TY - JOUR
AU1 - M, Merola, Nicole
AB - Abstract This essay-review considers four recent monographs in the environmental humanities—Kate Rigby’s Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (2015); Ursula Heise’s Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (2016); Molly Wallace’s Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty (2016); and Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (2016)—for the ways they enact and affirm the importance of literary critical practice in an era of ecosocial imperilment. The essay highlights the narrative character of ecocatastrophe; identifies the onto-ethico-epistemological commitments of these monographs; underlines the partial, provisional, and vulnerable nature of criticism itself; and emphasizes the importance of constructing—in community with other humans and nonhumans—new naturecultures, stories that emerge from slow, attentive reading practices. I write in the wake of the Trump administration announcement pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement, as well as the context of record low wintertime maximum sea ice extents in both the Arctic and Antarctic, and of daily global average CO2 levels hovering close to 410 ppm.1 In the near future—measured in months or years—we are likely to see northern white rhinos (current population, two) and the world’s smallest porpoise, the vaquita (current population, approximately thirty), go extinct.2 Human communities also find themselves imperiled: the Pacific Island nation of Kiribati purchased 6,000 acres of land in Fiji in 2014 to accommodate near-future climate-induced migration (Ives). And based on the accumulating impacts of climate change, in particular erosion of village lands and thawing permafrost, the Yup’ik Alaska Native village of Newtok requested, in 2016, a federal disaster declaration to secure funds to finance the relocation of the entire community (Waldholz, “Alaskan” and “Obama”).3 This disaster litany, a now-commonplace, despair-indexing trope in environmental humanities writing, signals the compromised contours of the near future and underlines the importance of naming and witnessing events of ecosocial emergency. It also gestures to the emergence of a new and important category of analysis, environmental anxiety, which underwrites a swarm of recent dystopian literature and film, including Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017), Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X (2014), Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2013), Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013), and Juliana Spahr’s That Winter the Wolf Came (2015), to offer only a very partial list.4 A different form of environmental anxiety infuses conversation about the stakes of doing environmental humanities, ecoliterary, and ecocultural studies work. Such discussion indexes more than the usual concern about the humanities in crisis; it exposes the ways that a tension between scholarship and direct environmental activism haunts reading for the environment in cultural texts. To buoy readers who may want to abandon ship now, the monographs I discuss below, under the sign of ecocatastrophe, enact and produce optimism about the utility of the work of ecoliterary and ecocultural studies. Individually and together, Kate Rigby’s Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (2015), Ursula Heise’s Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (2016), Molly Wallace’s Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty (2016), and Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (2016) showcase the capaciousness of current environmental humanities practice and the growth of ecocriticism from its origins examining Anglo-American nature writing. A quick gloss of the range of texts considered across these monographs highlights the spectra of period, region, genre, and media. The arc of Rigby’s study extends from Heinrich von Kleist’s 1807 novella “The Earthquake in Chile” to Alexis Wright’s 2006 novel Carpentaria. In Imagining Extinction, Heise reads for extinction story templates across last-of-its-kind narratives, biodiversity databases, endangered species laws, and contemporary speculative fiction, along with other genres and media. In Risk Criticism, Wallace considers Lydia Millet’s novel Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), Ramin Bahrani’s film Plastic Bag (2009), and the Hiroshima paintings of Iri and Toshi Maruki (1950–1982), among other texts, to create an eclectic and compelling archive that extends how we think about risk. Alaimo foregrounds her cultural studies stance in Exposed through engagement with scholarly and popular science books about queer animals, naked ecoprotest and ecoperformance art, and video work on the effects of ocean acidification, among other topics and artifacts of high and low culture. The currents in ecoliterary and ecocultural studies these authors attend to include postcolonial ecocriticism (Rigby, Heise); multispecies frameworks (Rigby, Heise, Alaimo); toxic discourse (Wallace, Alaimo); extinction studies (Heise, Alaimo, and, in a different register, Wallace); the geocultural turn (Rigby); petrocultures (via the vehicle of plastics) (Wallace, Alaimo); queer theory (Alaimo); new materialisms (Alaimo, Wallace, Rigby); risk society (Wallace, Alaimo, Heise, and Rigby); and nuclear criticism (Wallace). Underlying the range of texts and topics, shared comportments link the four books. All four authors propose and practice forms of reading meant to help readers confront the Anthropocene, though none enfolds an entire