Precarity afoot: material performatives as evolutionary relations across deep time

Abstract

This essay uses theories of materialist performativity to examine the processes of evolution and speciation. To this end, I highlight the relevance of performance theory for environmental and biological scholarship, and vice versa. I attend closely to the temporal dimension of materialist performatives, and argue that a consideration of “deep time” grants performativity substantial power as an explanatory concept. Finally, I present the Inaccessible Island rail – the world’s smallest flightless bird – as a representative example of the complex, multispecies relationality integral to a performative evolutionary theory, as well as the level of precarity that inheres in evolutionary speciation.

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