In this deeply personal book, the last one she wrote before her death in 2018, Deborah Bird Rose explores the shimmer of life - the iridescent pulse of beauty and power, the processes of transition and transformation - that flows across and between generations, grounded in her work with flying foxes in Australia.
'Rose entices us all to care about the often despised, sometimes loved, and now comprehensively threatened flying foxes of Australia. Perhaps they have a materially better chance of a future because Rose was a flying fox woman, a human being who used the hard-earned power to tie together Aboriginal teaching and kinship, settler science, and everyday complexities of caring and responding to others of truly different kinds that is carried on by ordinary people. I love Rose's work; I love this book.' Donna J. Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz 'Deborah Bird Rose's last book is a message shimmering with the passion, intimacy, cruelty, horror, complexity, generosity and wild beauty she encountered responding to the call of flying foxes. It powerfully affirms knowledge as co-becoming, a commitment to become knowledgeable witnesses and responsible participants in the intricate mutualistic giving and receiving that make up earth life. A unique and vital legacy.' Isabelle Stengers, Université libre de Bruxelles 'Shimmer is an inspiring and moving tour de force. Love, care, ethics, connectivity, and crucially non-innocence are the analytical-affective intentions with which Deborah Bird Rose experiences and makes us experience flying-foxes and the myriad blossoms they enable as they meet Aboriginal wisdom, science, the state, and the biosphere. Reading this book, being inspired by it, has been an honor, an immense pleasure, and a complex beam of hope.' Marisol de la Cadena, University of California, Davis 'Gifted to us at the precipice of her death, Deborah Bird Rose's Shimmer embodies everything we have valued about her writing--its calm and uncompromised ethical compass; its fidelity to Indigenous worlds and their more than human kin; and its arts of care for forms of existence, here the majestic worlds of flying foxes, declared enemies of settler expansion. Shimmer will hold a precious place in her singular corpus.' Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University Professor Deborah Bird Rose (1946-2018) was a world-renowned anthropologist and leading figure in the emergence and shaping of the interdisciplinary environmental humanities. Cover image: Fruit Bats or flying foxes over Cairns in Queensland, Australia (c) Ashley Cooper/Getty Images Cover design: Bekah Dey and www.hayesdesign.co.uk [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-9038-2 [PPC] ISBN 978-1-4744-9039-9 [cover] Barcode
