Postextinction Geographies

Audiovisual Afterlives of the Bucardo and the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3775869
AutoresHarry Hunter (0000-0002-0614-1344, Queen's University), A Searle (0000-0002-5319-895X, University of Nottingham, autor correspondente)
Ano2024
Volume114
Fascículo4
Páginas770-791
Data de publicação2024-04-20
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoAnnals of the American Association of Geographers (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 2469-4452 • E-ISSN: 2469-4460
EditoraInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/24694452.2024.2304206
PMID38746042
OpenAlexW4392639378
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas77

How do technologies animate more-than-human geographies after extinction? How can geographical scholarship evoke, or bring presence to, extinct biota? In an epoch simultaneously characterized by biotic loss at an unthinkable scale and the increased presence of representations depicting nonhuman life through mass media and digitization, we examine the epistemic, affective, and ethical possibilities of extinct animal traces to shape more-than-human geographies. We show how technological apparatuses inaugurate afterlives of extinction troubling binaries of extinct-extant and absence-presence. Specifically, we consider audio and visual remains of two taxa producing awkward and unsettling postextinction geographies: the ivory-billed woodpecker and the bucardo. Sound recordings and other historical traces continue to forge contemporary connections between human searchers and the ivory-billed woodpecker, although no sighting of the ghost bird has been universally accepted since 1944. The bucardo was declared extinct in 2000, but it was tentatively reanimated through a failed 2003 cloning project; in this milieu, visual technologies and representations conjure alternative presence and speculative futures beyond technoscientific spectacle. Through conversing our own situated, speculative, and technologically mediated relations with these taxa-and situating the technological assemblages themselves-we present some of the lively, contested, and dispersed ways technological apparatuses affect and inaugurate animated geographies after extinction

Aesthetics · Art · Environmental ethics · Sociology · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Wildlife Ecology and Conservation