Publication: Joeri Verbesselt and Syaman Rapongan, "Interspecies Storytelling for Prudent Predation" in Re-Imagining Class: Intersectional Perspectives on Class Identity and Precarity in Contemporary Culture (eds. Michiel Rys and Liesbeth François, Leuven University Press, 2024).
Contemporary culture not merely reflects ongoing societal transformations, it shapes our understanding of rapidly evolving class realities. Literature, theatre, and film urge us to put the question of class back on the agenda, and reconceptualize it through the lens of precarity and intersectionality. Relying on examples from British, French, Spanish, German, American, Swedish and Taiwanese culture, the contributors to this book document a variety of aesthetic strategies in an interdisciplinary dialogue with sociology and political theory. Doing so, this volume demonstrates the myriad ways in which culture opens up new pathways to imagine and re-imagine class as an economic relation, an identity category, and a subjective experience. Situated firmly within current debates about the impact of social mobility, precarious work, intersectional structures of exploitation, and interspecies vulnerability, this volume offers a wide-ranging panorama of contemporary class imaginaries.
From the introduction to the edited volume:
"The preoccupation with sustainable modes of living together is shared by Joeri Verbesselt and Syaman Rapongan’s chapter, “Interspecies Storytelling for Prudent Predation” (5.2), which proposes a close reading of the latter’s story ‘The Eyes of the Sky’ (2012). In this story, Rapongan, a Taiwan-based Tao writer draws on Tao mythology as a way of urging humans to consider and learn from animal populations— in this case, the fish living in the ecosystem surrounding the island of Pongso no Tao. Situating their contribution within contemporary Western academic debates on the Anthropocene and ecological precarity but decidedly prioritising the Tao perspectives and traditions that have advanced these insights independently from —and often considerably before—the latter for their analysis, the authors point out how interspecies storytelling can help envisaging modes of ‘prudent predation’ as opposed to the unsustainable fishing practices that respond to the needs of international markets. Thus, within the contours of literary and critical practice, the possibility emerges to imagine an international interspecies alliance that would reframe and correct the notion of class in the context of the Anthropocene."
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