Emma Blackett
Emma Blackett is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies at McGill, co-supervised by Carrie Rentschler and Bobby Benedicto. Her dissertation considers psychoanalytic theory in conjunction with the ecocritical subfield known as the “blue humanities.” Her interests more broadly include queer/feminist and decolonial studies, film studies, affect, ecocriticism, and what is being called apocalypse studies. She is a member of the Sex in Theory working group at McGill.
Projects:
Psychoanalysis for a Blue Humanities offers a critique of environmental subjectivity, taking as its premise the failure of public communications about ecological collapse to provoke action adequate to halting it. Focusing on watery environs for reasons of colonial and industrial history, apocalyptic mythology, and rising tides, it concerns filmic and literary representations of “beached subjects,” whose gender/sex/race characterizations are of paramount interest as they tell particular stories about ways to relate—or fail to relate, as the case almost invariably turns out to be—to water, land, and the idea of the end of the world. This project draws on psychoanalytic literature, refracted through Marxist thought, because psychoanalysis, especially when inflected by historical materialism, offers a most persuasive account of why the subjects called human so readily act against their own interests, even or perhaps especially in the face of their own deaths. This project is supported by FRQSC and the Wolfe Graduate Fellowship