C:/ITOOLS/WMS/CUP-NEW/30625609/WORKINGFOLDER/JEFFREY COHEN-OPM/9781316510681C19.3D 258 [258–272] 7.6.2021 4:35PM chapter 19 New Materialism and the Nonhuman Story Serpil Oppermann This chapter presents a brief genealogy of new materialism and examines the significance of the nonhuman stories it allows us to hear and tell. Those stories are now entangled in the ethical, political, scientific and theoretical complexities of the Anthropocene and crucial to the Environmental Humanities (EH). New materialism and EH inhabit each other with a range of commonalities, including bioethical, sociocultural, and scientific questions that arise from the challenges of Anthropocene quandaries (climate change, toxic bodies, postnatural places, multispecies tragedies, threats of extinctions, and posthuman futures). With their “pluralizing recourse” 1 to overlapping discourses, new materialism and EH converge on ecologically engaged collaborative thinking in responding to these chal- lenges within the context of transdisciplinary knowledge practices. EH can be envisioned as a “common stream” into which “distinct disciplinary currents” 2 flow. Among them, new materialism is the most notable because it emphasizes the politics and poetics of living matter, describing “how living matter structures natural and social worlds,” 3 and prompting a “material-semiotic means of relating” 4 to the world. The interdisciplinary space between the new materialist thought and EH is quite porous. They each share the same goal, as Iris van der Tuin contends, of “the break-through of the schism between sign/culture/ language and referent/nature/ matter.” What “this would entail,” she avers, is “revitaliz- ing ontology as the element that has seemingly become lost under the paradigm of representationalism.” 5 New materialism is often understood as part of a larger “material turn,” or as part of a renewed philosophical attention to the nonhuman, broadly understood as organic systems (from animals and plants to microorganisms) and inorganic systems, which include all forms of materiality, such as planetary ecosystems, geophysical processes, xenobiotic substances, techno- logical objects, elements, and subatomic particles. The term “nonhuman turn” is imbricated with the material turn as it “implies a movement in 258