project within Anthropocene studies.5 And all stage how reading for human-nonhuman entanglements might refract, register, and generate new onto-ethico-epistemologies for constructing better presents and futures, those attentive to the needs of both human and nonhuman creatures. The authors propose different names for these reading practices: Rigby’s “dancing with disaster,” Heise’s “multispecies justice,” Wallace’s “risk criticism,” and Alaimo’s “politics and ethics of exposure.” But common to all the books are: an expansively biocentric orientation and corollary insistence on human nonexceptionalism; a fundamental assumption that the planet and its processes are much less stable and less controllable than humans might wish; the unflinching reminder that all flora and fauna fundamentally depend on this unstable planet for their only habitat; and an insistence on reading for the vulnerability of human and nonhuman bodies in ecocatastrophic times. In contrast to terms like calving, cyclone, earthquake, or volcanic eruption, all of which name disinterested earth systems phenomena, “ecocatastrophe” presumes a body or bodies (human or nonhuman) upon whom (or what) something terrible is wrought. In other words, because it has an object—an animate, affected, interested party on its receiving end—ecocatastrophe accrues a different vector, tone, and set of affects than a biogeochemical process. Ecocatastrophe is only ecocatastrophe if experienced or observed by someone who can evaluate (and narrate) its contours; without diminishing its material-affective impacts, we can frame ecocatastrophe as, at least in part, a narrative form that overlays a biogeochemical process. Rigby draws out the “material-discursive” nature of disaster through the structure of her book, the careful literary analyses she performs (4), and her insistence on interrogating how lexical shifts from “disaster” to “natural disaster” to “eco-catastrophe” (her preferred term) structure human-nonhuman relations. She organizes Dancing through pairing calamities—the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the Black Death and other plague pandemics, floods on the west coast of North Frisia (now located in Germany) from 1164 to 1855, megablazes in Australia from 1851 to 2009, and cyclonic winds in Australia from 1899 to 2011—with literary texts that figure them in order to advocate for “an ecological enlightenment of the Enlightenment”; to offer “ecologically informed postcolonial reconsideration of particular nonmodern onto-epistemologies”; and to “open up an alternative, countermodern way of framing, anticipating, and responding to eco-catastrophe” (4). The phenomenon-driven architecture of Rigby’s book aligns it with other “elemental” texts, in particular the anthologies Prismatic Ecology (Cohen, 2013) and Elemental Ecocriticism (Cohen and Duckert, 2015), and her explicit engagement with Earth’s tectonic and biospheric instabilities and the notion of “geocultural becoming” link Dancing to recent work in the speculative geosciences (Rigby 89).6 Rigby is attached to texts written by and for human readers. However, her comparative mode of linking two different forms of mark-making—physical-material events and material-discursive narratives—is generative. A phenomenon-focused approach, taken further than Rigby ventures, might open the door for a potential new outgrowth of literary studies that asks what literary scholarship might look like if directed toward nonanthropogenic forms of writing, biogeochemical traces neither created by nor meant for human readers. Stepping into such unfamiliar realms might productively pressure fundamental assumptions, practices, and products of cultural criticism. A phenomenon-focused approach . . . that asks what literary scholarship might look like if directed toward nonanthropogenic forms of writing, biogeochemical traces neither created by nor meant for human readers. . . . might productively pressure fundamental assumptions, practices, and products of cultural criticism. Throughout Dancing, Rigby emphasizes the “maladaptive implications of the narrative of ‘natural disaster,’” arguing that the phrase “natural disaster” “presupposes and reinforces the hierarchical dualism of ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’” stymies efforts to recognize the anthropogenic components of extreme weather events, and therefore contributes to continued inaction on climate change (10). Instead, she proposes “eco-catastrophe” as a term that promotes “recognition of the interrelationship between human sociocultural practices and the more-than-human physical environment” (17). Rigby’s overarching aim is to show how “both historical reflection and narrative fiction might contribute to the material-discursive praxis of learning to more skillfully ‘dance’ with the increasingly unruly elements of our disastrously anthropogenic environment” (4). By analyzing literary texts she sees as exemplary of staging intra-activity (Barad 26, 33–34, 56–58, 132–246, 391–96), Rigby argues for the value of narrative fiction as a vehicle for testing, capturing, and producing the onto-epistemologies “dancing with disaster” and “caring for country.” The first phrase, in particular its focus on dancing, emerges from a personal dimension left unexplained in the text. That dancing as a mode might be unevenly accessible is not acknowledged as a possibility, an odd blind spot, given the postcolonial trajectory of Rigby’s text. The latter protocol, “caring for country,” on the other hand, emerges from a very specific and explicitly named standpoint: Rigby’s