Atmospheric conditions: Reading buoyant ecologies in Keri Hulme’s Floating Words
Lecture by Assistant Professor Orchid Tierney, Kenyon College
As Eva Horn has argued, we become conscious of the air as a medium when we notice “its disruption.” Drawing on the nascent field of atmospheric humanities, which probes into the socio-political constructions of the atmosphere as an object of inquiry, “Atmospheric Conditions” addresses a literary phenomenon I call buoyant ecologies in Keri Hulme’s short story Floating Words. Here, I propose that Hulme’s buoyant ecologies present a hybridised future of unsettled mobilities that textually disrupt the Eurocentric logics of settler colonialism.