Desire at Risk: Queer Reconfigurations of Sexuality and Race in Contemporary Flood Narratives

Abstract

Jacques Rancière’s philosophical critique of Lyotard’s notion of the sublime, enriched with crucial insights from dark ecology (Timothy Morton) and queer ecology, helps us to find out if, and under what conditions, the reading of nature as non-semiotic material alterity can be politically effective. To explore the different ways in which environmental collapse is being heard, this paper will consider two unusual art works, that all stage a tension between political/ethical and material readings of the flood: Craig Thompson’s recent graphic novel Habibi (2011) in which a reworked orientalism is employed to propose a political and ethical reading of the flood; and After the Deluge, a visual essay by Kara Walker created after Katrina, in which race places a crucial role (2007). It is especially the latter work that shows that art can only be politically relevant when it addresses the exclusionary differentiation between intelligible media and senseless noise, such as the abject, slimy muck left behind after the flood.