“The grass was me . . . the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me”1: Greening Karen Blixen

Introduction

Thorkild Bjørnvig (1918–2004) was a protégé and confidant of Karen Blixen. He was also a Danish environmental activist, ecopoet and ecocritic avant la lettre, and the first to study Karen Blixen’s writing from an environmentalist perspective. In his essay “Karen Blixen og forsøgsdyrene” (1982) (Karen Blixen and the Laboratory Animals), Bjørnvig unearths an all but forgotten episode from Blixen’s life in the early and mid-1950s, when she involved herself in acrimonious public debate over proposals to tighten Danish legislation governing animal experiments in science and industry. So touched was Blixen by the plight of Danish laboratory animals that she published several newspaper articles, pleaded with prominent authority figures like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr, and formed unlikely alliances with people like A. C. Andersen, editor of the journal Hundevennen (The Dog Friend). While such outspokenness seems uncharacteristic on the part of a famously reclusive writer, Bjørnvig labors to make Blixen’s seemingly eccentric actions appear meaningful and rational. By crossreferencing to other texts in the Blixen oeuvre, he shows that animal welfare (anti-vivisection in particular) and nature conservation were vital to Blixen’s fiction and nonfiction writings from the beginning to the end of her career. On this basis, Bjørnvig recruits Blixen into his eclectic counter-canon of nature- and animal-oriented predecessors and contemporaries, along with writers like William Blake, Rainer Maria Rilke, D. H. Lawrence, Elias Canetti, Edith Södergran, Gary Snyder, and Vagn Lundbye.

Rooted in romanticism, deep ecology, and animal rights discourse, Bjørnvig’s writing resonates with what has been called ecocriticism’s “first wave” (Buell 2005, 13–28), which concerned itself with literary revaluation and canon formation, tended to see nature and human beings as opposed to one another, and held that the proper response of environmental criticism should be to help protect the natural environment from the despoliations of human culture. In this essay, I outline an alternative “third-” or even “fourth-wave” ecocritical approach (Marland 2013, 853–60) to Blixen’s 1937 Out of Africa, which is grounded in cyborg studies, human-animal studies, critical plant studies, and posthumanist thinking.²

In its most straightforward and popular sense, posthumanism refers to recent, current, and future innovations in digitalization, robotics, biotechnology, nanotechnology, gene therapy, xenotransplanation, and other fields that have ushered (or are ushering) in a new historical age in which many humans live with chemically, surgically, or technologically modified bodies. In popular posthumanism (sometimes called techno-posthumanism or transhumanism), robots, clones, and cyborgs arouse hopes or fears that humans may be on the brink of decisively transcending their humanity by entering into ever-closer conjunctions with machines and other nonhuman forms. However, the thrust of what critics like Bart Simon label “critical posthumanism” (Simon 2003) is less to speculate about what comes after the human than to offer a certain mode of critical reflection on humanism, directed at critiquing the foundations of the enlightenment subject, historicizing the emergence of a particular notion of liberal personhood, and delineating the world-historical implications and consequences of humanism for both human beings and other creatures. According to the humanist model paradigmatically propounded by the seventeenthcentury philosopher René Descartes, the human being is clearly distinguished from nonhuman entities like machines, animals, and plants in that each human individual possesses integral wholeness but also shares with other human beings a unique and timeless essence called “human nature.” Critical posthumanism involves rethinking the dominant, familiar humanist accout of who “we” are as human beings. Drawing on poststructuralism, evolutionary biology, systems theory, and quantum physics, among other disciplines, critical posthumanism proceeds from the realization that humans are no longer—and probably never were—wholly self-possessed and distinct from other beings. It rejects the traditional humanist conceptualization of the autonomous, masterful, and clearly bounded individual agent in order to treat the human itself as a fractured “assemblage” that “coevolves” with other life forms and remains “enmeshed” with the biological, material, and technological environment (Pramod 2014, 13). As...