The Literary and Visual Landscapes group hosted a talk by Dr Eveline de Smalen on 28 October 2020. Eveline kindly agreed to allow the talk, ‘Nowhere, Somewhere, Elsewhere, Here: Nature Conservation and Cultural Representations of the Dutch Wadden Sea’, to be recorded.
We are delighted to be able to share the video of that talk here, thanks to Eline Tabak and the Literary and Visual Landscapes group:
Nowhere, Somewhere, Elsewhere, Here: Nature Conservation and Cultural Representations of the Dutch Wadden Sea by Dr. Eveline de Smalen
Abstract: The Wadden Sea, an intertidal UNESCO world heritage site, stretches from the north coast of the Netherlands to Esbjerg in Denmark. As an ecologically and culturally important site, it has been presented in fiction and poetry on many occasions and in many ways. This paper discusses the engagement with place in contemporary Dutch Wadden Sea literature and focusses on how literary texts present the Wadden Sea as connected or disconnected from other places and how they engage with local ecologies and communities. A close reading of these texts shows that many display a lack of concern for entanglements and local particularities in ecology and community. This cultural imagination of place is not without its implications in the real world. For example, it is echoed in problems with nature conservation that have been identified by several scholars in the humanities and social sciences. They argue that there are communication problems between conservationists and communities, because the former disregard the particularities, customs and desires of the latter. This paper shows how reading literature can diagnose the extent of this problem, which is not limited to particular groups or regions, but is reflected in the cultures of the Wadden Sea countries at large. While literature can help diagnose this problem, it can also be a tool to remedy it. By providing insights into the lived realities of local communities and the relations between human and non-human beings, literary texts can improve understandings of local cultures. This way of engaging with literature against the background of very urgent and specific problems poses fundamental questions about the position of literature in the world today that is neither politically detached nor wholly instrumental. Analyses of place in literature can be productively linked with real-world environmental problems, but these connections should always urge us to consider carefully how we conceive the place of literature in a world of environmental crisis.
Bio: Dr Eveline de Smalen is a literary scholar who works on literatures of coastal and riverine landscapes, with a particular interest in the transformative capacities of the imagination and the interactions between the realm of the imagination and that of policy and politics. She studied English and comparative literature at Utrecht University and completed her PhD in Environmental Humanities at the Rachel Carson Center in 2019. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Corridor Talk: Conservation Humanities and the Future of Europe’s National Parks” (DFG-AHRC, 2020-2022/3) and visiting fellow at Integrated Research on Energy, Environment and Society (IREES) at the University of Groningen. For this project, she works on the cultural imagination of the Wadden Sea.
More Literary and Visual Landscapes events are coming up this term. The remaining programme for 2020 is as follows:
Banner image: Ollicze
