2025-2026 FROM CONFLUENCE TO CONFLUENCE ~ Sladja Blazan's seminar: Shapeshifting
SEMINAR: November 22 & 23, 2025
Transcorporeality
Saturday 22
One of the most discussed new concepts in environmental humanities currently is the concept of transcorporeality as introduced by Stacy Alaimo in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and The Material Self. Transcorporeality is a radically relational vision of the human that highlights the material entanglements with one’s environments. Alaimo’s theory builds on materialist feminist theory that preceded her publication. After discussing the posthumanist mode of new materialism and material feminism as well as transcorporeal ethics and politics during the first day, we will move on to a fitting historical example of relational ontology.
Sunday 23
During the second day, we will discuss Nagualismo, a Nahuatl concept associated with Pre-classic Olmec-inspired depictions of shapeshifting humans or of animal guardians or companions or spirit guides. We will particularly pay attention to how this concept has been used to resist colonial powers and how the writer and artist Gloria Anzaldùa used la naguala, the shapeshifter associated with knowledge and creative power, to construct a theory of a “new consciousness” based on relational identities that are understood to be the basic building blocks for a just society.
Bibliography
Stacy Alaimo. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana UP, 2010.
Gloria Anzaldùa. “La conciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness,” In: Borderlands / La Frontera.
---, “now let us shift…the path to conocimiento…inner works, public acts.” this bridge we call home: radical vision for transformation, edited by Gloria Anzaldùa and AnaLouise Keating, Routledge, 2002, pp. 540-578.
Nancy Tuana. "Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina." Material Feminisms, 2008, p. 188.
Edward Said. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Foreword by Akeel Bilgrami. Columbia University Press, 2005.