ABSTRACT

This book considers how we encounter and make meaning from extinction in diverse settings and cultures. It brings together an international and interdisciplinary range of scholars to consider how extinction is memorialised in museums and cultural institutions, through monuments, in literature and art, through public acts of ritual and protest, and in everyday practices.

In an era in which species are becoming extinct at an unprecedented rate, we must find new ways to engage critically, creatively, and courageously with species loss. Extinction and Memorial Culture: Reckoning with Species Loss in the Anthropocene develops the conceptual tools to think in complex ways about extinctions and their aftermath, along with providing new insights into commemorating and mourning more-than-human lives.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the environmental humanities, extinction studies, memorial culture, and the Anthropocene.

chapter 1|13 pages

Layering Loss

A Conversation with Lucienne Rickard

chapter 2|22 pages

Beginning and Endling

Archival Atmospheres, Extraction and the Case of Aotearoa New Zealand's First Rose-Crowned Fruit Dove, or Specimen OR.030538

chapter 3|18 pages

Listening to Lost Species

Memorialising Extinction through Sound

chapter 5|20 pages

Edenic Extinction

Memorialising Lost Species across Timescales at the Eden Portland Project

chapter 6|15 pages

Franklinia in the Garden

Memorializing Foliage, Preserving Heritage

chapter 7|18 pages

Withnessing

Multispecies Approaches to Extinction, Testimony, and Bodies of Water

chapter 8|18 pages

Conjuring Up Ghost Species

On Photography and Extinction

chapter 9|18 pages

An Elegy for an Ecotype

Eva Saulitis's Into Great Silence and the Extinction of the Chugach Transient Killer Whales

chapter 10|14 pages

Lost Species, Lost Worlds

Memorialising Extinction in the Art of Todd McGrain and Chris Jordan 1

chapter 11|20 pages

Psittacine Extinction Story

I Once Loved a Lorikeet