Of Supermarkets, Shipwrecks, and Seasons: A Conversation with Sarah Dimick, Lisa Han, and Ben Stanley

In fall 2024, three authors reached out to us to pitch a recorded discussion of their newly published books in the environmental humanities. How could we say no?

Edge Effects is very pleased to welcome to the podcast Sarah Dimick, author of Unseasonable: Climate Change in Global Literatures, Lisa Han, author of Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor, and Ben Jamieson Stanley, author of Precarious Eating: Narrating Environmental Harm in the Global South (a recommendation from our recent Faculty Favorites feature!). The three gathered over Zoom for an expansive conversation spanning methodologies, ethical considerations, extractivism, environmental writing, precarity, and the impact of environmental change on local communities. They emphasize the need for interdisciplinary approaches and a nuanced understanding of environmental justice, discourse(s), and action.

Please enjoy this first-of-its-kind special episode, with many thanks again to our guests for co-leading such a compelling conversation on salient themes in environmental study!

Stream or download it here.

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Interview Excerpt

This excerpt has been highly condensed for length and clarity. We encourage listening to the entire episode for the full discussion.

Lisa Han: One of the areas where all three of our books converge is the relationship between temporality and power. Ben, you discuss chrononormativity in the context of neoliberal consumption. Sarah, you attend to seasons as a plurality of rhythms and talk about things like seasonal hegemony and chronobiopolitics. Could you both speak about how you approach power and temporality and the intersections between your two approaches?

Ben Stanley: Both the category of consumption fiction and Sarah’s category of unseasonable literature might be spaces in which time could be quite important. Transgressing against normative expectations, the timelines that people are supposed to follow, upends assumptions about time.

I think about that especially with the work of South African writer Zoë Wicomb, whose fiction I look at in dialogue with supermarketization, the rise of the supermarket as a dominant purchasing form. The supermarket reorganizes daily patterns around food and therefore daily rhythms.

What I love about Wicomb’s work is her sense that these temporal regulations bind people into performing gender, cisheteronormativity, and whiteness in their shopping routines but don’t fully control how people engage with the supermarket. Her characters embrace that, “If I go and do my shopping at this particular place and time then I’ll perform a class or racial status that I want to perform.” And yet at the same time, they reject chrononormativity by, for example, considering a bruised fruit instead of just perfect-looking ones. Fruit becomes this really interesting vehicle of same-sex desire and intimacy in Wicomb’s work.

Engaging with that specific example brought me to a broader question of how breaking out of temporal routines associated with food and encouraged by global capitalism might be a way to break out of rigid racial and sex-gender categories.

Sarah, what about you?

Sarah Dimick: The question of chrononormativity was one of the most challenging things for me to think through. There’s risk in trying to think about changes in environmental rhythms as something harmful that can easily be mapped onto a normative, habitual, or conformist sense of time. Associations are made between normative time and pre-anthropogenic climate change, and then disordered time and climate change. The moment these associations move from the realm of the scientific to the realm of the social is a highly risky one for us as intellectual thinkers.

What I tried to do was think about what it means to think of rhythm not as something that is normative or habitual, but rather something that forms a habitat, something that enables life and supports a wide variety of life. I’m interested in rhythm as something that creates space for people and non-humans to live and thrive. That’s not how rhythm is traditionally understood within literary studies, and I think that’s going to be an important shift for us to make as we move forwards so that climate politics do not become aligned with politically regressive regimes of normativity. That’s something I hope we can continue thinking about as environmental scholars.

BS: Sarah, a lot of the words that you use to talk about temporality are not only terms from music, like rhythm, but also words used in medical contexts: arrhythmias, pulses, disorders, premature, heartbeat. This rich, medicalized vocabulary implies a comparison between the climate and a medicalized body. Could you unpack that for us?

SD: The idea of seasonal rhythm actually comes from phenology. It wasn’t initially a term that I thought of in relation to the medical humanities or the medical field. But of course, arrhythmia immediately invokes this sense of heartbeat. And as I continued writing, studies were increasingly coming out about how prolonged or extreme heat can produce heart palpitations, particularly for people who don’t have access to air conditioning or shelter. So, as the project unfolded, that was a disturbing convergence.