location in Australia, her encounter with the Aboriginal Australian author Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria, and her exposure to Aboriginal traditions of learning to discern, and live with, the continent’s particular forms of unruliness. A reader outside these particular traditions may need to adapt them or excavate others generated closer to home, but this mode’s tone seems more commensurate with ecocatastrophe. Care has a collective dimension to it that dancing does not. One can dance alone, but care vectors away from the self toward responsibility for others.7 The orientation of care toward others represents a fundamentally hopeful and collective outlook for literature, its authors, its critics, and wider reading publics. Unlike so many contemporary dystopias that feature the demise of books and literacy, Rigby’s “caring for country” assumes a present and a future where literary reading is valued both intrinsically and instrumentally. Extinction studies represents a robust movement in ecocatastrophe studies. The material and narrative aftermaths of the earthquakes, plagues, floods, fires, and winds examined in Dancing feature some form of recovery as an essential component. Extinction, however, is irrevocable: “form[s] of life”—species and their various coevolved cross-species entanglements—disappear forever (van Dooren 1–12, 45–61, 125–47).8 The existential nature of extinction has made mourning, melancholy, and elegy the initial vehicles for responding to biodiversity loss in the environmental humanities.9 Replicating the pattern in the field, Heise registers elegy, tragedy, and the encompassing rubric of the environmental declensionist narrative to open Imagining Extinction and to serve as background against which to raise these key questions: “[M]ight [it] be possible to move environmentalism beyond the stereotypical narrative of the decline of nature without turning it into progress boosterism”? “What affirmative visions of the future can the environmentalist movement offer” without reverting to “imagined pastoral past[s]” or dystopian futures meant to caution? “Now that the notion of ‘nature’ itself has become tenuous ground, what might be the foundation for a new kind of environmentalism?” (12). And, representative of her attention to environmental (in)justices, she asks: What stories do we tell about the relationship between colonialism, the oppression of humans, and the endangerment of animals and plants? How do these stories respond to the theoretical questions and ethical dilemmas that arise in the confrontation with the immiseration of humans and nonhumans? What dimensions do they highlight, which ones do they hide, and why? (166) These questions register the huge stakes of Heise’s study, which targets the center of literary and extraliterary environmentalisms. With these and other incisive questions, which are peppered throughout the book, Heise deftly lays pathways that environmental humanities scholars will tread for the foreseeable future. Her questions assume the primacy of narrative, but they also push literary and cultural scholars to deploy their skills of apprehension, discernment, analysis, and articulation across a wide range of disciplinary boundaries. They also offer incredibly useful anchors for teaching, in particular for helping students think about intersectional structures of oppression that encompass human and nonhuman creatures and their habitats. To complement, complicate, and depart from elegy and tragedy, Heise traverses the terrains of comedy, database, epic, encyclopedia, and legal frameworks for fostering biodiversity; the tensions between environmentalist and animal welfare discourses; and ways to reframe environmental justice as “multispecies justice” (167). She ends with a discussion of how speculative fiction and material practices that are attentive to multispecies concerns, including certain examples of terraforming, rewilding, and other forms of intervention ecology, might stage versions of “multispecies justice” and thereby help us craft a less terrible Anthropocene. The multispecies framework that underwrites Imagining joins it to a growing chorus of likeminded texts, including The Mushroom at the End of the World (Tsing, 2015), The Multispecies Salon (Kirksey, editor, 2014), Flight Ways (van Dooren, 2014), and of course both The Companion Species Manifesto (Haraway, 2003) and When Species Meet (Haraway, 2007). Heise’s primary audience comprises literary and cultural scholars, but via the book’s overarching argument that “biodiversity, endangered species, and extinction are primarily cultural issues, questions of what we value and what stories we tell, and only secondarily issues of science,” she also launches a salvo across the humanities/sciences divide, aimed in particular at conservation biologists and ecologists (5). How conservation biologists and ecologists would respond to this provocation and to the possibility of collaboration with humanists is an open question.10 In moving from elegy to models for “multispecies justice,” Heise traces an arc from dejection to circumscribed hope, a trajectory common to much ecoliterary and ecocultural studies work on grim topics. Whether they end in an optimistic frame or not, as the books in this review indicate, environmental humanities scholars increasingly argue for dwelling with ecological unpleasantness. For ecoliterary scholars, the most surprising element of Heise’s text is the chapter dedicated to comparing biodiversity laws from four different contexts: the US Endangered Species Act, the German Federal