Jeffrey Squires

"The Season of Barricades and Blood": Annihilation, Ecology, and the Superorganism

Jeffrey Squires

Carnegie Mellon University Qatar

squires@cmu.edu

Nesrine Affara

Carnegie Mellon University Qatar

Based on our undergraduate medical humanities course, “Biologies in Text and Film,” we’ll analyze Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014) to explore how VanderMeer embraces an inversion of the Gaia principle to encourage his readers to better understand the anthropocentric practices currently damaging our environment. We focus particularly on Area X—the distinct ecosystem/uncanny setting of the novel—to discuss how, because the ecosystem is both an ecological niche and a superorganism, VanderMeer is able to generate a inversion of the Gaia principle: humans are made to serve the environment, trading off their own subject status to serve the environment. We argue that Annihilation encourages readers (and our students) to better understand the ways that guilds, trade offs, and other ecological theories work within our world; however, beyond a place for ecological pedagogy, the book argues that our own anthropocentric practices and thoughts disguise our ongoing abuse of our environment. Therefore, by creating a particular ecosystem wherein humans are made the unwilling servants of a greater organism’s desires, VanderMeer both empowers the reader to understand ecological principles while inverting our current understanding of our natural environment. Our research presentation is a collaborative effort between a biologist and literary historian and serves as a demonstration of how collaborative teaching, medical humanities research, and undergraduate education create a fruitful reinvestigation of discipline specific terms in new contexts.

BIOGRAPHIES

Jeffrey S. Squires is an Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University’s campus in Doha, Qatar, where he teaches first-year writing, film theory, and medical humanities. He has contributed to Brill’s Christian-Muslim Relations collection (2016), Church History (2018), and Routledge’s Kingship and Madness (2021). His current research involves the ways that science representation creates an entangled reader experience, simultaneously drawing on multiple discursive modes. His forthcoming publication (with Affara) exams the use of plausible science to question anthropogenic practice in Last of Us (Routledge, 2025). He is currently co-authoring a pedagogical book with Affara on biology in science fiction films and texts.

Nesrine I. Affara is an Associate Teaching Professor of Biology at Carnegie Mellon University’s Qatar campus. Following her graduate research (OSU, Ph.D) on survival pathways in skin stem cells and post-doctoral work (UCSF) on novel anti-cancer therapies, she is currently delineating the role of fibroblasts in tumor progression using 2D and 3D culture models. Her publications involve cancer immunology (Cancer Cell: 2010, 2014; Genes and Development, 2013) and tumor microenvironments (Frontiers in Immunology, 2024). Her recent publication (with Squires, Journal of Language, Literature, and Culture, 2024) explores the problem of entangled science representation in science fiction.