Extinction

¹Katrina Schlunke and ²Chris Healy

^¹University of Sydney

²University of Melbourne

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/csr.v24i1.6674

Article history: Published 25/09/2019

Citation: Schlunke, K. and Healy, C. 2019. Extinction. Cultural Studies Review, 25:1, 2-3. http://dx.doi.org/10.5130/csr.v24i1.6674

© 2019 by the author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially, provided the original work is properly cited and states its license.

This volume is dedicated to Deborah Bird Rose (1946—2018) who is deeply missed by many in the extended cultural studies community. Her unforgettable creativity, initially as an anthropologist working with the Yarralin people the Victoria River District, produced Dingo Makes Us Human (1992). In Reports from a Wild Country (2004), Deb took an Indigenous-inspired philosophical turn to consider what decolonisation might look like if it were attentive to Yarralin ontologies. Then, in Wild Dog Dreaming (2011) she turned to fully-consider relations with the more-than-human in a time of extinction. More than explicating or exploring the persistence and power of Indigenous cultures, Deb invited readers to learn from those who have triumphed despite invasion and colonisation. The power of her work makes her reader feel country and be inspired to move our feet differently across land as a ‘nourishing terrain’. Her capacity to evoke and hold out for kinship between human and non-human animals was vital and inspiring. So, it seems fitting that this volume is titled ‘Extinction’ given Deb contributed so much to alerting us to the multiple orders of extinction, be it the silencing of country when its stories were lost or the vulnerabilities of flying foxes. Her blog featured these simple words against a photographic image of a sunset over what looks like desert country:

‘Deborah Bird Rose

Love at the Edge of Extinction’

Such a title is a call for a utopic politics, for a kind of love which might bind species in new ways precisely because we are together in a time of multiplying extinctions. Could the mutuality of our vulnerabilities make new ways of being ‘in love’, on country, in relation with a ‘shimmering’ of existence? Deb’s response to the anxieties of extinction was to seek out the complexities of mutuality and to affirm the power of connection. Deb said her life’s purpose was to explore the ‘entangled ethics of love, contingency and desire in the face of almost incomprehensible loss’ and she did. Thank you from so many of us. We would like to warmly thank Peter Boyle for offering the poem that follows when we approached him for a contribution. It is a piece that communicates so completely the expansive worlds that Deb evoked and explored alongside the jagged grief of her loss.

Deb’s work lives on and, in important respects, inspires some of thought in the articles that make up this special issue edited by two people who were colleagues of Deb’s, Matthew Chrulew and Rick De Vos. Cultural Studies has a particular contribution to make as the producer of new kinds of stories about these new orders of grief while proposing diverse orders of connection, love perhaps, that may enable new or sustain weakened ancestral orders of mutual flourishing.

The reviews and essay that sit beside our special section on extinction remind us of other sites that ask for new ways of responding to unjust pasts. Allyson Green proposes that particular kind of art can help ‘build relationships that exceed the limits of reconciliation’ in part by calling the settler into an awareness of their/our unresolvable relationship with the ongoing effects of colonialism. The art of art being the capacity to keep puncturing assumptions while suggesting new modes of politics. In reviews Abigail Taylor considers the ‘awkward ambition’ of some to resolve global inequality while Alexander Howard embraces the demand for a speculative not realist thinking to not just reconsider capitalism but resolve it and Aaron Nyerges reminds us of the grief that was wrought through colonialism in the pacific and the ways in which postcolonial writing responds to that loss. Loss of many orders pervades this issue of Cultural Studies Review but so do the possibilities of rekindling, mutualism and legacy. Enjoy.