Professor Deena Rymhs

Mon, 1:00-2:50PM

In “How Do We Behave as Good Relatives?” Daniel Heath Justice writes about “making kin as oddkin […] where the range of relatives to whom we are responsible extends far beyond our biological relatives and, indeed, the category of the human itself.” This practice of “making oddkin” serves as centerpiece of this seminar, which turns to literary and visual texts by Indigenous artists whose work sees the human as thoroughly imbricated in more-than-human worlds—and indeed, challenges the coherence of such categories altogether. The various kinscapes invoked by these works show humans in intimate relation not only with “nature” but with the strange, abject, and seemingly non-living. Their embrace of the unwanted and, at times, the “monstrous” is a radical recuperation of the negative that models ways of making others into familiars while ultimately shifting who or what is seen as worthy of relation.