BS: Lisa, you draw an interesting contrast between versions of shipwreck mediation that’s very much about temporality. Some mediations seek to restore wrecked ships or artifacts from them to so-called “pre-wreck” conditions, whereas others are interested in thinking about the wreck as a living archive subject to ongoing changes in the ocean, such as a shipwreck becoming a reef. Do you see newer technologies as less extractive modes of visualizing the sea floor? And how might you situate that possibility in relation to your broader critique of ocean mediation as a form of extraction?

LH: I was super interested in the way that telepresence and livestreaming has enabled us to mediate the sea floor as a living exhibition space that doesn’t necessarily need to be disturbed or excavated from in order to be remembered. Really, it was an intervention into the question of remembering and inheriting.

So much of how we understand heritage and inheritance in the Global North is through property and money: old, expensive things. Why do we need to keep something in a static state of polish and purity to remember and commemorate it? Millions of people don’t have that opportunity. My own family doesn’t have that. I don’t own a single heirloom or photograph past my grandparents’ generation because of all the wars, poverty, trauma, etc. So, I really connected with this idea that the sea floor is a living space that refuses to sit still and refuses to be purified.

The temporality of the sea floor allows for a different understanding of inheritance and memory. An oceanic archive viewed through a livestream is much more aligned with how remembrance actually happens for a lot of people: this process of active recall, that changes over time, that can happen through actions, practices, and stories.

BS: Lisa, you write that to construct the archaeologist as a frontiersman presumes that the frontier can be understood as an archive and that the archive is itself a frontier. Could you tell us a little more?

LH: I started with this presumption that archeology is a political discipline. Shipwreck mediation is politically motivated. It is about drawing borders and boundaries and saying, “Hey, this belonged to us back in the day; this is a picture of our nationhood.” So, this terrain of salvage is really about extracting value in specific, political ways. The seabed is a kind of frontier space in the way that we’ve been treating it, and it shares associations with other frontiers: the western frontier being the space of wilderness that needs to be “civilized,” but also the technological frontier and the idea that going down deeper is an occasion to develop the most cutting edge—the newest, best technology.

The seabed is also an archive. There are millions of things on the seafloor that speak to the past, sedimented over millennia. So to me, the archaeologist telling a story that fits into present day aims and goals is a frontiersman in the same way that the frontiersman of the past were storytellers.  

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Featured Image: Remains of German U-boat U-352 off the coast of North Carolina, captured on a dive by Monitor National Marine Sanctuary maritime archaeologists. Photo by Tane Casserley/NOAA, 2017.

Sarah Dimick is an assistant professor of English at Northwestern University, jointly appointed in English and the Environmental Policy and Culture Program. Her research, based in Anglophone literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, focuses on literary portrayals of climate change and environmental justice. Her first book, Unseasonable, Climate Change and Global Literatures, was published by Columbia University Press in 2024. She co-edits the University of Virginia Press’s Under the Sign of Nature series and is a member of the Environmental Storytelling Studio. Contact.

Lisa Yin Han is an assistant professor of media studies at Pitzer College. Her research is situated at the intersections of environmental media studies, critical infrastructure studies, and science and technology studies. Her book, Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor, examines how media operations in deep ocean environments pave the way for extractive industry. She has also published work on environmental media and journals such as Resistance, a Journal of radical Environmental Humanities, Configurations, and Media+Environment. Contact.

Ben Jamieson Stanley is assistant professor of English at the University of Delaware. Ben’s work explores how we understand relationships between globalization and environmental precarity. Their first book, Precarious Eating: Narrating Environmental Harm in the Global South, was just published by University of Minnesota Press in 2024. This book highlights the role of food and hunger in contemporary environmental writing from South Africa and India. Ben is now working on a second monograph titled Mobility, Movement and Energy in a Changing South Africa. Their work has been published in venues such as II, The Global South, and Matatu Journal of African Cultural Studies. Contact.