Nature Protection Act, the biodiversity conservation directives of the European Union, and the 2009 Bolivian Constitution and its 2010 Law of the Rights of Mother Earth. Of these four contexts, she evaluates the Bolivian legal frameworks most favorably because that Constitution itself, rather than subsequent laws, creates “a new kind of legal and political subject” by “attribut[ing] legal rights to nature,” emphasizes the “plurinational” character of the country, and explicitly grants rights to indigenous nations within its borders, even as it rejects neoliberal pressures by nationalizing its hydrocarbon resources (111, 113). She highlights Article 348, which posits biodiversity as a national resource “of strategic value and public interest for the country’s development,” and Article 381, which calls native flora and fauna “a natural patrimony” and attests that “[t]he State will establish the necessary measures for their conservation, use, and development” (115). Heise further emphasizes the uniqueness of the Bolivian example in discussion of the Law of the Rights of Mother Earth, “the dynamic, living system made up of the indivisible community of all life systems and living beings, interrelated, interdependent, and complementary, which share a common destiny” (116). She describes this move as turning “global ecosystems into a legal superperson via a detour through indigenous cosmology, effectively creating what one might want to call a ‘bill of rights of Nature’” (117). Since Heise is ultimately interested in transits between narrative and the world, in using extinction story templates and their analysis to inform new conservation strategies and reduce environmental injustice, the ratio of creative texts to real-world examples in Imagining might give a reader pause; it signals the extreme difficulty of migrating imaginative models into the world. Constructing multispecies ecocosmopolitanisms, Heise reminds us, demands a “patient and meticulous process of assembly” and “careful negotiations that take all participants’ interest into consideration, even if not all can be honored in the end” (226, 233).11 This type of work, however difficult, is necessary, as it represents the only way to make explicit “a human commitment to value biological otherness and shared vulnerability to contingency.” Without demonstrating this commitment in cultural documents and material practices, Heise suggests, “the imperative to conserve biodiversity” will be diminished (54). And, as Heise’s book emphasizes, literary and cultural scholars who are trained to read for cultural values and their textual and material effects in all kinds of locations are crucial to the negotiating of new forms of multispecies ecocosmopolitanism. “Shared vulnerability to contingency” is another name for “risk,” the topic at the heart of Wallace’s Risk Criticism, which directs precautionary reading practices—interrogating the implicit values in how environmental issues are framed—at fictional and nonfictional texts from “the second nuclear age.” This form of reading aims to undercut the “certain” knowledges offered by risk management discourse and instead presents “a different orientation toward the future, with different implications for thinking about knowledge” (173); plus, this kind of reading resists closure, which Wallace argues is incommensurate with “narratives of environmental catastrophe” (181), and inaugurates “risk criticism,” “a literary critical version of Ulrich Beck’s risk society,” in order to “theorize the megahazards of the present” (4). Crucially, such precautionary reading necessitates “acknowledging the incalculable; it is an expansion of the concept of responsibility. . . . To do justice to the incalculable future, one must be ready to be responsible for the consequences, unpredictable and radically other as they may be” (190). Wallace takes “the second nuclear age,” the present era in which risks of climate change, biotechnology, and nanotechnology have risen to the scale of the nuclear, as a conceit for “alternate periodization” that provokes examining old and new reading protocols (3). Like the other authors under review, she employs a thematic organization, exploring the particular hazards of toxic chemicals, biotechnology, plastics, uranium mining and manipulation, and climate change. The key analytical categories to which Wallace attends include apocalypse, risk, slow violence, temporality, uncertainty, and precaution; her principal device is the tropological wager, which she borrows from Hayden White’s extension of Kenneth Burke’s “master tropes” (23). What perhaps makes Wallace’s book the most self-consciously literary of these studies is the way she conjoins the contextualizing of her project as an experiment in “‘reusing and recycling’ aspects of nuclear criticism for a new era of risk” with confronting Jacques Derrida’s work on the archive, apocalypse, and futurity, while deploying a tropological wager (4). I highlight this quality in part to acknowledge her astute analyses of textual details and also to signal Risk Criticism’s appeal to scholars working outside the environmental humanities, in particular post-1945 Americanists. Wallace’s assertions of the value of literature and literary forms of reading in an era of megahazards are explicit, persistent, and forceful. For Wallace, “literary and cultural critics are not just competent to take on the technoscientific and political issues posed by risk but are in some sense particularly qualified, as readers of the symbolic forms by which risk becomes real” (15). Evoking this argument