Chapter 1 - South to North Multispecies Co-Migrations in the Wake of Rachel Carson and Donna Haraway

Rachel Carson is one of the most prominent voices in the field of environmental blue humanities. Her trilogy on Ocean studies is a milestone in Ecology. The aim of this contribution is to follow Haraway’s suggestion — “it matters what thoughts think other thoughts” (2021: 63) — and thus demonstrate how Carson’s Ocean imagery informs contemporary narratives which connect the South to the North. In particular this is true for Amitav Ghosh’s novel, Gun Island (2019), as an answer to his own The Great Derangement (2016), which stag- es an intertextual revisitation of Heart of Darkness. Right in the middle of the Mediterranean, on the migration route from Africa to Italy, the sympoiesis of humans and more-than-humans (Haraway 2016) — migrants, cetaceans and birds — is described and celebrated in terms that are reminiscent of Rachel Carson’s Oceans (Carson [1955] 2021). All this foregrounds Jane Urquhart’s Sanctuary Line (2010), which also explores multispecies migration narratives from Mexico to Canada of both people and butterflies. While anticipating Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour (2012) and thus exploring the Monarch butterfly migratory habits — as Haraway does in “The Camille Stories” (Haraway 2016) — , Urquhart’s novel meets the novel by Kingsolver insofar as they both delve into multispecies co-migration from South to North thanks to the NAFTA/ USMCA Treaty; they tackle human rights, in particular the right to migrate, and environmental justice, so as to grant the on-going migration of Monarch butterflies from Mexico, respectively, to Canada and to the US.