The third Centre for Environmental Humanities talk of TB2 2023/2024. 

Cari Hovanec, ‘Surplus Life from Malthus to the Marsh, or, The Mosquito Swarm in Anthropocene Fiction’

Since Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population, the specters of overpopulation and superfecundity have influenced science, culture, and political economy. Notably, Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection was inspired by Malthus, while much of Marx’s work took shape contra Malthus. These Malthusian specters took on new life in the age of environmentalism, giving a green makeover to old racist, classist, and colonial ideas about the problem of “too many.” But there are other ways of thinking about surplus life. This talk will explore one such alternative conceptualization by close-reading the mosquito swarm in Namwali Serpell’s 2019 novel The Old Drift. Serpell’s mosquitoes give voice to the Anthropocene past and the Anthropocene future, claiming for themselves a Darwinian lineage that is grounded not in survival of the fittest but in the formal and formative possibilities of excess.

Cari Hovanec teaches in the English and Writing department at the University of Tampa. Her research interests include animal studies, environmental humanities, and modern and contemporary literature. She is the author of Animal Subjects: Literature, Zoology, and British Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Notes on Vermin (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming), from which this talk is adapted.

Please note that Cari will be coming to us via Zoom!