again later, she says that that the skill of analyzing how risk gets staged through fictional and nonfictional mediation is “squarely in the arena of cultural critics’ expertise” (99). These assertions, and others like them, echo, extend, and particularize Heise’s argument about reading for cultural values in biodiversity texts. Wallace’s skill at close reading underlines her argument that in the archive of “the second nuclear age,” risk emerges, not just as a means to assess hazard or benefit, but as a category through which to think more properly literary concerns—like irony, metaphor, metonymy, anthropomorphism, and analogy—even as it reminds us of the impossibility of separating these tropes from their historical contexts and political implications. (26) In her chapter on the risks of biotechnology, which explores disputes about genetic modification by putting Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation (2003) in conversation with debates about analogies between life and data, Wallace stresses the emotion of discomfort.12 And by highlighting the shared strategy of analogy that underwrites lay commentary on biotechnology, the pronouncements of so-called regulatory “experts,” and literature that expresses “doubts about the hubris of science,” she draws out the potential dangers of the strategy of “substantial equivalence,” analogy disguised as something scientific (97, 95–96, 97).13 For Wallace, “critical, ethical, political” discomfort emerges from genetic modification technologies themselves, from the “distinctly uncomfortable alliances” their opposition engenders, and from Ozeki’s novel, which “does not leave us in the comfortable position of being able to identify an authorial mouthpiece” (94, 94, 119). Wallace argues that by “[s]taging the staging of GMO risk, Ozeki at once offers a representation of uncertainty and elicits a feeling of uncertainty, leaving her readers as uncomfortable as her characters are in the liminal spaces of nonknowledge” (119). The space of “nonknowledge” where Ozeki’s novel positions the reader usefully emphasizes the notion of humility underwriting risk criticism and precautionary reading. This humility enables Wallace to rehearse ecocritical anxiety about criticism in the face of ecocatastrophe: for the risk critic herself, faced with the materialities of GMOs, of pesticide poisoning and loss of crop diversity, it is tempting to see the preservation of actual heirloom, open-pollinated seeds . . . as the more vital and pressing ecological work, our own tropological wagers, our forays into the archives of risk, superfluous in the face of corporate seed grabs. (118) Despite this anxiety, Wallace then reasserts the importance of literary practice: “How seeds are narrated, how understood—as commons or property, as embryos, immigrants, or possible Chernobyls—has a profound effect on how they are produced, disseminated, cultivated, and preserved” (118). While insisting on the absolute centrality of literature as a vehicle for engaging environmental risk, this moment also dramatizes how risk criticism, indeed, all criticism, demands explicit recognition of the vulnerability of the critic and of the very work of criticism, which is always partial and provisional. In Anthropocene studies the analytics of temporal and spatial scale play a key role. In the temporal register, debates over the Anthropocene start date swirl; its end date is fundamentally uncertain, dependent on the longevity of the human species and the effects of its planet-altering activities, and scholars look to parse exactly how the past, present, and future intertwine differently than they might have in other periods. In terms of spatial scale, the microlevels of cell and microbe, the macrolevels of planet, and everything in between are locations for analysis.14 In Exposed, Alaimo focuses on the dimension of the emplaced organism to argue for the importance of the practice of an “ethics and politics of exposure” (5). Peril at the planetary scale and the “context[s] of mediation and the horizons of scientific knowledges” ground her explorations of terrestrial and aquatic forms of biodiversity, toxicity, and environmental activism (3). This macro scale, however, is not Alaimo’s primary concern. To center the vulnerability of humans and nonhumans, emphasize the value of posthumanist feminist new materialisms, and extend the concept of “trans-corporeality” she developed in Bodily Natures (2010), Alaimo makes the case for remembering the organism, for “think[ing] the anthropocene subject as immersed and immeshed in the world” (157). In statements like “saturated life worlds call for immersive practices and methodologies rather than dry, detached assertions” and trans-corporeality “is a mode of ecomaterialism that discourages fantasies of transcendence and imperviousness that render environmentalism a merely elective and external enterprise,” Alaimo’s tone and style align with the prominence she affords immersiveness and embodiment (11, 113). She makes the reader feel, not just think about, the force of her concepts and protocols. Alaimo’s focus on the aquatic realm distinguishes Exposed from most ecoliterary and ecocultural scholarship and links it to the emergence of oceanic studies.15 This oceanic turn exposes the terrestrial bias of most environmental humanities work to date while also confronting us with a conceptually difficult space: phenomenon and creatures “often depicted as ‘alien’” and thereby not usually objects of consideration. Alaimo aims to craft a “potent marine trans-corporeality” that “submerge[s] the human