Quiet Catastrophes in Frame
Visualising Slow Violence and Lateral Agency in Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) and All that Breathes (2022)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8134005 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Merin John (National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli, corresponding author), Nisha Viswanathan (0009-0003-0592-4894, National Institute of Technology Tiruchirappalli) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 30 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 1-18 |
| Publication date | 2026-02-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal for Cultural Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1479-7585 • E-ISSN: 1740-1666 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14797585.2026.2632604 |
| OpenAlex | W7130411226 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 19 |
This paper examines Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild and Shaunak Sen’s All That Breathes as visual texts that engage the ecological and affective contours of Anthropocene cinema. Drawing on Rob Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’ and Lauren Berlant’s notion of ‘lateral agency,’ it considers how both films render visible the lived experiences of marginalised human and non-human subjects navigating environmental collapse under capitalist modernity. Through close visual and formal analysis, the paper argues that the films construct a poetics of survival rooted in repetitive labour, sensory attunement and mythic imagination. The characters in both narratives are depicted as practising self-abeyance and slow acts of repair – maintaining decaying ecologies rather than seeking escape from intolerable, precarious conditions. In doing so, the films make visible the often-invisible operations of structural violence, which manifest not in spectacle but in the lingering attrition of slow death, while simultaneously carving out fleeting, embodied moments of agency and ecological kinship.
Agency (philosophy · Government (linguistics · Perspective (graphical · QUIET · Temporality · Diverse academic research themes · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |