I found Haraway’s idea of “making kin” abrasive and potentially oppressive. Despite my initial ire toward Haraway’s piece, I found myself looking at the potential merits of the idea and I saw it was represented in all the literature we read throughout the semester. Two names that continued to appear on the periphery of class readings and discussions (Haraway’s piece for one) were Deleuze and Guattari. I read a selection from A Thousand Planteus: Capitalism and SchizophreniaI and was drawn to many of their ideas, particularly with the rhizome and how it represents an anti-hierarchy. Although my understanding of what they outlined may be superficial and flawed, the connection I made was how “making kin” can be a non-oppressive, non-hierarchical exchange while considering Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, which I believe influenced Haraway in addition to meshing well with her ideas.

My search process for finding articles started on OneSearch. I initially searched for articles relating to Lerner’s 10:04, using the keywords “Lerner” and “10:04”. There were a lot of reviews of the book and only one academic paper that showed up on the first page. I then looked through GoogleScholar and was able to find a few additional peer reviewed papers, however I ran into issues accessing some of them. I then found that if I searched for the journal and the author on OneSearch, I was sometimes able to access the article I couldn’t access through GoogleScholar. Unfortunately, I didn’t find anything written about 10:04 that would work for the piece I have in mind, but may still do some additional searching. It was much easier finding results related to Haraway, Ghosh, and Butler. One search I used on OneSearch and GoogleScholar was Haraway paired with one of the other authors. This produced very limited results, but gave me two pieces that will work well for what I have in mind. I also searched each author’s name with other keywords such as: chthulucene, pedagogy, kin, family, etc. The results were varied. Something invaluable I discovered while using GoogleScholar was it will search for synonyms of keywords provided. I will continue to do additional research to see if I can uncover further papers that will assist in my argument, which may include requesting some pieces I didn’t have immediate access to. There is also a chance I may tweak my initial question based on how annotating the papers goes.

Appleton, Nayantara Sheoran, and Danya Glabau. “Critical Engagements on Making Kin Not Population: An Epistolary Review Essay.” American Anthropologist, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13780.

Guerrero, Paula Barba. “Post-Apocalyptic Memory Sites: Damaged Space, Nostalgia, and Refuge in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.” Science-Fiction Studies, vol. 48, no. 1, 2021, p. 29–45. https://doi.org/10.5621/sciefictstud.48.1.0029.

Haraway, Donna.  “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, 2015.

Laurie, Timothy, and Hannah Stark. “Reconsidering Kinship: Beyond the Nuclear Family with Deleuze and Guattari.” Cultural studies review 18, no. 1 (2012): 19–39. https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v18i1.1612.

Leitch, Vincent B., et al. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Edited by Vincent B. Leitch et al., Third edition., W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Miller, Jim. “Post-Apocalyptic Hoping: Octavia Butler’s Dystopian/Utopian Vision.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 25, no. 2, 1998, pp. 336–60. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4240705.

White, Laura A. “Novel Vision: Seeing the Sunderbans through Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Hungry Tide.’” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 20, no. 3, 2013, pp. 513–31. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44087261.

• Make sure to answer the correct question for your group!
• Designate one person as spokesperson and take good notes.
• Provide at least a couple of bits of textual evidence: quotes or paraphrase of particular moments in the text.

1. Lerner’s novel is deeply concerned with scale in ways that connect it to the cli-fi genre, albeit in eccentric ways. What are some moments when the novel thematizes scale, the idea of bigness, smallness, and how the individual subject perceives or tries to comprehend the relative size and importance of the world around them? What does the novel have to offer us readers in facing a world that often seems too large, complex, and interconnected to be grasped and made meaningful?
2. Among the various subgenres one might use to categorize the novel, like cli-fi or autofiction, metafiction stands out. Metafictional works are about, in some sense, the process of creating fiction. What are some metafictional moment in the novel so far? What is the effect on us readers of calling attention to the scaffolding, so to speak, around the text, the process that made it, the decisions that led to the text that we hold in our hands, rather than other directions it could have taken or shapes it could have taken on?
3. What changes as the novel shifts its setting from New York City to Marfa, Texas? What are some of the contrasts between the two settings, and how do they affect our protagonist?
4. The central dramas of Part Four are, on the one hand, the protagonist’s interactions with a new social group, especially at the opulent house party and, on the other, the friction between the novel our protagonist is refusing to write (although we are reading it!) and the poem he writes instead (which Lerner did actually write in Marfa and publish!). Choose one of these dramas and unpack it, explaining what it adds to the novel and how it relates to the novel more broadly. If you want to really get crazy, you might explore what these “inner” and “outer” dramas have to do with one another.

• what databases you used, what was useful or problematic about them, what tricks you used to get the most of them.
• what keywords and search strategies you used.
• how your research question has changed, if at all, in light of what you’ve found so far (or haven’t)

Given that my topic surrounds the ordinary people in Amitav Ghosh’s, ‘The Hungry Tide’, and how there is a lack of representation for these people, to find articles relating to this I used keywords such as voicelessness, and representation. However, nothing was relevant to this, so instead I broadened my search to the book itself and went looking through articles that may have what I was looking for. Once I did find such articles I used the same idea to what connected it to my topic. Using Hunter One and Google Scholar I search for communication related to THT, and was able to find many more relevant sources. I did try to find some work by Gayatri Spivak whose work is based on postcolonial literature, but I couldn’t find anything other than entire books that were unavailable.

As a result, I finally found the answer to my question: Why was it so significant to Alex that Ben was the father of her child?

“But why, exactly, had she selected me? Because we were best friends, of course—because our relationship was more durable than any marriage we could imagine because she thought I was smart and good. I had never really doubted myself enough to doubt her reasons, but now it occurred to me with the force of revelation: She wants you to donate the sperm precisely because she doesn’t think you’d ever get it together enough to be an active father; she’s much more afraid of raising a child with an onerous father than without a father at all; she comes from a line of self-sufficient women whose partners disappear…” (pg. 195— ebook)

Even though I have now gained a deeper understanding of the dynamic from Ben’s perspective, the dynamic still seems strange to me. In considering Ben and Alena’s relationship, I am reminded of a part of the book that occurred earlier in the novel.

“If you want to try to have sex as part of a reproduction strategy”—I involuntarily raised my eyebrows at the phrase “reproduction strategy”—“or whatever you want to call it, I’m open to that, too. We’d have to talk more about it. You would have to stop sleeping with Alena, at least during that time. That would be too strange.” (pg. 177— ebook)

To make such a statement and act toward my best friend who is in a relationship is a very strange thing to do and to say. There was a time when I was unsure if Alena even knew about the situation or how she would feel about it – no mention of it was made in the piece. As much as I respect Ben’s perspective on why he is chosen to be the father, I am unable to comprehend the pressure he is under. This is something I saw with Ben’s way of being as well— he craves a connection with others and he wants love as well, so I feel like Alex is not giving him the chance to decide what he wants on his own before deciding what he wants on his own. 

The concept of the past, present, and future is another element that caught my attention when I was reading the piece.

“More than that: it was as though the physical intimacy with Alex, just like the sociability with strangers or the aura around objects, wasn’t just over, but retrospectively erased. Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they’d faded from the photograph.” (pg. 35— ebook)

The novel provides us with many examples of the past, present, and future, with this being one of them. My interpretation of this is that Ben was doubting his relationship with Alex- thinking about this baby and the future that awaits them with this baby that has yet to arrive- and that he was questioning his relationship with Alex. As we see in their struggles later on to conceive their child, the planning, the conversations they are having, some of which are enabled by a future that hasn’t yet come to fruition.