within global networks of consumption, waste, and pollution, capturing the strange agencies of the ordinary stuff of our lives” (113). Her work on plastics exceeds this aim. It endorses the notion of vibrant materiality while critiquing flat ontology, refusing to elevate thing power over consideration of “a phenomenon within larger economic, political, and environmental systems” (133). In parallel with Wallace’s discussion of plastics, Alaimo insists that “industrialized humans bear responsibility” for plastics, which “do not manufacture, purchase, distribute, or dispose of themselves” (138). The forms of naked protest she discusses—from La Tigresa, who strips on behalf of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest (68–70), to Kirsten Justensen, who puts her naked body in contact with melting ice in her Ice Plinth series (91–95); to Spencer Tunick’s photograph of 600 naked people standing on a Swiss glacier as part of a 2007 Greenpeace protest (78–81)—provide additional models for bearing responsibility for ecosocial imperilment. Alaimo’s trenchant critique of techno-managerialism as the “dominant style” of sustainability discourse also merits mention (173). Throughout her discussion of sustainability discourse, she underscores the concept’s “enlist[ment] in all too familiar formulations, epistemologies, and defensive maneuvers” and positions it as fear-based (143, 170). She critiques sustainability discourse for greenwashing. She excavates assumptions about economic progress that much sustainability discourse camouflages. She contends that much sustainability discourse externalizes the source of environmental problems while simultaneously presuming human omnipotence regarding the ability to control and fix complex systems. Implicit in all these points is her paramount critique: sustainability discourse is inherently anthropocentric. Although it may bring nonhumans and environments along for the ride, sustainability discourse fundamentally concerns the perpetuation of particular late-capitalist forms of human existence. Alaimo’s assessment of sustainability discourse accentuates the necessity of developing and promoting other concepts that might be more resistant to co-optation. Repair is one such promising notion (178). Alaimo reinflects Ulrich Beck’s concept of the “risk society” into a register different from Wallace’s transmuting of it into risk criticism. Alaimo is drawn to Beck’s idea that individuals in risk society experience a “loss of sovereignty over assessing the dangers” that imperil them (qtd. in Alaimo 4). Where Beck sees this loss as diminishing, Alaimo reframes it as “an invitation to intersubjectivity or trans-subjectivity and even . . . to a posthumanist or counterhumanist sense of the self as opening out unto the larger material world and being penetrated by all sorts of substances and material agencies that may or may not be captured” (4). This orientation toward the material world is another way of describing “an ethics and politics of exposure,” which, Alaimo argues, “may be undertaken, by any informed and empathetic citizen,” in the face of ecocatastrophes past, present, or future (5). She stresses the variety of practices of “exposure,” some of which produce involuntary subjects (nuclear meltdown, climate change) and some of which catalyze and are produced by voluntary encounter (performance art and protest). Whether one is “exposed” by circumstance or choice, Alaimo proposes a shared comportment: “Exposures may be differential, uneven, or incommensurate; yet to practice exposure entails the intuitive sense of the philosophical conviction that the impermeable Western human subject is no longer tenable” (5). “Exposure” is a decidedly nonromantic position and practice; it denies the kinds of Cartesian dualisms that underwrite human exceptionalism and forces confrontations with all manner of organisms and things we might rather avoid. It is also, perhaps counterintuitively, meant as an ethics that underlines pleasure. Alaimo suggests that “[c]onnection, interrelation, and intersubjectivity are the ontological conditions from which new delights and new ethics emerge. Pleasure spirals through these ethical ontologies that are unmistakably material rather than abstract, disembodied principles” (26). As she notes, pleasure offers a counter to more usual environmentalist modes of sacrifice and restriction (27). While, theoretically, the importance of foregrounding pleasure in the ways Alaimo suggests makes sense, this insistence feels, at least to this reader, a bit like forced cheer. She does acknowledge that pleasure is a difficult position to occupy, but questions of who/what gets to experience pleasure in the midst of ecocatastrophe, and when and how, deserve more attention. I wonder, too, about the “politics” in her seductive formulation “ethics and politics of exposure.” Although I know that “politics” here is underwritten by Latourian feminist new-materialist posthumanist leanings, I worry that such politics, despite Alaimo’s intentions, are too anthropocentric, that humans get exposed and also get to enact the politics of exposure (both for themselves and perhaps on behalf of other humans and nonhumans), but that other creatures only get exposed. To veer from the anthropocentrism that vexes “politics of exposure,” perhaps more commodious a concept is “insurgent vulnerability” (94). Alaimo proposes “politics of exposure” and “insurgent vulnerability” as essentially interchangeable phrases. For her, both evoke performative embodied feminist forms of occupation conducted from the standpoint