“Communication about environmental problems is never a simple matter of articulating facts that can be assumed to speak for themselves” (Bergthaler/Morthensen 2018), rather, it depends on processes of framing, on contending claims for discourse souvereignty and on rhetorical and artistic strategies of narration. Nor are what we in hindsight consider ‘turning points’ in environmental history simply given facts: The “narrative configuration that generates turning points is always a mode of sense- and worldmaking” (Nünning 2012). This panel will thus look into ways in which histories of changing and threatened environments have been and are being (re-)told, specifically focusing on the mediality and on words and visuals of worldmaking: Which rhetorical/visual/narrative strategies are employed in order to generate or question certain perspectives on the history of the environment and human-nature interaction and in particular its moments of (potential) shifts and thresholds? How are dominant discourses also challenged and visions of alternative paths opened up?

Date:

June 15, 2023, 17:30 – 19:00

Program:

Chair: Hans van Ess (LMU München)

Wang Yizhou (Hong Kong Baptist University / Former Fellow Heidelberg) Plant as an Actor, Painting as a Device: Human-Nature Narratives on Ming-Qing Transition

Maxime Decaudin (University of Hong Kong / Fellow Heidelberg) Narrating the ‘Barren Rock’: The Environmental Origin of Hong Kong’s Colonial Myths

Sara Landa (University of Heidelberg) Metamorphoses and Shifts of Perspective: Narrating (and Questioning) Epochal Change in Man-Animal-Relations

Wang Yiman (University of California, Santa Cruz / Fellow Heidelberg) Mediating Climate Change in the PRC