Poetry Review, 1: Awakening by Sam Love

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

 Sam Love, Awakening: Musings on Planetary Survival, New Mills, Derbyshire: Fly on the Wall Press, 2020 (£6.99, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-913211-06-6)

Reviewer: Rodanthi Tzanelli

The review will appear in TPQ

There is something sublime when reading about disappearing rainforests and a diagnosis of the onset of a Spermageddon in Sam Love’s latest volume, Awakening: Musings on Planetary Survival. The tone of the poems is orchestrated around notions of an impending loss of ecosystemic balance on a planetary scale, and yet, readers often find themselves smiling at his controlled humour or horrified at the absurdity of human behaviour. Structured into four parts (“Awakening”, “Origins”, “Impacts” and “Recovering Hope”), the collection retains the arc of an ecological drama in which humanity is both the agent of disaster and its ultimate victim. There is no doubt that Love thinks of this escalation into nothingness in more positive terms than the catastrophists of climate change: the book ends with a low-key note on our agency in small acts of kindness toward nature, such as planting a tree, letting it flourish and watching squirrels “weave their nests” in its branches. However, between the conclusion and the grim opening of the book, in which someone reflects on the gallons of water they use to relax in a jacuzzi (“as much … as a rural African / villager uses in ten days”), we are taken on a rather unpleasant trip into the Anthropocene.

Like most of Love’s previously published poetry, this chapbook reflects his interest in questions of energy and the environment. His creative thinking blends tropes of realism and surrealism, always with a large dose of humour:

“If aliens wanted to destroy rival humanoids,

what better way than to dangle

a synthetic material so enticing,

we couldn’t resist the lure

of a plastic covered Earth?” 

His style is openly pedagogical (he has a jargon-free “module” that he wants to teach us) and teleological (it will be about the end of life, if we are not very good students), but also intentionally erratic (here very serious, there bordering on the strange), so that he unsettles us. “If bacteria could do a belly laugh”, he asks, “they’d be doubling over, because the real joke is on us: humans who think we rule the earth”. Such Shakespearean prognostications on our demise teach humility and occasionally aim to induce guilt: for stylising our kitchen surfaces with ancient trees that natives respected as their source of sustenance for centuries, when we display them now as tokens of conspicuous consumption until they begin to develop cracks; for honouring our beloved dead by placing on their grave “nearly-natural synthetic flowers”, because they can “keep standing up, when you lay your loved one down”; or not collecting rogue plastic bags from the streets but letting them join during downpours other plastic detritus “destined to become the legacy of our so-called civilization”.

There is a strong contemplative feel in this collection, which I associate - in my vocation as a scholar and my own work as a writer of poetry - with pilgrimage. There is no religious association in his poetry, but only a desire to restore harmony both materially and emotionally in our world. Love asks us to light a candle for Mother Earth and “imagine [our] contribution to healing the planet”, but the call is not a New Age ritual. The hard facts of pollution, neglect and overconsumption that he lays out in his work are very difficult to stomach, and even more difficult to challenge at the level of practice in a world bound by capitalist mobilities and corruption. However, his ode to the ways the histories of human hubris and nature’s retaliation against our excesses are inextricably intertwined is worth reading for the clarity of its message and beautiful form.  

   

Worldmakings: A Book of Blogs

Kindle edition on Amazon

Paperback edition on Amazon

The present book includes a collection of essays organised into four thematic clusters that converge behind a single conceptual umbrella: that of worldmaking. Philosophical in its origins, ‘worldmaking’ refers to both cognitive and practical acts that organise the physical and social environments we inhabit. Section one (Gendered Worldmakings: Interplays of Culture with Politics) considers the behaviour and actions of some political leaders and former politicians, who tend to adopt gendered styles in the discharge of their duties or the choices they make, with various consequences of international or cultural significance. Section two (Small Acts with Grave Consequences) does something similar, but selects incidents whose protagonists are not celebrities but common citizens who react to particular pressures. Section three (Markets and Intersectional Worldmakings) considers the worldmaking power of international markets, especially with regards to their ability to trap or liberate human subjects from structures of inequality. The last section (Worldmakings and Sustainability) interrogates the ways organisations and state institutions act to create or sometimes unintentionally destroy liveable environments for world societies.

Constellations: A Trilogy

A POETRY COLLECTION

The three collections that feature in this book were fragments of impressions that I have been collecting from my journeys since my relocation to the UK. A Greek by birth, but a traveller at heart, I love blending stories I hear with my own perceptions of the cultures and people I meet. The first collection (‘Anna’s Lament’) features the oldest poems, and is designed on archaic myths and medieval Greek historical personalities; the second collection (‘Envisaged Certainties’) is progressively more hybrid in its narratorial and literary style, introducing towards the end travels in the cyberspace; the last collection (‘Elements and Lovers’) anchors its key plot on digital travel, to conclude the trilogy on reflections regarding the significance of embodiment and affect in forming enduring relationships.

