A Review of “Reimagining Urban Nature: Literary Imaginaries for Posthuman Cities” - C. Bayes (2023). Reimagining Urban Nature: Literary Imaginaries for Posthuman Cities. Liverpool University Press

The primary aim of Reimagining Urban Nature: Literary Imaginaries for Posthuman Cities is to demonstrate how a posthuman perspective contributes to reimagining cities as inclusive, multispecies spaces. Author Chantelle Bayes develops “an urban ecocritical study that speaks to the practice of writing” (p. 12), arguing that writers can create “new environmental imaginaries of the city” by drawing on key notions of posthumanism: “multispecies assemblages, co-constructed and situated knowledges and relational understandings of urban ecologies” (p. 8). Although focused on creative writing, Reimagining Urban Nature shows how to bring posthumanism into other forms of thinking about and transforming urban environments. This perspective has much to offer environmental education, and Bayes presents not only an accessible deep dive into the theory but also an engaging, Australian-focused application of it.

The introduction positions the study within urban ecocriticism and urban ecology studies, where it is distinguished by: (1) focusing on fiction related to Australian and New Zealand cities and “the complexities of these colonised landscapes” (p. 8); (2) undertaking an in-depth study of the posthuman city; and (3) deploying a practice-led research methodology in which thinking requires engaging with urban spaces through critical walking and ecophenomenology; reading involves applying ecocriticism to literature; and writing is a process of imagining and re-imagining urban human—nonhuman relations (p. 32). Literature informing the study is reviewed in accessible summaries of theories that can otherwise seem overly complex: posthumanism, new materialism, the origins of Western urban imaginaries and posthuman conceptions of the city. An overview of the book is provided, and the reader is left with a clear sense of the study’s aims and approaches.

The first chapter considers the foundational role of language in narratives, particularly “notions such as nature, landscape, place, and wilderness” (p. 41). The chapter is divided into three main components: a brief discussion of contemporary research into language and perception; a close look at the usefulness of terms such as “terroir” and “country” to reimagining human—non-human relations; and a focus on nature writing as creating links between conceptualisations of nature and everyday lived experiences. At issue is how terms and concepts might better reflect the reality that “humans and nonhumans exist in complex and entangled ways in urban spaces” (p. 71).

Chapter Two focuses on embodied research and writing practices. Bayes considers walking, gardening, swimming and surfing as practices “that go beyond observation to create embodied and reciprocal relationships between writer and place” (p. 74). In discussing situated knowledges, Bayes is careful to acknowledge, following Neimanis (2017) and others, that phenomenology and new materialism are not “new”, but constitute “a return to the situated knowledges still practised by many Indigenous communities” (p. 75). Posthuman phenomenology as research and writing practice is productively described as “attentive listening to and acknowledgement of those others who are entangled with human bodies in place” (p. 87). Writers’ accounts of their own embodied writing practices help develop a “greater understanding of the relationship between text, place and embodied experience” (p. 96).

The next three chapters apply the foregoing theoretical groundwork to analysing a diverse range of literary texts. This multi-chapter investigation of “how writers conceptualise the nonhuman in Australasia” and “how the Australian urban might be reimagined as a posthuman place” (p. 2) is organised around five urban elements: houses, gardens, bodies of water, public parks and streets. The strength of this approach is how it performs the theory: cities are not discussed in the abstract but as specific spaces where multispecies entanglement happens; readers are drawn into research-creation through their own embodied experiences of these spaces.

In Chapter 3, works by Tan Twan Eng, Fiona McGregor, Janet Frame, Tara June Winch, Shahrnush Parsipur, Indra Sinha and Ellen van Neerven reveal how human—nonhuman relationships in and with gardens can be reconfigured, from positioning the human “as a controlling force” over passive plants to recognising the agency of plants and other nonhuman garden inhabitants in helping “shape the people and environments” (p. 150). Gardens in the selected narratives are spaces for transformation, resistance and either the absence of humans or the presence of nonhuman gardeners and human/plant hybrids. Conceptual boundaries between houses and gardens are blurred in a “joint process of domestication”, with reference to Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) (p. 116).

Beginning with an observation that imaginings of water in the city tend to centre the human (p. 157), Chapter 4 examines alternative imaginaries of water in two broad categories: creation stories and narrative futures. Creation stories within works by Larissa Lai (Salt Fish Girl) and Alexis Wright (Carpentaria) refigure water as agential, forging “the conditions for human activity and survival rather than a passive backdrop to human activity” (p. 162). In these stories, “living relationally as part of the ecosystem is encouraged and the consequences of trying to live separately lead to destructive environmental forces that intervene in human lives” (p. 162). Themes explored in works of narrative futures include water scarcity and extraction in Merlinda Bobis’s Locust Girl; water and environmental displacement in Wright’s The Swan Book; and water’s role in the dissolution of hierarchies in Lai’s Salt Fish Girl. Overall, waters in these works “reveal sociopolitical processes as they play out through questions of access and control but also provide a way to reform cities and reimagine human-water relationships” (p. 184).

Chapter 5 examines how “new literary imaginaries that capture the complexity of urban environments can question some of the more damaging processes and systems [in cities], offer new ways of connecting with the city and propose alternative ways of living with the nonhuman in such places” (p. 186). Bayes considers how the figure of the cyborg flâneur might help make sense of the posthuman city by mapping “the many relations between organisms and technologies, fictions and realities, and the human and nonhuman” (p. 204). Other forms of the flâneur are considered in texts about “walking with and as animal” (p. 212): Wright’s The Swan Book, Bobis’s Locust Girl and Sinha’s Animal’s People. The chapter concludes with a list of strategies that writers use to complicate notions of the city. For Bayes, the aim is to “prompt new kinds of urban imaginaries built on posthuman ontologies that ask readers to engage with the city in new ways and to imagine new ways to live as part of a multispecies entangled place” (p. 217).

The concluding chapter brings the themes developed and demonstrated through the previous chapters together into a final consideration of “how a practice of posthuman research-creation and urban ecocriticism might contribute to efforts to make cities more inclusive and sustainable by providing new imaginaries of the city to live with” (p. 215). For those unfamiliar with posthuman critical theory and/or urban ecocriticism, this book offers a refreshingly accessible introduction to these complex approaches; for those well versed in the theory, it offers a clear and engaging demonstration of how to apply posthumanism and urban ecocriticism to thinking about alternative urban futures. This book is an outstanding multidisciplinary resource for any field of inquiry and practice concerned with “moving away from the current consumption-based thinking to a more relational understanding of the human place within the environment” (p. 1).