8. Dead Gods and Geontopower
At the core of Jeff Lemire’s 2009-2013 graphic novel Sweet Tooth is a tale of resource extraction. This may seem an extraordinary claim to make about a dark fairy tale of a text that is chiefly concerned with the postapocalyptic relationship between an ageing hockey bruiser and a young deer-human hy...
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2022
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cropenbookpubl:10.11647/obp.0303.08 2024-06-02T08:01:42+00:00 8. Dead Gods and Geontopower An Ecocritical Reading of Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth Ferebee, Kristin M. Sorbonne Nouvelle University Institut Universitaire de France 2022 http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/obp.0303.08 https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0303.08.pdf unknown Open Book Publishers https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ Life, Re-Scaled page 203-228 ISBN 9781800647497 9781800647503 9781800647510 9781800647534 9781800647541 9781800647527 book-chapter 2022 cropenbookpubl https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0303.08 2024-05-07T14:08:31Z At the core of Jeff Lemire’s 2009-2013 graphic novel Sweet Tooth is a tale of resource extraction. This may seem an extraordinary claim to make about a dark fairy tale of a text that is chiefly concerned with the postapocalyptic relationship between an ageing hockey bruiser and a young deer-human hybrid boy. Yet Sweet Tooth #26-8 and #35 reveal that both the mysterious plague responsible for destroying human civilization in the world of Lemire’s story and the animal hybrid children inexplicably born in the same era have their origins in an ancient nonhuman force disinterred from the Arctic ice. The trope of nonhuman horrors unleashed from drilling or melting in the Arctic has become a common one; Sweet Tooth’s world-ecological (Moore) framing of the incident as one that brings together colonialism, capitalism, and science is not particularly unique. However, the Canadian Lemire’s refusal to differentiate between genetic science and indigenous cosmology in the comic’s portrayal of both viral pandemic and embodied animal gods offers the possibility of a geontological (Povinelli) reading. Here, I interpret Sweet Tooth as fundamentally a piece of climate change fiction— one that responds to an urgent need for new ways to understand a world that is not only post-Human, but also post-Life. Book Part Arctic Climate change Open Book Publishers Arctic 203 228 Cambridge, UK |
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Open Book Publishers |
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At the core of Jeff Lemire’s 2009-2013 graphic novel Sweet Tooth is a tale of resource extraction. This may seem an extraordinary claim to make about a dark fairy tale of a text that is chiefly concerned with the postapocalyptic relationship between an ageing hockey bruiser and a young deer-human hybrid boy. Yet Sweet Tooth #26-8 and #35 reveal that both the mysterious plague responsible for destroying human civilization in the world of Lemire’s story and the animal hybrid children inexplicably born in the same era have their origins in an ancient nonhuman force disinterred from the Arctic ice. The trope of nonhuman horrors unleashed from drilling or melting in the Arctic has become a common one; Sweet Tooth’s world-ecological (Moore) framing of the incident as one that brings together colonialism, capitalism, and science is not particularly unique. However, the Canadian Lemire’s refusal to differentiate between genetic science and indigenous cosmology in the comic’s portrayal of both viral pandemic and embodied animal gods offers the possibility of a geontological (Povinelli) reading. Here, I interpret Sweet Tooth as fundamentally a piece of climate change fiction— one that responds to an urgent need for new ways to understand a world that is not only post-Human, but also post-Life. |
author2 |
Sorbonne Nouvelle University Institut Universitaire de France |
format |
Book Part |
author |
Ferebee, Kristin M. |
spellingShingle |
Ferebee, Kristin M. 8. Dead Gods and Geontopower |
author_facet |
Ferebee, Kristin M. |
author_sort |
Ferebee, Kristin M. |
title |
8. Dead Gods and Geontopower |
title_short |
8. Dead Gods and Geontopower |
title_full |
8. Dead Gods and Geontopower |
title_fullStr |
8. Dead Gods and Geontopower |
title_full_unstemmed |
8. Dead Gods and Geontopower |
title_sort |
8. dead gods and geontopower |
publisher |
Open Book Publishers |
publishDate |
2022 |
url |
http://dx.doi.org/10.11647/obp.0303.08 https://books.openbookpublishers.com/10.11647/obp.0303.08.pdf |
geographic |
Arctic |
geographic_facet |
Arctic |
genre |
Arctic Climate change |
genre_facet |
Arctic Climate change |
op_source |
Life, Re-Scaled page 203-228 ISBN 9781800647497 9781800647503 9781800647510 9781800647534 9781800647541 9781800647527 |
op_rights |
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0303.08 |
container_start_page |
203 |
op_container_end_page |
228 |
op_publisher_place |
Cambridge, UK |
_version_ |
1800746108874391552 |