Volume 5, No. 2Narrative, Environment, Social Justice

Joshua Parker, Robert A. Winkler

Introduction: Notes on the Relation of Narrative, Environment, and Social Justice

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The idea for this JAAAS special issue comes from the 49th Annual Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies, which took place at the University of Salzburg in Fall 2022. Presentations covered stories we tell about our environment, and about pressing social issues of the past or present. As varied as the presentations were, the common thread was inquiring into how we – as individuals and collectives – frame our experiences in these areas through narratives, to whom we tell them, and when, where, and why. The contributions here range in their treatment of subject matter from speculative prose to theater, from film to poetry, to a history of the advertising industry. They illustrate how issues of social justice, climate change, and storytelling are intimately linked, and explore various manifestations of this nexus in fresh and surprising ways.

Marina Pingler

The "Colonial Anthropocene" Imaginary: Re-Imagining Climate Change in Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018)

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Climate imaginaries – collectively held visions of future climate change – take shape in a variety of media and genres, from computer models to poetry. While some climate imaginaries have proven particularly enduring and have managed to attain a hegemonic status in climate change discourse – for example, the "techno-market" imaginary and the "climate apocalypse" imaginary – others remain marginalized. Drawing on Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018), this article theorizes the "colonial Anthropocene" imaginary as an alternative imaginary and examines its co-production at the intersection of academic discourses, activism, and literature. The "colonial Anthropocene" imaginary generally and Moon of the Crusted Snow specifically negotiate ideological tensions that have emerged in the discourse on the Anthropocene and forge a connection between the seemingly exceptional event of anthropogenic climate change and a historical sequence of colonial violence and forced displacement of Indigenous peoples. As one of this imaginary's manifestations in the literary domain, Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) embeds climate change into a longer story that begins with settler colonialism on the North American continent by drawing on an equally old genre: the Indian captivity narrative. Significantly, the "colonial Anthropocene" imaginary is a reaction to the impulse toward claims to universality resurfacing in the discourse on the Anthropocene, particularly in the notion of "the human."

Markus Schwarz

"There's still a world": Salvaging Hope in Garbagetown

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In Catherynne M. Valente's The Past Is Red, the world as we know it has already drowned. However, even after the apocalypse, traces of extractive capitalism – responsible for the destruction of the planet in the first place – are still lingering on as the novella is set in Garbagetown, a floating habitat of waste that emerged from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This article takes this rubbish as its starting point and examines what Elizabeth DeLoughrey calls our "anticipated history of ruins" through the lenses of utopian theory and salvage-Marxism. By conceptualizing waste as one of the most visible markers of the Capitalocene (Moore), I argue that it is not only a planet's resources that are considered disposable in a capitalist economy but also some of its inhabitants. The analysis focuses on the novella's main character Tetley, who, in contrast to her fellow citizens, attempts to locate beauty in the ruins and has hope – not for salvation but for the broken world. By reading Tetley as a salvagepunk character, this article nods towards a different utopian horizon in The Past Is Red, one that is not defined by solastalgia (Albrecht) for the past or the hope for a future Eden but as a praxis of becoming post-apocalyptic, by learning to "stay with the trouble" (Haraway) of a world built out of trash.

Nassim Balestrini

Aesthetic Innovation and Activist Impetus in Climate Change Theater: Beyond a New Formalist Reading of Chantal Bilodeau's One-Actor Play No More Harveys (2022)

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Canadian-American playwright and activist Chantal Bilodeau finds that we need innovative plays that meld climate change into the aesthetics, arguments, and social fabrics of drama and performance. Testing Bilodeau's suggestion, this essay focuses on the poetics of her newest full-length play, No More Harveys (2022). This reading of climate change theater and in particular of Bilodeau's one-actor play applies Caroline Levine's New Formalist method, which strives to read aesthetic and social forms simultaneously and non-hierarchically, and which raises pertinent questions as to how activist theater manages to balance aesthetics and (political and/or scientific) argumentation. While Levine's New Formalism offers a productive analytical angle on small- and large-scale forms, it cannot cover all literary and social phenomena single-handedly. The analysis offered here proposes to demonstrate the usefulness of complementary readings that take into account (a) decolonial and ecocritical concepts of planetarity, (b) a historically informed understanding of monodramatic and of autobiographical generic practices, and (c) the affordances of climate change theater at the present moment. As this contribution argues, Bilodeau employs and modifies elements of form and genre in a manner that allows multiple narratives of social injustice, violence, and detrimental hierarchies across large swaths of time and place to bleed into each other.

Johannes Vith

Violent Landscapes: James Benning's Landscape Suicide (1986)

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While serial killings, murders, and other violent deaths are traumatic incidents for the communities in which they occur, they also attract a great deal of media attention and form the basis for numerous cinematic adaptations in US-American cinema and beyond. Many of these movies employ a sensationalist approach and focus on the social environments of the killings: the perpetrator's upbringing, triggering experiences, or a generally troubled personality. There are only a limited number of cinematic treatments of violent killings that focus on the natural environment or the landscapes where these incidents occurred.

