Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Investigating affects of fear and grief in Ueda Sayuri’s Kemonotachi no umi (2022) through the lens of 'ecosickness' challenges notion of negative affects and demonstrates how these emotions can shape new posthuman identities and foster positive responses to environmental change.

Paper long abstract

Futurity, liquid landscapes, and the possibility of human extinction are at the heart of Ueda Sayuri’s Ōshan kuronikuru shirizū (Oceans’s Chronicles Series 2009-2022). In a future in which land has been submerged by the rising seas and life is only possible under water, the survival of the human is no longer a certainty. A new species of hominids and sea creatures become the last remnants of what once were the humans inhabitants of the world. In the last volume in the series, Kemonotachi no umi (The Sea of Beasts 2022), Ueda brings together four short episodes, previously unpublished, that once again explore how we think and ‘comprehend the enormity of species extinction’ (Weik von Mossner 2014). In these narratives, the voices of the nonhuman tell the history of a future in which humans are only a memory of the past. The nonhuman entanglements presented in the Ocean’s Chronicles Series are further problematized in this last volume by letting the posthuman existences narrate their own futures. The four stories represent a posthuman alternative to anthropocentrism and highlight the affective affordances inherent in a time of environmental change. By mapping the affective rhizomatic network of posthuman species inhabiting the sea, the four episodes in Kemonotachi no umi explore the affective conflicts resulting from the simultaneous connection to and dramatic separation from the human species of the posthuman sea folk. The characters are learning how to dwell with tragedy (Deyo 2018) as survivors in a time of cataclysmic environmental disasters and they also explore feelings of mourning and grief for a past and a species they did not know. Ultimately, this paper examines the collection's 'ecosickness' (Weik von Mossner 2014) and how feelings of nostalgia for the past and fear of the future can lead to positive affective responses to environmental changes. By dwelling on fear and nostalgia as affects that ‘do not function as predictably as we might think’ (Weik von Mossner 2014), the paper demonstrates how the characters are able to find the fluid stability of a new posthuman and nonanthropocentric existence in an unstable and constantly changing liquid world.