Butterflies in the Chthulucene: Reading Nabokov Geologically.

This article asks the question, what does it mean to read Nabokov's butterflies on the scale of the Anthropocene? In the first part, we establish what it means to consider literature more broadly in such terms according to its material and conceptual histories. The second part narrows our focus to principally two works by Nabokov: a scientific research article on the paleo-evolution and migration of neotropical Plebijinae and a passage from his chapter on butterflies in Speak, Memory which the author interprets as a fictionalization of his research findings. Reading Nabokov's butterflies alongside Leanne Simpson's story of eel migration and Nishnaabeg survivance reveals an "art science practice" committed to building more-than-human imagined communities, based on relationships of responsibility, on the global and deep-time scales of the Anthropocene towards a Chthulucene that centres Indigenous knowledge and being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]