ABSTRACT
Gerda Roelvink and Magdalena Zolkos describe the dismantling of anthropocentric belief in the autonomous, liberal humanist subject as invariably accompanied by a transformative aspect of affective modalities interconnected with ways and means of inhabiting our world. The evocation of affective responses to the continuing problem of devastating climatic change has made us confront both our bounded human experience, memory and planetary entanglements. While ecological crisis has forced us to confront what Michael Hardt describes as a new discourse of human subjectivity emerged in the wake of the blurring of boundaries between human and non-human subjects, it has also simultaneously dramatized the rise of a ‘politics of care.’ Arula Ratnakar’s novelette Submergence published in Clarkesworld magazine in 2021 draws our attention to this recalibration of knowledge production built on anthropogenic values. Arula’s novelette addresses through the protagonist Nithya’s technologically modified memory in inhabiting the memory of Noor as grappling with human and non-human life worlds, straddling historical and geological past and present, traversing bounded spaces of human memory to unbounded spaces of the ocean as a form of planetary memory. Drawing from Ursula Heise’s “ecocosmopolitan” and Donna Haraway’s “string figures” and “tentacular imaginings,” and “planetary memory” as discussed by Lucy Bond, Ben De Bruyn and Claire Colebrook, this chapter employs the affective mode of planetary memory to witness and possibly to bring about an epistemic transformation to our everyday local and planetary imagination. This epistemic transformation is read as debunking the notions of human history as a shared collective past to register the past in relation to the present as reformulating on what constitutes human-ness.
