THE POWER OF APPREHENDING THE NONHUMAN THROUGH AN ANTHROPOGENIC LENS IN POWERS’ THE OVERSTORY

Abstract

The Overstory by Powers can be examined as an ecocritical text charged with the agendas of both posthumanism and speculative materialism despite being a text that is conducted in a safe, realist mode. Powers works with the anthropogenic as a vehicle through which one can learn to access and apprehend the nonhuman. In understanding that the humans of the text figure textually as a gateway, the overarching sense of the text as human-centred dissipates as the anthropogenic functions to allow access to the ontological identity and affective capacities of nonhuman entities in the text. This essay will thus endeavour to tease out various ways in which the text differentiates the anthropogenic from the anthropocentric by examining how humans can be situated as mediators for nonhuman powers to be identified without being tainted by an anthropocentric lens; a large part of this endeavour seeks to examine how conventional humanist impulses like the tendency to see that which is like us is productively utilised by Powers to, conversely, illuminate differences that allow nonhuman ontologies to be retained. Ultimately, insofar as humans have imposed their metrics of value onto nonhumans as an excuse to enact violence, Powers text examines the nuanced ways in which humans, especially those differentiated from society in many ways, can function productively to learn to see the nonhuman that they have been blind to, thus promoting the need and possibility for an ecology for nonhumans and humans to co-exist on the same plane.