This article is concerned with filmmakers using (cinematic) landscapes as a mode of cultural expression for violence and trauma. It seeks to show that James Benning's Landscape Suicide (1986) calls for a different understanding of landscape that goes beyond a mere setting for narrative, as it gives landscape active agency in its mediation of two seemingly unconnected murder cases. The film compares and juxtaposes the murder of Kirsten Costas by Bernadette Protti in a suburb of San Francisco in 1984 with the killings of Ed Gein in Plainfield, Wisconsin, in the 1950s. In doing so, the film presents viewers with two distinct functions of landscape in mediating violence and trauma: as a spatialization of time and as socio-political surroundings. Analyzing these aspects of the film helps us to better understand the link between landscape, violence, and trauma in cinematic treatments of violent incidents and also sheds light on the broader connection between landscape and trauma culture.

Klaus Rieser

Genre, Space, and Social Critique in Chloé Zhao's Nomadland (2020)

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This article examines the extent to which Nomadland is a convincing representation of poverty in the United States and to assess the film's political stance concerning race, gender, and age. By analyzing Nomadland's narrative and filmic techniques, this article points out three major characteristics of the film that are relevant for its portrayal of characters defined chiefly by their poverty and age. Firstly, Nomadland employs genres subtly to undercut their inherent ideological effects. Secondly, in its portrayal of space, it represents the characters as placemakers, showcasing their agency in the face of structural problems. Thirdly, it adopts a particular neorealist production style that lays a powerful claim to authenticity.

While the film falls short of addressing the root causes of poverty and bypasses the question of race altogether, Nomadland serves as an exemplary model of socially conscious filmmaking in other regards. It transcends mere entertainment and counters a more mainstream strategy of personalizing structural problems through a nuanced portrayal of elderly working nomads while also displaying attention to gender and age.

Lukas Hellmuth

In Search for Alternatives: Queer Theorizing, Affect, and the Horror Film

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This article argues that queer theories of affect not only offer an alternative approach to analyzing the horror film in the twenty-first century, but also that a new wave of horror media negotiates its social criticism in newly queer ways. Analyzing Ari Aster's 2018 film Hereditary, it becomes clear that its horrifying effect stems from queer affects within its narrative that both its character and audience share. In this, Hereditary goes beyond traditional forms of criticism regarding its deconstruction of normative family structures, present in horror films as early as 1974's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as it not only points to potential horrors within the traditional family but instead lays open the inherent, inescapable affective horrors of these normative structures and narratives of belonging, necessitating the need for alternative forms of self-determination and community. Doing so, the film utilizes the established forms of the genre but plays both within and outside of its conventions, affecting its audience beyond mere shock. In applying queer theories of affect and negativity to the film, this article demonstrates a critique of the horrors of real-life institutions and systems that plague (queer) existence in our neoliberal society: normative family structures, sexual and romantic normativities, and complex feelings of (not) belonging. In this reading, Hereditary serves as a powerful counternarrative to the cruelly optimistic narratives of everyday life.

Julia Machtenberg

Localizing the Global in Sylvia Plath's "Fever 103°"

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The essay presents a close reading of Sylvia Plath's poem "Fever 103°" and argues that Plath's construction of her speaker's vulnerable self facilitates a breakdown of the boundaries between the embodied self and its socio-cultural environment. The argument is built on recent scholarship on Plath's work that views it in the context of the global political movements of her time. By examining the ways in which Plath's use of Cold War discourses shapes her construction of vulnerability, the essay shows how this construction produces the embodied self as deeply entangled with global political movements manifesting in and through the embodied self. By evoking and concurrently undermining the "poetics of hygiene," the poem suggests that any attempt to ascertain a state of utmost purity, of clearly delineated bodily and cultural boundaries, can only end in annihilation. It is in this sense that Plath's representation of her speaker's vulnerable self allows her to develop an astute perspective on the interconnectedness of the private, the national, and the global socio-political environment. In this way, the poet's construction of a vulnerable self represents an understanding of a globally interconnected world that poses localized dangers of
(self-)destruction.

Ioana-Mihaela Cozac

With Great Product Comes Great Responsibility: Marketing Gender and Eco-Responsibility

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US-American mass media was revolutionized when, at the turn of the twentieth century, mass printing of illustrations enabled the visual advertisement of lifestyles – the American Dream was now sellable at a faster rate than ever before. Today's mass media has refashioned itself by adapting to a rapid technological evolution, yet remains a space which enables monetization of identity. Women's purchasing power has resulted in a culture of advertisement developed to specifically target women. Whether it is overpriced and elaborate female hygiene products or universal items re-branded specifically for women, capitalism continues to thrive off of a gendered narrative of consumption. In recent years, it has merged with the rise of eco-friendly consumption. Many companies that engage in greenwashing strategies manufacture women's hygiene and skin care products. Additionally, due to a persistent sexual division of labor, household products turned green disproportionally target the female consumer. While there is a tendency for women to be more environmentally aware (Brough et al.; Capecchi; Zelezny), the urgency of this response is the result of a structure which has historically excluded women from positions of executive decision-making and production, while also perpetuating the exploitation of their gender-based identity. I argue that, as a consequence of this perpetuation, a narrative was established which ties responsibility of eco-awareness and ethical consumption to gender, manifesting in an "eco-gender gap" (Capecchi).

Martin Gabriel

Heaven's Harsh Tableland: A New History of the Llano Estacado. By Paul H. Carlson. Texas A&M UP, 2023, 386 pp.

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Martin Gabriel reviews Paul H. Carlson's Heaven's Harsh Tableland: A New History of the Llano Estacado (Texas A&M UP, 2023).