Call for Blogposts, Northern Notes Blog, School of Sociology & Social Policy, Leeds

During April and May 2020, the Northern Notes Blog, a blog published by the School of Sociology and Social Policy (SSP) at the University of Leeds, is recruiting international scholars and final-year doctoral students to contribute to its ground-breaking series on the impact of the COVID-19 on society, culture and politics. We are looking for short contributions on a particular aspect of the contributor’s personal research that connects to the COVID-19 crisis. Country-specific proposals are most welcome, and area-specific ideas (e.g. tourism mobilities, social movements, art etc) are preferred. Thematically open but structured around the idea of cultural and/or societal crisis, these short posts will feature in the School’s official website and be advertised internationally by the University’s marketing team. For previous published posts and an overview of the School’s NNB programmatic statement please visit: https://northernnotes.leeds.ac.uk/about/

We welcome reactive posts. These posts are important for raising awareness of the contributor’s research expertise (and areas of non-academic impact), informing wider public debate of social scientific perspectives. The blog is overseen by an editorial team of academic staff. The core team includes Dr Rodanthi Tzanelli (Current Editor-in-Chief), Dr Roxana Barbulescu, Dr Sarah Marusek and Dr Abel Ugba, along with Director of Research, Dr Paul Baguley, Head of REF Dr Angharad Beckett and Head of School, Professor Bobby Sayyid.  All posts will be reviewed and copy-edited by the editorial team before publication.

Interested scholars, practitioners and doctoral students must have a mastery of English and a specific research agenda around which they will structure their blogpost (1,000-1,500 words). For initial expressions of interest please email Dr Rodanthi Tzanelli at r.tzanelli@leeds.ac.uk (email title: ‘NNB COVID-19 Series Expression of Interest’) with a 100-word abstract and a provisional title of your proposed blogpost. The deadline for accepting proposals is 15 May 2020.

NEW MONOGRAPH: Magical Realist Sociologies of Belonging and Becoming The Explorer

Magical Realist Sociologies of Belonging and Becoming

The Explorer

At the bottom of the sea, freedivers find that the world bestows humans with the magic of bodily and mental freedom, binding them in small communities of play, affect and respect for nature. On land, rational human interests dissolve this magic into prescriptive formulas of belonging to a profession, a nation and an acceptable modernity. The magical exploration is morphed by such multiple interventions successively from a pilgrimage, to a cinematic and digital articulation of an anarchic project, to an exercise in national citizenship and finally, a projection of post-imperial cosmopolitan belonging.

This is the story of an embodied, relational and affective journey: the making of the explorer of worlds. At its heart stands a clash between individual and collective desires to belong, aspirations to create and the pragmatics of becoming recognised by others. The primary empirical context in which this is played is the contemporary margins of European modernity: the post-troika Greece. With the project of a freediving artist, who stages an Underwater Gallery outside the iconic island of Amorgos, as a sociological spyglass, it examines the networks of mobility that both individuals and nations have to enter to achieve international recognition, often at the expense of personal freedom and alternative pathways to modernity.

Inspired by fusions of cultural pragmatics, phenomenology, phanerology, the morphogenetic approach, feminist posthumanism and especially postcolonial theories of magical realism, this study examines interconnected variations of identity and subjectivity in contexts of contemporary mobility (digital and embodied travel/tourism). As a study of cultural emergism, the book will be of interest to students and scholars in critical theory, cultural, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and tourism/pilgrimage theory.

Reviews

"The book is an imaginative contribution to the sociology of aesthetics and offers interesting perspectives on mobility and belonging."

— Gerard Delanty, Professor of Sociology, Social and Political Thought, Sussex European Institute & School of Law, Politics and Sociology.

"Rodanthi’s multi-layered monograph offers intricate social-scientific analyses of the key human processes of becoming and belonging. Through four rhizomatic ‘readings’ that draw on various instantiations of the magical-realist type of ‘the explorer’, the author shares her critical insights about the current condition of Greece in particular and post-colonialisation and neo-liberalisation in general. That this thought-provoking text is hard to summarize or categorize is perhaps all the more reason to read it."

— Noel B. Salazar, Sociocultural Anthropologist, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

"This remarkable and incredibly wide-ranging book is on one level a study of a tourist event, the ‘one breath’ Underwater Gallery off the Greek island Amorgos, but it is also about so much more. Through uncovering the many modalities and layers of the tourist site, Tzanelli encompasses, one might say, a breathtakingly original and challenging interrogation of cultural theory, modernist aesthetics, tourist studies, sociology, visual theory, feminism, and postcolonial theory. Through a magical realist, contrasted with rationalist, lens her book is also informed by an emancipatory imperative to elucidate alternative visions of modernity through exploration of existential, experiential and corporeal travel. It is a landmark work of empirical sociological study and critical social theory."

— Larry Ray, Professor of Sociology, University of Kent.

"Social thinking is a creative endeavor. Unfortunately, there is often quite far between real manifestations of critical-creative social thinking. Rodanthi Tzanelli’s book on Magical Realist Sociologies of Belonging and Becoming comes to a well-awaited rescue for those stranded on the shores of routinized thinking. Rarely do we find such creativity in the field as in this book. The exploration reaches deep into the waters of interdisciplinary reflection, and travels across the vast territories of art, philosophy, and social theory making an important lighthouse for contemporary social thinking. We needed a magical realist map of this world, and Dr. Tzanelli just provided us with one."

