What if the Children of Compost had Arcadian roots?
Shared by REBECCA REAM
What if the Children of Compost had Arcadian roots? What if Haraway’s call to ‘stay with the trouble’ meant looking to Western antiquity to re-member how to practise queer kin making? Within Haraway’s latest book she draws on ancient Greek stories to illustrate her Chthulucene, what she calls the current earthly epoch. Derived from the ancient Greek word ‘Chthonios’ meaning “of in or under the earth and the seas”, Haraway’s Chthulucene informed her speculative fiction about the ‘Children of Compost’ (Haraway, 2016, pp.133-168). The Chthulucene also resonated with my own research revisioning Arcadia. Arcadia-as-myth was ruled by the promiscuous satyr Pan, who was considered “autochthons, sprung from the earth itself” (Schama, 1995, p. 526). Yet Arcadia soon became rewritten as a pastoral ideal, used as a European tool of conquest. But I wonder if rewriting Pan’s Arcadia as a queer kin haven could help revision the colonial huMAN legacies of Western imperialism (Haraway, 2016) and rewrite the historical roots of Compost Children ?
This microblog is the first in a conversation between Miriam Potts and Rebecca Ream
Image – Aphrodite, Eros, and Pan. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Source: Mark Cartwright (2015).
References
Haraway , D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Schama, S. (1995). Landscape and Memory . London: HarperCollins Publishers.