
Latest:
Journal article (open access) 'Defund
Culture':https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/defund-culture
Book review: ‘Review of Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage' by
Matthew Kirschenbaum:https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/721475
Blog post: 'Invest in the De-liberalisation of
Society':http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/?SSScrollPosition=0
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