— Ole B. Jensen, Professor of Urban Theory, Department of Architecture, Design & Media Technology, Aalborg University.

"This is the first book to boldly and magically transform traditional notions of worldmaking, being and becoming, critically challenging industrial capitalism and rationalized modernity to create radical conceptualizations of ethnic, gendered and non-human difference. Guided by Greek magic realism and postcolonial modes of ‘realist magic’, Dr. Tzanelli undertakes a philosophical and cultural journey into the multidimensional phenomenon of popular culture, transcending disciplinary silos, decentering the sociological imagination from Western-centered perspectives, and interleaving magically with tourism to construct new ontological and epistemological understandings and analyses of cultural pragmatics. Interview quotes and a personalized narrative weave artistry into phenomenal and material exploration of digital and cinematic technologies, "govermobility", emotion, embodiment and performativities of belonging."

— Tazim Jamal, Professor, Department of Recreation, Park and Tourism Sciences, University of Texas.

"In this work of iconoclastic erudition, which drives a critical wedge into the authority of rationalist social-science epistemologies, Rodanthi Tzanelli probes the persistence of hierarchies of art, scholarship, and cultural identity in the neoliberal age. By performing this exercise in a particular country, Greece, and by sympathetically connecting that country’s cultural specificities to its ongoing geopolitical vicissitudes, she reveals the dynamics and constraints of local artistic production as symptomatic of global realities – and especially of the capacity of powerful interests to disenchant the world by denying or fixing the significance of embodied experience."

— Michael Herzfeld, Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard University.

"Tzanelli’s unique book takes us on a journey of embodied artistic subjectivity as it navigates modernity’s multiplicity, and especially the price that must be paid for protecting what one loves in the (post)colonial, hypermobile Capitalocene. Those with a deep knowledge of sociological theory will particularly appreciate Tzanelli’s layered and complex treatment of the issues she considers, while more general tourism studies readers will enjoy tracing the book’s central character and his freediving community’s artistic engagement through tourism’s governmental-industrial worldmaking machine."

— Kellee Caton, Professor of Tourism, Thompson Rivers University.

Worldmaking and the Economy of Desire in Rio 2016

SP MOBILITIES SAO PAOLO, 13-15 March 2019

Worldmaking and the Economy of Desire in Rio 2016

You can watch this presentation on You Tube

Cities partake in selection competitions for the Olympic Games in their desire to be included in an international community of nations upholding a set of ‘universal values’. They promise to promote these values through the impeccable organization of the mega-event, in an ordered, safe and hospitable manner. Such ‘scripts’ can be followed with some degree of precision, but the precision itself comes at a cost.

This is what the Citade Maravilosa, a city of phantasmagoric postcolonial mobilities, discovered during one of the most challenging projects it undertook in its modern history. The Rio 2016 ‘project’ proved a double-edged sword, cutting the city both at the end of discipline and punishment and that of self-fulfilment through art-making and tourist worldmaking. With every change introduced to its fabric to produce a universally acceptable profile, new sociocultural problems emerged or old ones were exacerbated, withering its ‘marvelousness’ for the sake of conforming to the demands of hospitality. Today, intellectual, academic and political critics of this persistence to host the Olympics continue to perform post-mortem examinations on Rio de Janeiro’s wounded cultural and social spheres, whereas its citizens continue to clean the bloodbath of violence caused by the mega-event’s ‘pacifications’.

In this presentation I outline the ways in which we can approach the economic, political and cultural cost of securing a ‘passport’ to the mega-event’s amplified global mobilities of tourism, professional migration and technology. I provide you with two scenarios. First, I argue that for Rio the cost was double: not only did the passport posit serious challenges and obstacles to the city’s field of justice, it also invited the ‘scientisation’ of its carioca uniqueness, thus reducing it into a spectacle to be enjoyed ‘from afar’. The two costs are interdependent and point to Rio’s (in)ability to protect its freedom in late capitalism. The second scenario is contentious for its optimism. I claim that there are also voices of hope articulated within these stringent structures of international, national and regional regulation, which point to alternative vistas of a brighter future. To explore conflicting forces within this desire to make better worlds for cariocas and their guests, I dig a bit deeper into the cultural poetics of Rio 2016. This poetics supersedes politics and can be potentially liberating.

Reconsidering tourismophobia in cinematic tourism mobilities

SSP Research Culture Seminar Series

13 March 2019

Dr Rodanthi Tzanelli

Abstract

SEMINAR SLIDES UPLOADED: 

ON SLIDESHARE

The presentation focuses on the ways localities, nation-states and national or international activists (as the former’s spokespersons) respond to excessive cinematic touristification in reactionary or defensive ways. The cases upon which I draw are mostly episodic, but crucial for the current global climate of hostility against forms of strengerhood. Because established analytical frames on social movements do not assist in the study of most such episodic expressions of discontent, a new analytical model is devised to tease out their affective significance in the grand scheme of globalisation.