of “a politicized sense of permeability that insists on intersubjective, intercorporeal, and inhuman intimacies” and that requires shedding “the conventional armor of impermeability that blithe capitalist consumerism requires” (94). We can extend the notion of “insurgent vulnerability” farther than Alaimo wants to go by pressing past her focus on the organism, past the idea of humans performing representational political acts on behalf of other creatures and things, and toward the idea of insurgence as an occupation of space that can be conducted by nonhuman creatures, things, or earth systems in ways that decenter even more radically, perhaps even by dismissing, the human as a category of analysis. Ecocatastrophe prompts the questions where, for whom/what, at what spatial and temporal scales, with what results, and with what opportunities for repair or adaptation or embrace. In this context, I want to read and teach creative and critical texts that model the skills and tactics necessary to raise to the surface politics, events, ideologies, and affects that challenge business as usual and that, through careful and pointed deployment, help us slowly dismantle old stories about naturecultures and create and install new ones. I look for scholarship that skillfully parses complex texts, concepts, environmental and social situations, and the rhetorical and social functions of language, while also allowing for humility and vulnerability as part of the scholarly project. My optimism about the work of ecoliterary and ecocultural scholarship, including the monographs discussed here, is based in the belief that reading slowly and carefully matters. Rigby, Heise, Wallace, and Alaimo offer a critical set of reading practices centered on highlighting the vulnerability of bodies in the Anthropocene and advocating for futures characterized by ecosocial justice. Their books significantly advance conversations about the essential nature of environmental literary and cultural studies. In reading for ecocatastrophe, destructive phenomena, extinction, risk, exposure, and vulnerability, these authors materialize the art of discerning what is in the text, rather than what one might want to see there. My optimism is also tied to the ways these studies can aid us in the classroom as we guide students to confront and articulate the precarious socioecological positions into which the Anthropocene interpellates Earth’s denizens. The toolkits for registering and refracting ecocatastrophe that these authors present help us arm ourselves and our students with frameworks and methods to construct new natureculture stories, refuse “sustainability” in favor of “repair,” choose vulnerability and community over detachment and the capitalist carapace, create new alliances across various kinds of boundaries, and value the time and patience it takes to learn about environments, their inhabitants, and textual iterations of socioecologies. In ecocatastrophic times, the decision to analyze and resist, without denying, the frenzied pace of catastrophe and crisis is a quietly revolutionary act. These books are excellent companions for making the insurgent demand to slow down, value, and perform careful and attentive acts of reading and thinking ecocatastrophe together. Doing this work of discernment and apprehension in community—in conversation with other scholars and their work and with students—is one practice we should employ without delay. Footnotes 1 For the full text of the Paris Agreement, see United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, “The Paris Agreement,” United Nations Climate Change, web. For information on these events, see “Sea Ice Extent Sinks to Record Lows at Both Poles,” NASA, 22 Mar. 2017, web; and “The Keeling Curve,” Scripps Institution of Oceanography, web. 2 On the northern white rhino, see Sarah Gibbens, “After Last Male’s Death, Is the Northern White Rhino Doomed?,” National Geographic, 20 Mar. 2018, web. For information on the vaquita, see “Mexican World Heritage Site Is in Danger as Vaquita Faces Extinction, According to IUCN,” IUCN, 8 June 2017, web. 3 On the similar plight of the Inupiat village of Shishmaref, see Christopher Mele and Daniel Victor, “Reeling from Effects of Climate Change, Alaskan Village Votes to Relocate,” New York Times, 19 Aug. 2016, web. 4 For a longer discussion on environmental anxiety, see my “‘what do we do but keep breathing as best we can this / minute atmosphere’: Juliana Spahr and Anthropocene Anxiety,” Affective Ecocriticism: Emotion, Embodiment, Environment (forthcoming fall 2018), edited by Jennifer Ladino and Kyle Bladow. For gestures to anxiety as the basic affect of the Anthropocene, see Timothy Morton, “This is not my beautiful biosphere,” A Cultural History of Climate Change (2016), edited by Tom Bristow and Thomas H. Ford, pp. 232–33, 237. 5 Alaimo treats the concept of the Anthropocene throughout Exposed. Heise directly addresses the Anthropocene in her last chapter. Wallace attends to the idea in in her afterword. 6 For three approaches to speculative geosciences, see Nigel Clark, Inhuman Nature (2011), pp. x–xx, 1–26, 81–86, 100–106; Nigel Clark, “Rock, Life, Fire: Speculative Geophysics and the Anthropocene,” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 34, no. 2, 2012, pp. 259–76; and Kathryn Yusoff, “Queer Coal: Genealogies in/of the Blood,” philoSOPHIA, vol. 5, no. 2, Summer 2015, pp. 203–29. Rigby discusses Inhuman Nature in her first chapter. 7 See N. Clark’s Inhuman Nature for a discussion of sociability in the wake of ecocatastrophe, pp. xx–xxii, 27–80, 193–219. 