Ecocritique as transnational commons

ABSTRACT

The term ‘transnational’ can be read in two simultaneous dimensions: as an ontological description of a primordially queer birthing (trans+natio) and as a trajectory of practice engaging with the historical actuality of borders. Ecocritique is centrally transnational in both senses, and ecomedia are privileged vehicles for conflictual practices of friction and suture acting along the line of alienation dividing and binding the two dimensions. This is a fundamental fracture between those who govern – some but only some humans – and those who in varying degrees or absolutely are ruled with limited access or none to the work of ruling. The paper proposes an ecocritical aesthetic politics operating through mediation and communication to produce a commons engaging excluded ecologies and technologies in the co-production of a new political space.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecocritique
• ecomedia
• transnation
• governance
• exclusion
• commons
• mediation
• communication

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Sean Cubitt

Sean Cubitt is Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London and Honorary Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne. His publications include The Cinema Effect (MIT 2004), EcoMedia (Rodopi, 2005), The Practice of Light (MIT 2014), Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (Duke University Press, 2017) and Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique from Hollywood to the Mass Image (Oxford University Press, 2020). He is a co-editor of The Ecocinema Reader: Theory and Practice, (Routledge/American Film Institute, 2012) and Ecomedia: Key Issues (London: Earthscan/Routledge, 2015). Series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press, his research focuses on the history and philosophy of media, political aesthetics, media art history and ecocriticism.