Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Inspired by the climate-fiction of Octavia Butler and ignited by the dramatic impacts of climate change in California, this essay compares new materialist analyses with alternative agricultural practices to question how the material turn in the humanities might make an impact “in the field.” California’s agricultural economy remains the largest in the United States, but in addition increasingly horrific droughts, fires, and floods, the daily operations of farmers have been made increasingly expensive and unreliable due to diminished water sources, rising temperatures, and prolific amounts of pests. These variables denote and contribute to what Jason Moore has termed the “End of Cheap Nature,” which demands a new critical evaluation of California agriculture, especially considering its symbolic representation of a global agricultural state of affairs. This essay draws together a two-pronged archive of alternative food production and critical theory, investigating permaculture case studies and agricultural practices of the indigenous communities of present-day California (as presented by The Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley) alongside new work in feminist technoecologies and bio-ecological transcorporeality. These critical concepts and agricultural case studies are undergirded by the narrative power of Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a nod to the call for imaginative writing to make visible that which the thinking, feeling, eating, and voting public might otherwise ignore or deny.