8 By highlighting that the extinction of one species impacts a much wider set of fauna, flora, and microbes, van Dooren shows that de-extinction and rewilding projects that purport to short-circuit the irrevocability of extinction do nothing of the sort. Most de-extinction and rewilding projects focus on charismatic megafauna and elide the ecosystemic and climatic conditions essential to the initial flourishing of the species at the heart of the project. 9 See Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, “Melancholy Natures, Queer Ecologies,” Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (2010), edited by Mortimer-Sandilands, and Bruce Erikson, pp. 331–58, for a powerful, inaugural theorization of environmental mourning. For elaborations on ecological melancholy, see my “Materializing a Geotraumatic and Melancholy Anthropocene: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods,” the minnesota review, vol. 83, 2014, pp. 122–32; and “Mediating Anthropocene Planetary Attachments: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia,” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, edited by Dennis Weis, et. al., pp. 249–67. 10 Collaboration between scholars in the humanities and natural sciences, especially regarding the communication of complex scientific issues, is growing. But many collaborations of this ilk are unidirectional and do not place cultural values and stories at the heart of the scientific enterprise in the ways Heise’s work does. 11 Heise marks her conversation with Bruno Latour’s work in chapters 2, 3, and 5. 12 The overarching argument of this chapter, which tends to “the political possibilities for recasting ‘data’ as narrative,” resonates with Heise’s work on biodiversity databases (25). 13 The definition of substantial equivalence Wallace adopts from Erik Millstone, Eric Brunner, and Sue Mayer is worth reproducing in full: “Substantial equivalence is a pseudo-scientific concept because it is a commercial and political judgement masquerading as if it were scientific. It is, moreover, inherently anti-scientific because it was created primarily to provide an excuse for not requiring biochemical or toxicological tests” (Mayer qtd. in Wallace 97). 14 See, for instance, Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism: On the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (2015), pp. 9–14, 20–22, 27–46; and Derek Woods, “Scale Critique for the Anthropocene,” the minnesota review, vol. 83, 2014, pp. 133–42, for discussions of the importance of thinking scale in the Anthropocene. 15 See, for instance, Alaimo, “Violet-Black,” Cohen, pp. 233–51; Steve Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 (2015), pp. ix–xxxii, 1–24, 177–81; Teresa Shewry, Hope at Sea: Possible Ecologies in Oceanic Literature (2015), pp. 1–22, 85–113, 177–84; and Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (2015), pp. ix–xiv, 1–22, 26–63, 225–34. Works Cited Alaimo Stacy. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self . Indiana UP , 2010 . Alaimo Stacy. Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times . U of Minnesota P , 2016 . Atwood Margaret. Oryx and Crake . Nan A. Taleese , 2003 . Atwood Margaret. The Year of the Flood . Nan A. Taleese , 2009 . Atwood Margaret. MaddAddam . Nan A. Taleese , 2013 . Barad Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning . Duke UP , 2007 . Beck Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity . 1986. Translated by Mark Ritter, Sage , 1992 . Bong, Joon-ho, director. Snowpiercer. CJ Entertainment, 2013 . Jeffrey Jerome Cohen , editor. Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory Beyond the Green . U of Minnesota P , 2013 . Jeffrey Jerome Cohen , Duckert Lowell , editors. Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire . U of Minnesota P , 2015 . El Akkad Omar. American War . Knopf , 2017 . Haraway Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness . Prickly Paradigm P , 2003 . Haraway Donna. When Species Meet . U of Minnesota P , 2007 . Heise Ursula K. Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species . U of Chicago P , 2016 . Ives Mike. “A Remote Pacific Nation, Threatened by Rising Seas.” New York Times , 2 July 2016 . Web . Eben Kirksey , editor. The Multispecies Salon . Duke UP , 2014 . Rigby Kate. Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times . U of Virginia P , 2015 . Spahr Juliana . That Winter the Wolf Came. Commune Editions, 2015 . Tsing Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins . Princeton UP , 2015 . van Dooren Thom. Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction . Columbia UP , 2014 . VanderMeer Jeff. Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy . FSG , 2014 . Waldholz Rachel. “ Alaskan Village, Citing Climate Change, Seeks Disaster Relief in Order to Relocate .” NPR , 10 Jan 2017 . Web. Waldholz Rachel. “ Obama Denies Newtok’s Request for Disaster Declaration .” Alaska Public Media , 18 Jan. 2017 . Web. Wallace Molly. Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty . U of Michigan P , 2016 . Zeitlin, Benh, director. Beasts of the Southern Wild. Cinereach, Court 13, Journeyman Pictures, 2012 . © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Archives of Ecocatastrophe; or, Vulnerable Reading Practices in the Anthropocene
JF - American Literary History
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajy039
DA - 2018-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/archives-of-ecocatastrophe-or-vulnerable-reading-practices-in-the-10kPygKM0a
SP - 820
VL - 30
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -