Joshua Schuster, "What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals" (Fordham UP, 2023)

Jun 28, 2024

Author Joshua Schuster discusses the changing meanings of extinction and the cultural forms used to interpret them. Topics include last animal photography, de-extinction technologies, extreme biopolitics in the Third Reich, and the intertwining of extinction, origins, and psychoanalysis.

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Intro

00:00 • 3min

Exploring Extinction in 'What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals'

02:57 • 19min

Nationalism, De-extinction, and Indigenous Perspectives

22:15 • 8min

Exploring the Decolonial Approach to Extinction and Conservation

30:30 • 4min

Exploring the Challenges of Rewilding, De-Extinction, and the Complexity of Nature-Culture Interactions

34:33 • 2min

Intersections of Extinction, Origins, and Psychoanalysis

36:18 • 7min

Exploring Extinction, Biodiversity, and Care

42:59 • 11min

Life on Earth is facing a mass extinction event of our own making. Human activity is changing the biology and the meaning of extinction. What Is Extinction?: A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals (Fordham UP, 2023) examines several key moments that have come to define the terms of extinction over the past two centuries, exploring instances of animal and human finitude and the cultural forms used to document and interpret these events.

Offering a critical theory for the critically endangered, Joshua Schuster proposes that different discourses of limits and lastness appear in specific extinction events over time as a response to changing attitudes toward species frailty. Understanding these extinction events also involves examining what happens when the conceptual and cultural forms used to account for species finitude are pressed to their limits as well. Schuster provides close readings of several case studies of extinction that bring together environmental humanities and multispecies methods with media-specific analyses at the terminus of life.

What Is Extinction? delves into the development of last animal photography, the anthropological and psychoanalytic fascination with human origins and ends, the invention of new literary genres of last fictions, the rise of new extreme biopolitics in the Third Reich that attempted to change the meaning of extinction, and the current pursuit of de-extinction technologies. Schuster offers timely interpretations of how definitions and visions of extinction have changed in the past and continue to change in the present.

Joshua Schuster is an associate professor of English and core faculty member of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University. He is the author of The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics and co-author of Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk.

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